Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Huggins.
Jason, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
starting note – I haven’t written professionally in 25 years – and the 2nd biggest argument my wife and I have ever had was over comma usage (some people are slaves to UPI or APA formatting whereas I believe that punctuation is there to SERVE the messenger, not the other way around…)
Jason Huggins
This is the story of how North Carolina helped me turn my passion for people, art, and music – into my dream job.
The Huggins family arrived here Oct 24 1635 aboard the ship Constance – we’re about to celebrate 400 years in NC. We’ve been in Wilmington since the 1700s, and if you ever visit the corner of Market Street and Front Street, you’ll see a 3 story building on the corner with my great-grandfather’s name (and my dad’s name) up the top. There’s a big wrigley’s spearmint ad from the early 1900s on the wall of the Java Dog coffee shop in the cotton exchange another great-grandfather painted when he was 17. Anyone who remembers the old pepsi sign at the Oleander/Wrightsville split (before they put the food lion there) has seen his work.
My ancestors fought at Moore’s Creek, served in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, WW1, WW2, The Vietnam War, and then – having grown up in the military, I realized that I profoundly didn’t want to be in the military, which is a bit of a shame, because growing up on military bases around the country was the single best childhood anyone could ask for. It’s a big part of what led me to love meeting new people.
Mom is a Watson from Elizabethtown, and most of my summers and Christmases, no matter where we were stationed, were in Bladen County or New Hanover County, so North Carolina was the only place that ever felt like home, and I’m so proud to be a North Carolinian.
At the heart of it, I’m an arts kid – I loved drawing and writing and spent most of my life expecting to be a writer and artist. You’d usually find me reading books, listening to music, and drawing. Its’ something I could carry from place to place. Moving around all the time, leaving all your friends behind every few years, it’s easy to carry a book, your music, and your drawing paper wherever you go. I remember moving to Chicago at 6 and sharing songs on the bus as a way to meet new people. At the heart of it, music, art, and stories are how we learn each other and ourselves.
We’re all shaped by our parents music choices, either for or against. I remember being four, my little brother strapped into his car seat in the back of mom’s late ‘70s black Chevy Caprice (think old cop car), and being absolutely mesmerized by These Dreams by Heart. I had a mondegreen for this song until just a few years ago – I always thought they said, “These three koalas when I close my eyes…”
If you were a kid like me, you were profoundly moved by art, music, history and stories. If you’ve ever cried at a movie – you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s an older saying, maybe it’s a proverb from around the world or just a great quote by a poet or painter : “First you see the mountain in the painting, then you see the painting in the mountain.” That’s been a bit of a touchstone for me, and it’s been the guide to how I’ve tried to approach the world – there’s beauty everywhere – you just have to open yourself to it.
That’s how, at the age of 7, I found two cassette tapes in the dirty Chicago snow piled up at the edge of the sidewalk during the spring thaw: it was someone’s copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Top Gun soundtrack. After having lain undisturbed in an exhaust-discolored pile of snow for months, they glinted briefly in the sunlight as I was walking home from my friends Shawn’s house one afternoon. I started knocking the crusted chunks of ice from around the first one and, as I was digging, I found the second one.
I looked around, thinking someone must have just dropped them, but there was no one else around and they were too deep to be new. Sticking them in my pocket, fearful that I was actually stealing and that I’d get in trouble with God, I defied the universe and kept them anyway.
They were secret – they were grown-up, they were mine.
The Little Mermaid sticker adorned my old alarm-clock cassette player and I would sit in my room after my parents had put me to bed and secretly ready my books under my covers by the light of my glow-worm stuffed animal and quietly listen to these little audio treasures, afraid my parents would find out I was still awake and take it all way from me or, even worse, give them back to whoever owned them. It’s the only time in all of human history that the Top Gun soundtrack was forbidden or dangerous, furtive or illicit.
Then, I took my dad’s copy of Phil Collin’s Face Value album. After that I stole my mom’s Four Tops/Temptations album. It got weirder from there.
A quick note about dad’s records- dad’s collection was so good it got other people laid – they’d borrow albums from him to make themselves look more interesting when they had girls over. I’d seen it for years, but it was Pink Floyd that caught my eye – I had already claimed them as my own, and then to find out that they had so many albums – it was overwhelming at first. I had the best of the 60s 70s and 80s at my fingertips. Soul, progressive rock, ambient, krautrock, jazz, motown, pyschedelic rock, and so much more. Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, The Byrds, John Mayall and the Blues Breakers, Genesis, Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival, Bill Withers, The Temptations, Steely Dan – it was amazing.
We moved to Indy when I was 9, and growing up in Indy was pretty awesome. We started off at Fort Benjamin Harrison (little did I know I was going to marry one of his descendants) before moving to the east side near Cumberland. I got really active in scouts, met the people who would become my lifelong best friends in grades 5 & 6, and made the inevitable transition from playing with GI Joes in the mud pits out back to going over to friends houses and exploring other more socially salient parts of the world. That was also the first year I started asking for records for Christmas.
It was right around this time, 1991, that I had my first ‘DJ moment.” I had gotten a CD player at this point and grabbed my dad’s copy of the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack. I was recording the radio (this was a thing we used to have to do to get new music) and thinking how cool it would be to put the Clanaad track with PM Dawn’s Set Adrift a Memory Bliss. The music was great – but wouldn’t it be cool if … It sounded terrible because I had no way to adjust tempo and I had no one in my life who was a DJ or producer – but that seed took root.
I got my first real job two days after I turned 14 at the Dairy Queen on Washington and German Church Rd, immediately across from St. Johns, the church that gives German Church its name and the same place Troop 115 had its scout meetings every Wednesday. I was so proud to ride my bike all the way from Prospect in my uniform to make a whopping $4.75 an hour. At 16 I took a job at the Mrs. Fields Cookie Company in Washington Square Mall, and two months later I got offered a job at the Waldenbooks I’d been frequenting since we’d moved there. I’d work both jobs for nearly 9 months and in bookstores for the next five years.
However, I always thought I was going to be a writer and artist. I wrote for school papers, drew the cartoons, was the featured editorialist all through High School. I got published by the largest newspaper in Indiana when I was 14. I won ‘Best Columnist” in the whole state, beating out professional writers, when I was 17.
Through all those years, I spent almost every penny I had on books and music. The people at Best Buy, Sam Goody, Coconuts (shout out to the clerk who recommended Liz Phair’s phenomenal ‘Exile in Guyville’ album to my mom when she asked what she should get me), Karma Records, and Media Play all knew me by name. My friends and I would trade mixtapes and I spent hours putting together the perfect playlists. My friends were musical truffle hunters too – and I was lucky enough to get to explore the world of music through them as well.
I still think playing music for someone is an act of love.
That’s also when I started going to raves. It wasn’t held in clubs like you see today. There were some parties I went to where the only power came from street lights and they didn’t have the average to power lights to see by. Parties in abandoned warehouses and strip malls where you’d have to know someone to get in. There weren’t really ‘superstar’ DJs – they were more like facilitators than headliners. Yeah, there were truly amazing people like Slater Hogan and Shiva and Chocolate the Freaky Afronaut who were spearheading the effort – but it felt like a community and that’s hard to explain to people who’ve grown up in the era after the RAVE act made glow-stick illegal if a cop wanted to throw you in jail.
It’s hard to explain, but the rave scene at the time felt like it was a cultural renaissance, akin to the flowering of possibility and awareness America experienced in the 60s when kids were gathering in secret to listen to rock and roll, throwing off the dead weight of irrelevant dogma to pursue something uniquely new. Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect – an equal opportunity for all to share the same ecstatic experience regardless of background – as long as you could afford the $10-$20 to get into the show.
Parties like these weren’t like what you’d see today. some of which were in vacant strip malls, abandoned warehouse, derelict outbuildings at the fairgrounds. There was one show I went to that had almost no lighting anywhere except the bathroom – just a seething mass of moving bodies thronging to Revolution 909, Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson, Frankie Knuckes, Josh Wink, Assault, DJ Funk, Underworld, Juan Atkins, Carl Craig, Blaze and DJ Icey.
Pure soulful Chicago Deep House, Jazz-inflected Indy House, the driving beats and counterpoints of Detroit Techno, Philadelphia’s polyrhythmic and stripped-down, acid-rinsed house, and England was giving us lush electronica and the driving power of big beat as well as (most importantly for me) the emergence of Drum & Bass from Jungle.
The first time I ever hopped on a pair of decks it was 1996, I was newly 16 and dating a young lady whose brother had records and a pair of Technic SL-12000 MK 3s and a Pioneer DJM 500. It would be nearly a decade before I owned my own tables, but the seed was planted. The first tracks I mixed were Daft Punk and Carl Cox. I stuck the landing on my 2nd attempt.
I got an Aphrodite promo tape with Darkside on it in 1996 – and it completely transformed where I wanted to go from there. I felt like the world was my oyster, driving around in my faded bronze 1987 Honda Accord two-door hatchback that smelled like pachouli because a friend I’d given a ride to had soaked her hat in it and left it in my back window.
One quick note about my high school. Mine was the first class to transition from having 9th grade be the upper class of Junior High to the first class of Freshman at the high school. I’d started school young even in North Carolina so I was generally a year to two years younger than everyone else in my class. Race relations in Indy in the 90s were pretty miserable. There was a race riot at my school right before I got there. The Klan was active, gangs were becoming more frequent (some national, most local), and the school that had produced Colts Quarterback Jeff George and Journalist Jane Pauley was in a unique maelstrom of hormonal stupidity by adding a bunch of 13 & 14 year olds. With all of that said – it was one of the best examples of public education I could ever hope to point to.
The Warren Central school district had a unique carve-out, meaning they could increase property taxes without going to the county in order to fund education. We had an award-winning performing arts center, an award-winning career center where you could take shop, construction, or engine mechanics among many other opportunities. But the real standout were the teachers like Mrs. Clarkson in English, Philosophy and American History instructor Mr. Armstrong, Great Books instructor Mr. Comiskey, journalist Mr. Haab, latin scholar Magistra Marhsall, mathematician par excellence Mrs. Gaerte, Physics guru Mr. Landy, and an Art Department that knew how to develop skills & interests. I stared a philosophy club, a Latin Club, a customizable card game club, became the featured editorialist for the school paper, won 2nd place in the Indy 500 art competition, attended Boys State and became the press secretary for the Boys Nation president, became an Eagle Scout, and still found time to work two jobs.
Right when I was about to graduate from Warren Central High School in 1998, mom was crippled due to medical malpractice. She couldn’t walk, would never jump again, and the medical bills were insane. Dad started working three jobs. My brother was a sophomore and as I was leaving a lot of things fell to him. I had to choose between my dream college (St. Johns in Santa Fe) or a much closer school that was offering me a full-ride Arts scholarship. I chose the last real all-male school in the nation in the tiny hamlet of Crawfordsville, Indiana – the ‘Harvard of the Midwest’ – Wabash College.
Staying close meant I could help out a bit more, but all the fears I had about Wabash were put to rest with the truly outstanding quality of the rigorous academic curriculum. Most of my peers went on to become doctors and lawyers, politicians and researchers. I just wanted to get into the world and start working as a journalist. Through college I was continuing to write for the school paper, the Star News, and Indianpolis’ best independent weekly newspaper – Nuvo, under the editorial leadership of Jim Poyser. I also hosted WNDY, where my weekly music program allowed me to explore my diverse and sometimes absurd tastes.
I did my Junior year abroad in India where I studied North Indian arts & culture. I studied miniature painting with Padmashrii Kripal Singh Shekawat-Ji (the man who rediscovered blue pottery and was selected to capture the Bagh caves before they collapsed) and under Daya Vyas (aka the Yoga Mother, who was Rajasthan’s first female Ph.D. and teacher to Jane Campion, Cate Winslet, and many more – just a truly beautiful person who adopted me like some poor urchin she found huddled under an awning in the rain).
It was in India that I got all my stuff stolen and ended up homeless on the streets of New Delhi for a minute. It was awesome. I scrounged for food, drew pictures, and spent about a week waiting to get into the US embassy. The Indian experience is a deeply gratifying one, and I’ve been looking forward to going back ever since.
Here’s one thing I didn’t understand about India until I got there: it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. At the time, you’d see scooters, motorcycles, Bentlleys, Maruthis, rickshaws, dogs, cows, elephants, camels, bicycles, and pedestrians all dueling it out on the roadway they all wanted to win. Need a place to sleep? Here’s an abandoned palace from a Rajput prince from 600 years ago. There were places in the jungle where we slept on the porch so that the tigers couldn’t get to the livestock animals in the house. I have so many great memories like riding my bike in the 110 degree heat, but it was so hot that kept popping the repair seal on my tire and I’d get to sit and take lunch in the tiffin center while they repaired it again. Plus, I learned how to make paint out of gemstones and hike through the Aravali mountains. I’ll never forget watching the sunrise over the Himalayas in Ranikhet.
Truly an amazing place full of amazing people and the rhythms of Rajasthan in particular have stayed with me to this day. If you ever get the chance to visit Jaipur – I strongly recommend it. The Rajputs were like the Spartans of India (except with less proto-communism)
After college, I moved out to LA for a bit to try my hand in a different arena, working for a Lakers MVP and a former playmate. LA wasn’t really my scene but I’m truly grateful for my time there.
From LA, I headed to Minneapolis, and then back to Indy where I worked at the 2nd busiest gas station in all of Indiana for a year before it was time to move back down to Wilmington. There’s been very little that has been quite as frustrating as trying to change the gas pricing board (with the long poles and the vacuum seals) in -20 degree gales.
I joined a start-up muckraking newspaper called the Tonic, started cooking/bartending at the Juggling Gypsy, and doing some freelance for the New York Times affiliate Wilmington Star-News. I proudly helped bring light to the corruption in the WPD that led to the removal of the former chief of police, tackled everything fromm corruption, curfews, public housing, homelessness, and prostitution, and published an article on the 1898 coup that got us kicked out of the city archives for daring to ask questions about it. That one article probably had the biggest impact of anything else I’ve ever published. It started a conversation that ended up with the creation of the 1898 Race Riot Commission, the 1898 Memorial Monument, and a greater public awareness of a horrifying chapter in Wilmington’s history.
After sleeping in the streets for a story on homelessness that saw me hurt my leg pretty bad, I was still using a cane to get around when I took a trip to Wrightsville Beach and met the woman who was going to be my wife.
I’m not someone who believes in love at first sight – it’s stupid and never happens. But it happened to me.
That lightning bolt moment happened after hours of ignoring her and changed the entire trajectory of my life.It sounds cliched – but it was very much a ‘bond girl’ moment. She was climbing out of the pool of the Sunspree on Wrightsville Avenue, and it seemed like time slowed down – I saw the sunlight glistening in a million myriad colors as it dropped off her. I looked into her eyes and I swear I saw the entire future play out around her in a slow-motion cascade of colors and sparkling scintillation, the dramatic counterpoint to a quickly shifting mandala of infinite futures all happening around her simultaneously – and the only thing that didn’t change was her eyes. Her eyes held a brilliant unwavering intelligence, honest nobility, and tectonic strength – like the protective sheen covering every surface of every tree branch after an ice storm – just as the sun rises up. They were the only port in an overwhelming storm of images and moments, I watched her grow old right in front of me and the only thing that never shifted or changed was her eyes, which were focused, intense, and captivating. I knew that no matter what changed – I would look into those eyes every day for the rest of my life. That was the moment I knew I was going to marry her.
We bummed around Wilmington for a bit – hitting the beach every day, running a poetry night and open DJ decks at the bar, trying to tackle public corruption, and making garbage tips at a place that was transforming my city in real time. Meanwhile, my parents were divorcing, my brother had gotten hooked on harder drugs and he moved down from Indy to get away from his bad habits (it didn’t take), and I was spending the summer in love with a woman that I needed to convince to fall in love with me too. Luckily, I clean up pretty well.
One quick note about the Gypsy (now the Bar-zarre) – it used to be a Jamaican restaurant before Sebastian Gomez and Marcy Whipkins took it over and turned it into the refuge par excellence that wilmington was missing. Open to any and all, it was a kind of hippy bar that also served cheerleaders and marines side by side with belly dancers and fire spinners. I ran a poetry slam night, kung fu movie night, and an open decks DJ night. While I was managing the Gypsy, after I’d closed everything down, I’d lock the doors, pull out the cheap CDJs they kept in the back, and spend hours playing tunes and putting all those years of record collecting to good use. That one little bar turned Castle Street into what it is now and let me get the DJ hours in that helped me to refine my sound.
It was also thanks to a couple of the weekly resident DJs (Yoel ‘Delerio’ Del Rio, Jermanik Quinton Barber, and Emmit “Dr. M-IT” Brown, and Jason ‘Dr. Steppa’ Lee of Heavy Rotation) that I was able to get the feedback that gave me a huge push as well.
Mom and Dad separated and moved into different houses. It was not a clean situation. My brother’s fresh start started looking like more of the same, and moving to a bigger city with more opportunities seemed like a better idea each and every day. That’s kind of the thing about azaleas – they’re gorgeous and can be quite toxic for those who don’t know their way around them.
So in 2006 we moved to Raleigh.
Do you remember Raleigh in the early 2000s? Fayetteville street was pedestrian only and there was nothing to do and nowhere to go – it seemed like the city shut down at 5 PM on Friday and Reopened at 8 AM Monday morning. We were also dirt poor and I would be damned if we were going to ask for help.
We stayed in a $300/month room on Brooks avenue, sleeping on a mattress on the floor we got from a pair of Chinese grad students at UNC. Everything in the room was a curb score. The ‘dresser’ was part of a hanging kitchen cabinet set we managed to cram into my wife’s little Toyota Yaris. I’d found a bookshelf down the street someone had put on the curb for the trash to take out and hoofed it back down. I used the Cameron Village library for all our internet needs. I had a TV from Erin’s last apartment and luckily the house had cable so I was able to catch the season 2 premiere of the Venture Bros. We were sharing a single $5 footlong from the subway on Hillsborough street while we did everything in our power to make enough money to maybe save a little and eventually get a real place.
I remember depositing my money every night, then buying a coke and a candy bar. I went into my account a few days later and all my money was gone – the bank had taken it all as ‘overdraft fees.’ They were holding onto the money I’d deposited, and every time I bought a drink and snack they were listing it as ‘insufficient funds’ and hitting me for hundreds in fees. Weeks worth of work down the drain, it was heartbreaking. But, I can always double down on hard work and smarter decisions, so I saved up, went to a new bank, and made sure I never used BB&T again.
At one point I was teaching electronics and Harry Potter Camp at Durham Academy & Cary Academy, waiting tables as the original opening staff of the Bamboo Garden in Morrssville, delivering pizza for PizzAmerica, and doing guest sessions at WKNC and as many EDM nights at Mosquito and the Berkeley Cafe as I could. in 2006 I reached out to a local DJ company and got hired on and, before too long, I was making my way up the ranks.
2006 is also when I bought my very own decks – a pair of Denon DNS-5000s. I got them from K97.5’s DJ Showtime (Mista Talk of the Town!) out in Durham and they had a really unique feature – the could play two songs off the same disc at the same time – which means I could play 4 decks at once. I spent hours and hours and hours in our palatial little duplex ($475/month) at University Apartments. Black mold so thick you had to scoop it out from under the sink and neighbors so salty your blood pressure went up. It didn’t matter. I had a pair of small computer speakers I could plug directly into the output on the mixer and I could finally play at home!! Rats could have been developing into type 2 and 3 civilzations, transcending consciousness, and achieving singularity in the nicely folded pile of clothes we were trying to stuff into the cheap plastic tubs we got from the Big Lots next to the Cook-Out and I would still have thought it was heaven. I’d been preparing for this most of my life – all the CDs I’d collected, scrimping and saving and sacrificing for, and all those silver discs with tightly scrawled sharpie notes that I’d burned in the mad dash through the late 90s and early 2000s (before Metallica’s Lars Ulrich got litigious) were now like pieces of stained glass I could combine into infinite assemblages and infitessimally adjustable masterpieces of pure creativity. It drove my wife nuts.
I was a bit of a music snob when I started DJing out in public for the mobile DJ company. I felt pity for you if you listened to only what was on the end of your newspaper (mass media) spoon (yes, that’s a naked lunch reference). Sure, there’s good stuff on the radio sometimes, but there’s so much MORE out there. I was trying to be a subservsively ‘healthy’ DJ, trying to sneak James Zabiela and Wu Tang vegetables into everyone’s Britney Spears and Usher dino-nuggets. Is that a big bowl of top 40 mac & cheese? The cheesiest!!! Yes!!! and it’s got C Rayz Walz and Benga and Telefon Tel Aviv secretly in the sauce!
Then, Dubstep happened, and 2007 is when the water broke across the pond and it’s also the year I shifted to Serato Scratch Live, which was a music program I first go introduced to as Final Scratch (Josh Wink was an early adopter) and transformed DJing. It allowed us to used CDs or Vinyl records to play music off our computers rather than having to use Vinyl or carry around massive containers of CDs. It made being mobile easier and, more importantly, it made me faster on the decks. I could pull a song up moments after hearing what it should be. I could label songs in key RIGHT IN THE TITLE and build more harmonically sonorous mixes. I could sample pieces of a song right in the program and trigger them with midi-assigned buttons.
I could do more with a laptop than a million dollar studio could do just a few years earlier.
2007/8 was the first real rumbling of the massive shift in pop music that was about to completely redefine the overton window of pop music for masses. Suddenly, pop started getting more dance-music oriented. Remember, Hip Hop had been the default sound of American pop music since Neilson’s Soundscan was introduced in 1991, giving us PM Dawn’s ‘Set Adrift a Memory Bliss”. Had it been introduced a week earlier, the first #1 would have been from Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of A Black Planet’ album. EDM was being coined as a marketing concept that replaced the previous ‘Electronica’ and the popular appellation of “techno” for anything that sounded remotely electronic even though almost every sing pop song on the radio was, in my rapidly collapsing accretion disc, EDM by sheer virtue of its production. David Guetta scores big in 2008 with the Black Eyed Peas vehicle “I Gotta Feeling” and Akon is sneaking breaks and 2 step into his productions. Skrillex hits in 2010, and America has its “Smells Like Teen Spirit” moment with a whole new basket of sound opportunities for enterprising young DJs who smell blood in the water.
You know what else was in the water? A baby. My son, HAH1, was born February 24th 2008 and we took him back to our smarmy little duplex and all of a sudden our little two-bedroom wasn’t feeling the same way. I couldn’t play at home very much because the baby needed to sleep. I was full-time with the DJ thing but still picking up shifts delivering pizza (Damian Marley didn’t tip and that sucked because it was a LOT of pizzas). I was stockpiling anything of value because we might need to sell it if money got tight. My wife was working as a full-time teacher and making less than $10/hr. I’m wasting half a day and hundreds of dollars every other month putting used tires on my car, we’re still working in restaurants so we can take food home. Little did we know, it was all about to be much harder.
My brother, rather than cleaning up his act, had cleaned out my bank accounts by stealing my checkbook and cashing it out for drugs. Then, when he’d get pulled over for bad driving, would give them my ID and then never show up for court or pay the fines. Mom begged me not to report him. I wish I hadn’t listened sooner. My wife went back to work after Hunter was 3 months old and that baby wouldn’t take a bottle to save his life. You also couldn’t put him down. We just walked EVERYWHERE because if we didn’t, he’d cry. Every day, I’d get up, grab the baby, Erin would go off to work, and we’d spend the next nine interminable hours walking in our tiny little apartment.
Then the cops showed up and started throwing me in handcuffs. I remember throwing my 3 month old son at my neighbor and begging her to call my wife. Remember I mentioned the traffic violations my brother was getting? Turns out he wasn’t handling them at all and once that happens, the cops can come in, arrest you, hold you in jail until your court date (could be months away). Meanwhile, you can’t make money, you’ve probably lost your job, and there’s all kinds of other expenses associated with jail too – like making phone calls or getting food.
Luckily, we had saved enough up to afford the 10% to give the bail bondsman, I was able to get out, and we could move on. I had my court date. I just needed to prove to the cops that I wasn’t even in Wilmington on the date in question – which is really easy to do when your work calendar was as packed as mine was.
Until the cops showed up again and threw me in handcuffs for another violation. It just kept happening. I was trying to be a good and dutiful son and brother. It was hurting us a lot. A friend of mine, KC Baroody, told me some words that have stuck with me ever since – when someone is trapped in addiction, any help at all is enabling them.
Getting back to work was more important that ever. I wanted every DJ gig I could get my hands on. Didn’t matter what I had to play – I just needed them to have the best time ever so I could work more.
This is when I had my 2nd great awakening as a DJ. This is when I realized that it was ALL pop, just for smaller and smaller audiences. This is when I realized it was harder to write a song that would hit the radio that my mom would like than it was to write any super-niche genre-specific track that ticked all the boxes for scene kids. This is when I got over myself and learned that I didn’t have to wait for a song to be ‘uncool’ again for it to be fair game for left-field brilliance. Its’ when all the pieces came together in my head.
Then, the economy collapsed. The whole vibe shifted – and things got really tight. I’m probably one of the few people who actually made more money during that time period because I was making so little to begin with, that it was almost impossible to go further down.
By this time, I’ve been DJing weddings for several years, been playing in clubs for several years, and I’m the resident at 606 on Glenwood Avenue. I’m still popping into the weeklies and Larry Johnson is trying to help the nascent Triangle EDM scene limp it way into the new era by bringing Donald Glaude, Cedric Gervais, and Charles Feelgood to our fair City of Oaks.
It’s having dinner with Charles Feelgood at the Red Room (DJ Triple B was on the decks that night and was crushing at as usual – that dude’s a treasure) that he shows me his Vestax VCI 100. He pulls it out of his backpack and tells me that he’ll play his entire set on it that night. No need for control vinyl, no need for CDJs, everything he needs fits right in his backpack. It blew my mind, and I had to have one. The moment it becomes really viable for me is in 2010, when Pioneer launches the DDJ-SX, a 4-deck all-in-one Serato native controller with mic inputs that completely removes the necessity of a separate mixer or decks. The barrier to entry for DJing is now less than $6,000 for a basic rig. You can get a controller for $1250, and it’s awesome.
Just like how Serato made me faster, the controller made me faster still – and put more tools at my immediate disposal so I could make sounds and transitions that were nigh impossible before.
One quick note about Glenwood Avenue: Glenwood was popping for a hot minute thanks to the groundwork laid by Joseph Sky (DJ ProtoJ) at Noir (Matt Kenner’s place). He started bringing out the frat and sorority kids, drawing some of the attention away from the warehouse district (S Lounge, Spy, Mosquito, the Office). When Solas, 606, and other bars started opening up, there were a lot of places that were trying to go HARD. After a while, trouble started popping up and people were less inclined to go to a place that had a lot of shootings, stabbings, robberies, and the kinds of things that happen when you get a bunch of drunks in one place.
In the 2010s, the gravity of Raleigh nightlife started shifting to Downtown Raleigh, with places like Zinda, Architect, and Coglins eating Glenwood’s lunch the way it had eaten the Warehouse districts a few years earlier. I’m also really making a name for myself as a private event DJ. By this point I’m now running the DJ company, and I’m far and away the most requested DJ on staff. I’m training the new recruits and trying to convince the owner to fire guys who give DJs a bad name (but to no avail, they were cheap).
In the middle of 2012, the bartender/manager of 606, Brian Kite, tells me he’s opening a new bar and he needs me to play it for him. It’s going to be called Cornerstone because it’s going to be the cornerstone of their new bar empire (with Dan Lovenheim). How true it was. They were buying the house the little head shop across the street had occupied for years and turning it into a bar. When we opened in October, it was me, Brian, another bartender (Cecily) and a bouncer (Matt). Every night we never knew who we were going to get so every night I played to the people that were there and did everything in my power to make sure they had the best night ever.
At the beginning, some nights we were an indie bar, some nights we were a hip hop club, some nights we were playing deep cut rave-ups or throwback goodies. But each and every night, I was doing something a little different – I was trying to change how people viewed Glenwood. I was trying to create a space where it was OK to be friendly, where you could unironically get goofy and where everything was fair game. You could absolutely unironically scream out the Spice Girls (you can’t quite understand how verboten that was at the time, the public backlash against them hadn’t abated). I was trying to get past ‘cool’ into ‘fun.’
By December I’d trained the crowd enough that it we were starting to hit critical mass. We really hit our stride on St. Patricks day. Friday and Saturday nights were packed beyond capacity. Enough word had gotten around I’ll never forget wondering if the floor was going to collapse because everyone REALLY enjoyed Jump Around. The bar was pulling in 20 grand a night. It was so busy they ended up putting a bouncer by the bathroom to make sure that people weren’t getting into fights trying jump in line. People would get furious at me if I had to use it. They added another bar out back. Then they bought Brooklyn Heights, the hip hop bar next door. That became Cornerstone 2.
At the company I’d been working with, the owner would hire people with little to no experience and little by way of technique. I remember being asked to go ‘fill in’ for another DJ but that I shouldn’t bring my laptop, I should just play off their computer and decks. At the end of the night one of the DJs came up and made a big deal about getting the computer immediately and making sure I hadn’t deleted the playlist. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were trying to take what I was doing and try to replicate it. There’s one big problem with that – a playlist by itself isn’t what makes the event. The DJ themself isn’t what makes the event (how many of you have been to see ‘big name’ DJs and been wildly underwhelmed?). It’s the synthesis and interaction that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s something really hard to to put your finger on, but it’s vital and it’s real.
2013 was one of the hardest years. After discovering some truly heartbreaking news, I realized it was time for me to leave the DJ company I’d been running for 8 years. I’d been frustrated with how things were being done for a while, and knew that this was my opportunity to bring positive change to the Raleigh DJ industry. Stylus was going to prioritize skill rather than budget pricing, and put the emphasis on the experience rather than the DJs ego. We only brought on people who had a deep understanding of the synthesis, the vitality, and the drive to deliver at the highest levels. I call it ‘The Fire.” Stylus is exclusively made up of DJs who have it. No filler.
So, I’d quit my job, started a new company, then we found out we were pregnant again with our second child, and we needed to get out of our old neighborhood when the crime started going up, so we bought a house but no one would buy our old one, so we were stuck with it. My wife was a special education teacher making slightly above minimum wage and we’d functionally tripled our mortgage overnight and didn’t know what we were going to do. But, if there’s one thing I can double down on – it’s knowing how to work hard. I leaned in, worked every event I could get my hands on, and scrounged every penny we could come across. Any money I had in my pocked was exclusively from tips – and I was so grateful for it.
We moved, and I’d spent months doing every open house and wedding show, hit up the bars and clubs, reached out to every DJ I could think of to see if they needed help or had advice, and slowly built my company and my team. It was a very exciting but stressful time, because I had not just my wife and child counting on me to find a way, but there was another baby waiting in the wings and if I faltered, the consequences were dire.
That’s one of the hardest parts about being a DJ for special events – there’s a huge time lag. I might get booked a year or two in advance. It feels like a ‘sell’ but you can’t spend any of that money. It just has to sit there while you try to buy equipment, improve your skill set, continue your education, and slowly but surely get to the point where you don’t have to wonder how you’re going to come up with enough money.
In late December 2013, I was DJing at Cornerstone and we were almost done for the night. Only 14 minutes left. I checked my phone and saw that I’d missed a bunch of calls, my wife was going into labor! I threw on the live version of Skynyrd’s Free Bird (13 minutes and change) and hit the road. Pulling up right behind my wife and mother in law, and within 30 minutes we’d added another baby boy! HAH 2 was worth the wait and his big brother was so excited to have someone new to play with.
We got home in the middle of a freezing storm, then the power went out. We barricaded the bedroom to preserve as much heat as we could and piled every blanket on the bed and had a memorable first night home with our beautiful new baby, everyone snuggled up together, laughing at the clouds our breath made and feeling so incredibly grateful.
A new year brought new challenges and new opportunities, and the need to make Stylus work was greater than ever.
Stylus was on a mission. We built the single best DJ roster the state has ever seen. Eric ‘Animal’ Mills, DJ Grant Eddins, DJ Jorden Showtime Davis, Jenni J-Star Berzinskas, David “Dice” Arroyave, Joseph “Proto J” Sky, and Lewis “The Hotness” Harris. We added so many more amazing DJs over the years, including Spencer “Samson” McAvoy, Ramez “DJ Mez” Botros, Connor “Con Don” Donahue, and a stylish coterie of We brought on more staff, added more services and opportunities, and we were the people you partied with whether you were at a wedding, down on the strip, or at your company holiday party.
Most people heard us at Cornerstone, The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, City Limits, Noir, Black Flower, Virgils, Coglins, Tir Na Nog, Stool Pigeons, the Underground, London Bridge, Architect, Little City, Blowfish, the Longbranch, 606, Alchemy, Teets, Solas, the Botanical, The Underground, Aura, and so many more. We were doing over 800 events a year, hundreds of weddings thousands of people every weekend at the clubs. In 2017 I estimated that I’d performed for nearly 1/2 the Raleigh metro area. At this point, the number of people we’ve entertained is easily over a million.
in 2018, we added our third and final son. HAH 3, and our family was finally complete.
in 2019 – We were on a roll! We were hitting almost 900 events a year. I finally hit a point where I didn’t have to save things I’d found on the street just in case I needed to sell it for food or a mortgage payment.
In 2020, we’d heard rumblings of a new virus, the word pandemic had been tossed around but no one knew what to expect. We had our son’s 2nd birthday party in mid march. Two of our neighbors had been traveling, one had just come back from Canada through Seattle, another had just come back through New York city. It was a great party, but afterwards everyone got sick. Our neighbor was really sick for weeks and almost died. We certainly didn’t think we’d already gotten Covid – because how would it have already spread so fast to New York or Seattle?
But, life goes on – or so we thought. My first friend who died from it was an early 30s marine in New York City who was in great health. We used to party together back when I was mostly doing underground shows.
Then the pandemic hit in force, and more than just the messages of grief and sadness from people who were losing family members, the whole world ground to a halt. All of a sudden – we couldn’t do anything. I was DJing in Cornerstone when it happened – a basketball game was on one of the screens and I remember watching the game get cancelled and the crowds leave the stadium. We finished out the night and I remember thinking this will probably be over in a few weeks. Little did we know how wild it was about to get.
Every event got thrown into question. We are a public facing service and we couldn’t do much of anything. Bars and clubs were closed, weddings postponed, corporate events just cancelled. I remember thinking how this might be a blessing in disguise. I’m a very hard worker and being forced to stop for a bit might be great. If everything is cancelled and my wife and I have to stay home together for a few weeks – it might be a vacation when the kids are at school. We could tackle projects and spend time together! My naivety is adorable in retrospect.
The kids were home with us too – my wife was still working, and we had to try to figure out what we were going to do. We could scrape by on her income, and since it didn’t feel right to keep deposits for events we weren’t going to be able to do, we had money flying out the door. When the PPP loans came up, I applied for them as quickly as I could in order to make sure my team wasn’t going hungry. I was trying to pay them for anything I could.
Lots of people got loans, but after everything was resolved, 2021 and 2022 were not great for us. Most of 2021 was for events we already had on the books that were rescheduled from 2020, which meant we ‘lost’ a whole new year. To add insult to injury, we were required to pay back the loans in full which was a bit frustrating since many places had gotten millions, kept it for themselves rather than paying the staff, and got their loans forgiven.
But, slowly but surely everything turned around. By 2021, we were doing 9 to 11 club nights in downtown Raleigh every weekend. Private events were slowly coming back, and eventually the corporate DJ opportunities came back as well.
We’d spent that time period doubling down on what makes Stylus unique and what we can bring to the table, and our team and resources are more dynamic and inspiring than ever.
Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, the defining sound of great nights out in Raleigh has been Stylus DJs. Whether you’re looking to hit the strip, wild out downtown, attend a beautiful wedding, award the best in your company, or step out for a stunning gala, Stylus DJs have enhanced that experience with a commitment to over-delivering. By 2021, we were doing 11 clubs every friday and saturday night. Each and every year we’ve added top-talent DJs, and raised the bar on what to expect from your private event.
And that’s where we get to today. I purchased a small Italian Ice catering company, Sweetwater Ices, from a friend who needed to move back to New York to take care of his family and my very unique skill set allowed me to transform the business and now we’re serving more people than ever. When you see those adorable Sweetwater carts at a wedding or out at the food truck rodeos – don’t hesitate to go up and say hi! We have a great time and I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished.
The DJ side of things is finally back to where we want to be, although we’re still looking for opportunities that align with our ethos of great parties and fun concepts. We’re doing more and larger corporate events than ever. You can still find Stylus DJs at clubs and events all around the area. We even got to do events with several presidential candidates! We’re always looking for DJs that have the fire – so please recommend them to us! Our standards are really high, and this life isn’t easy – you have to give up a lot in order to make it work, but it’s so incredibly rewarding and I am genuinely grateful that I get to do this for a living.
With everything that’s happened, the past few years have been about giving back more and being grateful for just how lucky we are to do what we do. We’ve been partnering with charities and non-profits like the Special Olympics, NAMI, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the ASPCA, Roots for Reece, and many more.
I’ve often appreciated the old adage that first you see the mountain in the painting, and then you see the painting in the mountain. And that’s part of why I’m so incredibly proud to be a North Carolinian and to have been able to support my family by doing my dream job here. It’s taken a while to get where we’re at, and the journey has been full of truly inspiring moments and great beauty as well as hard struggles, and I can’t wait to see what’s next. Despite how crazy everything can get, it never feels like more than we can handle together.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
growing up in the military
Mom getting crippled
being homeless in India
Getting thrown in jail repeatedly for false charges & the cycle of poverty
2013 – starting a new business can be nerve-racking!
2020/21
Trying to manage 3 business
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
What sets me apart? I’m genuinely in love with what I do. I love music in a way that’s hard to describe – but I tried really hard in the longer notes.
I try to be a good person in a world where a lot of people need help – and I’m in the unique position to try to offer that help.
We throw amazing parties – and we focus on it very intently
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Being two or 3, sitting on the porch swing snuggling with my parents & watching the thunderstorm roll in.
Staying up to midnight for the first time, we made an itinerary and dressed all in camo and brought our stuffed animals so we could sneak out. I remember being afraid if witches or ghosts were going to be out at the ‘witching hour’
playing guns in the ravines with all the kids on base
Playing king of the hill on the giant snow mounds at recess
Pricing:
- Contact for Details – every event is different and we have options for every budget
Contact Info:
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