Deejay in a Train Station?

Yes! It's true! Emily and I deejayed at Union Station for a thousand people! One side of the enormous hall was designated as the dance floor, so we set the speakers up to focus on the one side. The dance floor sounded great. The other half of the room couldn't hear the sound very well, though. I did not anticipate two things on this gig. One was the reverberation in the space. There is a huge amount of echo, so the music was drowned out by the amount of people that were talking. The second thing were the electrical outlets. Complete oversight when I did my sight visit. Fortunately, the gracious people at Sound Investment helped us by providing extension cords and hooking us up. The crowd was really young. Some of the things I noticed were that the guys all had the same haircut - short and spiked - and the same physique - athletic. When I was in line for the bathroom, most of them were making derogatory jokes towards the women (note: the men's line was longer, much longer, than the women's and my judgement is that the guys were feeling inadequate). The women were all dressed up, hair done, make-up on, same height, same age. How could so many people look so similar? I noticed a couple times when I played a song that women would normally dance to (ie. I Will Survive), I would hear some women scream, but no one would come out to the dance floor. I then paid more attention to how they were interacting. I saw a woman talking with the bartender, I put on a song for the ladies, I saw her scream and jump around, she looked at her friends, her smile dropped, and she turned back around. It was then that I understood the room dynamics. Everyone wanted to impress everyone else and fit in. They didn't feel comfortable expressing themselves. Is this a reflection of me and the music I was playing? Hmmm...

The gig was for four hours: 6-10pm. Most people showed up at 7pm. There was a buffet and cocktails. There wasn't really much time to build a dance floor. I was feeling out of it, which isn't a feeling, but I wasn't being part of the party. I couldn't figure out what I could do to change that until about 9pm when I walked around the party. Emily jumped on the decks and brought out all the girls. Emily got a good dance floor then and I started to feel part of the party. Emily was hitting all the right stuff. We started playing off each other and then next thing I know, the party's over. I bet the party could have gone much longer and the dance floor would have steadily gotten bigger and bigger until a mosh pit formed. Maybe. A few huge learns for me on this one: check for outlets on my site visits, if there's a lot of hard surfaces there will be a lot of echo, and I should walk around the party to bring myself into the party.

--Jonathan Hood, resident dj