Holiday '03 - Parties: A Picture Of Health
Published in the April 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
By Jeff Stiles

After finally booking that prime client’s holiday party—the one he’d been courting since 1985—Iowa’s Dave Lundon was pumped. Unfortunately, his excitement ended shortly after the party began. “After I played two hours of Manheim Steamroller music, the client brought in a hypnotist with a serious attitude problem,” says the Cedar Rapids-based Lundon. “This guy did his schtick for an hour while we were there for six hours, and he got paid three times what we got paid!” Of course, after the hypnotist finished, Lundon did move on from jazz-flavored instrumental Christmas tunes to favorites such as “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and the “Cha-Cha Slide,” but it was still nothing out of the ordinary and truly nothing spectacular. In fact, for this Midwestern DJ, the 2003 holiday season remains a sore subject.

For mobile DJs everywhere, December holiday parties represent a cash cow, the one monetary infusion we anticipate all year. But they can also be a grueling routine of red-nosed reindeer songs and brown-nosing employee speeches. With the nation’s economy apparently just beginning to recover, and most companies still hesitant to invest profits, how did the season go for mobile entertainers? When contacted, DJs from throughout the country offered a variety of prognoses for holiday parties 2003.

Location Is Everything?
Some of the opportunities for success with holiday parties last season may have been related to location. Ken Heath, a former Idaho DJ who last year relocated his business to southern California, says his move to points western resulted in an avalanche of December events.

“I nearly tripled my gigs by simply relocating to southern California,” claims Heath. “After 10 years DJing in Idaho—with mucho word-of-mouth, Yellow Pages ads, brochures and website traffic—I had only two gigs in December 2002. But after a mere two weeks in California and nothing but my website and a few DJs from ProDJ.com knowing I’m here, I suddenly had five gigs from the start—and lots more Hispanic music!” Through his contacts with a DJ website, Heath says he was quick to learn ideas from regional West Coast entertainers and get quick gigs—and bring his brand of holiday parties to another part of the country.

“I played a mix of unusual jazz, lounge and holiday tunes during holiday dinners, and I worked very hard to find versions that people don’t usually hear or artists they’ve never experienced,” he says. “We had the whole gamut of speeches at our various functions throughout the month—from no speeches at all to a roast of the boss—complete with sappy background music for the butt-kissing parts!” For Heath, a few glow products and some fun pyramid-building games made his parties a lot more fun than the DJ could have ever experienced in The Potato State.

Walking A Fine Line
While many DJs in the Colorado area reported a slack season of holiday parties—with one DJ complaining that last year was the slowest Christmas he had seen in 26 years—Diana McKinney of Colorado’s Solid State Entertainment says that although the number of gigs were slightly up for the year, it still could not make up for an overall lousy party season.

As it turns out, the eclectic nature of the guests at Solid State’s parties sometimes created a little too much extra work for these DJs. “I had one party for a small business, and it was evident from the dinner blessing and the speeches he gave after dinner that the company owner, Ed, was a very strong Christian,” McKinney says. “The very first song one of his employees requested was not anywhere close to being clean, and so I knew right away it would be a challenge to make everyone happy.” Yes, a young female employee had requested Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” immediately following dinner—right after the DJ had been alerted that the company owner prefers two-stepping country music.

“Now, to some people, ‘Baby Got Back’ is not anything to be worried about, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given playing it a second thought,” McKinney says. “But I was really concerned about how Ed would react to this song and some of the other requests, such as ‘Strokin’.”
In the end, McKinney spent the night playing two different musical styles, alternating between high-energy tunes that appealed to the younger crowd and song sets that appealed to the older folks. “I hoped that as long as I was playing music Ed would like he would be happy. Fortunately, Ed and his employees and their spouses were all really terrific people, and in the end I had a wonderful night.”

Better Late Than Never?
In at least one part of the South, holiday parties turned out to be on target—but were booked so late in the season that Georgia’s Tim Raley nearly thought he’d have nothing to do on his weekends in December. For Raley, this past Christmas season was like none he’s ever experienced. “As a single-unit DJ I’m limited to a certain amount of dates, so I start booking early,” explains Raley of the Rome, Ga.-based Kre8shuns DJs. “Last January I sent last year’s clients my post-event survey and followed up with a phone call, but as May approached I had still only booked one event for the upcoming Christmas season—and that was with a new company I’d never entertained for before!”

In October, Raley still had only booked a single event, and started to worry. “My wife was quick to remind me about the many years I turned down gigs from calls that came in during the last week in November, and sure enough—during the last week in November the calls came in and suddenly every Friday and Saturday in December were booked!”

Of course, one of those last-minute bookings turned out to be one of Raley’s past clients who had been contacted previously by the DJ several times before—but who instead chose to wait until the very week of the gig to sign a contract.“I don’t know why this past season was so off for bookings until the last minute, but I’m just relieved it all fell into place,” Raley says. “I’ve already started working on this year’s bookings, and I just hope I can have every date locked in soon.“If not, then there is always the after-Thanksgiving rush!”

Mixed News From The Northeast
Most mobile jocks in the Northeast reported a sluggish economy—and a subsequently slow holiday season. In Massachusetts, Rob Alberti said his company’s 2003 holiday bookings were approximately half what After Hours DJ normally sees—which was in line with the previous season.“Many companies in the area just were simply not having events,” theorizes the Westfield, Mass.-based Alberti. “We ended up traveling further geographically to get the events we got, but with the recent upturn in the stock market I expect 2004 to rebound at least a bit.”

Although corporate events were down as a whole last year, for Gerry Siracusa the holiday season experienced two further setbacks“First of all, one of the two main weekends of the holiday season featured a major snowstorm that caused 80-percent of my holiday parties for that weekend to either postpone or cancel,” says Siracusa, owner of the Wayne, N.J.-based Golden Note Entertainment. “And secondly, while holiday parties have historically been spread out over the entire month, it seemed that every holiday party last year wanted to be on four or five choice dates of the month!”

Meanwhile, Elite Entertainment’s Mike Walter reported that his holiday season was up from last year—and certainly up from the morbid December 2001 of post-9/11. “We didn’t quite hit 1999 and 2000 levels,” says the Eatontown, N.J.-based jock, “but still, I’m glad to see the upturn and I hope it continues.”

He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands
Halfway around the globe, Wajih Halawah spent last December learning that holiday parties in Amman, Jordan, are way different than they were back at his previous place of employment in Iowa.
The previous New Year’s Eve would have found Halawah in Ames, Iowa, DJing for an after-hours party at a large club for college kids who were too drunk to stand—much less dance—by 2 a.m. That night, the party that was supposed to last until morning had to be shut down by 3 a.m.

But in 2003, the Jordan native was back in the country of his birth, entertaining at an ancient Arab fort called The Citadel. The courtyard of the fort was covered with a waterproof tent, and the entire area was set up with dinner tables that were covered with oriental rugs.“People in Jordan really do know how to party!” says Halawah. “The tent area featured mainstream music in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and pop/hip-hop/R&B formats, with a fantastic light show and huge dancefloor!

“The second room was actually inside the fort, rigged with moving heads under the dome and across the DJ stage. A massive wall of JBL speakers supplied the room with banging sound, and Arabic-style bench seats covered with rugs lined the walls, for those needing a break. The format was house music all night long for about 200 people in the second room alone.“I started at 9 p.m. with some disco and funky house, and moved up to percussive tribal beats all the way ’til midnight. After the countdown, another local DJ took over with darker progressive house and trance until 4 a.m., while I played a short set of hip hop and R&B in the main room. “There was no Christmas or holiday music played at all, and Des Moines would definitely have been much harder to get going as opposed to this part of the world!”