BC004 – DJ Q&A: Josh Wink, Pt. 1 – The Philly Years
The first of a two-part sit-down with one of the great American DJs and producers.
Two years ago, this is how I introduced what would be my final column for the print edition of Mixmag:
A happy birthday to Josh Wink, who turns fifty this month! It’s funny that a famous teetotaler was born on 4/20. But Wink has made and played some of the druggiest music ever without touching the stuff. Defying convention has long been his hallmark (that plus the iffy blonde dreadlocks he wore in the nineties), but the Philadelphia DJ-producer has had one of the most consistent careers in dance music.
Wink started spinning right around the time acid house was kicking off and eventually became a regular at New York’s Limelight, in addition to kicking off the rave scene in his hometown. Throughout the 90s subgenre wars, he commingled house and techno like whatever—acid was his core, and it connects with everything. Wink’s selections jack, but he’s clearly not from Chicago—his swing is flatter, his filter work more patient. He’ll flit in the occasional a cappella from his old hits, acknowledging his musical history without relying on it. He remains a party-rocker supreme and a DJ’s DJ.
Sometime in the future I may share that column (it never appeared online), but in the meantime, I have something even better—a two-part Q&A with Wink. This first sit-down was conducted in December 2012, for The Underground Is Massive, the second for Billboard (plus follow-ups for TUIM). What follows isn’t everything we discussed—some of it I used in the book already, some of it regards his producing specific tracks (including “Balls,” the focus of our second talk, for Billboard). What I kept to—and what there was, in abundance—was Wink’s history and viewpoint of DJing as a craft and a milieu, on the differences between the club and rave scenes in the nineties, and on how his work has changed over the years. He’s a great talker and a great guy—and, of course, a truly great DJ. Enjoy. (Part 2 next week.)
PART 1 [December 11, 2012]
MM: Let’s start you off on an interesting foot—Raymond Frances.
JOSH WINK: Yeah. Raymond—wow, Raymond! That’s the older guy that used to sell tapes.
He was a notorious Baltimore-D.C. area guy who threw parties, allegedly paid his DJs less than market value, because his parties were so big you had to play them, and then bootlegged their sets and sold the mixtapes.
I only think he did that to me once. I knew about him and doing that, obviously, because he always had his tape stands. He was also in a position where, if he wanted to book you again, you wouldn’t do that to someone. But I didn’t know all the shadiness about it.
Right before I called you, I was listening to your Live at Emotions in St. Louis, 1995, mix.
Yeah, there’s one in Baltimore, too, I think through a record store.
When did you start to DJ?
When I was a teenager in ’83, in conjunction with doing weddings and bar mitzvahs. I was an apprentice for a guy who had a company. His name was Chuck Jacobson and he [owned] Captain Jack’s Mobile DJ Company. I became his apprentice when I was thirteen. We were friends through camp. I helped him out because they had a AM radio station at the camp, and I wanted to become a radio-personality DJ.
From there I heard about hip-hop and house mixing when I was a little bit older—fourteen, fifteen. I would also go to block parties in Philly and see Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money. I was involved in the early days of that aspect of DJing. I started then doing school parties, doing house parties, buy the equipment I bought from the mobile DJ company and taught myself how to DJ and bought my own music, from doing odds and ends. That’s how it started for me.
The DJing came up from a natural progression, like a snowball you put on top of the hill: I was a mobile DJ and then I learned about beat-mixing. I got involved with beat-mixing and then I wanted to make my own music. Before that, I wanted to work in a nightclub rather than just doing home parties. From being in a nightclub I went, “Why am I playing other people’s music when I have all these ideas?”
Where was camp?
I went to a camp in the suburbs of Philadelphia, outside in the area called the Poconos.
Which nightclub did you work in?
I worked for two mobile DJ companies: Captain Jack’s when I was thirteen, then Silver Sounds. There’s a guy from high school named Mike Gordon who taught me the gist of beat-mixing, the whole idea of it. He was another student. We would practice. And Paul Evans, who I worked for—not necessarily DJing, but learning the business from him: packing a truck, breaking the equipment down on a larger scale, because he did Sweet Sixteen parties and high-school proms. He also did this event called the Matzoh Ball, a gig on Christmas Eve where all the Jewish folk would go and party. I would be there and be enthralled by what Paul was playing, mixing all different kinds of Top 40 to underground house with turntables with a rotary-dial knob on it, to control the pitch. That was probably ’85, ’86, ’87.
This is the beginning of house music—up to then, “dance music” meant Shep Pettibone mixes.
His twelve-inch mixes, yeah, and [for] other new wave artists: New Order, Depeche Mode. Also, extended dance remixes of Rick Astley and Jody Watley—stuff that the pioneers of 12-inch making, like Tom Moulton, were developing, along with earlier house music with drum machines, Steve “Silk” Hurley versions, [as well as] having the Shep Pettibone end of that stuff.
Did the Philly disco thing hang over the city at all when you were coming up?
No. I got full appreciation for that when I became a teenager. When I was around seven, six years old, disco in ’76, ’77 was huge then. But there was also the backlash—the disco-sucks movement. When you’re seven and six years old, you’re limited to the radio. My brother was around, listening to the Grateful Dead and Arlo Guthrie and Bob Dylan. I got the disco later on when I was a teenager and got into the appreciation of music through DJing, and got to really appreciate “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” Gamble and Huff. But not until then.
House music, it sounds like, seeped in rather than hit you over the head. You heard it coming through other music.
Yeah. I found out about it through hanging out with other DJs, like Paul Evans, going to record shops to buy records for my gigs. I’d find out about all the imported records and the extended 12-inch versions. You’d just play your classics and that’s that. It later became a little different. I would learn how to mix Michael Jackson into the Cure, beat-mixing through Technics SOB-10s, which has a rubber-band-belt-driven pitch control. I learned to do it that way through trial and error.
I got involved with house music as it seeped in through pop music: Shep Pettibone edits, Francois Kevorkian edits, the Tom Moulton edits of pop songs that would end up getting [on] the radio. When I would go and buy these records in the shop, I wouldn’t buy the 45s. I would buy the 12-inch versions and realize, “It’s different. It’s extended.” Tom Moulton—to me he’s the man. He’s responsible for getting the extended 12-inch version to what it was, through his Fire Island sound.
I tried to get involved in the nightclub scene in Philadelphia. I was a bike courier, a bike messenger, in 1986-1987-1988.
Late high school years?
Yes, exactly. I became friends with another bike messenger named Blake Tart. He was also a DJ, which I found out. While we were waiting between jobs, we would talk music and house parties, high school parties, where his head was, our collections, where to buy records. We became instant brothers from that point.
Blake and I threw the first Philly warehouse rave in 1989. We had a squatted warehouse and did a party—me and Blake and another DJ named King Britt. Blake and I would go to Kinko’s or the other printers at the time and printed up flyers and give them out on our bikes when we were delivering packages. We had a huge scene that would come out to these events we did at these warehouses.
Was that crowd there right away?
Yeah. It was such a diverse crowd because of who we know. We were involved in different scenes—the art scene, the punk rock scene, the hip-hop scene, the college scene—in Philadelphia. We would get to all of them because I would promote at the college campuses and get kids out. There was something cool about it. It was not necessarily illegal, but it was not necessarily legal. It was just such a hype. It was still shaded—the European rave scene wasn’t really in the U.S. press yet.
There was a bit of a scene here in Philadelphia for that music because of these guys, Jet and Stefan, who used to throw these parties on Wednesday nights in ’88 called Acid House Wednesdays. I fell in love with acid house music. That’s really the kind of music that made me want to produce music, instead of just DJ music. Blake used to sneak me into the Bank for these nights. The Bank was the name of the nightclub.
How it was in Pennsylvania is that you can’t get into a nightclub unless you’re 21—unless you work at one, which you can be 18 [and do]. The only way for me to get in—I was bar-backing at this club called Memphis in 1987. I would get into the club because I was a bar-back. That was my only way in. I would give tapes to the manager, saying, “Hey, if there’s any fill-in nights.” I’m a 17-year-old kid and the DJs there didn’t want me hustling their job. But there were two very important DJs there: Chip Dish and Ricky Lee. They were very big. Also, Bobby Startup—they were the big DJs that were playing alternative music, industrial, and house music all mixed together. I’d be a bar-back, listening to this stuff, going, “What is this? Fine Young Cannibals? Cool, wow.”
Blake used to sneak me into these clubs in ’87, ’88, and I could get into other clubs because other people knew me from working at these clubs, and they knew I didn’t drink. We would do the warehouse parties—it’s a funny story how things then turned about. There was an after-hours club, which meant it went till 4:00 [a.m.], and you had to be a member. There was a DJ named Gigi. Gigi was going up to New York to live—he had a girlfriend named Mary Paul, who would turn out to be the first stylist for Madonna. She was the one responsible for all the lingerie and the rubber bracelets.
Gigi went up to New York. In his position as the DJ at this after-hours club called the Black Banana. There were three after-hours clubs in Philadelphia: Strand, Revival, and the Black Banana. Blake was older than me and could get into the clubs I couldn’t. We heard Gigi was moving to New York. I gave them a tape and they hired me for Thursday night, back in 1989. I was nineteen years old and doing the Thursday night party in Philadelphia from 9:30 till 4, for seventy-five dollars a night, at this members-only, exclusive club.
You were talking about an after-hours squat. Did you live there?
No. We did these warehouse parties at this place—I think it was called Killing Time. It was a squat warehouse. We weren’t living there. There were punk rock shows there. Blake was friends with a couple people that lived there. We rented it out. We got the door benefit from it.
You were talking about the three of you having been in different scenes, and all of them mingling at this party. Was there a DJ fraternity behind the scenes? Would the DJs from different scenes congregate?
There wasn’t much of a DJ scene—at least for me. Mind you, I’m eighteen, nineteen, so I don’t know much about it. I just looked up to these guys because this was what I wanted to do. It’s not like everybody wanted to be a DJ. It’s not something you wanted to do back then. The music spoke to me and this was what I wanted to do. This was the only thing I knew how to do. I was twenty-four/seven, that’s all we’re doing. We’re talking about [new] releases, we’re talking about the culture—as a teenager this was my life. We would meet at either the after-hours clubs or at record shops.
A couple of DJs filtered around to different clubs because they worked [for] an owner who owned multiple clubs. For example, Memphis, where I worked, was open from 9 to 2. Everybody went to a couple of the after-hours clubs—you had to be a member to get in, because of the structured laws of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia is a Quaker-run city—very much like Prohibition. If you wanted to get a friend into an after-hours club, you had to be a member and vouch for them. It’s ridiculous, the liquor laws here. You still can’t buy alcohol unless you go to a state store in Pennsylvania.
Did the different styles of DJs mingle more than their respective audiences did?
The DJs in Philadelphia may have gone into techno music, or acid house, but Philadelphia was always extremely diverse with its music programming—unbelievably so. They would play 808 State records with Rick Astley, or Depeche Mode with Eric B. & Rakim. That was always a cool, unique thing about Philadelphia. The DJs would always be up for educating people with all kinds of music—not just one thing.
I think there’s a little competition in all cities. But when you started to travel outside, you wouldn’t notice it so much. I’m not competing with the people in Baltimore. But if there’s three promoters in Philadelphia—as soon as we started doing our parties a year and a half later, people started to follow suit and do it. Even though they were friends of ours, it was like a friendly competition.
Before rave came along, would competing with someone in Baltimore even have entered a DJ’s mind?
Not that I’m aware of. Not unless you’re hip-hop, where the whole aspect is battling another DJ. I grew up in that culture as well in Philadelphia, where it’s all about skills, what you knew in terms of your scratch patterns. Can you transform? Can you do this scratch or that scratch? Club DJing was more like beat-matching, that’s it.
Philly was where the transformer scratch was invented, isn’t it?
The more intricate kind—that was [Jazzy] Jeff, I think. We always live in the shadow of New York in Philadelphia—everybody you talk to, musician or DJ—or Chicago, or wherever. The DJs to me who were always the best were from Philly: Jazzy Jeff, Cash Money. I think we had more DMC Mix Champions out of Philly than any other place.
What was the model for your first warehouse rave? Were you reading the British press?
Blake and I were very into getting The Face or iD magazine, or NME. We knew about Summer of Love. We were looking to a place to go where we didn’t have to deal with doormen, and where we could stay open as late as possible.
You’ve been a teetotaler your whole life, right?
Yes, that’s correct.
When you start to throw these parties, do they have the full trappings? Are people taking Ecstasy?
Not then. Ecstasy was more of a thing of the ’90s, at least from what I saw. I grew up in the nightlife scene, so I got to see people do recreational drugs at a club. But Ecstasy didn’t necessarily come in till later, in the ’90s. The clubs got it later than, necessarily, the rave culture.
We did a couple of [warehouse parties]. We didn’t plan a whole marketing idea. We just wanted to see how it came about. [The first one] was amazing. I think we may actually still have pictures. You couldn’t let any more people in—I think we did 800 people in a warehouse. You couldn’t move. It’s amazing how we got the word out there and people just came. I remember the floor was [laughs]—the floor looked like it was going to cave in. People were dancing and the beats were pulsing as the floor was pulsing up and down with it. It was such a great feeling.
Were you on a second or third floor?
There were two floors. The downstairs—half the building—was open, because the roof caved in—a while [before], not that night. It was an open roof. There were a couple kegs in there, where people could go out and smoke and hang out in the coolness of the air. There was a social area downstairs, which became wall-to-wall people. There was a staircase to get upstairs where the music was. I think it was fall.
Did you want to find a different space?
I guess we did go to different spaces. It became a little bit too big for us there. We started doing it at more diverse places to really get the crew and the crowd we wanted. I’m a firm believer, always, in quality over quantity. So we’ll just go a bit more underground and get the people who know about it to come out. I don’t know many we actually did. But we did a series of them.
Then we started doing them at clubs as well. I remember us being the first people to bring Moby to Philadelphia. We did it as a rave at this place called the Trocadero. It was Moby’s first time coming to Philly. We shared a lot—we were vegan at the same time together, and I think he was thinking about moving to Philly, because he had a girlfriend here. Remember his track “Thousand”? It was around the same time.
Are most of the warehouse parties just you and Blake and Britt?
It was just basically me and Blake in the beginning. King worked at Tower Records and also at this mall called the Gallery. He knew a lot of people. We brought him in as an afterthought. He didn’t really know how to DJ then. But he had great music because he worked at Tower. He always had great taste in music. He learned how to DJ. I think when we lived together in ’89-’90, I taught him how to mix. Maybe he was DJing at these parties then. King and I started doing our own parties together while Blake was doing other things—he would still DJ with us.
We then started to become more club DJs by doing these things. I was already working at the Black Banana; then I worked at another club. I became a club DJ that would do these warehouse parties on the side. It’s a little less work, DJing in a club.
When did you start to produce?
Production came in ’89. First record—we signed it in ’89 and I think it came out in ’90. Strictly Rhythm put it out. It was King and me, under [the name] E-Culture. King had most of the equipment and I had some equipment, and we came in together and showed our same ideas and values, which is something that got us together. That’s how that came about in ’89, ’90. It was sampling—we didn’t use computers at the time. We were just using sequencers. King was friends with Gladys [Pizzarro], the A&R person [at Strictly Rhythm], through Tower. That’s how it came about. We signed it to them.
Part 2 next week!