Julian Marsh says these days everybody qualifies as a celebrity,
but he was never comfortable with being approached on the street. “I’ve
had a couple of hundred e-mails since announcing my retirement, so I guess to
the listeners we are celebrities.”
advertisement
advertisement
|
By Andy Zeffe
Friday, July 29, 2005
JULIAN MARSH WAS LUCKY. He fell into a career as a DJ.
It started ten years ago when New York promoter Marc Berkley heard him spin
at a private party, and asked him to play the Limelight.
With the break at the Limelight, other offers started rolling in. Marsh became
known for his feel-good, uplifting songs that crowds could sing along with.
He estimates he went on to sell 200,000 CDs working with the Centaur label.
But around 1996, he says, things on the circuit scene began to change. According
to Marsh, music in the gay scene turned dark.
“Back in 1995, pretty much everybody played upbeat, happy music,”
Marsh said. “It was a wonderful, happy time. I grew up in the ‘80s,
where we danced to happening pop songs by the likes of Rick Astley and Donna
Summer. I tried to stay with that mood throughout my career. Then things began
to get dark.”
Now, a decade after he started, Marsh is getting ready to retire. He says
he has become disaffected with the current music scene. In addition, he wants
a more settled home life, something that’s hard to achieve when you’re
a DJ and have to spin at parties that go on until the wee hours of the morning.
After a few more gigs, including the Pines Party on Fire Island on July 30,
Marsh is stopping the music.
By Labor Day, he plans to sell all his equipment and leave the DJ world behind
him.
MARSH COMPLAINS THAT TODAY’S club music has been reduced to nothing but
drumbeats. He believes that was largely the influence of music makers such as
the production team Thunderpuss, and DJs such as Junior Vasquez.
It’s a direction Marsh thinks is regrettable. He sums up that genre
of music in three words: “pots and pans.”
“I just never went that route,” Marsh says. “I stayed with
all the happy music. That is what I am known for and do to this day.”
In Marsh’s view, the turn to this kind of music has been the demise
of the circuit scene. The music has gotten darker and darker and the drugs have
gotten harder and harder, he laments, and says that circuit parties are no longer
the same kind of events they once were.
He also believes the change in circuit parties is at least partly due to a
generational change in the gay community.
Marsh, who is 41, says his generation of gay men, along with those now in
their 50s and 60s, were the original supporters of the circuit parties. But
as people get older, they go less to the big mega events.
The current generation of circuit partygoers, Marsh says, are a different
breed, heavy into the dark music and the crystal that it feeds into.
He is convinced the drugs and the music are intertwined.
“Now with everyone doing crystal, they can’t handle more than
a rhythm. That’s my personal belief,” he says.
But he also thinks that, before long, circuit parties are going to look foreign
and esoteric, and may even eventually disappear.
“I think with the new generation [of gay men], we are going to see they
don’t care about gay clubs, and just acclimate into mainstream society,”
Marsh says. “They are the ‘Will & Grace’ generation. It’s
a totally different thing. I remember lining up in the back of buildings to
get into new clubs, because people would throw rocks at you. Now the younger
generation just does not care about whether or not a club is gay.”
AT TIMES, BEING A HIGH profile DJ was a cutthroat business. Marsh recounts
an incident where a jealous competitor almost destroyed his career.
Another DJ sent out an anonymous e-mail, accusing Marsh of working undercover
with the FBI to turn in DJ’s and record stores that sold bootleg CDs.
Marsh says the facts of the e-mail weren’t true, but “the result
did a lot of damage to my reputation.”
Marsh began to tire of the DJ and circuit scene several years ago, and he
moved to Wilton Manors, Fla. from New York City in 2001.
As a matter of fact, he was in Florida looking at property when Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks occurred.
“People have the misconception that being a DJ is glamorous,”
Marsh says. “There is nothing glam about being a DJ. It is a huge responsibility
to entertain 2,000 to 5,000 people. You have to live up to their expectations.”
In the past few years, when traveling away from home for gigs, Marsh found
himself wishing he were comfortable at home, hanging out with friends rather
than on the road spinning music.
“After ten years of traveling, you are away all the time, and so it
is very hard to maintain relationships and have a decent home life,” he
says.
BUT MARSH HASN’T LOST HIS LOVE of music. These days, his inspiration
does not come from the dance floors. Instead, it comes from country western
songs.
“I love country music,” Marsh says. “That is where the beautiful
words and melodies are. And with the dancing, you are always holding on to someone.”
Marsh is a regular on Saturdays at the local country western bar, Manhattan
South. There, he listens to favorites like Gretchen Wilson and Tim McGraw.
He is also now concentrating on his new career as a realtor and mortgage broker
with Infinity Reality.
Even during his busiest years as a DJ, Marsh held a full-time career. He spent
21 years working with computers for New York Board of Education.
With so much on his plate, Marsh never got into drugs. He believes his career
suffered because he didn’t do drugs. In the circuit scene, he says, if
you didn’t do drugs, you didn’t quite fit in.
“I never judged people who do drugs,” he says. “I was probably
more judged for not doing drugs. If everyone is sitting around doing K and you’re
not, they don’t feel comfortable with that.”
DESPITE HIS DISILLUSIONMENT with the drugs and the current predominant musical
tastes, Marsh says he is looking forward to his last hurrah in New York, the
Pines Party.
He met the promoters of the event a few years ago on Lincoln Road in South
Beach, and they contacted him to play. Marsh will play the first half of the
event and DJ Tracy Young of Miami the other half.
“I hope to blow people away with songs they haven’t heard in years,”
Marsh smiles. “Numbers people scream over, like Sunscreens ‘Looking
at You’ and Sarah Washington’s ‘Heaven.”
In August Marsh is scheduled to play a week in Provincetown, and after that,
a week in the Poconos at a retreat for Gay Naturalists International, where
he will play for 800 naked men.
After Labor Day, Marsh will say goodbye to his equipment and his life as a
DJ, and focus on his new career as a realtor and his life in Florida.
“I recently did the Love Party in Rehoboth Beach,” he says. “They
told me they won’t be able to find somebody to replace my kind of music.”
|
