ADIOU!

Here's a MIX recorded live at a Pleasure Web Anniversary party a few years back.

Thanks, Jared. You'll live on in our hearts! And, of course, in real life here on Planet Rock.

STARSTRUCK

I always dreamed of being a Cosmic Guitar Player who would shack up with an Asian RISDy-educated Painter and make Sweet Sweet Music. Actually, when I was really little, I dreamed of being a Fire Engine. So shiny! So powerful! So RED!! But, as it turns out, being an artist in New York is easier than growing up to be a Freightliner Model E-One truck with a thousand gallon tank.

But sometimes it's hard to tell if you actually made your dreams come true and were 'A Success' or if you just shelled out time and money to create the physical tokens that you assume are markers of success, but really just serve as witnesses to your struggle. What you need is that recognition. For the world to say, "You made it, buddy!" Then you'd really know.

So when Jared casually told me that "Danny Krivit was in the other day and listened to your record, liked it, and bought it" I knew it was real!

Okay, so you're no Danny Krivit, but you can help make my dream come true too! My dream of Selling Out!! We still have copies of Run Riot for sale. You can get them at NYCTrust.com or at Big City Reco—...oh.....right.........

FREEDOM

The main sample for our hit record on Names You Can Trust Run Riot is an obscure African Calypso-type affair. We obviously had an original copy. We meaning DJ E's E: once again, I found myself jealous and surreptitious. And once again I didn't need to trade in a life-long friendship for a coveted piece of wax. Phew!

Midnight Lab Band co-conductor, DJ E's E, showed up at my house with 'my' copy. He got it from Jared at Big City Records for $5. The record currently fetches as much as a c-note when it pops up. Good luck tracking it down on the cheap now.

HOT WAX

 Record nerds hear stories all the time about destroyed stock piles of records. Because they didn't sell and warehouse space was needed; because they were pressed in dystopias that at some point destroyed the entirety of their country's music as if Ferenheit 451 was never written; or any number of other tragic reasons.
 

But that kind of thing just doesn't happen in the 21st century. Unless, of course, you are really from the 1960s and are stuck in some kind of time-worm-hole with the rest of us in 2010. Take, for example, my friend Young Chris: an enormous African American man in his mid-fifties from the deep south who's radio show has helped to empower the soldiers of the Civil Rights movement—trapped instead in the body of a diminutive white boy in his 30s with a Friday night show on EastVillageRadio.com that serves as a spectacle to rich douchebags who bridge-and-tunnel their ways onto our city streets and don't give a shit about shit except for Jäger shots and "lemme see your tater tots."

How and why it happened is besides the point. But out of the 300 records that were pressed, only the handful that Chris grabbed before reporting to duty at Big City Records survived the massive meltdown. I was one of the fortunate few to visit Big City Records on the day Chris was giving them out before he realized they were the only copies that would ever exist. I was in the right place, at the right time, in the right company.

ASAF

One of the resident DJs at our monthly party We Live In Brooklyn is the man they call Asaf. I met him years ago through Jared at Big City Records. Asaf is a record dealer as well and could often be spotted rolling with the Lost n Found crew—they played at Savalas in that part of Brooklyn where kids don't grow up. Since then, Asaf and I have become closer and closer friends. Now we talk on the phone every other week like a couple of 7th grade girls... except... we talk about girls instead of boys. "uhk, girls can be so annoy-yiiiingah!"

Asaf would later roomie up with Edan the Magnificent. We are friends now too; but we talk like men: at bars and briefly.