True Life Stories:
LOST
AND SOUND: A DJ Loses the Music
by Charlie
Bethel
First I want to say, this is a story about losing something, but for once, it does not have anything to do with retirement savings or investments. I’m twenty six years old and would have said, this time last week, that the current doom and gloom hanging over New York City and the borough of Brooklyn where I live had pretty much eluded me. I’m a musician. My music was always wealth enough to me.
I know a lot of people complain about all the noise and sound surrounding us in New York, but for me the soundtrack of the city, that I first visited when I was a kid, growing up in New Hampshire, always got my heart beating faster in a good way, and made me know this was the place I had to be. At age sixteen I got myself into a program called City Term, where kids from all over the country came to discover the five boroughs. At eighteen, I enrolled in NYU. Today I call Brooklyn home -- the place I love, though (this week, at least), it’s the place that nearly breaks my heart.
You might not think a person who grew up on a farm at the end of a dead end dirt road would develop an obsession with Latin beats and R and B and African drumming, but all my life I’ve been beating out rhythms and mixing up music and dancing. Sometimes just my fingers on a table, or my tongue on my teeth, sometimes on a drum, sometimes on a skateboard.
The way I make music is to sample fragments of what’s out there -- a universe of sounds, many of them buried inside the jacket of a forty year old vinyl record album. I like to think I rescue music. I find songs and beats recorded by people who may have laid them down in some little studio in a place like Zimbabwe or 1966 Detroit, and I download them on my laptop and play around with them, mix them up in new ways, and play them for people who might not even have been born when they were first recorded. This is my passion.
My earliest musical memory is of Michael Jackson on the “Thriller” video, that I got to watch a few dozen times a day, back when it first came out, because the babysitter I went to had MTV. I was two years old, but I knew what I liked, and that was beats.
Twenty four years later, I still can’t sit still when I hear that song, though there are about ten thousand others now on my playlist, and so many vinyl albums in my Bushwick apartment there’s hardly any room to walk any more. You could call me a vinyl addict -- possessor of the first degree NYU ever granted in "DJ-ology," a term they invented for me.
By day, I work with kids in the New York City Parks department, helping them write and record hip hop songs. Weekends I troll flea markets and junk stores for vinyl. Thursday nights I spin and scratch music at a club under the Brooklyn Bridge, where they know me as Captain Planet.
To people of my parents’ generation, a DJ was someone who set records on a turntable and placed the needle in the groove, with some snappy chatter for introduction. But even my fifty-something-year-old parents got it, eventually, that what I do on the turntables is not just play other people’s music, but invent new sounds. Beats in particular.
I have this memory for rhythms. I can go to a particular crate of west African imbira music and pull out an album I bought five years ago, and know just where to set the needle, to hear a five measure pulse -- da da da dum dumda -- that segues perfectly into this little-known Motown gem I found the other day from a band hardly anybody ever heard of, or a Cuban bandleader from the fifties. I put those sounds together with my mixer, rhthms intersecting, track over track. Multiply that by a few thousand mixes, and that’s what I do Thursday nights.
Last Thursday was a particularly good one. As usual, I showed up for work with my crates full of hand picked sounds for the night. I’d already put in a full day over at the projects, helping a couple of seven year old girls record a sweet little number called “Sistah,” about how much they loved each other. But I was pumped to start spinning, and the crowd was loving it. I was also celebrating -- with my fellow bandmates, The Beatards -- the release of a new video we’d made, called “Nasty Funky” -- a song in which I talk about all the music I loved growing up (James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner) and the way it shaped me. I even got my little brother -- age seven -- to appear in the video, portraying my own younger self at that age, with a boom box on his shoulder. Jiving away.
The night went even better than usual. Added to the usual excitement, I had started dancing, myself, with an incredibly beautiful Brazilian woman named Maria. As the night wound down, it was clear she’d be coming home with me.
Normally, I drive my own car to gigs, but that night I’d lent my Subaru to a friend. So I called a car service for Maria and me. It was four thirty a.m. when I packed the last of my gear -- turntables, mike, headphones, records and laptop -- into the trunk of the town car, headed for Bushwick.
A few weeks before, I’d traveled to Israel with my other brother, on a program called Birthright that offers free trips there to any person of even partial Jewish heritage, to check out their roots. Though my own Jewish education and background was nil, and my bloodlines somewhat diluted, my brother and I had qualified. And though we’d set out with a basically tongue in cheek attitude (Free trip! Brothers on the road!), with a highly dubious perspective on the bombing of Palestine happening all around us at the time, we came back with a somewhat modified take on things -- enough so that when my beautiful Brazilian lady friend started talking up ultra-radical anti-Zionism in the back seat of the town car, I felt a need to defend the homeland, at least part way.
Discussion got heated. The evening was no longer totally on track. The town car pulled up in front of my building. Maria and I got out, arguing pretty fiercely now. The town car pulled away.
With all my DJ equipment. A few thousand dollars’ worth, which basically represented everything of value I own in this world, besides the ten thousand or so other albums inside my apartment. Also gone -- and this was the hardest: my laptop, with every beat I’d ever recorded on it. A few thousand hours worth of musical composition time. My kids’ music. Rare songs I’d collected over the last ten years, everywhere from Senegal to Jordan. Basically, everything I cared most about in life, besides my friends and my family.
Not backed up.
Maria went home. After reality set in -- as much as possible, in the sheer numbness of exhaustion and despair -- I called the car service. Although I’d ordered a ride to pick me up from the club, the dispatcher said I’d been a no-show, meaning that the car I’d actually ridden home in appeared to have belonged to some random driver from some other, unknown service.
In the grim days since that dark morning, I’ve called them all. You can spot my flyers (in English and Spanish) all up and down Atlantic Avenue. Read my pleas and offer of reward on Craigslist. Word is out to my fellow DJ’s, who commiserate as only like-minded lovers of beats and salvaged sound can. I’ve spoken to the police in my precinct (laughter on the other end of the line. Forget it, chump). My sister, back in New Hampshire, is doing reiki, picturing a turntable. My brother in LA is sending downloads of his own music collection -- the songs that make the hair stand up on the back of his neck. A good and loving effort, though the tunes that move him most are not necessarily the same ones that could, on occasion, make me nearly weep.
I’m a positive person. I have my health, and my family. As soon as I can swing it I’ll get a new turntable, and a laptop. I’ll find more music to love. I’ll create new beats. Meanwhile, I go to my job with the kids of Bushwick, laying down tracks for them. I still consider myself a lucky person -- for all the good things I’ve got in the world. Music being one of them.
The irony is not lost on me, that in a way what I have been is a finder of lost music, and now I have lost the music, myself. Maybe that’s in the nature of music: that somewhere on the planet, someone is putting out a song at this very moment, or a rhythm, or a sound, and maybe a thousand people will hear it, or maybe only one. And still it matters.
Loss takes many forms. Your savings. Your art work. Your true love. Hopefully not your health.
What I’m holding now -- as the days pass, and my flyers flap in the breeze, and the phone doesn’t ring with someone saying “Hey man, you lose a turntable by any chance?” -- are all the things that weren’t in the trunk of that town car Friday morning. The beat goes on.
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