Small Town Spinners

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-On a recent Friday night, a gathering of people queued for up to 20 minutes to pay a $5-cover to get into a bar at the base of Snow King. The crowd, most of whom were in their early 20s, waited anxiously to enter the venue, a balmy market for romance and other amusements.

Just after midnight, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” a 25-year-old song that has again become a hugely popular party anthem, beckoned co-eds in summer dresses to the dance floor. A few of the braver young men quickly followed the tanned, predominately vodka-drinking pack, hoping for a chance.

But this scene was not your uncle playing early ’80s pop music at the high school dance. This version of “Billie Jean” was overlaid with the chorus and beats from “D.A.N.C.E.,” an international club hit by the French DJ duo Justice, a white-hot act favored by the world’s trendsetters.

DJ Mikey Thunder, who worked the turntables during the “Billie Jean” remix, has in recent months taken up a twice-weekly residency at 43 North, a well-frequented bar that has also become a hot spot for dance music in the valley. On Tuesday and Friday nights there, Thunder, along with  “Just Kenny” Tsumari and others from the local coterie of local DJs, spins and splices a mix of contemporary and vintage tracks, re-imagining familiar songs, and replanting collective music memory into new contexts. But, more simply, it is about having fun.

“Partying is all about releasing yourself a little bit,” Thunder said over an afternoon ice cream cone last week. “It’s about trying to temporarily forget the ongoing struggles of life. A lot of people associate all that with drugs, but I don’t.”

Jackson Hole, once an isolated place where opportunities to see and hear local music meant checking out live bands performing rock, cowboy, bluegrass and other forms of Americana music, has in the last 10 or 15 years seen a vast evolution in its DJ culture.
Since its early beginnings in the mid-90s, Jackson Hole’s DJ scene has evolved through slips and gains, endured loss and tried friendships, and emerged as a dominant cultural force in valley nightlife. With more and more spinners coming into their own and catering to a broadening range of musical tastes, the last of the Old West may have an innovative DJ scene closer to the hip Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn than to the Grand Ole Opry.

Rocky Vertone, who spins under the name Vert-One, is considered an elder statesman among Jackson Hole DJs. In the mid- to late-90s, Vertone, alongside his friend, music partner and early DJ mentor, Chris “King Weep” Blank, began playing house parties and weekly gigs around the valley. The pair eventually formed Four4 Productions.
“Our intention was to just be DJs and bring in music that nobody hears around here,” Vertone said at his Full Circle frame shop last week.

Vertone and Blank, who was known for his personal style of house music, began “throwing parties” around the valley, spinning at bars and restaurants that would host the regular dances until, sometimes for unknown reasons, the invite would end and the party would move to other locations over the following weeks.

“Were we considered oddballs at the time?” Vertone recalled. “Sort of. But we were stoked, and people were psyched to come out and dance and have a good time.”
Just after the turn of the millennium, Four4 established itself as the valley’s premier DJ unit, having gradually amassed the expensive sound equipment, turntables and other high tech gadgetry used to conquer and play musical hopscotch with recorded beats and sounds.

Tragedy struck in late 2005, when Blank died in an automobile accident. His death left a deep wound for many in Jackson. The loss was particularly profound for the valley’s set of Burning Man Project attendees, a varied group of creative types that commonly believes in a close connection between art, nature and spirituality.
“For me, that was the day the music died,” Vertone said. “He influenced more people than any other DJ in Jackson Hole.”

Todd Jones, a co-founder of Teton Gravity Research, was an on-and-off fixture of the party circuit in the early days, when Vertone and Blank held court behind the turntables.
“[Blank] was the man,” Jones said. “He was the guy that brought a lot of the new music to Jackson Hole.”

On Thursday, Vertone and crew played their last “Disco Night” at the Stagecoach Bar in Wilson, marking the end of a seven-year run at that venue.
Four4 – officially Vertone with a revolving door of cohorts and freelancers – will move its Thursday gig to the Town Square Tavern this week, hoping the change will breathe fresh air into the weeknight party scene downtown.

But the Stagecoach will not go quiet on Thursday nights: Andre “Dr. Dre” Castignoli, who started the original Disco Night at the Stagecoach around 1994, will return to take over the weekly gig in Wilson. Vertone called Castignoli “the godfather of the scene” for his early initiative.

While the dance parties that regularly draw out hundreds of people continue to shift from one restaurant, bar or hotel to another, there are other DJ series and special shows that define Jackson Hole’s position as a small town with an emerging set of urban sensibilities.

Regular DJs at local dance parties in Jackson Hole’s multipurpose bars (a place that serves club sandwiches at lunch, for example, might turn after midnight into a throbbing bacchanalian scene) say they can’t avoid the need to cater to certain givens like knowing people will insist, often drunkenly, on hearing “Billie Jean” or other ’80s pop songs. But some say there is another side to the local DJ element.

Brian James, better known as “Cut La Whut” or “Cutter” came to Jackson from Riverton, Wyo., in 1994. Still a teenager at the time, he eventually fell in with Blank, with whom he was a roommate for three years. Cutter began performing professionally around 2000, as a young, up-and-coming DJ with Four4.

“Ten years ago this whole scene was in its infancy,” said Cutter, who samples from a wide spread of hip-hop, electronic and Jamaican dancehall music and described his style as “not genre specific.”

“Forty-three [North] has embraced the DJ culture to a certain extent, but I don’t know why more places haven’t,” he said.  “I don’t know if it’s a more cosmopolitan way of thinking or what.”

Cutter is now with Front Street Productions, a company he founded with promoter Dom Gagliardi, who also books shows for the Mangy Moose and owns the Village Café in Teton Village. The two split off from Four4 in 2004, envisioning a troupe that not only featured local DJs but also national acts for special one-night-only shows. The collaboration allowed local DJs to open for those performers.

“We saw this scene getting to a point where there’s all this potential,” Cutter said. “We tried to say ‘hey, let’s bring in these other shows,’ but they weren’t ready to expand.”
The spinning off from Four4 by Cutter and Gagliardi created a rift in what was once a tight-knit group of friends. Today, all parties insist the tension is part of the past.
“If you start something and someone else comes in and takes over, that can be hard to take,” Vertone said. “But they wanted to do their thing, and I understand that more now than I did back then. Front Street brought a whole different thing to the music scene here. Dom’s a promoter; Cut’s a great DJ. They do their own thing.”

After Front Street lost a popular Friday night gig at Eleanor’s Cuvee last summer, the company decided to veer away from weeklies and to focus instead on booking and promoting shows by out-of-valley acts. It also began throwing more sophisticated private parties at homes and art galleries in the valley.
“We’ll bring in the right DJ and deck it out, provide a full atmosphere,” Gagliardi said. “If they want to do a Taj Mahal party, we’ll turn it into the Taj Mahal.”

Gagliardi was preparing for the Declaration 2008 Party, an ambitious Fourth of July concert featuring DJs Tony Touch of New York City and J Boogie of San Francisco.
“When you bring these DJs here to a small town in the middle of nowhere and get them playing music, they really enjoy it,” he said. “Jackson Hole holds its own as far as the kind of talent here, and everybody we bring in takes that back to their cities. That’s only happened recently.”

Meanwhile, a handful of up-and-coming DJs, as well as those who have been around for a while, continue to do their thing. Teton Thai hosts DJs on its deck six nights a week. Cutter and Mikey Thunder each have a night there, and so do brothers Christian “Mr. Whipple” and Adam “Bamboo King” Senf, who spin only the irie-est Reggae music.

Ben “Behnibubu” Westenburg and Chris “Drunken Master” Howell, who both spin at Teton Thai, are praised by their peers as local purveyors of glitch, a subgenre of house music characterized by electronic meltdown and heavy bass, as well as dubstep, a sparse electronica with roots in South London. Those two, along with Cutter, will begin a Thursday summer residency on the deck at Koshu Wine Bar beginning this week. At the Stagecoach on Wednesdays, Kenneth “Victor Ragamuffin” Jenkoski will keep the reggae night tradition going.

Photo by derek diluzio
Photo by The ebbs and flows of Jackson Hole’s emerging DJ scene.


PERMALINK:
Small Town Spinners | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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