I’M A WEDDING DJ & IT’S A LITTLE WEIRD.
I have always been a hustler. When I was 9 or 10 years old I had a little bike shop in my basement and I would build bikes from scrap parts and sell them to the older kids. When they broke them, I’d buy them back for pennies on the dollar and flip them again. I had 2-3 paper routes, I mowed lawns in the summer, shoveled driveways in the winter, ever industrious! I took that money and bought records, thousands and thousands of records, because I've also always been an obsessive music collector. Soon after college I learned that I could make money playing records and I never looked back, but that wasn’t enough, I also produced dance nights, parties, concerts, small corporate events and later graduated to producing multi-million dollar marketing initiatives for fortune 500 companies. In those days I DJed a lot. Sometimes up to 4-5 days for corporate stuff AND 4-5 nights a week in clubs. I was lucky enough to play with everyone from Pearl Jam and Grandmaster Flash to Daft Punk and Diplo, but it wasn’t all jam packed nights with amazing artists, I was grinding it out on the club / festival circuit for five years in New York and five years before that in Seattle. In that time I was surrounded by drugged out club owners, back stabbing "colleagues", and audiences who thought way more of radio pop than they did of the craft of being a turntablist... plus, the money and hours, were terrible. Instead of making another slight course correction to navigate my life into tolerable waters, I just crashed the ship and swam away.
“To find new ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.”
I never meant to be a wedding DJ, I fought pretty hard against it in the beginning... but as it turns out i’m pretty good at it. In 2007 I moved to LA without knowing a soul, during the worst financial crisis in recorded history, my wife was pregnant and I needed a job so I applied my experiences and talent to possibly the most undesirable (to me at that time) career ever, turns out that it was the best decision I ever made. I saw a wide open lane in the wedding industry, wedding DJs were (mostly) dorks who said stupid shit on the mic, wore terrible suits, and played the world’s worst music ever, or they were real DJs too ashamed to actually advertise that they were, in fact, wedding DJs. So I set out to change people’s perspective and bring something fresh to it.
“I’m an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I’ll bring you something out of it.”
Even though I went into it kicking and screaming, I found that the wedding / event industry employs some of the most talented, funny, creative, sharp, and most importantly NICEST people I have ever met! Before I knew this, I built my own new professional network by pulling from my past lives in events, film, marketing and advertising. So from the start we were marketing to professionals and artists from outside the wedding world. From the beginning we have strived to make something funny, something authentic, something against the grain, but first and foremost... something FUN! We have been fortunate enough to find like minded artists to collaborate with who are ambitious and creatively adventurous many of whom are repped on this website, so I feel truly honored just to be a part of it all.
I can’t really say enough about how many ways this industry continues to change my perspective and my life, not to mention how gratifying the experience of bringing some of my people up from frustrated artists to successful entrepreneurs has been. By joining this diverse community of professionals in the wedding world, I am surrounded by extremely talented, warm, people who have amazing families, who are down to help and collaborate, who are genuinely excited about life, who like to have a really good time, who I count among my closest friends.
It still makes me feel funny to say I am a wedding DJ at a dinner party, but it makes me feel pretty awesome to say that I own four companies, work with my best friends, and make people TRULY happy every weekend. It makes me feel insanely good about myself to set that example for my kids. I can’t even express how blessed I feel that my wife can be with our children in the day (and not at some miserable corp job) and we are all together at least 5-6 evenings a week. All this while I make a living creating art that I am incredibly proud of, and to have the support of my peers and fans that are so open minded.
I would have never chosen this career, but I’m so grateful it chose me.
