I've Got Believers... Believing Me
Stack 16
The night I became a DJ, I had no business being in that booth.
It was a Saturday in the fall of 1988, or close enough to it that the difference doesn’t matter. The Max was still in that sweet spot where it felt like a secret — not so small that nobody knew about it, but not so big that it had lost its edge. The crowd was growing, and the energy was building. And on that particular night, I was doing what I always did before we opened: getting everything ready so Richard could just walk in and do his thing.
That was the routine. Troy and I would clean the bar, stock everything up, and I’d head into the booth to fire up the fog machine, set the lights, test the sampler. By the time the doors opened at 2am, everything would be humming. Richard would roll in around 1:30, take the booth, and the night would begin. It was a good system. It worked.
Until it didn’t.
1:30 came and went. Then 1:45. I kept setting up, kept checking the door, kept assuming he was just running a little late. We had been working on a Ledernacken remix that week and I was genuinely curious how the dance floor would react to it. I was looking forward to watching Richard drop it.
At about five minutes to two, I heard John’s voice rising from somewhere near the front of the club. John was not a quiet man under the best of circumstances, so the yelling itself wasn’t alarming. What was alarming was that it kept going. And getting louder. As it turned out, he was yelling at Richard, who had shown up so drunk he could barely stand.
Richard’s temperament was a lot like mine. He didn’t yell back. He just went quiet and took it, which, if you’ve ever dealt with someone who loves an argument, you know is the single most effective way to make them absolutely insane. The less Richard engaged, the hotter John got. And then, at 1:58am, I heard John tell Richard to get out.
Two minutes to opening. No DJ.
John came toward the booth, and I will be honest with you — my first thought was that I was next. I ran through everything I might have done wrong in the last twelve hours and came up mostly empty. But John had that look, and I braced for it.
Instead, he asked me if I thought I could DJ that night.
Something in my head saw the opportunity before the rest of me had a chance to think it through. I said yes.
John looked at me for a second, said “okay, let’s get through tonight,” and walked away.
I stood there in the booth, stared at a wall of records that weren’t mine, and got to work.
I want to be clear about what I did and did not know how to do at that point. I had watched Richard mix records more times than I could count. He’d let me take over during bathroom breaks, and I’d played around enough to understand the basic mechanics. But understanding something in theory and executing it in front of a dance floor at 2am are two entirely different things. I had no formal training, no record collection of my own — at least not of the dance floor variety — and approximately zero minutes of actual experience.
What I did have was the club’s record collection, a good ear, and the stubbornness to not fall apart in public.
The mixes were rough. There’s no other word for it. I was pulling records off the shelf and hoping they were the songs I thought they were, dropping needles and adjusting on the fly, doing my best to keep the floor moving while my hands figured out what my brain already knew. For the most part, it worked. Not beautifully. But it worked.
At some point during the night, a large man appeared at the edge of the booth. Ron, who was known around town as Eartha Quake, the DJ from Tool Box. He was a genuinely kind person — one of those big guys who look scary if you don’t know them, but warms the whole room if you do. He leaned in and asked if I wanted any help.
I nervously said I thought I was getting it.
He smiled and said, “Ok. Holler if you need me,” and stepped back.
I never forgot that. It was such a small thing, and it meant everything. The night could have gone sideways in a dozen different ways, and here was someone with real experience offering a hand without making me feel like a total failure. That’s a rare quality in people. I’ve tried to carry it with me.
We made it to closing. When the doors shut and we headed upstairs to close out the books, John asked if I could keep doing it until he found a permanent replacement. I said yes.
What I didn’t know yet was that “until we find a permanent replacement” was going to take a while. And I knew that I wanted to be the replacement.
The Max had built its reputation on something specific: a blend of popular dance music and underground club music, in a space that was primarily gay but genuinely welcoming to anyone who could behave themselves. That combination was harder to find than it sounds. Most of the DJs in Tulsa who were willing to work in a gay club knew the mainstream side of the catalogue cold. They could play Madonna, Taylor Dayne, and C+C Music Factory all night long without breaking a sweat. But ask them for A Split Second or Front 242 and you’d get a blank stare.
I knew both worlds. That turned out to matter more than my lack of polish.
I spent the following week in the booth every single day, practicing. Just me and the records and the empty club, running mixes over and over until they started to feel less like guesswork and more like instinct. By the next weekend, I was noticeably better. Not great, but better. And John still hadn’t found the right replacement.
A month in, I stopped being a temporary solution and became a permanent fixture.
John had also learned something from the Richard situation, which was that relying on a single DJ was a liability. So, over the next few months, while the club kept growing, we cycled through guest DJs on a rotating basis. The crowd was growing fast. We went from fifty people on a good night to three hundred, and the energy that comes with that kind of growth is its own thing entirely. The more people came, the more people wanted to come. Word was spreading. The Max was becoming a destination.
With that growth came a more mixed crowd. We’d always been primarily gay, but straight people started showing up in larger numbers. That was fine by us. There was a sign at the door that made the rules clear enough: behave yourself and you’re welcome here. And for the most part, people did. We rarely had real trouble. The environment had a way of self-selecting for people who just wanted to dance and have a good time, regardless of who they were going home with.
By the end of that stretch, we’d settled on a second resident DJ named Mark. He was straight, easy to work with, and knew his way around a dance floor. The two of us became the regular team heading into 1989. We made a good pair — he leaned towards pop and top 40, I leaned towards alternative dance. So, Fridays became my night with more of an alternative feel and Saturdays were more pop leaning. We still played the same staples, but the songs in between were different.
I think about that fall a lot, actually. Not just the night I stumbled into the booth, but the whole stretch that followed. The daily practice sessions in an empty club. The slow accumulation of confidence. The way one accidental yes turned into a career I hadn’t planned for and wouldn’t trade.
There’s something about being thrown into something before you’re ready that either breaks you or builds you in ways nothing else can. A classroom can teach you theory. Experience teaches you what to do when theory runs out. And that night at The Max, with two minutes to opening and a dance floor that didn’t know or care that I had no idea what I was doing, was one of the better educations I’ve ever received.
The Eartha Quake moment still gets me, though. All these years later. Someone who had no obligation to be kind choosing to be kind anyway, quietly, without making a show of it. I don’t know if he ever knew what that meant to me. But I’ve thought about it more times than I can count, usually in moments when I have a chance to do the same for someone else.
Holler if you need me.
Holler if you need me - Not a bad way to move through the world.
Speaking of moving through the world, things have definitely been moving this past week. I’ve begun editing the Starr Love audiobook and it’s going well so far. I’m hoping to have all of the editing done by the end of next weekend, at which point I should be able to make an announcement or two about its tentative release.
As a result of the narration throwing me back into the world of Stu Starr, I made a post to social media saying I had Stu on my mind and offered a free download for the day. Well, I forgot to set it back to paid status the next morning, so it’s still sitting there as a free download right now. I’ve set a reminder to change it back on Sunday. So, if you’d like a free copy of I’m A Star, hop on over to my Bandcamp page before then.
More road ahead next week. Make it a good one.
Jeff
Music credits for the audio version of this Stack: DJ by David Bowie