7

LICK THE PAVEMENT CLEAN

Wasn’t planning on becoming a DJ. Never even thought about it. And so the story of how I went from an aspiring musician to a promoter to a record label “executive” to where I am now is a lesson in resilience, resourcefulness.

Also, dumb luck.

Thing is, I wasn’t much of a businessman early on. I was good at spotting talent, nurturing talent, promoting talent, but that’s about where my skill set ran thin. Yeah, I was making noise at Dim Mak, getting my groove on in Los Angeles, but I wasn’t making money. In fact, I was losing money—like, a shit-ton. My strengths and my weaknesses were kind of canceling each other out, so I was mostly treading water.

But I kept at it, because I was a fan at heart and I was having a blast, and Dim Mak gave me a front-row seat to the bands I loved, the music I loved. Best example of this was my work with The Kills. I had a US distribution deal with them. They had a separate deal in the UK, but I was their guy in the States—and, if you remember, for a hot while they were probably the most talked-about underground indie band on the scene. Their sound had this immersive Chrissie Hynde vibe, but it was also edgy and bluesy. It had a feel to it that was familiar and at the same time brand fucking new, and I was just a passionate, passionate fan—so completely honored that they trusted me to champion what they were doing. I went on the road with them, became their tour manager, hustled my tail off, did whatever you do when you’re jump-starting a career—theirs, mine, whatever. Plus, these guys were my friends. Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince. They treated me like a member of the band. A lot of times, it was just the three of us, tooling around in a little van. I would drive, or Jamie would drive, or Alison would drive. We would listen to Captain Beefheart on the road. We must’ve listened to those Trout Mask Replica and Safe as Milk albums forty or fifty times, all the way through. Everything they listened to, I digested. What they were into, I was into. I sold their merch, struggled to wake them up for lobby calls, talked them through whatever shit they were dealing with. I would have taken a bullet for these guys, I loved them so much.

To be fair, I was a shit tour manager, and I wasn’t set up at Dim Mak to fully service Alison and Jamie once they started to happen in a big-time way. Like a lot of the bands I was promoting, The Kills got to this place where they were ready to graduate from Dim Mak and take the next step up the ladder. I understood that progression—I didn’t love it, but I understood it.

I remember going in to talk to Keith Wood, who was the main guy at Rough Trade Records in the US office, and we were going over all these receipts from The Kills’ tour, and it was clear to both of us that I had no idea what I was doing. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what it meant to stick to a budget, and after a while Keith just looked up at me and said, “Dude, we need you off the road. You suck at this.”

He was right. But what I didn’t suck at was finding these acts ahead of the major labels, and propping them up in my own DIY, indie way.

It went to my head, the success I was having with a lot of my Dim Mak artists. Soon, all these major labels wanted to talk to me about maybe seeding their talent roster, incubating some of these up-and-coming bands, helping them to spot the next big thing. I loved that all these A&R guys were starting to hit me up. I loved that they thought I had something to offer. All that talk filled my head. All the noise my bands were making … that filled my head, too. I started thinking I was the shit, started turning down some tremendous opportunities, just because it felt to me like I wasn’t being treated with the respect I arrogantly thought I deserved. Like when Arcade Fire was about to pop. Their manager when they were coming up was also their lawyer, and she reached out to me, said she had the most incredible band from Montreal, sent me their Funeral album, which had just been completed. The album was absolutely stunning—I was blown away. So I called her back and said I wanted Dim Mak to do the album, but she wasn’t offering me the album. The album had already been signed away. What she was offering was an EP, which the band was calling “No Cars Go.”

I said, “If you don’t give me the album, I don’t want it.” Like an idiot.

To this day, I kick myself that I let Arcade Fire get away from Dim Mak just because of my ego. Just because my reach had started to exceed my grasp and I was starting to get a little too full of myself. Keep in mind, Arcade Fire probably had no idea this woman was reaching out, because these were early, early days for the band. They didn’t have a big team behind them. They were all scrambling, and this lawyer/manager was just trying to get their demo out ahead of the album, maybe get a buzz going, thinking we could help each other out.

And we could have, if my head had been a little smaller, and here it would be good to report that I learned my lesson after this one misstep and immediately set things right, but that’s not exactly how it went down. There’s a learning curve, you know. You figure it out as you go along. You get taken down a couple pegs and you start to realize you’re not all that … you’re only a little bit of that.

Meanwhile, I was hitting the Los Angeles music scene—smacking the shit out of it, actually. I was out every night, bouncing from one club to the next, always on the lookout for the next big thing. I’d work all day on Dim Mak stuff and go out all night—not exactly the best mix for a healthy lifestyle, but I was young and invincible and feeling like I was on top of the world.

There was this bar I used to go to in those days called Three Clubs, on the corner of Santa Monica and Vine. I was living in central Hollywood, in a crappy-great apartment: nine hundred square feet, nine hundred bucks. A good deal, if you didn’t mind the neighborhood, which felt like the epicenter for every drug dealer, pimp, and prostitute in town. My street was beyond sketchy, but I loved it. There was a ton of excitement, this sense that anything could happen, at any time, and I was right in the middle of it.

There was a bartender at Three Clubs named Cali DeWitt, and he became my very first true friend in Los Angeles. Turned out he knew who I was, knew about Dim Mak, had been to a couple Pickle Patch shows in Santa Barbara … had even been to see some of the bands I used to play with. We were cut in a lot of the same ways. Cali was a punk kid at heart, with long-standing roots in the local music scene. His brother Nick was the drummer for a band I’d signed to Dim Mak called Pretty Girls Make Graves—a name they’d pinched from a line in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.

We hit it off. Cali had this insane record collection, and he thought my collection was solid, so we were always talking about records, listening to records, going to see all these new bands. We were part of a very small subset of the culture that was big into vinyl, big into learning everything there was to know about our favorite artists. It was like an obsession with us.

One night, he put it out that he wanted me to DJ at his bar—said he thought it’d be cool for me to bring some of my records down, maybe turn people on to some of the music and artists we loved. He said, “Your collection is sick. People will be into it.”

I didn’t even understand what it meant to DJ, to work with two turntables and a mixer. But Cali said he had whatever equipment I’d need, and that he’d show me how to do it.

His idea was to run a special promo night called Sides, where people like me would come in and play entire sides of our favorite records—presumably in front of a bar filled with a whole bunch of other people like me.

He said, “Play whatever you want.”

I said, “Hardcore?”

He said, “Whatever.”

Cali couldn’t pay me, other than letting me run a bar tab—probably didn’t even occur to me that I should be paid. Wasn’t any kind of career move. It was just me spinning records at a small corner bar, for maybe forty, fifty people. But I showed up at Three Clubs with a couple crates of records—seven-inch, twelve-inch. They weren’t dance records. They weren’t hip-hop records. I had no idea if the people at the bar would be into my music, but Cali said to play what I wanted, so I took him at his word. He sat me down in the back corner, showed me how to use the two turntables he had set up—straightforward stuff, you know. He showed me what the needles were designed to do, how to use the mixer. I had a record player at home, and I’d logged some time at our college radio station, so I wasn’t flying completely blind. I was a long way from beat-matching, but I had the basics down. I might not have been ready to really call myself a DJ, but I could put together the most lit Spotify-type playlist and fill the room with the music that mattered to me.

As long as I’m coming completely clean on my rookie abilities as a DJ, I guess I should clarify my role at my college radio station. I never got a chance to do my thing at the main campus radio station, KCSB, but I did have an overnight slot at our second-tier station, KJUC, which we all called K-Juice. The name was a bit of an overstatement, because there wasn’t a whole lot of juice to what we were doing. We were a minor-league operation, and you could only pick up our signal in this one little corner of campus. I was convinced I was broadcasting into a vacuum, and there were a lot of nights when I’d challenge listeners to call in with a request, or just to let me know they were out there. I’d threaten to play Extreme’s “More Than Words” on a back-to-back loop if I didn’t get a call in the next ten minutes, or whatever, and that usually did the trick.

Back to my DJ debut …

The very first song I dropped that night at Three Clubs was a cut off Born Against’s Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children, and in keeping with the theme of this book I’m happy to report that the album jacket was an image of an American flag set against a blue background.

(It’s all blue!)

When the music came on, I looked out across the bar and saw this sea of confused, annoyed faces. Don’t know what kind of music those folks were into, but it sure as hell wasn’t … this. But Cali was digging it, and I guess he was the guy I was playing to. He didn’t give a fuck—and, just then, neither did I. All I cared about was playing my records, letting my music breathe. It felt to me like a kind of calling, like it was on me to spin this music and put it out in the world. (It would be a while before I figured out that the job of DJs is to help people have a good time, not to amuse themselves by cranking the volume on their cherished records. To play what people wanted to hear.) Cali’s deal was to disrupt, shake things up, push people’s buttons—and bringing me in to share my hardcore collection was just one way to do that. He’d go on to design clothes for Kanye West, and to become a true visionary in the LA street-culture scene, but here he was just mixing drinks and kicking up a little dust.

Out of that first gig, Cali and I decided to form our own DJ group. Wasn’t like my debut as a DJ was any kind of runaway success, but we were caught up in it. We would just play hardcore punk records. We would call ourselves DJ Cry Babies. I would be DJ Cry, and Cali would be DJ Babies—only we never actually got around to playing anywhere. We just talked about it, same way we used to talk about all the things we wanted to do in and around the local music scene. And it just worked out that this was the one and only time I DJed at Three Clubs—not because I sucked at it so much but because it just never came up again. Cali would get these wild ideas all the time, his head was always spinning, and by the end of the week his Sides idea was played.

I kept going out to all these bars, all these clubs, and now that I was in the mix I was looking for places to play my music. I got it in my head that it was like spinning records at K-Juice, only here there’d be a bunch of people right in front of me, so I could play to an audience. That Three Clubs scene wasn’t really my scene; I was hoping to play for some like-minded souls. I’d spent all those years putting together this massive record collection, and now my buddy Cali had turned me on to the idea of maybe sharing it, so I wanted to keep that going. I liked the idea of turning people on to a whole new sound, or maybe reintroducing them to a style of music they hadn’t heard in a while.

There was this one club I went to, Echo, and I eventually talked my way into a DJ gig there. By this point, I think I’d played a half-dozen or so sets around town and I still didn’t have any equipment of my own. I didn’t even have a name, was just going by Steve Aoki, although there was a time or two in there when I billed myself as DJ Cry—just, you know, to try it out.

I was spending a lot of time at Amoeba Music, this record shop I used to go to, buying up all kinds of records. I was starting to realize that I needed to play a little bit of everything, so I loaded up on hip-hop, house, R&B, indie, dance music … whatever I thought would get a crowd moving. Not only was I not getting paid for these gigs—I was shelling out money to fill in some of the holes in my collection.

When the gig came around on the calendar, I showed up at Echo with all these new records and set up to do my thing. There was an emcee on the mic trying to hype up the crowd. I had this Kelis song cued up I was going to open with called “Millionaire,” featuring André 3000, and the emcee came over to me to ask how I wanted to be billed. It just worked out that there was this line from the song that went, “Mama, I’m a millionaire,” and it was stuck in my head, so I said, “Hey, I’m Mama Millionaire.”

The emcee looked at me like I was brainless—said, “Yo, that’s no dude’s name. You can’t be Mama Millionaire. You should be Papa Billionaire.”

I didn’t like the sound of that one, so I gave it some thought—not a lot, but some, ’cause I was about to go on. I couldn’t be “Papa” anything, I was just a kid, and from there I made the leap to thinking I could be Kid Millionaire, so I put it out there.

The emcee went out to introduce me—“Put your hands together for DJ Kid Millionaire!”—and it rang like bells in a church. I thought, Holy shit! Great fucking name!

And it was. For a while.

So I started going by DJ Kid Millionaire, and it stuck. A couple weeks later, the name had grown big enough to get me my first paying gig, at another club I used to go to called Spaceland, and here again my head for business didn’t do me any favors. The gig paid $75, but for the first time I had to bring my own sound system, so I hit up my friends, friends of friends. Nobody had the right mix of speakers and turntables, so I had to scramble. (Shout-out to my friend Sam Spiegel for hooking me up with whatever I needed!) It ended up that I had to lay out about $100 just to “borrow” all this equipment and get it set up, and it didn’t take a genius to see the math didn’t exactly make sense.

Still, I did the gig and counted it a good deal. I mean, it was a paying gig, right? That’s the way my mind worked—or, the way it didn’t work, I guess. I told myself it was a step up from the shows I’d been doing for free, even though it was actually costing me money and I was coming out behind.

It would have helped if I didn’t suck. I was spinning my own vinyl, learning on the fly, and it just wasn’t happening. I was train-wrecking, big-time, but I got better as the night went along. Each time out, I’d discover something new—some new technique or trick of the trade—and here on this first paying gig I finally had my song selection down. I was playing to the crowd. Notorious B.I.G. Bloc Party. LCD Soundsystem. Wasn’t exactly my music, but people were up, moving, having a big old time.

End of the night, I went up to the guy who ran the place and asked if I could maybe play there again.

He said, “Guess so.”

(Not exactly a ringing endorsement—but I’d take whatever I could get.)

I said, “One thing, though. It cost me a hundred bucks to rent all this gear. Any chance you could give me another twenty-five dollars so I’m not out of pocket?”

And here it’s not like the guy even had to think about it. He just said, “Actually, no. Was thinking of giving you fifty next time, because you weren’t very good.”

So that was my last paying gig for a while.

Cut to a couple months later, when I ran into a friend of mine named Frankie Chan, outside this venue called El Rey. He was passing out flyers for a Thursday-night party he was throwing called Fucking Awesome. Frankie had this whole fun, indie thing happening with that party; I’d been by a few times, and we got to talking. I told him about the DJ gigs I was trying to line up, and he already knew me as a promoter. He knew what I had going on with Dim Mak, knew I was plugged-in around town, knew I had this rep as an indie record guy with all these cool underground connections.

Frankie and Har Mar Superstar were the main DJs of the party, and they were buddies with two guys named Mike Piscitelli and Jason Dill, who had this very small streetwear brand called “Fucking Awesome,” and that’s where they got the name. The brand was so small they would literally just make shirts for their friends, but it had a whole lot of cred, even in this small way.

Whatever Frankie had going on with his Fucking Awesome party, I wanted in, so I asked if he needed any help handing out flyers, hustling, getting the word out. Told him I just wanted to help him fill the room and play a set. Don’t know why, but I was really selling myself, wanting to get some traction going on the DJ front, and Frankie was willing to give me a shot. Maybe it’s because that party reminded me in some way of the Pickle Patch shows we used to stage in Santa Barbara. It was homemade, homespun, bare-bones. It was authentic. I wasn’t thinking in any kind of scheming way—like how great it would be to have a venue to break our Dim Mak artists. No, it was more of a sideline pursuit, something to do to fill the time, maybe rediscover the stoke that lit me and my housemates back in college, when we were putting on all those shows—and yeah, maybe there’d be some crossover benefit to what we were trying to build over at Dim Mak, but that would have just been a bonus at this point.

Frankie told me I could play, but I would have to play for free. After that, if everything worked out, he’d be able to pay me fifty bucks a throw.

Sounded good to me. I mean, I’d get my name on the flyer. I’d be on the bill with Har Mar Superstar, the main DJ who was headlining the party. It wasn’t much, but at the same time, it was a big, big deal … it was fucking awesome!

That first night, I was the opening DJ. I was playing as people were filing in, which meant I was just playing to the bartenders. There was a lot of chatter, wasn’t exactly an ideal setup, but I was determined to make it work. I had my crates of records, I had an idea in my mind of the music I would play, but then of course you’ve got to read the mood of the room, get a feel for the moment, change things up. And I figured it out, to where Frankie asked me back, to where Frankie started paying me, to where I began to develop my own little following … even to where we became partners.

Here again, I want to stress that the Fucking Awesome party wasn’t my deal. It had been going on before I got there. I didn’t start it … I didn’t name it … but once I signed on I kind of helped it along. The party was held in a small, retro-type bar in Hollywood called the Beauty Bar, done up to look like an old-fashioned beauty salon. There were salon-style chairs and hair dryers lined up on one side of the wall to make the place look like a throwback to the beauty parlors of the fifties and sixties. It had a kitschy feel that people seemed to dig—only you couldn’t fit too many people in there comfortably. Uncomfortably, we could probably squeeze in 100, 125 people. The place was maybe a couple hundred square feet, with a bar on one side of the room, the DJ booth tucked all the way in the back. You couldn’t even see the booth, really—all night long, people would stumble upon it and think maybe it was the coat check room.

Still, I was lucky to be there, happy for the opportunity, even if it was a shit gig starting out. First couple times, I actually got there way early, so I could get comfortable working the turntables. The bartenders would be laughing as they were setting up because I was just so awful. I got better at it, though, but it’s not like there was this intense pressure to step up my game—people weren’t coming out to the Beauty Bar to hear the opening DJ anyway. Matter of fact, that was pretty much the culture at the time, all over town. If you weren’t a top-tier celebrity DJ, nobody really gave a shit about you or your set. That explained the nothing-special DJ booth we had in the back, where no one could really see you, but the thing about downplaying your DJ booth like that is that it’s hard to get a party going. The energy is where the DJ is, right? So it follows that if you put the DJ in the corner, there’s no energy.

That all started to change with our Fucking Awesome party. The room quickly filled with energy … kinetic, frenetic, combustible energy. Thursday nights, we were the place to be. All these great indie-hipster bands coming through town would make it a point to check us out. We set it up so we were like the after-party following their shows. In our own little world, we were blowing up, turning people away at the door. Every week, we were slammed, and the noise we were making just got louder and louder.

The whole time, I was still finding my way as a DJ. If anything, I was more of a curator than a true DJ back then. A trend-spotter, a tastemaker. I had the music part down, but I was still finding my way on the technical side. My thing was to share the bands I loved in this underground way. No pretense. No staging. No bells and whistles. It was just a way to keep the party going, to promote our Dim Mak artists, earn a little extra money on the side.

Eventually, the main DJ started going out on tour and it fell to me to headline, and that gave us the legs to do more parties. Within a couple months, our Fucking Awesome parties started to morph into the Dim Mak Tuesdays parties I ended up running for a bunch of years in a bigger venue up the street—an old movie theater called Cinespace. That party just exploded, became the most poppin’ indie party in LA. We had all the big-time bands coming to DJ: Interpol, the Shins, the Killers, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs …

If you step back and trace the genealogy of it, our Cinespace hookup came straight out of our Beauty Bar parties. That’s how it usually worked in our underground culture—one thing led to another. How it worked here was we’d struck up a friendship with a guy named Jason Stewart—an artist/promoter who went by the name Them Jeans. Jason was this freakishly tall fixture on the scene, maybe 6'10", so he really stood out. Hard not to notice. He was coming to all of our parties, and he took us aside one night and told us he had an open slot at this old movie theater that had been converted into an event space. The place was huge compared to our Beauty Bar digs. It was originally a kind of dinner-and-a-movie lounge, so there was a lot of unconventional space. There was a small room in front, maybe four hundred square feet, but then there was this giant open space, with room for maybe six hundred people. And, a stage! So—fuck, yeah!—we jumped at the chance to move our party over there.

Things kicked up a whole bunch of notches with this move to Cinespace, which was where all these cultures started to collide. By this point, I’d been DJing at parties for all these different magazines—five, six, seven parties a week—and now we had a stage where some of these artists who had been coming through for our parties could actually perform. Rock acts, pop acts, hip-hop acts, other DJs … we were already out there on that cutting edge, but now these artists had a place to play. One of the great side benefits to these parties, that “bonus” I talked about earlier, was the way these gigs let me feature a lot of our Dim Mak artists. They gave us an important platform, but off that we started showcasing all these other up-and-coming acts as well. Labels were hitting us up, managers and agents, everybody wanting to get their talent in on our scene, and we put it out there that there was room enough under our tent for everyone. And just like it was with the Pickle Patch phenomenon we’d created back in Santa Barbara, people started to think that you weren’t happening as an artist in town if you weren’t happening under our roof.

One thing about our Cinespace setup: almost as soon as we started doing our thing there, we moved our DJ booth front and center, and it just worked out that the best spot for it was up against a brick wall. Trouble was, we blasted the music so loud in there, I ended up with permanent damage to my left ear—an occupational hazard, I guess. The trade-off, though, was that the DJ began to take on a more prominent role. Wasn’t just me, in that spot. It was like a shift in the culture.

Our personalities were out there.

Our energy was out there.

We were out there.

After a while, I became a partner in the venue, and our Cinespace Tuesdays became Dim Mak Tuesdays—a never-ending party that ran for over ten years. It was around this time I started working with my manager, Matt Colon. That gets a shout here for how it came about, because it was an unlikely collaboration. Matt was working as the marketing director for BPM and Vapors, two influential magazines on the dance and indie-hipster scenes. The sister publications used to host a monthly party at Cinespace on Tuesdays, until our Tuesday party started to blow up and they had to move to another night. Over the next year or so, we developed a good working friendship. Things could have gone another way between us, I guess, because we’d kind of pushed the magazines off their spot on the calendar, but Matt wasn’t like that. We got along. He would bring me on to DJ at a lot of his parties—in San Francisco, New York, and Miami, as well as Los Angeles—because I was a good reflection of that hipster, skateboarder vibe he had going with Vapors. In those days, I was known more as a promoter and an indie-label guy than a DJ, so I didn’t really belong in the pages of BPM just yet, or at their parties. But with Vapors, I fit right in.

After a while, Matt’s parties became a bigger deal than the magazines they were meant to promote. The business kind of flipped away from print and into this event culture that was taking shape. Matt and I used to travel together during this time, and we’d hang out a lot when we were in LA. I can remember a conversation we had one night over dinner at a Thai restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, where I was whining about how difficult it was for me to track all the booking requests that were starting to come my way. I’d never been great about responding to the pile of emails lining up in my in-box, so I was missing out on gigs that would come and go before I could even respond to an invitation for me to DJ. Yeah, those gigs were only paying me $100 or so, maybe $200, but I was counting on that extra money to cover my bills.

I said, “I need someone to keep me on track with all of this.”

Matt said, “I’ll do it for you.”

And that’s how our partnership was born. We started with a handshake. It took a couple years for Matt to sign on full-time. He kept doing his thing for the magazines, but after a while there was enough money coming in for him to step away from his day job. One of his first acts on my behalf was to convince me to reject all those $100 and $200 offers that came my way. He put it out there that I wouldn’t show up for less than $500, and I remember being a little freaked out about that, thinking nobody would pay me that kind of money, but the offers kept coming in at about the same rate. I was grateful to Matt for pushing me to rethink what I was worth.

One of the first big gigs he set up for me was a Super Bowl after-party in Detroit, early on in 2006. The party was being thrown by Hewlett-Packard, and somehow Matt was able to get me $5,000 for an appearance. The number was astronomical—way more than I’d ever seen on one deal. It was a good payday for Matt, too, with his 10 percent cut, so we set off for Detroit feeling pretty great about ourselves. I’d be playing with Queens of the Stone Age, who were just out with their Lullabies to Paralyze album, so this was a huge deal—but we almost missed the party. We fell asleep at the gate, and we didn’t hear the damn boarding call for our connecting flight, even though we were sitting in the first row of chairs in the waiting area. They kept calling our names, and calling our names, and we were there the whole fucking time, and when we finally woke up we had to scramble to get our asses on another plane. In the end, Matt had to call ahead and arrange for a police escort to get us to the event through all that Super Bowl traffic, but we managed to make it there with a couple minutes to spare.

It was around this time, too, that I first met Adam Goldstein—DJ AM—who started coming to our parties in 2005 or so. I’ll write more about AM a little later on in these pages, but for now I just want to put it out there that he was the great exception to my nobody-gives-a-shit-about-DJs observation. He was the king of the DJs. He was the one dating Nicole Richie, the one playing private parties for celebrity clients like Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio, the one with the household name. The rest of us were just pretenders to his throne, so when he started coming to our parties to check us out, I was floored. Oh, man … there’s no way to overstate the influence this guy was having on our emerging scene, so just having him at one of our parties was major. Having him become a regular … are you fucking kidding me?

You have to remember, this was back before social media. These were the days of MySpace and Instant Messaging, which essentially meant you had to actually be in the clubs to find out about this music. You had to be in the scene to experience the scene. You couldn’t do it in your bedroom, you had to get off your ass and seek it out, and like any good curator/tastemaker/promoter, DJ AM was out there checking it out. Checking us out.

Out of that, we decided to put our heads together and launch a whole new party—Banana Split, which was like the culmination of everything we’d been doing in our separate orbits. It was this great convergence of underground culture and mainstream culture … and after that it was only a matter of time before some of AM’s huge star power started to rub off on little old me.

I look back on that time and I still get chills. We had all these amazing artists coming through. will.i.am. The Black Eyed Peas. LMFAO. Skrillex. Kanye West. Our parties became a thing, and DJs from around the world came to soak up the culture, to taste what we were putting out there. It was a magical, meaningful time—a tsunami of music and art and a moment that hasn’t really been duplicated since. I was so fucking thrilled to be in its middle—God, it was insane. Los Angeles was like this great magnet for all these tremendous artists—still is!—so eventually we had all these groundbreaking talents turn up to play: Lady Gaga, Kid Cudi, M.I.A.… Really, it makes my head spin, just to think of the artists we were able to feature. If you were an artist coming up, if you were a producer, a head of a label, you had to come out to our parties. From Jimmy Iovine to the Killers to Drake … it felt to us like we were the music scene.

I’m not putting this out there to blow smoke—this was how it was.

One thing I hadn’t counted on, though, was how my DJ name might get me into some trouble, once people actually knew who I was. I should have seen it coming. I’d just liked the sound of it, you know. DJ Kid Millionaire. Never really thought it all the way through, but then, when the DJ thing really started to percolate, when the editors of BPM magazine finally decided to put me on the cover, I caught a lot of heat for it. The editors of the magazine took a lot of heat for it, too, mostly because I’d yet to earn my cred as a DJ. The haters lined up against me, started talking shit about how the “Son of Benihana” had his chest out, was boasting about having all that money. Wasn’t like that, though. Wasn’t like my father had given any of us a thing, other than his name and his work ethic. All those years, me scrambling to make my rent, me digging my way out from under the pile of debt I was racking up at Dim Mak, me spending $200 on a plane ticket to fly to a $100 DJ gig, me pinching copies from Kinko’s to promote my shows while my buddy Mike Phyte looked the other way … I was DIY, all the way. Self-made, all the way. Figuring it out, in what ways I could. Holding all these moving parts together with grit and Scotch tape.

The criticism stung. I’d spent my whole life getting teased and taunted for who I was, for who I wasn’t. I could never quite fit myself in, growing up in Newport Beach. I bounced around to all these different schools. I was the quintessential outsider, and it didn’t help that I had a father who seemed to thrive when he was out of his element. Mostly, it didn’t help that I had a father who was mentioned in the newspaper. The other kids would jump to all these conclusions about me, thinking that because my father ran this famous chain of restaurants, that meant I was rich, or thought I was special, or entitled. Wasn’t like that, either. But try telling that to a bunch of middle-school kids who were just scrambling to fit in themselves.

So when I started getting all this negative feedback on my DJ name, I tried to transition from it right away. Couldn’t shed DJ Kid Millionaire entirely—I had to phase it out over the next while, because that was how I’d become known. I started booking myself as “Steve Aoki, Kid Millionaire,” and then eventually I was able to drop the stage name and just do my thing as myself.

Wherever this DJ thing was gonna take me, it would take me as I was.