Tales From The DJ Booth: Using Your DJ Skill Set Outside Of The Club

It’s been years since I’ve had a consistent, resident gig as a strip club DJ, although I still fill in at the finer clubs (such as Acropolis) now and then. But, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped DJing entirely—rather, I have found places outside of the strip clubs, that best utilize the tactics and knowledge I’ve picked up over the years working in professional dance studios for the naked and agile. You may not know it, but if you’re a strip club DJ, you’re already set up to work elsewhere during the slow seasons. For instance...

Weddings

Your job, as a wedding DJ, is to use music and ambiance to convince a room full of strangers that the woman being auctioned off is worth the thousands of dollars in cash and prizes that people are expected to pay, just to watch her walk down a carpet, before doing some sort of naughty, adult-inspired activity with a man she barely knows. How is this any different than a Saturday night at the strip club? Add to this, creepy songs with undertones of fatherhood, drunk girls in similar outfits starting fights, having to ask whether or not the buffet food is free...these are things that any experienced strip club DJ already has down to a science. Plus, you’re already trained to keep the microphone away from drunk uncles who want to address the rest of the room, you’re totally prepared for a piece of random legging to be thrown into the crowd, and last (but not least), you know how to sneak a hit of weed or two, without getting caught.

Further similarities between the pole and the aisle include the fact that you will be given a Spotify playlist in advance, which will no doubt deteriorate to ‘90s rap and Journey by the stroke of midnight, you may or may not have to ask if the guy grinding on the girl-of-the-hour is a relative or a stranger, there will likely be free alcohol given to you, but you damn well better not go home with the girl who gave it to you (because she’s dating the buff biker guy by the entrance), old people disappear by dark and at least one person is visibly not done with last weekend’s bachelor party. As a rule of thumb, I charge for a wedding whatever I would make as a strip club DJ for a weekend—with the same discounts applied for situations that involve free steak and wine.

Karaoke Bars

These places are the armpit of any mid-sized town—perfect for a sleazy and/or alcoholic strip club DJ to take over. I put an emphasis on the lower-tier status of "karaoke DJ," because, well, it is lower-tier. By default, there can be no such thing as a good karaoke DJ. If the person running sound behind an outdated folder of Sublime and Puddle Of Mudd "hits" is good at singing, why aren’t they doing something more respectable, like fronting a cover band? If the KJ is bad at singing, then expect to hear them do a song in between each customer. However, as a strip club DJ, you can use your established riffing and hosting skills to avoid having to sing, altogether. I ran a karaoke night for years, which was a lucrative experience, until I got fired for our Guess Which Stripper Is Pregnant contest (I chalk this up to the fact that the winning choice was eight months into pregnancy, thus making the contest far too easy to win). The point here, is that if you find other things to entertain your crowd with, besides your off- key rendition of "Simple Man," you can make a good dollar running a karaoke night.

The other aspect of karaoke, that strip club DJs have down, is kissing the asses of semi-entitled, intoxicated females for measly tips. Now, let me be clear—75% of the dancers I work with are genuine, honest, humble-while-off-stage women who tip well and take care of their DJ. That other quarter, though, is part of the same crowd that hits a strip mall bar on a Thursday night, for a few rounds of Britney- Spears-’n’-Shrill. Like the lesser-desirable variety of pole dancer, karaoke girls tend to be equally demanding about things, such as song ownership ("Do not let that other bitch do Rihanna while I’m here!"), poor attempts at flirting ("Heyyy...I tipped last time, but you’re cute... can you sign me up early?") and the occasional holy-shit-she’s-actually-talented performance ("Can I get ‘Bobby McGee’ for my first song?").

Radio

Although technically dead, radio is still around to those who refuse to let it rot. Specifically, community radio, online podcasting and satellite stations. Ironically, this is also where many strip club DJs (including myself) got our start. The ability to "saythingsreallyfastandthen- PAUSE" is a skill that, if not honed, results in what I like to call "speaker vomit," which is when the strip club DJ is unintelligible, over-FX’d or otherwise hard to hear. Radio not only requires that a lot is said—often in a short window of time—but in addition, it’s often the same announcements, rotated over and over again, with slight deviation here and there. "Come to our booth at the state fair and meet the hosts of Chad & Chad In The Morning, donate to our sponsors, jet fuel can’t melt steel beams..." and so on. Swap out "tips and tips alone" for "traffic and weather on the hour," and you’ve got yourself a radio disc jockey.

Further, let’s say that your stint at KLOL or whatever doesn’t work out. Well, in that case, you can jump down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, alt-right memes, left-wing radicalism, torrented documentaries about The Deep Web and whatever else is sitting in your C://My Documents folder, to create your own, batshit crazy podcast. I don’t know a single strip club DJ that’s not sitting on at least a dozen gigs of content that would give Alex Jones a boner. For instance, I’m currently obsessed with crytpocurrencies, theories surrounding the demise of western culture, old episodes of Sponge Bob, the Ugandan Knuckles meme and softcore amputee porn. Tell me this jambalaya of greatness wouldn’t make for a good talk radio show. Speaking of which, former strip club DJ Mike "Doughboy" and I are starting a podcast, called Unintended Consequences. If that’s not ironic enough for Portland, what is?