laura gavoor wrote: The only somewhat easy markets to make a little money with at that time were > Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. DJs that I worked with were getting > about $1,000-1,200.00 usd -- MAX > [...] > Jeff was living (mostly) in Berlin at the time and circumvented a lot of > international wear and tear by being in the midst or close to the action. > Derrick did the same having taken an apartment in Amsterdam. > [...] > Fact is, you weren't here and your perspective is from > across the ocean.
This is a bit of a tangent, but your statements above remind me that I have a different perspective on this. In the early to mid 1990s, my friends and I were organizing parties/raves, sometimes in clubs but usually in warehouses and rental halls, in SW & Central Ohio. We had the resources to bring in and properly pay pretty much any Detroit DJ who was available. Whatever they wanted, we would have given them. I mean, we were only a few hours' drive to the south. Yet every time we asked them to come DJ or play a live set for some 800 kids in Dayton, Columbus or Cincinnati, we always got "sorry, he's in Europe that weekend", "sorry, he's *living* in Europe now". There were a few exceptions like Carl, Richie and Shake, but on the whole, certain Detroit artists, artists who we considered to be big names who weren't getting their fair shake in the U.S. artists who we wanted to help promote, had made themselves unavailable to play outside of Detroit and Europe. I can name at least half a dozen legitimate, adequately-funded domestic promoters who were, at the time, very passionate about getting this music out there to these kids who wanted the original music makers to come and play it for them, yet these opportunities all slipped by for one reason or another, and it certainly wasn't due to lack of interest on the part of the promoters, or any conspiracy of exclusion. Now 6-8 years later it sounds like you are complaining that these DJs/artists weren't given the recognition they deserved over here, and they weren't getting paid enough in Europe, and you're saying it's all because of their race or whatever. Well maybe we just didn't talk to the right people back then, and I mean no disrespect to the hard work you put into promoting from your end, but it sounds to me like deliberate decisions were made to go play in Europe and to ignore the USA outside of the self-contained Motor City scene because there was the perception that the artists were much better appreciated over there. Perhaps the numbers ultimately did support those decisions; why play for one-offs at home when you can get booked every weekend at clubs in Europe? But it's just hard to be sympathetic with some of your complaints when we were on the end of the business that, more often than not, had to settle for promoting Detroit techno by way of small-time, mostly-white DJs ... or just not promoting it at all because it was so much easier to bring in a Chicago hard house DJ, a UK trance band, or a hard techno DJ from NY or Berlin. - Mike ____________________________________________________________________________ mike j. brown | xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/ denver/boulder, colorado, usa | personal: http://hyperreal.org/~mike/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
