I am Not the DJ

There are so many reasons to hate New Years Eve. Even before I had to work them, I never really liked it. It either meant that I would soon be returning to school after the Christmas holiday, or attending some party that would most likely not come to any sort of satisfying end or rewarding experience. There’s something decidedly melancholy about New Years Eve.

Unless you’re drunk, then it’s really just pathetic.

But I digress.

As it turns out, for about half of my adult life, I’ve found myself sitting behind a sound console in the first hours of a new year, babysitting a CD (and even a tape back in the day) of dance music. (Talk about melancholy!)

The kind of dance music that makes me want to commit some form of violence, as I feel the music itself does to the inside of my head:

BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM

It makes me want to BA-BOOM on something. I hate it.

But it is my job, and I grudgingly appreciate that it means something to others – indeed some can even discern the subtle differences in the BA-BOOM – so I insure that the kick, snare, and hi-hat are easily heard, sit back, and put in my ear plugs.

In any case, by this time in the evening, I have spent the past 12 hours rehearsing, tweaking cues, and running shows, culminating with the final New Years Eve “tag” to the world’s longest running musical revue called Beach Blanket Babylon. In a heavily programmed, repetitive gig like anything associated with the term longest running, it’s the kind of seat-of-your pants extravaganza that only an experienced sound mixer like myself can pull off year after year.

That’s right – my ego gets a little BA-BOOM!

That is until the short, blond twenty-something woman in her high-heels and little red party dress staggers over to the me as I sit behind my $20,000 digital live sound mixing console and interrupts a conversation with my sweetheart to ask, in a slightly condescending tone – as if to make clear her dissatisfaction with what she perceives as my particular choice of BA-BOOM – “Are you the DJ?”

No, I’m not the DJ.

And Happy New Year to you too.

BA-BOOM.