DJ Mojo (Pyramid Club, Hurrah, Berlin, Rubulad)
"You talk to the kids who live in [Bushwick and Williamsburg] now, and [if you say], 'Hey, do you want to go to Manhattan?,' they look at you like it's the Kon-Tiki."
A quick note for those of you in NYC: I have two free events coming up later this month. The first, on Thursday February 22 at 6:00 pm, is the next installment of my “East Village in Music and Words” conversation series at the Tompkins Square Park Library. This one, rescheduled from December, features antifolk pioneer Roger Manning - details are here. And then on Tuesday 27, I’ll be discussing my book at the Jefferson Market Library with Saundra Thomas as part of Open House New York’s “OHNY Stacks” series - details are here.
Once you meet Jim Smith, better known as DJ Mojo, you never forget him. He’s tall - I mean really goddamn tall - with a sonorous voice and the overall demeanor of a guy has seen some shit. When I first became aware of Mojo in the early 2010s, I knew him as the booker at two dive-y venues in Brooklyn, Trash Bar in Williamsburg and Matchless in Greenpoint, and as the host of a show on Breakthrough Radio, a wonderful and sadly-departed internet radio station where a bunch of my friends were working at the time.
Still, I was surprised when Konk bassist and deejay Jonny Sender encouraged me to interview Mojo for my book. But as I quickly learned, his demeanor is more than earned - this guy truly has seen some shit. In the mid-’70s, when Mojo got his start working the door at the uptown “rock disco” Hurrah, he was already a Viet Nam vet and Columbia grad. He went on to man the door at Max’s Kansas City, Pyramid Club, and an obscure after-hours club called Berlin (which doubled as a regular-hours reggae club called Reggae Lounge). He’s even the subject of an early Beastie Boys song, “Egg Raid on Mojo,” with recounts the true story of the underage Beasties exacting revenge on the poor guy for the sin of having denied them entry to a 21+ club.
After leaving Pyramid in the mid-’80s, he took a decade-long break from nightlife before re-emerging as a deejay and promoter in Brooklyn’s nascent indie rock scene. Now 74, Mojo remains deeply entrenched in the city’s musical underground, and you can regularly catch him deejaying at some of my favorite clubs in the city, including TV Eye and San Pedro Inn. We spoke over the phone in August 2021.
What was your introduction to nightlife in the city?
I've been collecting records since I was maybe 11 years old. In the late ‘70s, when the punk thing started, it struck me as truly different, and that appealed to me. As I got more into it, I got more into other alternative pieces of music and performers, which actually, in an ironic way, took me even deeper into the past. For instance, I was listening to straight-up punk bands, and then I was listening to ska, then I was listening to new wave-y bands, and then I started getting into electronic music. My interest in that led me back to the 1930s, to listen to people like Pierre Henry, who developed music concrète, and people like Harry Partch. It was almost like this time machine.
[My entry into] the scene itself was out of necessity. I just literally needed a job, and I thought it'd be cool to work in nightlife. I knew people who were working in nightlife at the time, and it was good money. It started expanding my musical horizons, because I met deejays who were playing stuff that [I’d] never heard before. It was an organic evolution; it just seemed that the longer I was in it, the more I became part of it. That isn't that isn't to say that I was ever a major part of it, but I was able to meet and commiserate with the people who were.
Where was your first club job?
Hurrah, which was right near Lincoln Center. It was a very small place, but it hosted most of the really far out stuff that was happening at the time. Ruth Polsky was the booker there. She was really a pivotal element in the New York scene, as far as music is concerned. Her booking was nothing short of revolutionary.1
I worked there for a few months, and then I worked at Max's [Kansas City] part-time. Then I started to work at a place called Berlin, which at the time was one of the biggest after-hours bars in the city. And when I say “biggest,” I mean size-wise. It was at 622 Broadway, and it had two rooms. One room was about 500 square feet, and the other room was about 6,800 square feet, and on any given Saturday night, both of those rooms would be filled. It was open well into the wee hours of the morning, 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning.
Was this the same space that was Reggae Lounge?
Exactly. It was Reggae Lounge from around 9:00 to about midnight, and then it was Berlin from 1:00 until 10:00 am.2 It was two different atmospheres, but it was the same people who owned it. Reggae Lounge had its own following. The guy who was a deejay, this guy Rupert, was probably one of the best reggae deejays in the city. He knew all those people from King Jammy Super Power over on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.
My head was really into making a large amount of money in a short period of time, because I was interested in traveling. I wanted to get out to Los Angeles and to San Francisco. So I had this job at Berlin where the money was really great. I worked the longest shift, from when Reggae Lounge opened to when Berlin closed, and I did that three days a week - Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Then the building was set on fire by the owner. He wanted to chase everybody out, because he wanted to flip the building for gentrification purposes. He waited until the coldest day of February, I think it was, and he set fire to the roof. He locked the doors, so when the Fire Department got there, they had to pour water on the roof, which went throughout the entire building. I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. The Fire Department finally got those doors open, and the water literally looked like Niagara Falls coming down those stairs. If that wasn't bad enough, then it froze. There was this eight-inch sheet of ice in the middle of Broadway, and you could see stalagmites of icicles hanging from the windows. It was just a mess. That fire put a block in my plans, because whatever money I’d made and put in the bank, I had to hold on to now because I wasn't working.
It wasn't until well into the beginning of April that we were able to actually get back into the building. Needless to say, all the electronics and the sound system were just destroyed. Richard Sweret, who was the head deejay at Berlin, had kept his records there because he didn't want to lug them back and forth [from] his apartment in Hell's Kitchen - they were all destroyed. I remember getting in there, the ice had finally melted, and one of the things that struck me as super dangerous was the fact that there was still a huge puddle of water on the dance floor in the main room. I took a broomstick, unscrewed it from the broom head, and tossed it in like a Javelin, and it just disappeared. I was like, “I'm not walking on that floor.” The floor was actually bowing because there was that big of a puddle there, so one false move and you’d go through the floor.3
[There was an] English contingent: people from i-D magazine [and] all those kids who had come out of [the scene around] Spandau Ballet and the Blitz crowd. They were pretty big on the scene, and they used to come to Berlin all the time. There was this guy Jon Baker, everybody called him Mole; he organized a benefit for the workers from Berlin at Pyramid, and it was one of the biggest parties the Pyramid had ever had at that time. This is 1980 or ‘81, I think. Everybody who was somebody in nightlife was at this party. I ended up getting a job at Pyramid because at the party, Bobby Bradley, who was running the place, asked me, “Do you want to work here?” I was like, “Sure, why not?” I ended up working at Pyramid for a good two or three years.
Where were you living?
In Brooklyn. I had an apartment on the Lower East Side in like, ‘78-’79, but then I came back to live in Brooklyn Heights in 1980. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and going into the city was just like going down the block to the grocery store. The sense of provinciality that exists in the city today is really kind of a new concept. I've been taking trains since I was a little kid, so it wasn't a trek for me. Nowadays, I work mostly in Bushwick and Williamsburg, and [when you] talk to the kids who live in these neighborhoods now, [if you say], “Hey, do you want to go to Manhattan?,” they look at you like it's the Kon-Tiki. And vice versa: you have people who hang out in the city who wouldn't dream of coming to Bushwick.
That, to me, is sort of a forced provincialism that I think has been a detriment to the music. Because the fewer people you have moving around, the fewer ears you have listening. You find yourself playing to a lot of the same people every week. That kind of bugs me, because, “Great, glad you came, nice to see you,” but it makes no sense to me to be playing to the same 300 people every night. At that point, you’re just juicing lemons, man. That's just getting the money. I guess if you own a club and you got a rent to pay, okay, fine, but it’s not establishing culture.
Pyramid was having all these drag shows, but they were also having bands like Sonic Youth and Swans in that same space. And then [the seminal hardcore punk venue] A7 is right across the street. Was there any feeling of tension between those different communities? Or was it all one community?
It was all one community. [Going to] A7 across the street, it wasn't like you were crossing the Louisiana Purchase to get to it. It was pretty much the same kind of vibe. A7 eventually morphed into King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, which was kind of like a spin on the Pyramid in a certain way.
A7 would sometimes be open 24 hours. You'd go there, and if you knew Dave [Gibson, A7’s owner] or anybody who worked there, you'd knock on the door and [it could] be like, four punk kids asleep on the couch, or fifty kids slam dancing. This could be at 3:00 in the morning or 8:00 in the morning.
But if you want to talk about tensions, when Pyramid started, it had probably the most diverse customer profile. You had the gay crowd, you had the punk crowd, you had the new music crowd, you had the old guys in the neighborhood who would come by in the afternoon and drink at 2:00 and go home at like 5:00. It had probably one of the best and one of the most inclusive attitudes as to who went there, and when it lost that, it lost what I felt made it great.
When did it lose that?
Late ‘80s, early ‘90s. There were a lot of reasons. I have an opinion as to why it happened, but that would only be my opinion, so I won't go into it. I'll just say that when it lost that broad palette of identities, it really kind of lost [what made it special].
Something else was happening in the neighborhood that was also impacting nightlife, which was the resurgence of the drug scene. Well into the late ‘90s, there was a big resurgence of heroin, and that was changing up the neighborhood almost as quickly as the gentrification dollar.
Back in the ‘70s, the drug scene in the Lower East Side was bleak, [but] it was in your face. There was no way you could not know where to buy drugs. You would literally have people waiting on line to buy drugs. When that got quote-unquote “cleaned up,” the drug use got pushed further down to Pitt Street and further into East Houston and all that area under Williamsburg Bridge, and the drugs miraculously became more potent. Seasoned junkies who were able to shoot five bags a day, they would do one bag and boom, OD. There's kind of a perverted logic in the junk scene that anything that's that strong, I have to try, so you had a lot of people dropping dead.
And then when that happened, a lot of civilians [started] getting mugged for money, because [the junkies] wanted to get drug money. A lot of people responded by calling the cops, and when the cops started busting the drug dealers, they also started busting the underground clubs.
You also worked at the Mudd Club at some point, right?
I wasn't ever an employee there, but I knew more than 50% of the staff because I was working at other clubs. But the Mudd Club - if you want to talk about a club dying of slow and painful death, that was the Mudd Club. The acts got worse, the staff got worse - at one point, the guy doing the door was some sketchy ex-con guy who was just incredibly nasty.
One of the last shows I ever saw at Mudd Club was also a show that I booked for [British electronic noise band] Whitehouse. I actually played with William Bennett and Whitehouse on stage, I was doing some electronics with them. I think that was the last time I stepped foot in the Mudd Club, and maybe a year later, it was closed. It had just deteriorated. It was very bad.
Were you already starting to book shows at different spots then?
That was sort of the beginning, when I first started what I call “barnstorming.” I would carry a duffel bag [full of] seven-inch records, and I would go to clubs where I knew somebody would be deejaying. I would say, “Hey, how late are you going to be here?” “I'm here ‘til 4:00, man.” “If you want to go outside and smoke a cigarette or have a beer or something, I got a few records in my bag.” I was amazed by the number of people who were like, “Sure, go ahead.”
I would get on the tables and play for like an hour, and then I'd let the guy come back in. It would get me free drinks and a couple of bucks here and there. I evolved that into booking bands, and one of the first places I did that was Pianos.
But that's much later.
Well, for me, there was a sort of a blank period from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s. Because the scene had changed so radically, and in my opinion not for the better. I really didn't see anything for me, so I took another career as a chef. I worked at several different restaurants; I started out as the dishwasher, and I ended up becoming a sous chef. I was working five, sometimes six days a week. When I had a day off from the restaurant gig, I didn't feel like going out. I would just sit in my living room and listen to stuff, or I would get online and try and like research stuff.
What about the scene had changed in the mid-‘80s?
I'd say one of the biggest factors was the Club Kid thing, which never held any interest to me whatsoever. Because it was just like, all you people do is dress up. That's fine - you want to wear crazy outfits, that's cool, I don't care. But when I hung out with people who did that, those people had day jobs. They dressed up because they had a store in Soho where they were selling the same clothes that they were wearing.
The Club Kids just seemed to be kids who came from money, but were outsiders in their own community, so they came to New York and formed their own community, like The Island of Misfit Toys. I understood it, but it wasn't anything that I was interested in participating in. I'm not saying they’re bad people - well, with one exception - but it just wasn't interesting to me. So when that became the norm, I was more than happy to be cooking lobster thermidor.
The flip side was the house music scene. The places that weren't doing house were doing Club Kids and the places that weren't doing Club Kids were doing house. So you had your choice of really boring white people or really boring Black people.
We're jumping around a little bit chronologically, but I know you've spoken a number of times about the influence that both [Mudd Club/Danceteria deejay] Anita Sarko and [Paradise Garage deejay] Larry Levan had on you.
Well, Larry wasn't what I’d call a house deejay. He played everything: he did play house music, but he also played a lot of disco and R&B. Larry knew music backwards and forwards, so it’s kind of an oversimplification to call him a house deejay. I do, however, think of him as one of the best deejays in New York City, without question. Same thing for Anita Sarko. They were both unique in their outlook towards music, and they were both unique in their love and dedication to music. You will not see the likes of either one of those deejays again, not for a long time.
I always tell the story about how Anita broke “Rapper’s Delight,” Before anyone had it, she actually played an acetate of it. She always had massively eclectic taste, because she would not only play clubs and private parties, but she did the Whitney Biennial and fashion shows. Like Larry, she was very much her own universe. The loss of both of them - not just from a professional standpoint, but from a personal standpoint - it’s just very shocking. Especially Anita, who died by own hand.4 It's terrible. They were more than just deejays; they were like the rudders that were moving the entire boat of music.
Before you were going to the Garage, had you gone to the Loft or the Gallery or any of those kinds of places?
I went to the Loft a couple of times. David Mancuso had sort of a laissez-faire approach to music styling, as I do. [It wasn’t] that he put on one banger after another, it was more that he was trying to create an atmosphere. And when Larry was playing at Paradise Garage, it was a different atmosphere, but he was creating that atmosphere.
Paradise Garage was where people went to dance. You went there and you just danced your butt off, literally. We’d go on Saturday night at midnight, and then I’d walk outside and the sun would be shining. I’d think it was like 8:00 in the morning on Sunday, and it was actually noon.
So when you start getting back into nightlife in the mid-’90s, had the culture perceptibly changed?
Music had changed and how people went to see music changed. One of the first things I did is I sat at my kitchen table with a big yellow legal pad and I made a list, which ended up being about seven or eight pages long, of some of the more popular bands that were playing and where they were playing. I told myself, I’ve got to see at least half of these people so I can understand what's going on, because I’d been out of it for close to nine years.
Then I started [getting involed in] the Rubulad party, which was this big artists’ collective in Brooklyn that is miraculously still going. That was interesting to me, because it brought back a lot of the same diversity that the early Pyramid had. The first Rubulad parties were just magnificent, because they were totally underground, totally DIY, totally inclusive. Of course, things end up getting popular and word of mouth ends up traveling all over the globe, and the next thing you know, you have people pulling up in limos coming into the Rubulad parties - which we didn't really mind because, you know, they had money. That's great, we'll pay the rent this month. But you know, too much attention can be a bad thing.
Once the chime of gentrification was rung on Bedford Avenue and North 8th Street, the older artists who were living in the big lofts and paying cheap rent were now being displaced by younger artists who were willing to pay three times as much for half. That also played a part in the changing complexion of who was going out. When Rubulad first started, it was a lot of local people, a lot of diverse artists, a lot of gay people. And as the neighborhood became more gentrified, you had people coming in who were speaking, like, Greek, who’d just gotten off the plane and were coming to see Rubulad.
You have all these moneyed people coming into the neighborhood and partaking, and okay, they come in, they pay for the drinks, they pay to get in - great, no problem. But they are not contributing anything. We get their money and we get their physical bodies, but they're not going to come back and say, “Hey, a friend of mine is a filmmaker, and we'd like to do this,” or, “A friend of mine is a sculptor, and he'd like to put this in your front.” The only thing they had to offer was money. It's tourism.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
---------------
You can buy my book This Must Be the Place here
Follow DJ Mojo on Instagram
Polsky would later become the booker at Danceteria, and played a pivotal role in bringing British bands like the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen to the United States for the first time. She was tragically killed by an out-of-control taxi outside the Limelight in 1986.
Other accounts have Reggae Lounge going until 3:00 or 4:00 am, with Berlin kicking off around that time.
Berlin/Reggae Lounge later reopened one block south at 599 Broadway, in a space that had previously been home to a gay disco called the Flamingo, and which later housed a post-punk/new wave club called Chase Park.
Sarko died by suicide in 2015.
This is fascinating. DJ Mojo was a big advocate for the band I was in during the early-mid 2000s. Is there another part to this interview? It seems to end abruptly.