I did everything, from birthdays to weddings, to school dances and … well, that’s about it, really, give or take. Shows varied from having 5, 000 people to 15. It was certainly an interesting experience … although it was also a gruelling and badly paid one.
The company was run by a guy called … well, let’s call him Terry Dangerman (he strikes me very much as being the kind of guy to regularly Google himself, and this way I avoid popping up on one of his searches).
Terry was a … unique individual. In addition to the DJ company he’d been running for 30 years, he was also a professional pornographer, taking pictures of nude models to sell to online porn sites. He ran the entire business out of his house – including the modelling, with his bedroom doubling as a studio. It wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that it was a scungy little brick veneer place that he’d lived in since he was born and appeared not to have been cleaned in all that time.
His house – and all the equipment – reeked of dust, grease and solidified sweat. My co-workers were unwashed stoners, hypocritical “Christians” and hyped-up madmen. The abysmally small amount of money and the incredibly hard working conditions meant that eventually all but three of Terry’s employees were whittled away, so much so that we were struggling to get enough people together to do the jobs we booked.
One of my co-workers was a truly baffling enigma. We eventually dubbed him “Dangerboy” because of his zealous devotion to Terry. Dangerboy had a crew cut, a terrible skin condition, sub-par intelligence and the assertion that he was always right. It didn’t matter what the subject was, he bleated on about it as if he was the world’s foremost authority.
Dangerboy was also under the mistaken impression that he could dance. With the way he pumped the air and slammed his foot – completely out of time with the music – he was a sideshow oddity, with audience members pointing, staring and laughing at this guy up on stage, looking so much like a baboon dry-humping the air in front of him.
Dangerboy eventually became an ironic sensation; girls would get up to dance with him, take pictures with him, and the rest of us would stand off to the side, wondering what the hell was going on. I cringe to think of the handful of shows he soloed on; given his general demeanour, he wasn’t really trusted to do his own gigs, but during the times we were stretched really thin, there was no choice but to send him out. It might just be me, but I kind of like the idea of a DJ knowing a little bit about music, instead of being someone who’s under the impression that Nirvana is “techno music”.
But back to Terry. With the slight benefit of being one of the few employees who wasn’t completely retarded, I was offered the chance to do some office work and earn a bit more money. Thanks to the incredibly idiosyncratic method that Terry ran his business, it took me forever to learn the systems for everything. It didn’t help that I would often turn up to work to find the middle-aged, obese Terry sunning himself out the back in nothing but a pair of Speedos, leaving me to fight back my sense of nausea for the rest of the day.
It’s at this stage I interject a Googled photo of some random guy just in case the mental image wasn’t enough.
Terry would eat and talk with his mouth open, pieces of Subway (his standard meal) spitting everywhere. He had a terrible sense of humour, and yet he felt he was one of the funniest men in existence (barely a week wouldn’t go by without him repeating an off-the-cuff remark he’d made to an employee several years earlier; “There’s always a case for a minidisk!” Don’t get it? There’s not much to get!).
He’d drill us about treating the clients with respect, and then bitch and swear about them within earshot if they pissed him off during a performance. In fact, despite being a fairly amiable guy most of the time, if you had to assist him on a show, you had to prepare yourself to be screamed at and abused for a good ten or twelve hours.
He was homophobic, racist, hated young people and modern music, and was a total skinflint. He remains the only boss to have exposed me to porn (not that I had a major problem with it, but I remember the afternoon it happened walking out into the sunlight reflecting on the pure freaking absurdity of it).
For this man, I played well over seventy weddings, birthdays and assorted other celebrations. I wore a Dr Seuss style hat as I led conga lines at primary school dances. I worked the spotlight on the fighters and the topless ring girls at kickboxing tournaments. I hiked eighty-kilo equipment up and down cliff-faces, by myself, all so that a bunch of bogans could get pissed and fall unconscious to Dexys Midnight Runners at their wedding reception. I got beer bottles thrown at my head by yuppie UQ students and abused by middle-aged housewives on New Year’s Eve.
And yet … I kind of miss it. But then my back spasms and I thank God I don’t have to report for duty at DJ Dangerman’s Sound and Lighting ever again.
4 comments:
ouch. good post. there is a tv show in that. although you'd have to pay for the music rights...and Australia might not have the budget, but perhaps we can get around it. *Runs off to type*. It's very the Office.
Sarah always said a book about all the different jobs I'd had would make a good lad fic novel. Just recently I was thinking how good a sketch comedy character "Terry" would make (like how The League of Gentlemen's characters are all based on real people). But you're right, there's vast material for a TV show there. You'd really have to jump through hoops to get around the music royalties, though.
would have to have generic songs maybe, no big hits, or do a deal with an OZ company like shock, not focus on the dancing just what happens between dancing and after..
Yeah, like how Sunset Strip is focused mostly on the production of the show and depicts little-to-nothing of the actual show itself.
Believe me, there'd be enough material in the set-up before the gig and the take-down after.
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