James Smith unearths his copy of Evelyn King’s 1982 album, “Get Loose.” (Philippe Theise)
“Do you ever feel like you’re visiting in your own neighborhood?”
That, approximately, is what Randy Delgado, who worked at Myrtle Avenue’s Dope Jams, a record store that carried underground dance and nurtured a weird, collective flame for non-conformist lovers of the beat, asked James Smith as he shopped for club classics on a cold night in January.
Smith nodded. The exchange occurred about two weeks before Dope Jams closed its doors near the end of that month, victim of a rent increase.
The store brought Smith up the avenue from the apartment he shares with his mother and cousin in the Ingersoll Houses, past Connecticut Muffin at Clinton Avenue, past the Utrecht Art Supplies store in front of Pratt, and past the Emerson, one of the new bars near Dope Jams’ former location at 505 Myrtle.
But Smith, 45, had been making the walk since the early eighties, when he and his mother left the Williamsburg Houses on Bushwick Avenue to move into Ingersoll. And it was in a park near the old William Gaynor Intermediate School on Graham Avenue where Smith first saw DJs tapping electricity from light poles to spin records.
“I loved how they [played],” he said, while standing in the hallway of his apartment in February, going through the l’s and m’s in the long plastic crates of vinyl stacked against a wall.
Smith takes out Gwen McCrea’s slinky, mid-tempo fantasia, “Funky Sensation”; Linda Clifford’s brassy version of the affronted disco diva’s statement of independence, “Runaway Love”; and Melba Moore’s jaunty, lite celebration of new romance, “You Stepped into My Life.”
He keeps his 70s records in his bedroom, along with his playcrate—a DJ’s ready trove of essential cuts—and stores more crates of disco, hip-hop, and other genres like reggae and gospel in a spare room.
[I’ve got] “every Four Tops, Temptations, Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Supremes,” Smith said. That goes for Jay-Z, too: Smith’s got a brick of Hova releases that any young hip-hop collector would envy.
He’s been collecting since the mid-eighties, when he and a friend would take the F train to Coney Island on Sundays and hit the flea markets on Surf Avenue. But Catherine Smith, James’s mother, said that her son was picking up discarded records off the pavement and bringing them home as a child. Sitting in her kitchen, she recalls the day her five-year-old placed a 45 on the table and imitated a record player.
“He made his finger spin it,” she said, thinking that she had a drummer or a DJ on her hands.
“‘Look, don’t be bringing no records into the house,’” she recalls telling her son, with the hallway stack looming behind her.
Smith remembers Ms. Zaichik, his elementary school teacher at PS 84, bringing in records and other gifts for her students on Friday afternoons, and he said she kept a portable turntable in the classroom. He recalls that she gave him a seven-inch copy of Moore’s hit.
Smith attended PS 84 after his teachers determined that he read slowly. He had already attended two other elementary schools, and would graduate from William Gaynor, a school the city eventually closed in 2009 for inadequate academic performance. Smith then left Eastern District, a high school that suffered from overcrowding and violence before closing in 1995, without a diploma.
Throughout his years of schooling, Smith never took a music class, and said that Ms. Zaichik is the only teacher whose name he remembers.
In the late eighties, Smith started hanging out outside a used appliance shop near Gaynor on Graham Avenue, where he learned to fix washing machines, dryers, TVs and air conditioners. The owner paid him off the books, and he earned about $150 on a good week. James keeps a collection of photographs attached to worn cardboard backs in his bedroom, and one shot depicts him smiling in front of a workbench lined with TVs in the shop’s basement. In another image, he’s standing in front of a turntable and mixer, headphones around his neck.
Smith looks happy in both pictures, but in the one with the headphones, his smile is so thick and brilliant it appears edible.
The appliance shop closed about seven years ago, and an occasional deejay gig at Family Day at the Williamsburg Houses hasn’t come through in a few years. Smith last spun records at a baby shower in 2011, and said that neighbors sometimes ask him for help fixing machines. He’s approached business owners to inquire about maintenance work, and sometimes comes away with a card, but no applications. Last year, he started collecting aluminum cans and redeeming them for nickels.
But he moves with vigor while handling the heavy black crates in the hallway. He speaks with precise, hip diction—“Them motherfuckers are picky,” he says about the buyers at Williamsburg’s Academy Records—when talking about the tendrils of the record game that still reach into his life. The discs he’s scored for dollars sell for much more at premium shops like Academy; at Dope Jams, when Delgado wondered about the origin of a sample on a house track, Smith often knew the source.
He wants, more than anything, to spin again. “[I] love the atmosphere of the crowd,” he said. “[It] keeps me functioning.”
And Smith can prove that he knows how to blend and alter sound. In the opening minute of a mix he co-created last year under his DJ alias, Rock Masta Pat, electric guitar skitters over snare and hi-hat like diamonds over onyx, and then a steadier line evokes the smooth, sinister theme from Knight Rider. At about 1:45, the bass takes on the same post-punk cast as New Order’s in “Ceremony,” and then everything shifts into a cowbell-fueled party jam headlined by a flamboyant MC. Smith scratches, the vinyl sources pop, and flashes of Chic’s “Good Times” precede a crackling series of handclaps. Despite some glitches in the recording, most of the 14 tracks that follow, mini-mixes themselves, are equally eclectic and satisfying.
According to Casey Block, a DJ and used record dealer who works weekends at Williamsburg’s Artists and Fleas market, having a good mix cd is one way a DJ can convince people to give him a chance to spin. But there are other factors, too, that are as important as mixing skills and musical knowledge.
Surrounded by crates of collectible vinyl near the start of spring, Block laid it clean: bars and clubs are primarily looking for “people [who] bring out people, rather than people who play excellent music.”
“[If] none of your friends come out, a lot of times you won’t get rehired,” he said.
With turnout being essential, promotion is key. Speaking two weeks later, Block explained that some DJs send near-weekly emails to alert fans about upcoming events. Block likes to post on Facebook in advance, and then text “nine people at once—the most the iphone will let you”—on the day of the gig.
Smith doesn’t have a computer or a smart phone. More problematic, though, may be his small social circle: he speaks often with a friend, Angelo, with whom he made a 2011 mix, and stays in touch with two more friends who live in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Smith’s regular trips to 505 Myrtle, where fellow voyagers roamed the stacks, are over. He likes to spend time in his room, and said that he doesn’t talk to many people when’s he out of his apartment. He will need to make new connections to find opportunities to spin.
If he can, Smith might find an audience for his style. Block said that 90s r&b is having a moment, as late twenty- and early thirty-somethings want to hear the mainstream smashes of their youth. The era of Mary J. Blige and En Vogue isn’t too far from Smith’s sweet spot of 70s and 80s disco and r&b.
It’s clear from the thousands of records in his home, and from the speakers, mixer, and five turntables in his room, that sharing his love of music is what Smith wants most.
“[There’s] nothing better,” he said.