INTERVIEW: ROCTAKON

FROM BOTTLE SERVICE CLUBS TO BBQ PITS

Right now, there seems to be a fair amount of nostalgia for 2000s-era New York City nightlife. Was I there? Not exactly. But I know someone who was: Roctakon. He was one of the definitive working DJs of the time. Roctakon played at celebrity-laden clubs like Bungalow 8 and Marquee, but he also kept a toe in more underground-leaning communities. He could do a tasteful disco or house set, but he could also rock a room of jacked-up goons who wore Von Dutch.

Though Roctakon connected the dots between downtown clubs and fancy clubs and bridge and tunnel clubs, he ultimately chose to take his skills not to hipster venues around the globe but to the kind of bottle service establishments in cities like Miami and Las Vegas that would become emblematic of the more absurd end of 2000s nightlife. He chose the Ed Hardy route, not the Ron Hardy route. Along the way, he helped shape a cross-genre, free-for-all brand of DJing (“open-format”) that made a whole lot of sense in the kind of gaudy rooms that defined pre-recession nightclubbing.

Roctakon is a masterful club DJ, and I’ve always enjoyed his opinionated and sometimes trollish writing about the craft and nuance of playing back then, which saw the last gasp of pure vinyl DJing roll into a new, laptop-driven era. There are few people who can talk about this moment with such specificity. Roctakon has done a lot of work outside of the DJ world; currently, he lives in Nashville and spends most of his time mastering another craft: Barbecue. But I wanted to go back in time and go deep, and we did. The result? Another 5000+ word interview with a DJ on John’s Music Blog.

I always thought you should write a book about DJing in the 2000s, but I know you're not going to do that, so I figured I might as well ask you some questions for the blog. 

Well, the thing about it is that it’s not that interesting. 

To me it is, and I think there's a lot of kids now that are interested in that era of New York.

I mean, I didn't do anything cool. I worked in cheesy nightclubs. 

Yeah, but I think there’s a history that’s not being written. The histories that are being written are histories you probably feel some sort of way about. I once heard you talk about how you thought those James Murphy, DFA parties at Plant Bar were some of the most over-mythologized things in New York nightlife.

Well, it was just some bar.

No, for sure. But 20 years later, there's kids that are interested in the history of New York at that time, but they’re not getting the full story.

Yeah, well, of course—to the victor go the spoils. If you were working in cheesy clubs back then, we didn't win the culture war at all. We lost the culture war to hip people. Rightfully so. 

It's interesting you say that because you were always sort of on the edge—you interfaced with both of these cultures.

Yeah, for sure. 

And I think what's interesting about you is that you have this purview of like, you understood what was happening on both sides of the fence.

I moved to New York pretty soon after 9/11, in 2002. From 2002 to 2004 or so I did much more straddling of both worlds. And I sort of weaseled my way into gigging occasionally at APT and I was also doing Bungalow 8, which was really snooty, but you had a little more freedom with the music there. And then I did cheesy clubs, like real bridge and tunnel stuff. I was doing kind of anything and everything, all I wanted to do was make a living DJing, but I also had that desire to play sort of cool music—you know, the youthful ignorance of this stuff's cool and the better music and blah blah blah. And especially coming out of the ‘90s and being a Gen X person, there was a lot of that idea that certain types of music are better than others. 

I was straddling both sides of the fence. The cheesy club stuff was working well enough, the other stuff was working well enough, but I've always been a bad self-promoter. Like, I'm annoying and like attention, but I'm bad at self-promoting, especially when it comes to art. I don't have that blind self-belief that a lot of people do that takes them to the top. I saw this sort of cool music scene, and at that time it really seemed like that was a more self-promotional path to take—if I wanted to do a cool party where I could just play dope music and this and that, the amount of networking and self-promotion and the early stages of branding yourself that I was going to have to do seemed fucking insurmountable. And not fun and not what I wanted to do at all.

And I felt like a lot of the people in that world were just not very good. A good house DJ or whatever, that's a whole different thing. But at the time, the technical ability of people in that zone was not particularly high. You’d go to APT and listen to Bobito play the whole song and sort of train wreck. I think people in that world have gotten a lot better at DJing, but it still can be like that to some degree. But anyway, I was not that impressed with the talent level of the DJs. That's not including house. It was more the hip hoppy hybrid, playing funk and soul, everybody was playing a lot of classics in that era, getting into the disco stuff—it was just sort of a lead up to that stuff really getting bigger a decade later.

For sure.

At the time, I said, Oh, they appreciate the talent more in the cheesy world and the fucking money's better, and I didn’t have to do as much self-promotion. Like, I really didn't, which sounds weird because now the self-promotion aspect in any world is bad, but in that sort of cheesy world it’s kind of the worst, but at the time they still needed people that could read the room and play to a crowd and they paid you good for it. And that was not the case in the quote-unquote “underground” or whatever. So I was just like, fuck it.

Back in the day, when you were playing five-hour sets at some bridge and tunnel nightclub, or some bottle service nightclub, how did that unfold? Walk me through it.

So you get there and you're going to open, right? And there's two ways to open. Open with hip hop or open with not hip hop. And I always thought the best nights were the nights where you don’t open with hip hop and you open with everything else. And you didn't hit that hip hop stuff until like 12:30, 12:45. And so maybe you open with Bad Boy R&B and that kind of stuff. But by the time people are really starting to get there, you're out of that zone and you're just playing ‘80s and classic R&B and maybe a little rock. Not giving them the hip hop and the hits, the real hits until it's jamming and people are moving and going.

The later you go into whatever the new hip hop of the era was, like 50 Cent or Lil Jon or this and that, the later you get to that stuff, the easier the night is. If they're antsy for it early, once you get to 2:30, it’s going to be a little dicey in there for a minute. The basic format is: opening stuff, then you got your peak block where you're going hard with all types of hits. You hit all the new hip hop stuff. If it's later in the 2000s, you have your big chunk of 110 to 130 BPM stuff that you hit. And then you can go back down into some high-energy, but slower hip hop stuff. And sort of rise up the BPMs again. It's easy, that two-hour block where you can just throw hits at them. But the hard part is coming out of that and keeping people there and keeping it going till four. 

Yeah.

It would really just depend on the crowd, but a lot of times, a reggae set would be really good at around 2:45. But if you don't have that kind of crowd, you have to figure out what their version of a reggae set is, if it's going to be, you know, a few ‘80s things, or if it's going to be some singalongs, if they're really white, or if it's going to be a real retro hip hop thing if they're in that sort of zone. And then if you want to do the hits again later, you kind of can. I realized that it’s okay to play big records again later. But I think it's really finding that set for that specific crowd that is going to carry you from 2:30 or 2:45, depending on how late or early you went with the hits. And if you catch that set right, if it's reggae or if it's singalongs or if it's ‘80s or whatever, the rest of the night flows and you don't even have to think. For me, that last hour, if I came out of the hits right and found that groove, that last hour would just fly by.

But, the deeper into the open-format era, the harder it became, at least for me. If you're traveling a lot, you just go into autoplay doing the same old shit you're always doing. And when you're doing that, when you're doing a sort of DJ AM kind of set, even if you're not playing a set, you're just piecing together three songs here, three songs there… When you're in that kind of DJing—I mean, it can work really well, especially at those casinos and stuff like that. 

You played some casinos?

Oh yeah, I did all that stuff.

Atlantic City? 

Oh, any of those things you could think of. There were so many of them, especially before the crash of 2008 and 2009 when the real estate market fell apart. There were so many of those places in 2007, these real estate agents outside of San Diego—those guys were spending money like they worked on Wall Street. You know, real estate guys in the Southwest. 

So you were going to Arizona a lot? 

Oh, dude, I had a chunk of time. It wasn't that long, but it was maybe a spring, summer and a fall, or something like that. Six, eight months, where I was in Miami on Friday. I floated somewhere around Saturday. Sunday, I was off—I would go to Vegas, I had a room. And then Monday, I played in Vegas and Tuesday, I played in Arizona. And then Wednesday, I'd get up and fly back to New York for a couple of days and then go back to Miami the next Friday. 

That's a psychotic schedule. 

Oh, I mean, it drove me insane and fat. I was getting fat and just sitting around eating my feelings. I had seven Bang Brothers subscriptions because I had a girlfriend or whatever. It was really bad. It was the beginning of a bleak part of my life. But the point I'm making is that if your sets are just three songs here that go together, four songs there to go together, whatever, it’s antithetical to having a flow and reading the crowd and creating a long arc of a night. 

Even so, I'm sure that by a certain point, you understood like, OK, this track works in Phoenix. 

Oh, you know where I always bombed? Chicago. 

Interesting. 

Whatever the scene was that was bringing us in as cheesy DJs, I think the people thought they were more sophisticated than I thought they were. And so I was playing them the normal stuff and they wanted something different and I just am not good at that. Like, there was a moment, not the 2000s, but the ‘10s where—and this is not specific to Chicago—but where it was this sort of alternative dance culture, whatever. I don't know, these fucking, you know, Phoenix remixes or fucking whatever. That kind of stuff. 

Indie dance? 

Yeah. So there was a moment where I would have a lot of these bombs, when this indie dance thing was big. These managers or club people would expect that I could do that. And I didn't even know those records at all. You know, I had four of them, but I didn't know any of that music. And I just took a look around and said, Dude, these people aren't fucking cool. Like, I don't even want to play this stuff because I don't know it. And B, like, these are just normal ass people. I can play this Jennifer Lopez song. It doesn't matter. 

You want to play the lowest common denominator or actually good dance records. You don't want to play what's in between. 

Yeah, that's the least fun kind of DJing—to be a DJ that tries to play above the crowd. And there are some gigs in LA where they didn't like me because I wouldn't do that. There's a lot of gigs like that in LA where everybody's at fucking peon and they think that they're so cool. You know, the management wants it to be cool.  

Let’s go backwards. Around 2002, 2003, you must’ve been going out to a pretty big range of clubs in New York.

I did go to a little bit of everything. I would go to see Rich Medina or whoever at APT or something like that, but then I was also going to see DJ Riz at a big club. Sometimes you go to the hipster party and then fuck it, it's late and there's no girls, I'm just gonna go to Shelter. I distinctly remember a night like that where I went to Don Hills, Justine D and Michael T. I remember being there, it’s like three in the morning, sort of nothing was popping, and being like, I'm just gonna go to Shelter, and then I was at Shelter until like seven in the morning. You could still do stuff like that in that era. It was the last sort of gasp of real New York kind of clubbing. 

Yeah, the deep house thing continues, but it's a family reunion kind of vibe now. 

I think in a lot of ways culturally New York is going the Paris route where what's happened there has already happened and you can go to New York and experience the facsimile of the ‘80s or early ‘90s or sort of late ‘70s and it's good for tourism. I'm not saying people don't like the music and that dance music isn't beloved there or anything like that—it has a scene, but it doesn't feel urgent.

When you were going to Shelter, you were seeing Timmy Regisford spin?

Yeah, and by 2003 or whatever that was on its way out. They had left the Vinyl space on Varick and they moved to I think it was Speed which was up in the 20s or 30s or something. I remember going to Shelter when Armand Van Helden was on a big run with “You Don’t Know Me” and “Flowerz” and all that kind of stuff was sort of hitting. Shelter was a massive fucking club, and we went at the regular prime time, and it was wall to wall, like 1 a.m., slammed with people. House had that momentum back then. I don't know what year that was—like 99, I don't know, but by 2003 it was definitely on the way down. 

Were those DJs influential to you?

Oh, Regisford—I didn't see him hundreds of times, but all the times I ever saw him it was always a huge influence on me. He takes a while to warm up and he's either on or not, but I’ve seen him do lots of crazy stuff.

What does that mean to you for him to be on or not?

Oh, you know, later on into the 2000s or the ‘10s, he would be fiddling with these complex blends of running two records together for a long time and do this thing where you have a loop going and bring stuff in and out over the loop. It's DJ stuff, but it's maybe not the best thing to do to get it going. Maybe there's not enough people to try and build a vibe or you’re just kind of in your own world as a DJ. I’m not pointing my finger at him—myself or whoever will get into that zone where you kind of just tinker up there. You got to be there. You got to play. You're not that excited about it. It takes a little while to get into the zone and kind of snap out of it and start going for it. 

You're noodling. It's like a musician noodling. 

Exactly. But earlier Regisford, you'd go to Vinyl or Speed, they had some sort of shelving system in the DJ booth. I would imagine they had padlocks on it or whatever and they would just pop it up when he left, but all his records were there. So it's basically like a little room the size of a room in an apartment with a wall of records. So everything's there, and he was just incredible—quick mixing with disco, really smooth, really great, playing classics. And he would take these chances with blends and doing weird stuff and you know, it didn't always hit totally but when it did you're just like, holy cow. He was always running the “Smooth Criminal” acapella in a weird way under something, just stuff like that, but super influential, a lot of theater.

I remember being at Shelter and he was playing that song “Groovin’ You” by Harvey Mason, or whatever, that they sampled for Gusto’s “Disco’s Revenge.” He's playing it and it wasn't loud. He was tinkering in the back, looking through the records, and as the break was about to drop with the great bassline, he kind of stopped what he was doing and, like, not ran or not walked but kind of sauntered to the console and just slammed the bass up and the volume up right as the one dropped on the break. And it was just absolute theater. 

If you're watching you're like, Holy shit, and then if you're just dancing, the beat hits you—it works on multiple levels. I get chills just thinking about it. It was one of the greatest pieces of DJing I've ever seen, just the whole thing, the casualness of it, the timing, this idea of it being theater but also just DJing, too, like you're controlling the levels of the music and the bass and everything. He didn't do anything. He just turned the volume up on a fucking song and people went crazy. 

You hear these stories about that era of New York DJing. It’s cheesy, and other people have said this, but it’s kind of like The Dead or something. They just fuck around for 10 minutes. And you're like, This band sucks. Then they hit a pocket. 

Yes. 

Well, you read about Larry Levan or Ron Hardy and it seems as if they liked to fuck around and maybe almost be purposefully bad…

Yeah, I mean, I was like that. I wouldn't be purposefully bad, but I would get into zones. I was actually thinking about this, I hadn't thought about DJing for a while before we texted about doing this. And I was thinking about how much time I spent trying to be good to the detriment of being good. Just working too hard and trying to do cool stuff. So much of DJing is DJs trying to impress each other. It's the sort of thing where you're trying to have a hot girlfriend to impress the other guys, not because you actually like her. It's a lot of that stuff. 

And I started doing, obviously I started doing less the older I got, just out of laziness and also realizing, dude just let the song go. It doesn't matter who thinks you're good or bad or if you impress some people, just do what's right for the moment. I was listening to mix CDs that I'd made, and I was just like, Oh, the stuff I made when I was older is so much better because I was not trying to impress anybody. I'm really just thinking about what's the best thing to do here.

So much of that era of open-format club DJing was about tricks, in a way. 

Yeah. So the choice was, be a self-promoting, cool DJ or just go play cheesy clubs. And I went to do the clubs, but you know, not long after that, DJing goes to the computer, and with the computer, I start to realize, Oh, I can do anything. I can do anything I want and I can play anything I want. And what does that look like? The chains are off, you get the green flag. And I thought it was really fun for a couple of years. There used to be so much work to do the simplest thing on vinyl. I started to learn how to play on three turntables doing quick acapella stuff and real fast mixing. And then it became, Oh, you can just do this stuff, have it already done on your laptop. It was fun. I talked to somebody recently about that era and I was sort of lamenting some of my decisions and they were sort of like, Oh, in that era, you had to be good. Go do the laptop thing and be good. See what you can do. 

It was the last generation of people who came up playing vinyl and then made that transition in the middle, I think there was a very specific kind of energy that came out of that because you had the experience of having to bring vinyl to a club and having to figure that out. 

Yeah, you understand how you get good enough and then you take the chains off and you're totally set free. And you're young enough that the computer's not scary or it comes naturally enough. 

It seems like after computer DJing happened, even the kids now that choose to play vinyl, it will never be the same.

If you choose to play vinyl, you're a retro hobbyist. It's expensive as hell. Everything doesn't come out. It's not a natural thing. You're choosing to do a vintage hobby. You know, it's fine. You can race your vintage motorcycles or whatever you're into. I like old cars and stuff like that. But you're making a choice to pursue a vintage-esque hobby. You're not doing something that's natural, that's of the time. Which was another thing in the 2000s, what I did, it was of the time and it felt natural. You know, it wasn't cool. It was of the time. I always say it was just a crappy time to be in your 20s. But I didn't make a goofy choice to be retro or go against the grain of the era. 

I think about when I did some DJing in high school. It was two years before the laptop DJing, Serato thing took over—the amount of commercial rap records I bought only to play out that have zero value now… I wish I would’ve bought indie rock records. 

We've made music free, basically. It's 10 bucks a month to listen to anything you want on Spotify. And in America, where money really matters, it's been devalued. I think in the Boomer era music was sort of the most important art, and how people expressed themselves culturally, and identified themselves. It was a big economic engine and a huge way Boomers determined themselves as well as the next generation, the X and the early Millennials. But the thing that got kicked off in the 2000s with streaming and the initial shockwaves of Napster or whatever—the demotion of music in the cultural hierarchy made DJing a lot less interesting for me. And there are gonna be some people out there that are like, Oh, no, music still matters, blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, it does, but it's not the top of the food chain. 

I think that by doing this blog, I'm kind of leaning into that. You can still engage with new music in interesting ways, but you're right, it just objectively doesn't drive culture the way it did 30 years ago. 

No, it doesn't at all. And there's still money to be made. People still like music. They wanna go see Taylor Swift. I like music still. I listen to new stuff, it's fine, but it doesn't mean what it used to. And that's probably good, I think. As someone that used to DJ, it's bad, it fucking sucks because going out and hearing music used to mean so much to people. And as an average person, I just don't think that it's like that anymore. I talk to people who DJ cool stuff, and there are people out there that like the music and you do have nights occasionally where you get the old feeling. But I think that the work one has to do in this era and this age to get that old feeling is—it's not worth it to me. I'd rather do something else. 

I was thinking about your new barbecue passion and it seems like you finally found something to maybe rival the obsession you had with DJing. Would you say that's true? 

Yes and no. I got frustrated with DJing in 2009 or 2008. Then it was a decade of trying this and trying that and wanting to have something click to get out of DJing. I tried all this other stuff and everything was kind of annoying. Like, you wanna go work in streetwear or something like that, the people are these fucking losers, you know? God bless you if you care that much about a t-shirt or a sneaker. I just don't. I get it. And then at the same time I don't. And writing's cool. I was trying to hustle a script in Hollywood and I actually really like writing and I like the process. I was just looking at the money and the work and the sort of unpaid labor you have to do. And I was just like, Yeah, I don't feel like doing this crap. 

I'm just trying not to DJ, you know what I mean? And being in LA, people burn for it and they want to tell their story so bad, they wanna be somebody. I like it, don't get me wrong. I would do it, but I just didn't burn to do it in that way. Maybe I was becoming more of a healthier person. And so I was working in LA at Delilah three nights a week, which if you like cheesy nightclubs, you can read about it in Vanity Fair. It’s a celebrity hangout in LA. And it was sort of—it's a sad state of affairs in Los Angeles if the best DJ for your celebrity restaurant that you can find is a pushing 40 white guy. You know, I didn't even like rap. And I was in there playing for Drake and his people. 

I learned a lot about being an employee and shutting the fuck up and saying yes to the seventh assistant of some rapper and getting slapped and stuff like that. It was awful, but a really good learning experience. And I sort of hoped I would fall in love with the job again, but I did it and I fucking hated it. But I did start to like DJing again and when COVID happened I said, I'm going to move back to New York and take my career seriously. And I packed up all my stuff and I went to Virginia to stay at my parents' house. And then, after a couple months of COVID summer, I had no interest whatsoever. This stuff started collecting dust and I just didn't care. I got sort of disillusioned with a lot of stuff and I just had no desire. I was grilling out of my parents' house and tinkering with that. And I was like, Oh, I kind of like doing this barbecue stuff. So I just kept doing it. 

And it seems like you're pretty serious about it. 

My buddy and I did a couple of pop-ups and I realized I needed more restaurant experience. So I just went and worked in a regular restaurant for nine, 10 months, in the kitchen and in the front, selling Nashville-style chicken and stuff like that. They were going from a pop-up to a restaurant—I wanted it to grow and it wasn't really growing. If I was going to stay there, I wanted it to turn into Chipotle, you know what I mean? And so I was in Seattle and I was like, I got no girlfriend and there's no barbecue here. And I sort of wanted to stay, but I went to Texas for a year to cook barbecue. I don't feel the same way about it that I felt about DJing when I was young, but I don't think that I could ever feel that way about something again. 

I just don't think anything I like offers the kind of feeling that it did back then. It was its own world and lifestyle and sort of specialness. Because it was hard. There's a lot of people that kind of drifted away from it because it was so much work, but Serato made it easy. There was a high barrier for entry with DJing and I like that kind of stuff. I like those sorts of challenges. It was not something I was good at naturally. I think I had a natural ability to understand people and how they relate to music, but the technical side of it didn't come easy to me. All of it I worked really hard for. I would meet people and they thought it just sort of happened. It didn't happen. It was hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of my 20s, like, in a fucking room, figuring it out. And doing things over and over again.

And the whole thing of buying records.

Yeah, it was a whole lifestyle. You got to go to the record store on a certain day. You got to look for apartments that are on the first floor. Your whole life is built around it. I think I sort of like those things. I gravitate towards those things now. Now it’s like, I got to have a shitty house where the neighbors aren't going to fight with me about, you know, fucking smoke everywhere. But yeah, I don't think I'll ever like anything the same way. I like DJing, but that's fine. And I do like doing barbecue. It's stupid because it's another thing where I'm going to have to cross the self-promotion bridge at some point. I live in Nashville now and I need to start doing my own stuff because I'm running out of money. And I mean, self-promotion is just like not my thing. 

You need to find a partner. 

I definitely need somebody. I mean, my most successful time DJing was when I had a manager that could sort of be like, Just do this, just do that. But I'm going to have to do it. And I guess I believe in it enough. I believe in what I'm doing enough that I'm sort of willing. But it's fun. It’s lots of little puzzles that you have to figure out. I'm not very chef-y, but I like getting in the kitchen and figuring out the puzzle of a dish or whatever. It seems maybe not to come naturally, but I sort of like it. But I don't really like a lot of the chef stuff. I think it’s so goofy. But I like the barbecue thing. It's fun. Really, you're just building fires. How much of it is building a fire and putting stuff in a place because of how you build the fire? Or it's just like, Oh, how is this log going to burn? That's a lot of it. And the people are cool, the real barbecue guys are psychos. Everyone's crazy. There's actually a lot of ex-DJs in barbecue. And they have the energy of DJs. So even though I'm not great at it, it just feels like familiar territory. I'm like, Okay, I know all these people. 

Roctakon on Instagram and Mixcloud AFB Barbecue on Instagram