Sinead O’Connor’s “Troy” (from her ‘87 debut The Lion and the Cobra) may not have been as widely-circulated as the Prince-penned “Nothing Compares to You”, but it’s no less a classic.
The World’s Worst Strip Club DJ part 4
A 6-part essay by Jerry DeCicca
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
My first Sunday shift is shared with Super Bowl XLI. The roads are covered in 2 feet of snow. I don’t eat dinner before I arrive because on Sundays, I am told, pizza is served. When it’s delivered, I take two pieces on a plate back to my booth. After one bite, I spit it out. It tastes like Windex, and I go hungry except for the package of Sour Patch Kids I find in my coat. And as if there weren’t already enough Prince in this place, I watch his halftime show on one of the corner’s televisions. At 8:30, no girls have shown up yet. By 10 pm, 7 girls are on my list and no sign of the owner. I stumble several times on the microphone and, through some mis-clicking on the mouse, allow dead air to spill into the room more than once. Mia is about to take the stage. Her card lists her likes as metal and 80s hard rock, so I play Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” and AC/DC’s “T.N.T.” Mia is dyed blond and skinny as straw, a good formula for popularity, but I find nothing about her sexy and suspect the barlight is helping, not hurting, her appearance. While she’s dancing, she shoots me looks that tell me all is not right with my song selections. Then, she rushes to my nest and pounces, “I can’t dance to that shit!”
“I’m just playing the bands listed on your card,” I say, sane, sensible, and waving proof.
“Let me see my card.” She studies it, front and back. “Those bands aren’t on here. It doesn’t say Bon Jovi,” she says, pissed and fidgety.
“Yes it does. Right here,” and I point to the words. Then I point to another line on the card. “And this says AC/DC. A-C, D-C.” There is even the signature lightning bolt drawn between the two sets of letters.
And she says, “No it doesn’t.”
At this point, I start going a little mad as I unsuccessfully struggle to juggle this discussion with my announcer duties. Again, the air goes dead between songs while Sabrina is on the stage. I hurry to play a song by the Killers. Mia gives up with a huff and a puff, never acknowledging her mistake or offering an apology. Maybe someone else wrote the card for her. Maybe her tastes have changed. Maybe she’s illiterate. But three things are for sure: she’s an idiot, a brat, and I hate her. As she walks away, she caws about “something I can dance to” but she refuses to be any more specific and tells me to “scratch that other shit” off her card. Sabrina seems to understand. She’s attractive and has a nice smile, but she’s ultimately forgettable and seems too self-conscious for strutting topless, except when she spanks herself. With her hands on her ass, she looks assertive, comfortable with her position center stage. A week from now, I run into Sabrina at United Dairy Farmers, a convenience store walking distance from my apartment. She’s wearing nylon jogging pants and buying Diet Coke. She seems nervous to see me, says hi, and bolts, as if I’m going to tell the guy taking money for gasoline, “Hey man, wanna know where you can go see that chick’s tits?” Worlds collided.
The World’s Worst Strip Club DJ part 3
A 6-part essay by Jerry DeCicca
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Maria is Latino and curvier than what most men want from a woman on a stage in this millennium. But at the Centerfold Club, where most patrons are over 30, skinny isn’t a necessity. Her card says she enjoys “newer hard rock” and Matchbox 20, Prince, Santana. I play a Nickelback song and then cue Prince’s “Alphabet Street”. She spins around the pole, but never hangs from it. Halfway through “Alphabet Street” the elderly Asian man sets his bottle of Budweiser on his table and moves to the edge of the stage. Maria struts his way, smiling and giggling. She takes his hat off, pulls his face into her chest, and shakes. She lets loose of him and he smiles like he just rode a roller coaster, dazed and exhilarated. Wham’s “Careless Whisper” is one of my favorite 80’s ballads and I play it every shift that Maria and I work together. One night, when she’s drunk, she says goodbye while twisting my nipples. It is the last time I see her. I never learn if she quit, switched shifts, or wasn’t meeting her money quotas for the club to keep her employed. When girls disappear, I never know what happens to them. No one tells the DJ anything.
India is next up and I’m her biggest fan. She is the woman I saw dancing earlier to “Raspberry Beret.” Tonight, her hair is straightened and she looks exotic. She likes Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, and 80s R & B. But I ignore all this and pick two songs I prefer because I’ve already developed my first strip club mini-crush. I play Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games” and Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love.” As Isaak croons and the steel guitar hums, India walks the stage wearing a lavender top that ties around her neck and bright white tights that color her short, thin legs. The music fades into the next song, and, as she removes her top, letting it fall to the floor and revealing her small, dark nipples, I see her scoff. Idol is snarling and India bends over. She holds her ankles and looks between her legs. Then, she lets go of her ankles, turns her chin over her left shoulder, makes eye contact with the fat white guy, and begins spanking herself. With 45 seconds of the song to go, India snatches her clothes, steps off the stage, and makes her way to the DJ booth, still fastening her top while standing beside me.
“Hey,” she says, touching my shoulder like she might love me. “I can’t dance too well to white music, baby.” She smiles, so I know she isn’t mad. Her teeth are crooked and sharp. She looks feral and I blush.
“I can’t either,” I say, trying to charm her back. She tells me I’m “all good” and walks away. Over the next couple months, I put India on the stage over 30 more times and that interaction will be the longest conversation we’ll ever have. No more Isaak or Idol, my regular jams for India become Sade and Terence Trent Darby.
Terence Trent D’Arby “Wishing Well”, Live circa 1988
You know, it might be time to reconsider Terence Trent D’Arby, or at least his first album. This is a truly great pop song. The two craziest things I read in D’Arby’s wiki page is that his first album sold over a million copies in its first three days of release, and that he professionally reverted to his given name Sananda Maitreya in 2001 following a series of prophetic dreams in 1995.Been telling people this for going on two decades now. The third album is really great, too!
I had such high hopes that he would be the Next Prince. He had It, albeit too briefly, which makes Prince’s contiguous classic albums all the more impressive.
I simply can’t imagine being 17 in 1980 when this came out. That gatefold jacket. Those hits. One of the greatest albums of its era, up there with Off the Wall, Madonna, 1999 and I Want You in its sheer ability to connect the two Americas — the dancers and the wallflowers.
This image from The Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian” video is forever branded in my boy brain. It was 1986. I was eleven. It was #1 on the charts and their first hit. And there was Susanna Hoffs. Just barely averting my eye. There were others — Kelly McGillis, Cynthia Gibb, Kelly LeBrock and Kim Basinger. But Susanna had a guitar. The song had all the hallmarks of a novelty hit, but they had “Eternal Flame” (my favorite Bangles jam) and the Prince-penned “Manic Monday” just around the corner.
And then Jon Coombs was born.
(via suicidewatch)
The Troutman Brothers and the full extent of brotherly love
There’s something pretty special about when brothers get to do good work together. Ask me. I’ll tell you all about it. I love working with my brother and find it very inspiring when I see other brothers doing the same. Brotherly collaborations are filled with so much passion — the kind that runs hot, spanning the entire spectrum between light and dark. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s not good, it’s awful. Luckily for me, I have very little of the latter with which to contend.
The story of Dayton, Ohio’s premiere funk band Zapp is a brotherly tale for the ages. Comprised of five brothers, Roger, Lester, Larry, Terry and Tony, Zapp rode the funktails of Parliament in 1979 into a record deal with Warner Brothers, which led to a series of classic funk albums (under the names Zapp and Zapp & Roger) that became both a sonic blueprint as well as sample fodder for West Coast G-Funk hip hop a decade later and beyond. It’s actually quite impressive how much the Midwest’s dual funk axes of Ohio and Minnesota contributed (Zapp and Bootsy Collins for the former; Prince and The Time for the latter) to the genre in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
It’s Zapp’s first three albums (Zapp, Zapp II, Zapp III) that I’ve been devouring lately, the first of which was a gold record for the group, mostly on the strength of “More Bounce to the Ounce”. An outstanding debut that illustrated that when this band of brothers was on, they reached great heights.
When the Troutmans were not on, however, it got mega-dark. There were many professional and personal tensions that the Troutmans dealt with throughout the years, but the rock fugging bottom hit in 1999 when — presumably over a business dispute — Larry fatally shot his baby brother Roger,then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. The Palms Weekend offers a horrifying chronicle of that Sunday in 1999. When the distance between the zenith and nadir of a story is this vast, its hard not to attribute an additional heaping order of magnitude’s worth of gravity to that which was born of the zenith.
