Amateur Hour

So we were supposed to DJ this big fancy party at the Soho Grand celebrating the end of the Fusion Film Festival, Matty Balls and I were. We were pretty excited because although we've played a fair amount of bumpin' parties (many of which were at our house) , we've never played a venue anywhere near as swanky and sophisticated and snooty as the Soho Grand, and it's also always nice to get hired to play to unfamiliar crowds. I spent a lot of last week practicing - which was a great thing, because I'm slowly but surely getting better - and also bought some new pies for the occasion.

Sadly, last night, after packing up three boxes of heavy-ass vinyl and all our gear (including the turntables, which weigh about 40-50 pounds) and schlepping it all down four flights of stairs and into a cab and down to Soho, we discovered that the people organizing the party had expected us to have our own fucking amplifers.

Three hours of hand-wringing and engineer-calling and open bar-abusing and computer speaker-trying later, we still didn't have any speakers and we decided to throw in the towel. It was pretty lame. Although the friends we invited seemed to enjoy themselves (open bars tend to spread the love around), it was nevertheless extremely embarrassing to stand next to a set of impotent turntables while errant partygoers, ticked off at the electro muzak the hotel was piping in from their super-hip lounge, came up and requested funk and soul that I would have loved to have played for them, only to be disappointed.

Since the main problem descended directly from a breakdown in communication between us and the party planners (who apparently didn't even confirm the Soho Grand until yesterday, although they had promoted the party as being there in the Washington Square News on Wednesday) it's impossible to hold anyone responsible for this. But it's definitely the sort of sobering, dues-paying experience that makes me want to be five times as professional in the future.