Photo by kidPEACE Media
After selling out the two day dance festival HARD Haunted Mansion, Gary Richards/DJ Destructo joined DJ A-Trak and DJ Skeet Skeet for an intimate discussion panel with UCLA students and electronic music fans November 3rd in Ackerman Grand Ballroom. They discussed their pasts, present, and futures as DJs and as young kids being influenced by music.
DJ A-Trak kicked off the unmediated panel with his beginnings in Canada circa 1995 as a scratch DJ. When he was thirteen he would spend time “sneaking a couple of scratches on my dad’s record player”. Two years later he became the World Champion of DMC in Montreal (Montreal Battle) and moved on to the Italy World Finals where he proudly states that his mother accompanied him. He says that those battles are what “set off his career”. He attributes a lot of turntable influence on the San Francisco Scratch Movement, where he worked with Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, Shortkut, and Apollo – The Invisible Scratch Pickles. He did battles, club gigs and was a hip hop DJ. He explained that his past as a hip hop DJ stems from delving into influences such as soul, jazz, and funk. He noted that he has a background in classic rock as well. Around 2004 he met a few DJs in Montreal and in New York while visiting his brother. This is also around the same time Kanye West picked him up as an official DJ where he toured with him for four years. He noticed that the DJs during this time were doing something new – mixing multiple genres in their sets. A-Trak said that “the DJ sets became a whole mix of genres of anything that could make people dance without really paying attention to what genre or where the song was from, to the point where if it was like in a certain tempo range and it made sense then they would play it, so the tempos kinda went higher up in our sets” and that “It got to the point where this house record, this weird distorted European electronic record, would make sense next to this Outkast song and next to this old school Afrika Bambaataa song”. He believes that pop, rap, and rock music are each headed towards a dip in the electronic direction, “Electronic music is sort of becoming the norm for everything” and that “during the last few years everything’s been meshing”.
DJ Skeet Skeet, or Skeeter, is from a small town in Iowa where “the only outlets for music were from…University of Iowa” where he used to go “picking up records and talking to people about music”. He was into punk and hardcore, Inside Out, and “Crappy metal core songs, thinking I wanted to be in Slip Knot”. He moved to LA when he was sixteen and received a football scholarship to San Jose State. There he did lots of music and design related things, “Messing around with DJing because it was fun”. He said he would typically DJ at frat and house parties. He reminisced about his life as a young music nerd, “Me and a bunch of dorky kids who couldn’t get into the cool clubs…were all playing weird records with guys like Steve Aoki”. He quickly mentions his Paper Magazine DJ of the Year 2008 and then humorously shares that he and A-Trak are both “Pepsi DJs” – a little known fact that they both managed to forget about. They both noticed that there is a competitor’s water bottle on the table where Skeet joked “We can’t even drink this thing. You gotta tear the labels off” with A-Trak motioning to the bottle that “We’ll have to just write Pepsi on there”.
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/djskeetskeet
Photo by kidPEACE Media
DJ Destructo, or Gary Richards took the mic and discussed growing up in Maryland and what it was like having a dad who is in the record business, “he never really made it to the soccer game but I got to see a lot of good music”, “[he] took me to a lot of concerts like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin when I was a little kid”. Richards says he discovered electronic music circa 1989-90 at clubs in downtown LA warehouses he would frequent. He listened to music like Kraftwerk, Run DMC, Luke Skywalker, and 2LiveCrew. When he first discovered electronic music he was “hooked”. He knew he had to start throwing music events and started doing so in 1990-91. He only knew of a few DJs at the time so he began teaching himself to DJ.
On New Year’s Eve 1992/1993 he did an event called Rave America at Knott’s Berry Farm that sold out tickets to twenty thousand people. Rick Rueben saw how much potential the electronic scene had and approached him with an offer to produce the electronic and techno music Richards had been spinning and knew “that this electronic techno music…would blow up like hip hop”. So he started working with Rueben and signed XL Recordings, Lords of Acid, Prodigy, and Messiah. Richards thought that his dream job had become a reality but quickly realized that despite working with big names like Rueben that “nobody really cared”. This didn’t hinder his passion for music and he kept at it, working at labels like A&M and Interscope. After his brother signed Slip Knot, Richards began working with his brother signing metal bands. In 2006 he “decided that the record business is kinda for the birds these days because no one is buying plastic CDs” and “went back to where I originally started” organizing events such as HARD Haunted Mansion and DJing as his present moniker Destructo.
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/destructohard
As a deservedly proud promoter and DJ, Richards/Destructo mentioned that this New Years Eve will mark the two year anniversary of HARD and that A-Trak was also in attendance and will be headlining it this New Years Eve. In the past there have been such performers as Justice, Peaches, and 2LiveCrew. HARD New Years Eve and Destructo’s Birthday headliners for 2009 into 2010 currently include – Boys Noize, A-Trak, DJ Mehdi, and Destructo. Like any seasoned promoter and realist Richards shares some parting wisdom with all of the collegiates in the audience about how success in the record business really works – “You can work with the best music in the world, but you have to have a lucky break with timing” and “if you are at the right place at the right time and you have something super credible and good, you just get that one chance you know? I worked my whole career to get it, and with HARD it just hit. From two years ago til now it’s taken off. It’s cool that it’s taken off for all of us”.
After the discussion panel the audience was invited to comment, ask questions, and hang out after all the Q&A. The DJs were very humble and grounded for being musical celebrities. They shook hands, took pictures, and even discussed one-on-one with inquiring audience members. Fans were even able to get autographs and some were given HARD t-shirts, Fools Gold stickers (A-Trak’s record label), and almost everyone walked away with a mixed CD filled with tracks highlighting the night’s special guests.
HARD: http://www.hardfest.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/hardfest
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hardfest
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