DJ War Zone

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I asked veteran DJ about his wildest experience as a DJ. Here's what he had:

“Outdoor festivals can be a dream or a nightmare for a DJ, so I, like most DJ's, am a little skeptical when taking a booking for an outdoor festival, unless the money is very good. We drove up the day of the show, a six-hour drive from our house in Greensboro, NC. On the way to D.C. my girlfriend, London, and I, almost bailed based on the day we had up to leaving but hit the road anyway. 6 hours later we found ourselves so far in the country that the closest gas station was 30 minutes away! Checking in, we noticed the sketchiest group of security people we had ever seen. You would have thought that instead of being an hour outside of our nations capitol, that we were deep in the swamps of Alabama somewhere. The farm was huge! It was so big that even though there were thousands of people there it looked like a small handful of people.  I was to play the headlining slot at 4am so London and I decided we would sit back and relax and have some drinks from the cooler.

The promoter, who booked me, was obviously stressed with the whole evening. When we first saw him, he looked as if he had been out in the woods for a week, with no shower, and wasn't happy about it, either. He proceeded to tell me that the security team had gone rogue, and was confiscating everything from every person there. They also seemed to have taken over the three stages set up for artists. He pulls out a big 1lb Ziploc bag from his back pack and inside the bag is the largest melting pot of crazy drugs I had ever seen. I started to realize why he looked like he had been stranded in the woods for a week. He offered me a handful of whatever I came out of the bag with and then tells me that the portta-potties fell through so there were no bathrooms for the 4 thousand people that were running around in all manner of raver gear. Me being a dude, I was unfazed, but as I slowly turned my head to my lovely girlfriend, I could see the look on her face saying “this shit is all your fault.”

We made the best of the situation. We spent hours resting and walking around from stage to stage listening to different DJ's and bands jam out until about 10pm when the skies just opened up!  This was no light drizzle or even steady rain. This was hurricane downpour! We hid in the car and watched the weather for what seemed like forever. It was so heavy that you could barely make out the lights from the stages. We couldn't see other people till they were 2ft from us, and most were covered in glow gear!

Meanwhile cars kept pouring into the venue that was down in the bottom of a valley between two far away hills. Around 2am, the rain eased off to a light downpour, and after being in the car for a few hours, we decided that we would roll up our pants legs and check out the damage. It didn't take long to see that the whole area was one large mud pit. Two hours to show time and I was no longer thinking about my set. Instead I was worrying about how we were gonna escape this cluster fuck. In order to get out you had to drive up a single lane path, that at the beginning of the day, was a nice grass road. The rain had turned it into a 4 x 4's wet dream.  I looked at the road and looked back at our small gas efficient front wheel drive vehicle, and knew that it would take a miracle to get away from this god forsaken farm outside of D.C.

I took control of the turntables at 4am to the site of 3 thousand rain soaked EDM fanatics. No one knew I was scared shitless about getting out of that place. Time flew during the set, and mix after mix flowed even sweeter than I had anticipated. I'll never forget the site of the crowd jumping together in unison in the bottom of that valley. Each time they landed in the mud, everyone on the stage would be peppered by mud.  There was a person on each side of me wiping the vinyl clean after each mix. It was a DJ war zone! To this day I honestly don't know how I managed to play an almost perfect set in those conditions.

It was a short-lived victory for me though. No sooner than London (my girlfriend) started packing up my gear, I was stomping through the mud looking for the promoter to get paid, so I could attempt to get the hell out of dodge, before it was impossible to get up that hill. The cars and trucks coming in were turning that path into two deep ruts.  Thirty minutes later we were ready to go, and London was convinced that we were never going to make it out. We would be stuck here until the mud dried, and god knows how long that would take. Staying was not an option. My theory, as I explained it to her, had to work. I knew we wouldn't have the traction to make it out, but it being a single lane path in and out, if I did get stuck, the event staff would have no option but to get me out, or I would block every other persons exit.

The whole way up the path a group of 10 mud-drenched kids had to follow my car, and constantly push us through mud and guide us side to side, so we would stay on the path. In a little over 10 minutes we were free from the path and safely on the gravel.  As I took one last look back down the hill, I saw the destruction my car had done to the path. I knew that within a few hours that “road” would be impassable. The festival kids would be stuck till the mud dried, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that, nowhere on that whole property was there a dry place. There was nowhere to put a tent that wasn't built with some serious waterproofing, and no porta-potties!

We were exhausted beyond belief. We pulled into the first gas station we came across and apologized, with our heads down, on our way to the bathrooms to clean ourselves off. We drove 6 hours straight home, and were beyond dead on our feet as we pulled in our driveway. After showering and before we passed out for the next 16 hours, I swore to London I would never put her through that again.”