Daft Punk & the Very Happy Hour
Don't Die Wondering
In 2007 I was in Las Vegas on assignment for Spin—now a cultural artifact, then a print magazine that you read if you loved music—to write a cover story about Daft Punk and a sidebar about their collaboration with Kanye West.
At the Vegoose festival, I stood stage left backstage behind the curtain next to Steve Aoki and 20 feet from Daft Punk’s pyramid at the center of the stage. Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo put on their robot helmets and walked out in front of 300,000 people who then stopped being people and became music and movement.
That looked pretty fun.
Of all the things I have experienced in my professional life, the thing my kids ask me about the most are the hours I spent hanging out with Daft Punk, not wearing robot helmets, before and after that show and again the next day in LA.
Dad, what did they look like without helmets?
What were they like?
Were they nice?
They were super nice.
When skateboarding was my greatest passion in life in the late ‘80s, turf care being a close second, this was my favorite Vision Street Wear ad.
The command: Don’t Die Wondering has been stuck in my head ever since.
If there’s something you want to try, try it.
If there’s something you want to do, do it.
If there’s something you want to be, be it.
Life doesn’t last forever.
Don’t die wondering.
Start today.
I started DJ’ing in 2000.
Conceptually, I have always wanted to DJ in front of people, at an event.
It didn’t need to be 300,000 people, and it wasn’t about me getting something. It was about the desire to give to other people the experience that electronic music and movement have given to me so many times: having my me and I disappear and getting to live for a moment what it is to be an us.
In 1995, I lived in London and every week I picked up a copy of Timeout and hopped on the Tube to go to a few things that sounded cool and cost less than £5.
I didn’t know the different electronic music genres, I didn’t know the artists, I didn’t know the DJ’s.
Once I started going, I kept going. Randomly, I ended up at some of the most seminal dance spots of all time at clubs like Megatripolois, Strawberry Sundae and (a one-time £30 splurge) The Ministry of Sound.
In these contexts, music and movement sometimes made the me in me and the I in I disappear and I became part of the us that is all of us and just us, just a thing in harmony with other things in a world without time, just rhythm.
Then it would be over. Me would be me. I would be I.
This was just music and movement, no special ingredients added.
In these experiences, I glimpsed something that felt important and an unlearning of what artificially separates and divides.
For 25 years, I DJ’d just for fun, just for myself.
I had a setup wherever I lived, first Technics 1200s then the now extinct Torq Xponent, then a Pioneer controller setup.
I made time to DJ and recorded sets that I posted to Soundcloud and Mixcloud.
In LA, I would drive five hours to the middle of the desert by myself to dance under a full moon with strangers on a Wednesday night until the sun came up on a Thursday morning.
But I never passed Go and played a gig of my own.
It wasn’t a priority.
Work. Riding bikes. Getting married. Being a dad. Commuting three hours a day in the Bay Area. The need to go to bed before 2 a.m. Repairing the chicken coop.
There was always something else to do that felt more important.
We all need money to live and it’s also easy to fall into the trap of only doing things that fulfill our financial needs or that we believe will elevate our status in some area of life we regard as important.
Things we pick up and love that don’t fall into those buckets often get set down.
We stop doing them because why would we.
DJ’ing alone, unseen, did not elevate my status and it did not financially enrich me.
In and of itself, it was fun to do.
I loved it.
The better I got, the smoother my mixes became. As a consumer of electronic music, the more I listened to perfect mixes from the world’s best artists, the more interested I became as a creator of electronic music and as a selector of tracks as a DJ in doing it in a different and more raw form.
At times, I deviated from the patterns I understood to be the hallmark of technically proficient DJ’ing and I started to mix in a way that deconstructed the experience.
I leveraged the transition between the tracks and within the tracks and played with them as an object of drama and narrative tension that exposed the tricks of seamless movement to explore a listening and dance experience that was sometimes jarring, but in a way that I found to be really exciting.
Part of what I enjoyed was that I put no pressure on myself to be great at it, or even good. I just enjoyed doing it.
Still, I wanted to play out somewhere.
I was most connected to other DJs, producers and the electronic music community when I lived in Los Angeles, less so when I lived in the Bay Area.
Now I live in Maine in a town called Hope.
There are amazing things here like the mom and dad bald eagle I saw in my backyard last weekend teaching their juvenile eagle how to hunt.
There is also less electronic music here than places where I used to live and less time, it seems, to hear it and be part of it. This is the story I have told myself for the five years I have been here.
Here I am.
If not now, then when?
I decided this is the year I would play somewhere.
To make it happen, I had to do things that felt inefficient and socially uncomfortable.
I asked around and read the flyers on the bathroom wall at Zoot coffee, which is the nexus of all information in the midcoast area.
I cold DM’d people who held events and who I had been heard also DJ’d. I had coffee in real life during time I felt like I needed to be doing something else.
I learned about a few places that sometimes had events with electronic music.
During the past decade, the specific dance experience I envisioned creating was a single hour of electronic music in a space without drugs or alcohol where movement could be the focus of the experience.
I’ve been to Five Rhythms and Ecstatic Dance and every other event in this dance genre and am aware of Daybreaker, but I wanted to do something different than those things.
My concept was: here is a space, here is a sound system, here I am as a DJ, here is techno, let whatever arises in this space in this time arise and then it will be gone.
Techno to let go.
One of the people I met was Angela Hunt, an LMT who has a cool yoga and sound healing studio in Rockland, Mystical Alchemy. We met for coffee on a freezing day at her studio and she was open to giving the idea a try. We picked a date, a Friday in March, and a time slot, 6 to 7 p.m.
It was the Very Happy Hour.
The week before the event, during a walking meditation in my yard, my feet getting stuck and unstuck in the thawing mud and the rushing stream along the edge of my property became objects of my hearing, feeling and seeing.
After the meditation, I reflected on Thich Nhat Hahn’s saying No Mud, No Lotus. Decay and beauty are the same thing, nothing lasts.
Things arise, they’re gone, they’re here, they’re gone again.
In Buddhism, the first stage of enlightenment is called sotapanna.
It means stream entry. I thought about how in certain moments, music and movement together can dissolve the sense of me and I and in their place create the sense of just us.
I went inside and grabbed my phone and walked back out and recorded my footsteps in the mud and the stream and then my feet walking again.
This would be the beginning and end of my set.
A few hours before the Very Happy Hour, I felt nervous.
The weather had been above freezing a few days during the week. Now it was below freezing and lightly snowing.
Being nervous seemed natural.
I hadn’t done this before and I have never done anything worth doing that I truly cared about that didn’t give rise to some twitch of anxiety as I prepared to do it.
My wife, Molly, told me to relax and enjoy it. My kids said to have fun.
I watched myself feeling nervous and named it.
This feeling is nervousness.
It’s a feeling I always want to push away when I have it.
I sat in it and watched it and got in my truck with my GoRuck full of cords and a laptop and my DJ controller and drove to Mystical Alchemy.
I called my friend Steve in LA on the way there and told him what I was doing. He said it would be awesome.
At the event, I pushed play, and I did not know what would happen in the space we created, just that something would happen.
A small group showed up including my neighbor—the legendary musician Rory McBride, and friends from the True Heart Sangha.
Any people is enough people.
As soon as I started playing, I could not hear the music very well. I am not a sound engineer and I had done my best to set up the speakers and the space. I didn’t have a monitor and to my ear the sound was muddy and bouncy.
It was difficult to calibrate loudness levels and even to hear the music I was mixing.
For a moment I felt stress and then I reminded myself it didn’t matter.
I had done my best to set up the sound system, and this was what was happening.
I reconnected to what I was there to do, to be open to whatever happened with the music and the people and the space and whatever ideas came to me in the moment about what to play and how to play it.
I set down the desire to be good and picked up the moment.
It was not perfect.
It was fun.
It felt good.
People danced, I danced. In moments, me and I disappeared and it was just us.
Then it was over.
I did it.
We did it.
We will do it again.
And so can you.
You don’t have to be Daft Punk, you just have to be whoever you are at whatever the thing is.
That’s all you can be.
25 years isn’t too late.
It’s the perfect time to start.
What have you been waiting to do?
How many years have passed since you first knew you wanted to do it?
Don’t die wondering.
Start today.
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