The question I am asked the most is, “How did you become a DJ?”
I have a friend who sang and played guitar in Mexican restaurants. Sometimes, some friends and I would go have dinner and watch my friend perform. We would always sit close to the music and because I knew him, we would talk and joke between songs. It was always a good time and I always enjoyed going, but I always wished that I was the musician and not the customer. I took guitar lessons as a kid and I could kind of carry a tune, so I decided to go to work and become a musician.
I practiced and practiced and studied, it was a lot harder than I thought, but eventually I learned 40 songs. Because in the Mexican restaurant chain I wanted to work in, you played 4 sets of 10 songs each. I auditioned and got the job and was extremely excited. But, it didn’t take long to realize, that job was pretty boring if you didn’t have a table of friends sitting in front of you. Also, I was nowhere NEAR as good a musician as the other musicians out there on the “Taco Tour” I couldn’t take requests. As I mentioned I knew 40 songs the other guys knew hundreds, so I only ended up doing this gig for a few weeks.
As luck would have it, I was humming and strumming away one Friday night and a guy came in and sat fairly close to me at the bar. He watched me for whole songs and clapped after every one, frankly it was kind of creeping me out. Usually people only knew I was alive if I stopped playing and there was no music. So I play though my set, take a break, go to the bar to get a glass of water and this guy walks over to me, he said he noticed I seemed comfortable in front of people and I was quite a comedian so he asked had I ever considered being a DJ. Well, I was raised Southern Baptist and I had no idea wedding DJ’s existed and I asked, “Like on the radio?” He explained what a wedding DJ was and said he owned a company that offered wedding DJs and asked me to come by and watch him DJ at a venue that was on my way back to the Mexican restaurant the next night. So I did. I just happen to walk in during the garter and bouquet and I stood there in the doorway thinking, “Oh man, I could do this!”
I immediately went to work for this guy, went to several events with him and then started going out on my own. This was early 1994. I worked for this guy maybe a year and then went to work for a larger company for three more years and then quit my day job and went full time on my own in 1998.
So I always say, “It was my natural talent as a musician that led me straight to a career as a DJ!”