Miami Beach 2005 Part I

We’re back from Miami Beach!

In fact, as far as I know, most San Franciscans who braved the land of sheer bikinis, spinning gold rims, sweltering nights, and very expensive drinks have returned safe and sound (although Mark Musselman was MIA for 24 hours but he eventually showed up … check the Momu site in a few days for a full report from him).

Tuesday Night
We arrive. Jackie, Hoj, and I make our way to the Albion hotel, which is a really nice hotel with fake service. Half of our reservation is lost. We spend an hour at the front desk waving our faxed confirmation around, while the girl helping us talks to a manager who is hiding in the back room. Par for the course for a Miami hotel check-in actually. Apparently Astrid & Spesh have a better experience at the Clinton, and end up with a bottle of chilled champagne in their room. Damn, I played hotel roulette and lost!

Cab to the Onda Lounge for the Most Wanted/Spundae party. I arrive at midnight and find our set has just ended - Spesh has played three records and that's all the time we had. I let it go ... I'm going to have fun the first night no matter what. Scott Carrelli and Hsiao-Wen are there, as are Alex, Billy, and some other SF folks. DRC shows up to support and is in a really contagious good mood. Guiv is happy and drunk and puts me in a choke hold that I'm pretty sure is supposed to be a hug. Robbie Rivera is playing funky bassliney house. As I put on the first record of our tag-team set I realize it's going to be a bit of a transition ... the music that Spesh and I play is just kind of ... how to put this ... intense and deep and weird. But after a couple moments of confusion the crowd seems to get it and some hands go in the air. First night = really fun.

Wednesday
Breakfast with Jackie at the Galleria. It's warm and windy ... a large umbrella falls down and nearly decapitates a nearby fellow diner. No corrective action is taken by the restaurant and the exact same thing happens ten minutes later. We meet up with Spesh at the Toes In The Sand party at the Creek hotel. Lots of people show up. Patty from Proton, Karen from Memphis, all the Qoöl LA guys. It's the only bar in Miami where drinks are cheap ... a bucket of beer for $10. We drink it. We meet Randall Jones, a fellow progressive DJ who we realize, as soon as he opens his mouth, is also a frat-guy. "These damn clouds are cock-blocking my sun, weeeeeaaaaak!" Indeed, the sky is darkening. The heavens open up and water pours down. We find shelter, keep drinking, laugh a lot, nobody leaves the party. Lightening strikes the river twenty feet away, stirring up a large cloud of silt and making the loudest noise I've ever heard. Spesh and I play some records ... I play IB's new track for the 2nd time and make a mental note that we need to sign it for Loöq. People are taking lots of pictures of us and videotaping us which is kind of strange ... I'm not that good at hamming it up and beat-mixing at the same time ... but we appreciate the love and try to be really friendly to the people that want to meet us. It's great to have fans!

Thomas Penton goes on after us but unfortunately we can't stay for his set as our crew is wasting away from hunger. This also means we can't lend Thomas our headphones, as apparently he has lost or forgotten his. This probably wasn't the case with Thomas, but we've been hearing about a number of DJ's who travel without headphones, relying on the previous DJ to lend them theirs, creating kind of prison-bitch system of near-mandatory headphone lending. Apparently the justification is that headphones are too bulky, and/or that Sony headphones fall apart a lot and are costly to replace. Well, here's a solution for you ... buy some frikking Technics that won't fall apart, and then bring them to your gigs. It's just lame not to.

David Christopher and Amy (Headrush Music/Toes in the Sand) let us know that they've just gotten engaged. Congratulations! They're great people, music lovers with a real vision and my guess is that they will take Toes In The Sand a long way and have lots of success. David's a great DJ too. And thanks for booking us you two, we enjoyed playing at the party in spite of nearly being electrocuted.

Jackie and Hsiao-Wen head over to the Mansion to work the Godskitchen event. Spesh, Astrid, Scott, and I eat gourmet food and drink good wine at The Hotel hotel's restaurant on Collins. We run into somebody who Spesh thinks is Gene Carbonelle and we both tell him how much we're hammering his mix of SX-1's Pump Up the Mix but turns out to be someone else. Jackie and Hsiao-Wen let us in to the Mansion and we catch most of Matthew Dekay's set which sounds great. The party is sponsored by some new Playstation portable device, which I end up playing a demo of except that the game is attached to a 6 ft tall blond woman in a mini skirt by a 12" cord from her waist, so I don't get a very high score.

Later that night I meet Spesh and Astrid at the W-6, a small club on Washington where the DJ's Inbox event is happening. The only problem is it's barely happening ... a transfer of club ownership and the Miami citation/illegal banner removal police have seriously interfered with Chris Coleman's attempts to promote the party. There's only a few people there for Greg Benz's set and ours that follows, as well as a number of other talented DJ's playing the party. Still, we have a good time playing records for the random bunch of folks milling about the club. A bit later some spring break types wander in, and a guy says his girlfriend will show me her tits if I play a certain track, but I don't have it (for the record, I would have done it ... I really have no problem with requests if I have the record in my bag - though that has yet to actually happen). Even later Jackie, Hoj, Guiv & Peter from Spundae, Scott and Hsiao-Wen, Mark Rahmani & Mariell all show up and the last hour of the party is really fun. Jackie seems slightly shell-shocked from working the guest-list line at Mansion, apparently it was a living hell. "I am *never* doing that again," came out of her mouth a few times. On the plus side, I think Jackie has a new appreciation for how incredibly lucky we are to throw a party in SF, where for the most part people are nice, reasonable, intelligent, and non-obnoxious. She also brings up Timo Maas's haircut a number of times, for some reason she seems traumatized by it.

RANDOM MIAMI STORY #1
Apparently P-Diddy stepped on Lee Burridge (in the middle of an interview no less) as the wannabe dance music icon/celebrity clambered over a hedge to avoid the front entrance of the Marlin hotel. You know what P-Diddy? – nobody gives a shit if you’re in Miami for WMC – you have nothing to do with dance music and you haven't earned the respect of dance music producers and DJ's. Nobody is going to mob you if you just go in the front door like a normal person. We’d all rather gawk at Timo Maas’s ugly-ass mullet instead!

Thursday
Breakfast/lunch at the Galleria again, with Hoj & Jackie. Later Spesh and I meet with Andy Jarrod from 3Beat Label Management. We've been working with him for a couple years, but until then had only communicated via email. As expected, he's an excellent guy, we all get along great, and I think we all leave the meeting with a greater appreciation of our working relationship and the good things that our businesses are trying to jointly accomplish. That's really one of the best parts of going to Miami, at least for me ... meeting similarly minded people from all over the world, people who in many cases you already have business relationships with but have never had the privilege of meeting. Dinner at that Cuban place on Washington with the weird 3D painting on the wall, and the delicious fried plantains. After dinner I meet Mark Musselman back at the Albion and we make our way to the Proton Radio party at Cafeteria. It's packed and going off. It's my only night off (not DJ'ing) so I have a few drinks and am instantly drunk. I hug everybody and tell them how great they are. I try to give an inspirational speech to Blake Jarrell and Jeff Devas, two of the most talented young producers I know, but Jeff misses my monologue because he is trying to email me a picture from his phone for his still undone Loöq artist page. It's fun talking to other producers, DJ's, and label heads (James Zabiela, McRae from Grayarea, Manuel from Infusion, Jacob Todd, lots of others) but even more fun running into people we've met at gigs around the country lately ... Patty has brought a large crew from Jacksonville out ... there are a number of people from Cleveland ... it's fun to see all the familiar faces and I get a really warm glowy connected feeling, and I don't mind so much that it will probably turn into a hangover the next morning. Congrats to Sam, Patty, Christy, and the rest of the Proton crew for throwing a fantastic party. Long live Proton Radio!

Next Entry
Spesh Stuck in Elevator With Case of Heineken
Guiv and Peter Win Award But Miss Sex Opportunities
Swedish DJ/Producer in Heroic Brawl
San Francisco Takes Over the Design District
50 Oz Steaks
Everybody's Feelin' Frisky