The scene is straight out of a junior high dance. Though the pack of would-be dancers at R2, a relatively new Downtown club, are clutching beers and cocktails rather than punch, and the average age is at least mid-’20s, the knots of young women and lone men stick to the walls and stare into their drinks with the same intensity as a class of gangly teenagers in the early moments of that awkward social in the school gym. A guy with a stylish goatee, white sneaks and matching blue shirt and pants, both tight—the whole get-up resembling that of a clubbing auto mechanic—sits forlornly at a high-top table, his head resting on one hand. He nods listlessly and looks as if he might fall asleep.
Fortunately, Stroud, the DJ up in the booth, has a new secret weapon. Though he’d created the tune just the day before at his home studio on Cherry Avenue, he’d cleaned it up before this Friday night, and was convinced he had something special to drop on the reluctant dancers around midnight, just as the club started to fill up.
A dance club works a little like an atomic bomb. To get the floor bumping, the club has to achieve a precise mixing of elements, just as an atomic bomb’s uranium achieves its critical mass by the addition of another radioactive element—the trigger. In the club, the critical mass involves the right density of dancers, the heavy element of a big beat—one that gets people bouncing around the room—and some form of catchy hook. Tonight, as he has been in so many dance clubs so many nights before, that hook is Michael Jackson.
Billie Jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
As soon as the unmistakable lyrics grace the booming beat Stroud constructed, the floor starts to move. A tight cluster of three women gleefully storms the floor and begins furiously shaking it—quickly attracting an extra layer of Brut-splashed males. Within two minutes, the dance space, the dimensions of which are like a large racquetball court, is almost full. Even the mechanic guy is out of his seat, his white shoes flashing under the flickering lights.
Stroud himself comes out of the booth, down the stairs, and stands in the middle of the floor. To the casual observer, the motionless DJ with blue eyes, red, spiky hair and a goatee might appear somewhat menacing as he stands with his arms crossed. One might even think that he’s striking a “Behold, I am lord of the dance!” pose. But Stroud, who is 38 years old but still gets carded, is merely taking advantage of the best spot in the club to absorb the huge sound system’s full blast to see if he’d mixed the tune cleanly.
With the exception of the vocals, the “Billy Jean” remix is all his creation. The bluntly confident yet unpretentious Stroud thinks the song has potential, and hopes to get it out on the Web. But, he admits that its appeal is not all his doing.
“Everybody loves Michael, man,” Stroud says.
A tribe called who?
Electronic dance music is the red-headed stepchild of Charlottesville’s sonic landscape, having been virtually choked out by folk music, ubiquitous jam bands and the MTV-fueled popularity of hip hop. This is, after all, The Dave’s town. Why mess with a good formula? Most other nighttime music acts pale against the shining light of guitar-driven music, with the notable exception of the Goth scene.
Stroud is likely the most experienced DJ in a 100-mile radius, and has had many legitimizing moments in his long career at the decks. Back in ’96, after he’d been spinning for only six months, Stroud played at Buzz, a legendary D.C. rave that was the biggest regular dance party in the United States before it was busted in an infamous Fox 5 investigative report that captured drug use and—yikes!—massages on hidden cameras. For a longtime professional DJ like Stroud, playing dance floor psychologist to a resistant audience can be a spirit-crushing experience.
“Nobody likes progressive house here,” Stroud says, referring to his specialty in the booth. “Being a music fan, it’s tough. These people want to hear something they’ve heard over and over.”
House music isn’t the only genre in a DJ’s arsenal that gets the cold shoulder from Charlottesville’s club denizens. Hip hop, which currently rules the world of pop, is only a safe bet if it’s in heavy rotation in music videos or on the radio. Mike Rodi, co-owner (and founder) of R2 and Rapture, the restaurant that envelops it, says a classic hip hop hit by A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul is a guaranteed buzz-kill unless it’s “sandwiched” between Missy Elliott, Jay-Z or some other mega-star.
“You have to win them over with the stuff they know,” says Rodi, who sometimes spins at R2 under the moniker Sketchy.
“Some of my most despairing moments are when I put on something I think is really great and I clear the floor with it,” he says.
Stroud once played OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” shortly after the song’s release. Though “Hey Ya!” has become one of the most overplayed tunes in recent years, it was a complete clunker at the club that night.
These days, the surefire club rocker is “Milkshake” by Kelis. The simplistic pop ditty is the audio equivalent of crack cocaine—a cheap, but deadly addictive rush.
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I can teach you, but I have to charge
If those lyrics don’t ring a bell, you don’t go out much.
On this recent Friday night, Stroud plays a version of “Milkshake” a few songs before his “Billy Jean” remix. Though it definitely creates some energy, even getting the sleepy mechanic to jiggle in his chair, it fails to push the R2 crowd over the dance tipping point.
The next night at R2, Stroud rearranges the set’s order. A few songs into his set, he drops “Billy Jean” and again gets people on their feet. Then, he immediately spins “Milkshake” and takes the club up another notch.
Stroud’s version, it should be said, is a far cry from the cheese-laden original. He tracked down a remix with beats that sound like Tron on steroids, the thick pulse only softly adorned with a floating version of the sickeningly catchy vocals. In short, it’s a crafty mix of overplayed tripe with something legitimately underground. It works brilliantly, and Stroud can be seen smiling up in the DJ booth, which sits high above the dance floor, next to several Euro lounge-style tables and a couch on the second floor.
There is one glaring absence on the floor this night. King George, the Charlottesville club fixture who is at R2 every Friday and Saturday, is hanging out by the bar rather than assuming his customary spot on the floor, bathed in dry ice and flashing lights.
Asked if Stroud lost him with the night’s set, King George shakes his wig-sporting head, and points to his outfit, which, under the sequin-adorned fishnet shirts, includes various chains as well as a chain-mail codpiece.
“I’m about 20 pounds heavier tonight,” King George says. “I’m not sure I’ll be doing much dancing.”
A few feet from King George, two women peer through a gap in the wall between R2 and Rapture in an attempt to gauge whether or not to drop the $3 cover charge for entrance to the dance club. The women see a floor that is hopping for the second consecutive night and has, for now, accomplished Rodi’s goal “to sort of bridge the gap between MTV karaoke party and Manhattan.”
DJ exodus
Because electronic music is swimming upstream in Charlottesville, some local talent has left town.
“It was tough for me to find a DJ spot in Charlottesville,” says UVA grad Mike Walker, who spins under the name Mike Brie.
A hip hop “battle” DJ and scratch turntablist, Walker wiggles the vinyl to scratch out wickedly complex sounds while using the cross-fader, which controls the output from two turntables, to juggle beats and rhythms. The format for a DJ battle, which is directly related to the MC battles made famous in Eminem’s movie 8 Mile, feature two DJs trying to both out-spin and out-diss each other.
Walker, who arrived at UVA five years ago to get a master’s degree in computer science, found a cadre of fellow hip hop DJs who played at Tokyo Rose’s basement—which eventually took the microphone away from hip hop shows after a gunplay incident—as well as Orbit Billiards and the Biltmore Grill.
But Walker says the scene dried up quickly.
“For me, I didn’t really have any opportunities,” Walker says.
Jeremy Kilmartin, a.k.a. Dingus, a hip hop/disco DJ from Providence, Rhode Island, who is living in Charlottesville this summer, also bemoans the dearth of DJ venues. Kilmartin says he was tossed from Atomic Burrito, a restaurant with an after-hours scene at which he had hoped to spin, on a recent weekend night for mocking an allegedly inept DJ.
“It’s a rock ‘n’ roll town, completely,” Kilmartin says.
Even a visit from a world-famous scratch DJ, Mix Master Mike, who has long performed with the Beastie Boys, was a flop locally. When Mix Master Mike played at Starr Hill last year, Walker says only about 50 other people showed up to hear the turntablist.
Of his fellow local DJs—SHandz, Cobalt 60 and DJ Myson—Walker says, “they’ve all moved away, actually.” Last month, Walker also pulled up stakes and moved to Alexandria, in part because of the potential DJ gigs he could score in D.C.
Walker recently won a regional DJ contest at a D.C. club, and will travel to Chicago for the finals in coming weeks—one of two well-known DJ competitions in which he’ll be spinning this summer.
Asked what keeps Charlottesville’s club set from being open-minded about less poppy electronic music, Walker cites the overbearing popularity of jam bands, which “builds upon itself.” But he also mentions the lack of venues that cater to the underground, which is not just a local phenomenon.
Since the glory days of rave culture, which peaked in the mid-’90s, electronic music has been pushed toward the mainstream. Once police, local governments and Feds started looking for ways to hit back at MDMA, the hug-drug known as Ecstasy, raves fell into the crosshairs. Widespread efforts to crack down on raves culminated in the U.S. Senate’s 2003 passage of the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act (nobody can touch Senators in acronym artistry). The law extends “crackhouse laws” to raves and holds rave organizers responsible for hosting parties at which drugs are present. If convicted, rave promoters can face big fines and 20 years in the slammer.
The RAVE Act and other push-backs have forced most raves out of uncontrollable warehouses and such to legit and legal venues. As electronic music moved back toward clubs, it lost many of its younger followers. And, many argue, the music simultaneously became more poppy and watered-down. To make matters worse for house/techno and hundreds of subgenres, record companies have made a mint off commercial hip hop, stealing most of electronica’s thunder in clubs and leaving Gen X fans sitting at home listening to their stereos.
“There’s been a retreat into the known,” Rodi says of the current music scene, while also conceding “there’s a lot of crappy electronica out there.”
For Stroud, who has been making a living as a DJ since 1995, when he sold Stroud Designs, his Corner graphics, skate and surf shop, the backlash against electronica means going commercial to pay the bills. And though the tunes he spins to get R2 moving might make him occasionally roll his eyes, at the college parties, “I’ve got to stick with that really pop cheese, man.”
The way we were
It wasn’t always this way in Charlottesville. In fact, the town was on the map during rave culture’s peak for its ability to throw kick-ass warehouse dance parties.
The godfather of the Charlottesville rave is Duncan Haberly. A Western Albemarle High graduate, Haberly, 37, promoted many legendary raves while attending UVA law school from ’93 to ’96. Haberly credits brothers Thane and Will Kerner for inspiring him to fire up the raves.
“I personally believe that Charlottesville, for a period, had the best dance scene for a small town in the U.S.,” says Haberly, via phone from San Francisco, where he runs a contract renegotiation firm.
Haberly’s first two raves, which he dubbed Krusty’s and Krusty’s II, in deference to “The Simpsons” clown and British raver parlance, were held at the former Splathouse on Grady Avenue in 1993. By all accounts, they were a huge success, with Haberly claiming attendance of more than 1,000 at each party.
“That was a full-tilt party. We had kids busing in from New York, Florida and Ohio,” Haberly says of the first rave. “It put the taste for real electronic music into people’s mouths.”
From there, Haberly went on to throw raves at the now-defunct Trax, the old Live Arts space on Market Street, a warehouse near the National Guard Armory on Avon Street Extended and a regular gig in the room in the back of the Jefferson Theater.
“Hawes was awesome about it,” Haberly says of Jefferson owner Hawes Spencer. The large space, which has high ceilings, brick walls and hardwood floors, was perfect for the music.
“The bass would just bounce off the ceilings and come back down,” Haberly says. For a further trippy enhancement, the Jefferson would project movies on the other side of the room—adding to the swirling lights in the room and giving dancers an entertaining break from the floor.
But when the fire marshal paid a visit to the Jefferson in May 1994 and demanded, as Haberly claims, an $8,000 wheelchair ramp, “that put the kibosh on that.”
Near the tail end of Haberly’s big-beat tour of Charlottesville, he teamed-up with Stroud to help promote the parties, often selling the tickets to secret venues out of Stroud’s shop. Both partners spun at the raves.
“As soon as [Stroud] got involved, life got easier,” Haberly says, adding, “he’s absolutely carried on and put his own stamp on it.”
Though Haberly is aware that underground electronic music has struggled in the years since he left town, he thinks Charlottesville is hardly alone in favoring bland, commercial dance music. Haberly even claims he moved from a thriving music spot to “a pretty terrible dance scene” in San Francisco.
When told about R2, Haberly says, “if somebody’s opening a real dance club, we must’ve done something right.”
R2 detour
“The club is very much my baby, in terms of conceiving of, tearing my hair out and losing money,” says Mike Rodi, who came up with the idea for R2 in 2000.
The club finally opened last November. Though several local venues had long played dance music, most notably the members-only, after-hours Club 216, which regularly packs the house with big beats, Rodi says R2 was intended to be home to house, trance, breakbeat and other forms of dance music that can’t be found anywhere around Charlottesville.
“We’ve been able to do very little of that,” Rodi says of that original goal, adding that DJs are “discouraged by the amount of work they have to do to draw an audience in Charlottesville.”
The space kicked off with a performance by Blowoff, a D.C. dance act featuring indie rock guru Bob Mould. Though the show was a hit, attendance petered out in subsequent weeks. Rodi says he once considered bringing Deep Dish, a jet-setting D.C. duo that is among the hottest house acts in the world and has produced tunes for the likes of Madonna, to R2 for a show. Though he admits that Deep Dish’s $10,000 price was intimidating, he says the big bucks weren’t what nixed his plan.
“I could lose money, but I wasn’t prepared to take a loss on it and have an empty room,” Rodi says.
All gloom aside, Rodi says things are picking up at R2. The weekend nights of pop dance and hip hop are bringing in a growing, racially mixed crowd and giving Rodi “a little more breathing space.” As a result, R2 has begun booking “stuff that doesn’t have a home in Charlottesville,” such as world beats, house music and acts like Laptopalooza, a lineup of diverse, tech savvy DJs that hit the club for a night of on-the-spot grooves on a recent Wednesday.
Turntablist Walker, who as Mike Brie performed at R2 on July 10, calls the club “fantastic” and “long overdue.”
“I am happy with the way it turned out,” Rodi says, adding that he thinks R2 is beginning to achieve the goal of “exposing people to music that they don’t hear everywhere.”
“I’m glad that we have 216 and R2 here in Charlottesville,” says Arantxa Ascunce, who got down until 5am on a recent Saturday night at Club 216. Though Ascunce, 30, who has been in town for five years, says Charlottesville’s club options are certainly limited compared to her previous homes of Northern Virginia and Spain, she says, “at least there’s somewhere to go dance.”
As for Stroud, the R2 shows are his main venue for now, as he no longer spins at Club 216. Though Stroud can test his tracks at R2, to really let his favorite sounds loose he relies on the music he mixes up at the home studio and that he plays on “Electronic Era,” his weekly radio show on WNRN FM 91.9, which runs after midnight in the first two hours of every Tuesday morning.
On a recent Monday night, Stroud plays a remix he’s just begun of the newly released “Ch-Check It Out” by the Beastie Boys. Stroud’s home studio is filled with drum machines, mixers and keyboards, but most of his work is now done on a computer.
“My gear is like nothing compared to what I can do with software,” Stroud says.
With midnight approaching, Stroud packs up his two Pioneer turntables, which actually spin CDs, not vinyl, and his music in three metal-lined carrying cases, leaving all of his estimated 5,000 record albums at home.
In the studio, he smiles regularly and bounces around while playing a set list of block-rocking house tunes, all of which are far darker and seemingly more layered and complex than his pop club tunes. He bleeds each song into the next by watching a digital display of the tracks’ sonic waveforms rather than by keying off of the grooves in the vinyl of record albums, as did the traditional disc jockey.
While describing some of the more annoying behavior he encounters at gigs, including the question, “How can you not have the ‘Electric Slide’?” Stroud displays several of his tracks on Promo Only CDs, which is a track mine for professional DJs around the world.
“Some DJ over in Europe” picked up one of his creations, Stroud says nonchalantly. Of the potential fame-maker of getting a track discovered by a DJ superstar like Digweed, re-mixed, and played for club kids around the world, he says “I’ve a had a couple close ones.”
Stroud says bootleg versions of his music are getting picked up on the Internet. “Stuff’s happening now. If I keep with it, who knows?” he says. But if he never breaks through, he says, “I didn’t really plan to be a lifer, as a DJ.”
In the meantime, he’s sticking with it.
“I’m poor, but I get to do what I want to all week long,” Stroud says.