Today we’d like to introduce you to DJ Demo.
Thanks for sharing your story with us DJ Demo. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In the ’90s, I’d make my own personal mixtapes by recording music from the radio. Back in the day, there wasn’t much to do after playing outside, eating dinner and watching local TV. Of course, my friends were smoking weed, drinking and getting into trouble but moms was not letting me run the streets. So every night, I would sit in my room and listen to the mixshows on 97.9 The Box and 102 Jamz. I couldn’t get enough of hearing DJs like Steve Nice, Aggravated, Def Jam Blaster, Walter D, and even Mad Hatta. Honestly, I enjoyed sitting at home listening to them mix and trying to figure out how they made those futuristic scratch sounds.
Then, I got to high school and I started saving my lunch money for cassette tapes. When I’d go to Fiesta with my mom, I’d read “The Source” magazine while she was grocery shopping (Fiesta had the illest magazine and comic section). I would look for the album reviews and see how many mics they gave new albums. Their scale was from 1 to 5 Microphones,’ One Mic’ being horrible and ‘5 Mics’ being a classic album. So, anything over 3 mics I would make a note of and buy later that month when I’d go to the mall with my brother and his friends. I bought Wu-Tang Clan, Fat Joe, Das EFX, KRS-1, just to name a few. But the tape that changed it all, Funkmaster Flex’s “60 Minutes of Funk Vol.1”.
That tape opened my eyes to mixing and cutting, I listened to that tape endlessly because I wanted to figure out how he made those sounds. About a year later, I met this Puerto Rican/Dominican kid on the baseball team named, Alexis. We hit it off because we liked the same hardcore Hip-hop groups like Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang Clan, and M.O.P. At a certain point, he thought I was cool enough to tell me that he had turntables at his house. And come to find out he lived three blocks away from my house. When I saw the setup of two Gemini belt-drive turntables and Gemini 676 mixer with the sampler, it was the most amazing thing I’d seen in my life! I’d go over there as often as I possibly could and watch him mix and cut. Sometimes, he’d teach me and let me try and mix…God bless his mom and grandmother for putting up with the noise and feeding me Puerto Rican food!
So, after a year or so of watching Alexis kill it in the room, I wanted a set of turntables. Of course, my parents weren’t buying them and I didn’t have a job. I was stuck, so I thought. During my senior year in high school, I was in a work-study program with the Adam’s Mark Hotel and during the holidays there was an opportunity to work and get paid! I signed up for the holidays and I worked all Thanksgiving break and two or three weeks during Christmas/NYE. With that job, I was able to make enough money to get a pair of turntables and a mixer.
In January, I ordered the set from Music Factory in New York because of the ads I saw in the back of The Source magazine. I was shitting a brink because my package was delayed for like a month and I sent them a 900$ check. I thought I got ripped off by Music Factory and then out of nowhere, a HUGE box was dropped on my doorstep. My set up finally came in! However, I shitted another brick because I just spent 900$ bucks on something I didn’t really know how to use. I just stared at them for the next few weeks and thought to myself, “what did I just do?”. I also had to stare at them because I had no vinyl to play on them. But over the next year, I still sucked and really had no records but Alexis and I did high school house parties and the Valentine’s Day dance at Elsik High School.
That’s was the beginning.
Has it been a smooth road?
There’s been a lot of struggles. Internal and external.
Internal Struggles:
I am a natural introvert. Maybe I could have been further along in DJ’ing if I could have been a better “people person”. I.E. go out to bars, drink, travel and mingle with people. That is something I still struggle with today and I work on just a much as DJ’ing itself. Moreover, I had to recondition my mind in order to become a business owner. My parents instilled in my brother and me to go to college and get a job for the government. Just be an employee for someone else and don’t make any waves. So, there’s a lot of conditioning that I’ve had to work through and I still work on today. Now looking back, it’s understandable because my parents grew up in poverty as children of immigrant farmworkers. DJ’ing, as a full-time occupation, was inconceivable to them… still kind of is hahaha.
External Struggles:
In the 2000s, the pay at my first residency dropped and I had to leave. I found out later the GM had a coke problem and was embezzling money. SMH. So, I was out of a job. A year or so later, I made it to party 104.9 as a guest mixer. During that time, veteran DJ’s on payroll would call the station and complain while I was on-air because I was playing songs NOT on the playlist. Shouting matches often occurred over the phone and sometimes things almost got physical when those DJs would come up to the station. Things were very competitive and they probably thought this young no-name kid possibly aiming for their position. What they didn’t know was, I didn’t know what I was doing and I was shitting brick every time I was on-air. Shout to Wu Chang for holding me down and putting me on at Party. The best time ever!
Also, during that era people wouldn’t give you the time of day to even have a conversation. If you weren’t apart of the right social circle or a super dope DJ, I assume people thought you were an opportunist. In those days, there was a lot of opportunists and understandably so because money and gigs weren’t as plentiful as they are now. It was also during the Houston Rap Boom in the mid-2000s’, everyone was trying to “get on”. Everyone thought Houston was going to turn into Atlanta, as a music industry town.
These are just a few examples of what struggles I’ve had over the years. They still happen but now I better equipment to navigate through adversity.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into The Waxaholics story. Tell us more about it.
The Waxholics and our night, “Wax Thursday’s” is the project that gets the most personal attention. It’s a weekly ALL VINYL party. We play hip-hop, R&B, soul, reggae and even some Latin! The core weekly group is Christian Pope (Promoter/Co-founder), DJ Big Reeks (Co-founder), Loso, and myself. It’s been going every week since, 2012.
What I am most proud of is, how much we have grown as a group. We are like family. We have a great time playing classic music and people over the years have gravitated to our party. Each week isn’t easy carrying records but working with and playing for dope people makes it all worth it. A couple of years ago, we were nominated for “Best Night” by the Houston Press with the likes of, Bombon, Fist Full of Soul and Save the Tuesday’s at Barbarella’s. That was pretty dope to be mentioned with those parties.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Who knows. The only people left playing music will have this in their bio:
“Influencer/Model/Producer/World Traveler”
Contact Info:
- Website: www.demosounds.com
- Email: demohtx@gmail.com
- Instagram: demohtx
Image Credit:
Jarele Taylor
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