My Three Most Memorable Experiences as a DJ in NYC
Meeting/Being Complimented by Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear
Probably my favorite DJ experience, for a couple of reasons.
The short of it is, Chris Taylor seems like a really nice, sweet guy, based on the ten minutes or so we spent outside the bar, talking about the Arthur Russell album that I liked and knew he produced, Love Is Overtaking Me.
I told him how Love Is Overtaking Me was the album that I first listened to when I started listening to Arthur Russell and how one song in particular, “I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face,” was the song that had grabbed me and made me listen more closely and feel things. Chris Taylor said that he had had to argue for the song’s inclusion on the album — the people who ran the Arthur Russell estate didn’t think it quite fit in with the rest of the songs on the album — and I remember the way he said he argued for its inclusion. “If you guys value my opinion at all” is how he put it, I think, although now that I think about it I’m not sure if that’s exactly the way he put it, since I remember it being eloquent, and I’m not sure that what I just said is eloquent; what I mean to say is, I remember feeling very impressed with the way he had expressed himself, the convincing, yet also cordial — casual — way he put forth his argument, and I remember thinking to myself, “This is how a person who is confident in what he does talks.”
I should also mention that he was wearing a collared shirt with the buttons unbuttoned more than most people generally unbutton them and that he had a prominent tattoo across one side of his chest, a large, black, swirly, unexpected thing.
After we talked, as I was packing up my stuff and then riding home, I thought about how, if I had still been a musician like I had been a few years ago, this could have been one of those moments you work and work for, the chance to impress somebody who could really do something for you, in an organic and totally non-weird way. I also thought about how much money we had made and how I wished there was someone to bring home with me (I had done this before, the two of us on my bike, her sitting on the seat with her hands around my waist as I leaned forward and pedaled) and, in the middle of all this, riding across the empty streets and stumbling up the stairs to my third floor walk-up apartment, I felt drunk, and calm.