Code Red Interview
This is an interview I did with Code Red back in 2004 for a site that is now defunct:
How did you get into electronic music?
I had this girlfriend back in high school, and she coaxed me into going to the Tunnel in ‘98. She basically was like, “Let’s go to a club!” I was like, “No, I don’t want to,” because I thought it was retarded and stupid and whatever. She finally made me go, and I didn’t know anything about electronic music culture or anything. I went, and it was really cool the first time. We had a really weird first experience. I learned how great and scary the club was at the same time, because a friend of mine got partially raped in the club the first night we ever went. That was a little weird, but other than that, it was a really good time!
So we just kept going, and I really only knew about the club scene at first. I really didn’t know there was distinguishing between what’s considered the club culture and then rave culture, and I didn’t really go to a rave until late ’99. That was even a really bad experience, because we went to this party called Basic, and I don’t know who threw the party, but I’m still waiting for my refund like you all promised. We went in there, and I didn’t really know a lot about music back then—what was good, what wasn’t—but it was really bad.
Halfway through the night, like thirty cops rushed in and arrested all these people for standing around having a good time. It was another bad experience so I told myself I would never go to a rave again. I’d stick with clubs. What I didn’t fully realize was that the Tunnel was the weekly meeting place for people that were going to raves. Sound Factory kind of had some nights like that, but it wasn’t like that, or a couple of the other clubs in the city that were more “club-ish”—you know, like club style.
Tunnel was really a major portion of the kids that were going to raves and clubs at the same time, so you had your mix. The Tunnel had so many rooms. Like, some rooms, it was only people who went to clubs, because there were so many different types of music you’d listen to. Then there were only people who went to raves in that room, and you’d have a couple mixed rooms and stuff like that.
Yeah, like in ‘98 I got pretty much coaxed to go. Very slowly, I started learning who was who, but it really wasn’t until 2000 that I started understanding electronic music, you know, finding out what was what. I remember this guy that I used to hang out with, Joe, comes up to me with this CD and is like, “Hey, listen to this!” It was a Baby Anne or Icey CD or something. “It’s called breakbeats.” I was like, “Oh, OK, cool.” I listened to that, and it was so different from what we were listening to, because my first exposure was Chicago hard house. That’s like BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, fuckin’ hardcore beats and shit. It was a totally different change of pace, but that was also right around when I started learning a little bit about what popping was and how popping worked, as opposed to liquid and digitz.
So your first party…
Basic. I don’t know if I would call that my first party. It was my first. I don’t know what I would call it – knowledgeable experience of what could go wrong if you’re at a bad party. I mean it was atrocious. I had a horrible time, and like I said, I swore that I wouldn’t go to another party, but I did.
What was your first good party then?
I don’t know, probably the Countdown parties. As jam-packed and sweaty and overly drug-induced as it was, it was an awesome party because you just go on in there and the music was really intense. It’s so different if you go to a rave today compared to when I was going to raves. I guess I started going just when the crest, as Hunter S. Thompson puts it, where the crest just broke. That’s where I came in, right as the crest was receding, but I still caught a really, really awesome part of it. It seemed like after the first year every time I kept going, it started getting a little worse, a little worse.
The music was just really pure intense music, and everyone there was dancing. It wasn’t you go to a lot of events now and people are kind of more intellectual nerds about it. You’re just kind of like, “Why are you not dancing? Why are you not even moving, you’re just kind of standing there like you’re at some, not even Guns ‘N Roses concert, I dunno, Rolling Stones concert, just nodding your head. I think they dance more at Rolling Stones concerts then they do at some parties now.
The Countdown parties were cool. I think originally they were countdowns to the millennium, so they had 12 of them. I went to four or five of them, and a couple of them were held at this place called the Wave in either Long Island or Staten Island. The venue was…I can’t even remember what it was like, but it was fuckin’ awesome. It was totally out of control, and a lot of shenanigans were going on, but you know, it was fun.
So tell me about the Tunnel, what was it like?
Physically? Well, when I started going there, it had already made kind of a transformation. Tunnel and Limelight were like the meccas or the epitomy of what club life was like before all of the government came down on it. It was still really, really underground. When I came in, it flipped a little bit, like a year after I started going. When I started going, there were about eight rooms. I think before I started going, there were another two or three, I could be wrong on that, and there was a half-pipe somewhere, where kids would skateboard. I think it was part of the main dance floor. If you’ve watched the movie “Kids,” when they’re skating at one point, I think they’re actually in the Tunnel in the skate park. They used to have a clothing shop in there too.
It was basically set up where the Tunnel itself, one-third of it was set up for a gay party. I think that was majorly influenced through the original club kid. The guy who kept it running, his name was Jeff something. It was two main back rooms, and it was called Curfew. That’s kind of where I started going in through, because my best friend, who I started going to the clubs with a lot as well right around the same point my girlfriend started making me go, her older brother worked there, so he was like “Oh, I’ll get you in! I’ll get you in for free, or like ten bucks.”
It was my first exposure to people being completely uninhibited by their gayness. It was the most unbelievable experience, eye-opening experience ever. It was kind of beautiful at the same time, because you have all these people that would hide their identities during the day, and it was just their chance to let loose and be exactly who they want to be, or these were people that were like that all the time, but everyone was totally exactly who they wanted to be. Whether you were gay or straight, in those particular rooms it was probably the most identity-accepting social interactions I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was phenomenal. I saw the extreme, extreme dimensions of drag queens and transvestites. It was pretty cool, actually, just to see how people deemed themselves and where they found their identities. It was a really great cultural experience.
That was one of the rooms, and it was sort of exclusive. They were pretty picky, it was at a point where…well, clubs still are. It was one of the less picky clubs, but they kept the room pure. They didn’t really care if you were gay or straight, but you could tell if they didn’t want you in the room, and you couldn’t get in unless you had passes. It was really funny, because if you were in line, there would be like two people trying to get in. You could tell they were troublemakers or more ignorant-minded people that were just trying to get in there for the cheaper amount. They would ask them if they were gay, and they’d be like, “Yeah! We’re gay!” “Aite, well make out with the person next to you.” And you’d see them in line all timid, you’re like, “Nah, man, your line is over there.” It was more just to find out if you were just cool with who you were around, or if you were just trying to get in the cheaper way.
That was one area, and then there was the main room. I guess the main room was about, I want to say, 50 yards long and 25 to 30 yards wide. That’s pretty fucking big, and that was just the main dance floor. That had one big bar and two cages in the middle, which was always funny. People dancing in the cages and stuff, all these foreigners would be there trying to get their hands in the cages to feel up the girl. Yeah, that was pretty interesting.
What else? It was weird. you had your main area, and it was kind of a whole main open area. It was a dance floor with two cages in the middle. You went up two steps, and there was the bar, and past the bar was a whole lounge area. There was also a little space where a lot of the breakers would dance and stuff; that was always pretty open. It wasn’t in walking way of anybody, so they could totally break there or whatever. Then there were stairs, and there were two stairways going upstairs. No, there were two stairways going upstairs, this was the main one. Above it was one or two of these huge, flying angel statues all made of, if I’m not mistaken, disco-ball glass pieces. The whole thing was coated with them, and they were like three times the size of a human. They were huge. It was nuts, you know. It was just a totally overly done great club, but it was still dark and dingy at the same time.
You go up the steps, and to the right was the Mezzanine. That’s where we all hung out. That was small. That was only like, 1000 square feet. It wasn’t that big at all. It was this whole area [motions around loft apartment]. It was from here to here where you danced, and then this was all chairs and stuff. You’d go up the stairs, and if you went up to the right, it’d go to the Mezzanine. If you went up to the left, it would go to another room, which had another bar and bathrooms and shit like that. That room sometimes was playing music from one of the other rooms, or they’d have a DJ there. Then you could walk into another room behind that, and they played a lot more gabber hardcore kind of stuff, sometimes hip-hop. I want to say there was a hip-hop room somewhere, I think. I think that was sometimes, I thought it was something else.
The curfew room was on the far side of the dance floor, all the way on the opposite end of the stairs and everything like that. And you’d walk into there, and you’d have a lounge area. They had their own bar. You’d walk down and there’d be a whole other dance area with a DJ and stuff. We used to have a juice bar there, too, which was pretty cool. Oh no, you go into the hallway. The hallway ran the length of the main dance floor. And in that hallway there was a juice bar, and leather chairs set up. The great thing about the Tunnel was that there was always a place to sit. There was always a place to lounge out and hang out and do whatever.
Then there was one other room that was attached to the curfew room called the chandelier room. You walked into that one, and it was two floors. You could go up to the second level and actually look out over the whole Tunnel from the other end, where the Mezzanine was. You could look out over the whole Tunnel from the other side. They called it the chandelier room because they had a chandelier that was probably 15ft in diameter or something like that. I mean, it was pretty fuckin’ massive and dirty. Covered in dust and probably had midgets living in it or something.
So yeah, that was pretty much the Tunnel. Dark and, if it was a busy night, it took you about 40 minutes just to walk from one end of the room to the other. That was always part of the fun, because you’d be walking through, and you’d make so many friends there that you always expect to see. You’ll be looking for somebody and get halfway down the main floor and you’ll run into another person and be like, “Oh my God! I haven’t seen you in, like, 4 hours!”
“Yeah, I’m still trying to get through to get upstairs!”
“Did you see so-and-so?”
“No, I’m lookin for him too!”
And you realize that you’re going one way, and he’s going the other, and you’re like “Aww, fuck, where the hell is this person?”
That was a little before the cell phone boom. Some people had cell phones, but it was like the Nokia 5120 or whatever that fucking monstrosity was. You know, it was like a Zack Morris Saved by the Bell cell phone. Everyone had the pager, you know?
It was just nuts. You could stand in the middle of the dance floor during the DJ’s set, and you would feel the floor literally just going up and down because everyone was pouncing the floor on the beat just going fucking nuts, for the most part.
Oh yeah, the hip hop room was down in the basement. That was pretty big, but I never went down there. Apparently on Sundays it was all hip-hop. It was rated the most dangerous hip-hop event you could go to in New York City, which is a pretty hefty title. So during the other club nights, a lot of the people would be downstairs and it wasn’t even worth going down there. I didn’t even bother.
It was cool, because everybody would dance their asses off, and guidos were your best friends, you know, whatever.
How did you start dancing?
I started dancing, I guess…well it was weird. I had never danced before. Aside from bar mitzvahs and high school bashes with fuckin’ soda and candy apples, it was whatever. So I went into the clubs, and I was more in awe of what people were doing at first. I see all these people using glowsticks, and my friend was like “Aw look!” and does the figure-8. I was like, “Oh, how the fuck do you do this shit?” I mean it was fuckin’ crazy! I watched him do that, and you walk around, and you see these people. It’s weird, because people were good at it, but people never realized that it could become a talent. People were just fucked up and havin’ fun waving glowsticks around, you know? I guess little to their knowledge it went beyond just this figure 8 movement.
There were people that were really good. This guy used to come into the club that attached the glowsticks to the strings. He cleared half of the dance floor, and it wasn’t just because he was swinging them around. He was so fucking good. He had these long-ass strings and was so fucking good. He was doing these crazy-ass tricks—put them in his mouth while he was doing all this other shit. It was fucking phenomenal. It’d be great when one broke, and it would smack the floor and glow shit would go all over everybody. Everyone would all be like “Aaah, that’s fucking great! Everything’s glowing!”
So I kind of started witnessing that, and then I guess somehow or another I snuck my way into the Mezzanine room.
Snuck in?
Yeah, it was weird. The Mezzanine room wasn’t a private party, but a lot of the people that worked for the Tunnel stayed there, and hung out there. So the promoters and friends of promoters usually got permission to rope it off when they wanted to. None of the bouncers stopped them from doing it, so it was more like you went up there, it was “who do you know?” or “who are you friends with that’s in here?” and “sorry, it’s a private party.” Someone would be like, “Oh, well, how do I get a pass?” It ain’t about havin’ a pass man!
I got in there one time, and I’m watching people do glowsticks, and I’m watching people do Maglites that I was talking about. I see this one kid Don, my old roommate, and he was doing it. This was before I knew who he was, and I was like, “Oh, that’s really cool! Let me see! This is really hard and impossible! How do you do it?”
I watched him a little longer, and then one week I found out what they were. I couldn’t figure out what they were at first, because you don’t have the tops on the mag lights. They’re like little sticks with lights coming out of them. I went out to home depot and I bought myself a wrong size. Well, they weren’t really. They got smaller as you got better with them, but I got these big ol’ ones. I fuckin sat in front of a mirror trying to figure it out, and I went to the tunnel, got back in the Mezzanine room. I started doing it, and Don walks over, looks over at me, and says, “Lemme show you something.” He fuckin’ takes them out of my hands, starts doing them, puts them back into my hands, “That’s how you do it.” What a cocky motherfucker, man!
I was like, “OK.” I mean, he was cool and really friendly, but it was just like “alright, alright.” Practiced a little more, went home, decided that I would sit in front of a mirror with the lights out in the bathroom and figure out how to make it look like how they do it. I started doing it more and more, and then I went back up to that room and saw him and said, “Check this out!” I did it, and about three or four months later, I got better and was kind of right up there on their level. I started finding out there were about 15 or 20 people that did it.
I started meeting them and going into that room more because I started becoming friends with them and everything. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much that they were using glowsticks. I mean we all used glowsticks, they were fucking fun as hell to use, we always went there with 30 of them. But then once we started getting into Maglites, we started using them and started doing it more and more and more until it became a desire. You wanted to go there because you wanted to use your Maglites, and you wanted to fucking sit there for like 12 hours and practice them, and do them. It’d be really funny, because you’d see people looking in from outer banisters of a part of the tunnel and watching them do it, it was pretty cool.
That’s where I kind of picked up on liquid. I wound up going to Tennessee for a little while to go to school and kind of dropped it, but kind of didn’t. I got really into using the glowstrings and using glowsticks, but not really Maglites. It was ’99 I guess, and I saw one kid. There were two kids down there. One was good at liquid and the other kid was really good at glowsticks. I don’t know, I think kids got to a certain level with them, got good, and a lot of people left. They just left the scene, and I don’t think anyone really took a passion to it. It was just something to do at the club, and if they got good at it they got good at it.
It was different up in New York, where kids were doing it and thriving off it. They loved doing it. Every time we went, someone was doing a different trick with them. That kind of became my premise for liquid, because that’s basically what it was. You were creating liquid, but you weren’t using your body. You were totally using your hands and the motion of the light to create trails and paths and everything. That’s why, in my opinion, liquid has nothing to do with waving. It was separate from waving, there was no wave. There was nothing in your body you were using to create a wave, it was completely external.
That’s kind of where I first got into it. It was done to Chicago Hard House, because the beat was just that constant “bang bang bang bang.” It was just that tempo, that 4/4 tempo, but really really fast and hard and a lot of noise. You were pretty deaf when you came out of the club. I think I said “what” more than I actually said real words, because you couldn’t hear shit at the club. That’s where my whole liquid part came out of. I didn’t really know what waving was.
I didn’t really see anyone do waves until I ran into Many Styles. He was the first person. The first and one of the most still pretty amazing dancers. Apparently he isn’t dancing really anymore, but what he was doing for the point of time he was doing, it was pretty dope. It was this slo-mo character storytelling kind of popping. I saw him at one of the countdown parties, and he cleared the whole fucking club, it was unbelievable. I mean the dance floor at this venue, it was big. It was no small club. He had probably a good five to six hundred people stopped in their tracks watching him tell a fucking story for 20 minutes.
I went up to him and was like, “That was fucking ridiculous.” I didn’t know what else to say to him, that’s fucking ridiculous. I saw him again at the Tunnel, and he would frequent the Tunnel every so often and hang out up in the Mezzanine and stuff. I was like, “how do you do that?” The first thing he showed me was, he didn’t even show me the pop, he showed me the wave, and he showed me the clicks of the wave. I think it was more to demonstrate the isolation.
He showed me what they called “flicks,” which is where you actually flick each joint as opposed to doing the wave in smooth parts, or ticking it or whatever. Flicks or clicks, I forget. Clicks had to do with where you actually look like you were “clicking” like that [demonstrates], where flicks is where you were actually flicking arm piece, do you know what I mean? He showed me that, and that’s when I first went home and tried to figure out how to do each section. So my inauguration into popping before I even knew it was called popping was to learn how to do the arm wave. That was way after I learned what liquid was, and I’d been learning digitz for a while too.
Let’s go to digitz then.
The first time I saw it was real briefly at one of the Whistle parties at the New Jersey Convention Center, Camden or something like that. Everyone was like, “You got to see this guy Mario.” I’m like, “Alright, where is he?”
“Well, you’ve got to find him.”
“Alright, there’s this guy who’s supposed to be crazy at what he does, and I’ve got to find him? How am I supposed to know who he is?”
“You’ll know.”
I’d been told what he does, and I’d been shown a little bit. I actually started a little bit of it before I met him, because everyone was starting to do it, and this was the group in the Mezzanine. Then, this one guy showed me how to do braids. My first technique was doing braids, and then just doing more you would consider just finger strengthening techniques, if you were on a website for like hand coordination type stuff. There was a premise behind it, and they were like, “Yeah, you gotta be able to do stuff like this.” I think the rolls were something they also started showing, but the braids were the big one.
The thing about braids was that it taught you how to feel the placement of your fingers through timing and speed and coordination of both hands. You’re working with ten separate things, working on different speeds, paces, movements, and going in time with the movements. This guy John had showed me that, and we were doing that, and I didn’t know what it was. They were like “Yeah, this guy Mario, he can make his fingers look like stairs!” I was like, “What?”
At that Whistle, it was right at the end of the party, and my friend John comes over and is like “Come here, come here! This is Mario!” Mario is sitting there doing his thing, going like this, making it look like he’s going right up the stairs with his fingers, and then gets into some shit that I was like, “What the fuck is that?!”
That was my first, it was real quick, and then I kept going to the tunnel. I started getting to know him, and I really don’t know the point where we started becoming boys. I’d see him doing it, and I’d start doing it, and I’d see him do more and was just really fascinated by it. A friend of mine at the time, Joe, was really doing it, and he was learning a lot from Mario and was pretty advanced with it. He was pretty much getting up to the point where, he wasn’t really as good as Mario, but he could sit there and work with Mario on stuff. Joe was kind of my tutor at first.
I started running into Mario, and I’d sit down and watch him, and then it was just strange. Language ceased sometimes, literally. Verbal communication ceased a lot in the clubs and it was totally through dancing and movement. My connection through Mario was that he sat down and started doing this with this hand, which doesn’t really help on the recorder. He started doing this movement and basically made me put my hand up and mirror it. Through that, I was able to learn off of him and actually learn how to feel the idea of what digitz was through him actually doing it. It’d be really weird, because you’d get into it for a couple minutes and you’d pull away and look at each other and be like, “…wow.” You know what I mean? I can’t believe what we just created together, and it was pretty cool.
We became really good friends, and he was a kid that came from a rougher life than me. His means for survival, in my opinion, were justifiable. Unfortunately, those were roads he had to take, but he was an honest, genuine person which was totally awesome. I could trust the kid with my house, the kid left me with his house; we were boys. I got to learn a lot off of him, and I just kept going with it and going with it.
I remember one time I was doing it to Joe, and Joe just kind of looked at me and was like “you can’t be surpassed with it, what you’re doing is ridiculous.” Then I showed Mario, and Mario was just like, “I can’t even get to that.” It was more or less once Mario started getting out of it. I think if Mario had kept doing it…you know, I had time to gain up to him and everything, but I remember when I’d been doing it for a while.
Then we started getting into the LPC thing, and you gotta love rumors. Someone was like, “Yeah, Jared’s telling everybody that he created it and all this stuff.” I ended up seeing Mario at a party, and I didn’t talk to him for almost a year, and he was like, “What the fuck?!” I told him what we were doing and was like, “Listen, I never said it, you have my number, if you thought I was doing something like that and being disrespectful, you should just call me because we’re boys. I wouldn’t do that.” You know, it got squashed, and towards the end of it he gave me his approval for it. It was really cool, I mean it would have sucked if he was like, “I don’t want you showing everybody.” It would have just fizzled out to nothing because nobody was doing it.
When I started showing LPC, me, this guy Joe, and like two other people—no one continued it seriously. A couple people were doing it, but I don’t know. It’s just such a crazy art to just put it down and forget that it ever existed. It was just too hard for me to grasp, and watching kids actually start to try and learn it. When we went to Philly dancing and stuff, 4 months later we were standing up in the VIP area, the lounge area, and it’s kind of a little above the dance floor at Motion. I looked over at Fu or Eric, and said, “Look at all these people trying to do digitz.” We haven’t even told anybody how to do it, and all these kids were trying to learn it.
At that point, because I was really, really hesitant about showing people, I was like, “Here’s my decision….” I think we were kind of talking about the video at this point too, and I was like, “I don’t know if I really feel right putting it out on a video and showing people.” You know, it’s not mine solely, but it’s my art. I really worried about what people would do with it, where people would go with it. But then I started realizing that if I didn’t try to show it, or at least document what it was, it was going to be a way worse situation. It was kind of one of those things where I kept doing it, and people got influenced by it, and if I don’t say anything about it, it’s going to turn into a mysterious culture. I didn’t really want that to happen, I didn’t want people to take it for the wrong elements.
You know, liquid has such a huge taint to it, because so many people took liquid and twirled their hands in the air, and everyone’s just like “Ah, that’s just that ravin’ bullshit!” I don’t want people to say that about digitz, I want someone to be able to look at someone doing digitz and say, “That’s pretty fucking crazy man! It makes sense, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it makes sense and it looks pretty fucking cool! What is it?” And I want that person to be able to turn around and “It’s this, it came from this, it’s got this kind of foundation to it, this kind of theory to it, it’s looked at this way, duh duh duh duh da.” So that’s kind of my extent to where finding digitz and then kind of moving forward with it.
OK, so let’s take it to the time where the Tunnel is being closed down. What happened? And did you know the LPC by this time?
LPC was 2000, which was right when the club really started getting hassled by the NY government. Guliani started making the cleaning of the city, which I thought was pretty cool in some senses. I just think he was too lazy in trying to distinguish what was good and what was bad, and how to fix things. Instead it was like, “Nah, I don’t even wanna deal with it, so if one thing goes wrong, then you’re just totally fucked.” There was a lot of illicit shit going on that was going on in the upper levels. The owners like Gatien were fucking extradited to Canada. He can’t even step foot in the United States anymore, because he owes billions of dollars in tax evasion and all that kind of shit.
I don’t know. Tunnel closed for the most part, and it was I guess at that point that there was this kind of grace period of just doing it, and it’s really hard to date everything, but somewhere between the end of ‘99 and the beginning of 2000 is where I started running into all the LPC crew members. We started working on stuff and hanging out and forming a crew.
That’s when we all started moving to Motion. We started going to Philly more. There were still raves going on and still large parties, so we were doing that. We just weren’t going to Tunnel anymore, which kind of sucked because Tunnel was like a weekly thing. You’re guaranteed 12 hours of awesome time to go dance, but now it was like you had to wait for a good party to come, or you had to go to Motion. Motion was kind of like the next “think tank,” I would call it.
That’s when we as LPC started feeling each other out and feeling that there was a movement going on and a movement starting. It was, in the most humble way I can say it, fueled by us. People were really showing an eagerness to learn. We were like “Fuck it, we gotta put a video out.” It was so annoying people were just like, “That’s just bullshit, man! That shows us nothing!” What are you trying to do, dig a hole and bury one at the same time? What’s the point?
So we did the video. From the point of Tunnel closing down, but raves still going on, but then Motion opening up, and Motion turning over from Space to Motion. We all started going there instead, because New York…I mean there was Limelight. Limelight went a little bit longer than the Tunnel, but Limelight was owned by the same guy, so that pretty much made its end. It kind of got its head cut off after a while.
So one guy had two clubs going on that were…
Gatien had more than one. I mean, he was the fucking man when it was like running the clubs in New York. I don’t know the full deal of what he had is. We should interview my boy Don because he has a lot of the New York history—who was doing what, who was running what, and all that stuff. He was a major deal in all the clubs and stuff.
So Eric also mentioned to me that he was going to Tunnel and Limelight, did you know him?
Nope.
But you just happened to be…
I mean, there’s so many cases like that, it’s just really weird. Eric was going to the Tunnel before I was, I believe. The Limelight too, I’m sure. I never really frequented the Limelight. I went to Limelight when there were raves being thrown there, not during their club nights. It was really weird, I never met him. I think I spent so much time up in the Mezzanine room that he was probably down somewhere else, and I never walked upon him. It was just one of those freak things. Like, I broke up with my girlfriend and she was going to the club too, and we never fucking saw each other. I’m sure she saw me a couple of times and didn’t want to say hi, but that’s cool. We had a little bit of hate towards each other for a while.
Who else was really involved in the digitz section of the Mezzanine room?
Well, there was Mario. There was this girl Sue, who I was going to the club with. She was probably the only true female practitioner that was very good. Kimmy did it, but she never went too serious with it. Sue was pretty good. There was a guy Milo, and that was Mario’s partner in crime. They would always do some weird ass fucking shit with each other. There was Joe, this guy John. This guy Yennel, Don. This guy Richie, I mean there was a bunch to name.
And they all just disappeared?
They just disappeared, dude! I mean I’d go to like, a fuckin reunion rave or something like that. Oh, and this guy Danny. We called him K-Dog. He was always doing it. It was weird, some people, it was fun for them, others of us, I don’t know. For me, it was like I felt like I was given a newborn child, and I was just never able to let it go. Maybe it’s just the instances I was put in, like the scenarios, like randomly running into Fu and Sami at a club in New Brunswick, like a random bi-monthly party in New Brunswick. That’s how I met them. If I didn’t go to that party, I never would have met them. I never would have met Eric, or anybody else, and who knows what would have happened? I don’t know, it was just one of those fate kind of things. I ran into the right people, and they wanted to keep doing it, and I wanted to keep doing it. I think we just had that kind of mindset to work together and make things happen.
So it seems like you worked a lot with Joe? Was he ever LPC?
He was for like a week. He was for a little while. For sake of not being bitter, I won’t get into what happened, but we’re not friends anymore. He was never really too valuable in the crew, because he didn’t really want to participate. Which was cool, I don’t really hold it against him for that, but we turned out to have a little bad blood between each other. So, for the sake of not being bitter about it or pulling anybody’s card, I’ll leave it at I know what he did, and he knows what happened.
Do you know Mario’s last name? How hard would it be to track him down?
Mario, man, if I was a DJ, I would say crate digging. I’m telling you man, these kids are hard to find. When they disappeared, they disappeared, you know what I’m saying? Numbers change, I haven’t been in touch with anybody who’s been able to figure out what happened to him. I’d love to be able to get in touch with him again too, like, “look at this shit!”
Think there’s ever a chance where they’d see the LPC video?
I would love to hope so. I would love to give him that. We’ll see, I mean, I might be able to get in touch with him. I just got to take the time to dig, start pulling up some people who might know where he is.
