I Didn't Choose to Become a DJ. A Cassette Tape Chose for Me.

I didn't choose to become a DJ.

A cassette tape chose for me.

And it happened in the summer of 1987 in a suburb of Chicago — in a bedroom I didn't live in, listening to music I had never heard before, played on a silver boombox that belonged to my cousin.

I was 16 years old. I had no idea my life was about to change direction.

The Summer of 1987

Every summer my mom would take my sister and me back to Chicago from Houston to visit family. We had moved from Chicago to Houston when I was 9 years old after my parents divorced. But Chicago was still home in a lot of ways. Our family was there. Our roots were there.

The summer of 1987 we visited my cousins in Downers Grove — a suburb southwest of the city.

My cousin Cheryl was two years older than me. I walked into her room one afternoon and she was sitting on her bed listening to music on a silver boombox.

I sat down on the floor and listened.

It sounded like Disco to me.

I asked her — what is this? Disco?

She laughed and said no.

It's called House Music.

The song was Move Your Body by Marshall Jefferson.

I had never heard anything like it. The piano. The vocals. The rhythm. It felt familiar because of Disco but it was something completely different. Something newer. Something that felt like it was being made for right now.

WBMX and the Mixmaster 5

Cheryl had recorded it off the radio — specifically the Mixmaster 5 on WBMX 102.7 FM Chicago.

For anyone who knows House Music history — WBMX was sacred ground. The station where House Music found its first radio home. The Mixmaster 5 — a group of DJs including Bad Boy Bill, Mickey Oliver, Julian Jumpin Perez, and others — were the architects of how House Music sounded on radio in Chicago in the mid to late 1980s.

I didn't know any of that then. I just knew the music coming out of that silver boombox was doing something to me that music hadn't done before.

Cheryl gave me the cassette tape.

That cassette tape introduced me to Bad Boy Bill.

The DJ whose mixing style, whose selection, whose energy on those recordings became my standard for what a DJ should sound like.

My idol.

The man I would eventually meet as a peer in 1993 — six years later — on weekly radio conference calls with mixshow DJs from around the country.

My friend to this day.

But that summer of 1987 he was just a voice on a mixtape that my cousin recorded off the radio and handed to a kid sitting on her bedroom floor.

The Basement

My other cousin John had turntables and a mixer set up in his basement.

He was preparing for a DJ battle at a local teen club called Prime and Tender.

I went down there and watched him practice.

He was playing Jack Your Body by Steve Silk Hurley — one of the defining House Music records of that era. And he wasn't just playing it. He was doing things to it that I had never seen anyone do to music before.

Scratching. Beat juggling. And a technique called Transforming — rapidly cutting the crossfader back and forth to create a stuttering rhythmic effect on top of the music.

It blew my mind completely.

I watched him for a while and then said — anyone can do that.

He looked at me and said — go ahead and try.

I walked up to those turntables and put my hands on vinyl for the first time in my life.

It felt completely foreign. The records felt strange under my fingers. I had no idea how to make them do what John was making them do. I couldn't beatmatch. I couldn't scratch. I couldn't do anything remotely close to what I had just watched him do.

I stayed in that basement anyway.

I wasn't going to leave until I at least understood the mechanics. Until my hands started to make some kind of sense of what they were touching.

Here's something that helped — I was a trumpet player in my high school band back in Houston. Rhythm and timing were already deeply embedded in my body through years of playing music. I just needed to translate that understanding from a trumpet into my hands on vinyl.

So I stayed. And I practiced. And I kept trying.

The Drive Home

A few weeks later we packed up the car and drove back to Houston.

Chicago to Houston is a long drive. Sixteen hours give or take depending on stops.

I listened to those cassette tapes the entire way.

Not just House Music either. My cousins had also introduced me to Freestyle music — a genre I had never heard before that was exploding out of New York and Miami at the same time House Music was exploding out of Chicago.

Cover Girls — Show Me.Stevie B — Party Your Body.

A whole world of music I had never heard before was playing in my ears for sixteen straight hours as we drove south through Missouri and Arkansas and into Texas.

By the time we pulled into Houston I was a different person than when we left.

Starting From Scratch

I didn't have turntables at home. I couldn't afford Technics 1200s — the professional standard that every serious DJ used. So I started on belt drive turntables and a Realistic mixer — the best I could do at the time.

I started buying records. Dance music. House music. Whatever I could find in Houston.

I went back to Chicago the following summer and went record shopping at Gramaphone Records — one of the legendary House Music record stores on the North Side of Chicago where DJs came from all over the country to find music.

I practiced every chance I got. At home. At my friend's house who was also learning to DJ. In every basement and bedroom I could find a set of turntables in.

And I never stopped.

What That Summer Actually Was

I didn't know it in 1987. I couldn't have known it.

But that summer in Downers Grove was the moment.

Not the radio shows. Not Tommy Boy Records. Not Z100 New York. Not the Billboard Top 10. Not Warehouse Live Midtown.

The moment was a 17 year old kid from Houston sitting on the floor of his cousin's bedroom in the suburbs of Chicago hearing Move Your Body by Marshall Jefferson for the first time and thinking it was Disco.

Everything I've built in 35 years of music starts there.

In that room. On that floor. With that silver boombox.

A cassette tape changed my life.

And I've spent the last 35 years being grateful that my cousin Cheryl pressed play.