Week 6 – Portland, Oregon

track of the night….
Sometimes this one works and sometimes it doesn’t. in Portland it REALLY worked.
Get Low – Justin Martin – dirtybird (mp3 clip)

Portland Overview -
It was a weird tour week. Sometimes i do these gigs where i leave around 8pm to a West Coast city and am back in the morning almost like I never left. Portland was scheduled like this.

Lets start with the apartment where they put me up. I think it was probably the pimpest lodging I’ve ever stayed for a US DJ gig. Someone built this amazing modern building just before the housing bubble burst. Now they use them for anything and everything possible including DJ lodging. I felt bad for the owner but good for me!

I was booked for a 3 or 4 hr. set at most but i ended up playing the WHOLE night…almost 6 hours until my plane left the next morning. The crowd was very Northwest rave style and super enthusiastic.*** I maybe played a little long past 5 am but it was a scenario where i either get a 45 minute nap or I just played it out. Of course i decided to play it out so the people who stayed got to hear some funny weird stuff like Christian Martin’s Yo Gabba Gabba bootleg.

There’s a Party in My Tummy (Christian Martin bootleg) mp3 clip

Thanks so much to the very enthusiastic Portland crowd and also Jeff and Cynthia for putting together the event. Who would have guessed that and outdoor event in the middle of winter could be so awesome. I will definitely be going back (and wearing a warmer jacket) Of course staying up all night straight through seems like a great idea until you actually get home and your two little kids want to play games all day. I was a trooper but i got some serious sleep the next night…maybe made it to 8pm at most.

The Hippies

****Let’s take a second to talk about a current phenomenon going on in America. Back in the day the hippies would all follow the Grateful Dead. Then when Jerry Garcia died there was a giant void that was filled by jam bands like Phish. Never before in this evolution has electronic music been a part of the hippie equation. But recently somehow a new breed of hippie has risen up. The burning man folks have taken over the reigns and dubstep has emerged as the music of choice. This seems like a very unusual combination but take it from me, i have seen it with my own eyes. 4,000 hippies going insane to UK dubstep in Yosemite national park at a festival called “Symbiosis.” The even crazier part of this is that an American guy called Bassnectar is the Dj of choice for this sound. He draws the biggest crowds and is the most sought after and he never leaves the states. This is incredible to me that an American Dj is playing UK dance music and making 10’s of thousands every gig and never setting foot outside of the USA.

Portland on Friday had a little bit of that vibe going on which made me want to comment on this phenomenon. My sets at Symbiosis and at Rain dance on Halloween this year showed me the possibilities in America for my brand of tech house as well as Dubstep. The hippie’s are actually the most enthusiastic, creative crowds in the USA. I will be pursuing gigs to play at these shows because the crowds are crazy, fun, and there are always a lot of naked people running around. In Portland i felt like there would have been some nakeds if it hadn’t been for the freezing cold temperature in the outdoor tent. The lines between jam bands and electronic music are definitely getting blurrier because I was the last show as part of a 3 day Reggae festival! I may not look like or be an actual Hippie but i do get a free pass because my home address is on Haight St. San Francisco. (an automatic hippie club qualification.)

Week 6 – San Francisco – Wednesday night – surprise Drum n Bass vinyl set

Track of the night.
 Everything Drum n Bass

SF
This wasn’t really a tour date but I was booked to play an all vinyl set in San Francisco around the holidays. The guy who booked me owns Tweekin records down on Haight st. where I bought all my very first house records. dirtybird have been selling our records there since the start of the label. Back in the day this was the place where you would see every big SF and international DJ on any weekday. The current owner, Manny (M3) is a long time SF DJ who is part of one of SF’s longest running house crews called Green Gorilla.

My very first vinyl had about 10 test pressings total. i gave them away to people but maybe 3 of them were for sale in Tweekin. You can hear that my production wasn’t quite there yet, but this is the very first thing i ever had on wax as “Barclay Crenshaw.” (about 2 years before dirtybird 001. You can see that the original record label name was supposed to be Rook Records (Rook is now the name of my publishing company.) dirtybird was just a better name for a label so i changed it before the first record. If anyone could find a copy of that vinyl i would be really impressed.

Barclay Crenshaw – Banana Phone – Rook Records (full mp3)

Anyway, I have always been a huuuge drum n bass fan and I decided to do something special at this all vinyl show. I called up Justin Martin who has a nice collection of old “intelligent” Good Lookin’ style DnB vinyl. Then i went through my own harder collection. I even went to go buy some records from this new shop min SOMA run by John Holiday. He had some real hot shit there as well and between the three collections I managed to put together a very historical vinyl set, starting with the old ambient vibey 1995 stuff like on Good lookin and working my way up through Photek and Metalheadz all the way up to the slammin Krust and Dillinja material released around 2002.

It was really fun. People thought i was kidding at first. I could tell some were there for the house trax but I loved playing those basslines!!!! They were rolling around my head for the next two days straight. It was probably the most fun I’ve had Djing in a while. i definitely still love Drum n Bass. That is for sure.

A spattering of the records i played.