Claude von Stroke
|
Boston club king DJ
RICKY FATTS is a busy man. “Right now I’m DJing five nights and promoting one. I got Tuesdays off. Wednesday nights I’m at the Wonder Bar, Thursday night’s Saint, Friday night Redline, Saturday night Felt, Sunday night’s Saint, and Mondays I help promote the industry night at Saint. Usually I’m not too busy until around Christmas time, but it’s been an odd year.” Since getting his break as a lighting technician on Lansdowne Street more than 10 years ago, Fatts has seen a lot of changes. “It was definitely a lot better at one point. The big clubs pretty much died, the wanna-be New York lounge blew up. The Euro scene kinda disappeared, the Latin scene started to come up. It seems to be getting better now. It seems people are getting a little tired of the lowest-denominator-type nights, of the same old same old, which is definitely a good thing, and club owners are starting to get a little more creative again.”
One such club is Redline in Harvard Square, which has given Fatts free rein on its Friday Alternative night. “I’ll play some Stevie Wonder to Salsa to Kraftwerk to whatever the hell I want and people are receptive. Everyone from Harvard professors to off-duty cops to college kids to friends of mine that want to go out in Cambridge. Sometimes we’ll have people visiting Harvard Square like from China or whatever and they’ll come in. So I’m everywhere. I try to get a lot of Latin in there too. I’m Latino, and there are also a lot of Latinos that end up comin’ out.” If he can’t get it done in the club, he will do it on the low, in after-hours loft parties. “They’re getting rid of so many of the artist loft spaces around town so it’s kind of tough, but you don’t want to start getting the word out too early.”
As a long-time Boston resident, Fatts knows just about everyone in clubland, and he leverages these people to make the after-hours work. “You plant people at a few clubs around the city at the end of the night to go around and tell everyone that they know. Each person goes to the people they know that have big mouths, then you text the actual address. Kinda word-of-mouth-type thing. It just goes out and you do it all that night. Try to get in and get out without getting into too much trouble.” His knowledge of the scene also gives him a historical perspective. “Back in the day there were a lot more parties like that, and I’m trying to get that going because those are still the most epic most fun parties that people still talk about today. It might get a little too hot or too funky in there, but other than that you can hang out as long as you want — as long as people are awake.”
The late-end escapades are essential to Fatts in that the club might close down just as people are really moving. Plus, “I love doing what I do — I could play for 12 hours straight. Just give me an outlet and give me a person to watch and listen and I’ll roll, you know?” He’s also proving to be a capable producer. His DJ Ricky Fatts production moniker sits on MySpace and gives listeners a preview of some of these projects. But his own personal favorite (and ours too), “V-Day (Beta),” is available only at thePhoenix.com alongside this story.
The local Boston house heads at Marz Entertainment let us onto a killer last-minute detail. Today (September 28) sees hotly yipped producer and remixer CLAUDE VON STROKE hit the Hub at the newly renovated Good Life down near Chinatown. Von Stroke (a/k/a Barclay Crenshaw) is a tech-house type of guy dropping all sorts of avant glitches into his set — the kind of music we ache for here at Circuits. His San Francisco label, Dirty Bird, is on the rise on the worldwide club scene, showing up in charts of some of Europe’s finest. Co-produced by local label HEADTUNES, the show opens with SERGIO SANTOS, the resident bleep expert at the Boston house collective.
ADVERTISEMENT
 |
And Boston MC TERMANOLOGY continues to rumble into the ears of hip-hop tastemakers around the country. His latest salvo, Hood Politics IV: Show and Prove, just received a street date of November 7. The mixtape shows off Term’s ill talent with experts CLINTON SPARKS and STATIK SELEKTAH. And speaking of Sparks: the local glory boy makes a rare local appearance this Friday night at Flirt. In case you didn’t know, Sparks is P. Diddy’s official tour DJ and “DJ to the Stars.” Check his Web site — www.clintonsparks.com/ — for tons of downloads and pictures of him with Janet and Samuel L. Jackson.
On the Web
DJ Ricky Fatts: //myspace.com/djrickyfatts
Termanology: //www.termanology.com/
Email the author
David Day: circuits@squar3.com