DJJD Music: DJJD Volume 1

DJJD Volume 1, my first Compact Disc compilation album, was conceived on a calm, cold, yet sunny winter day (January 2, 2001) within the confines of the office of a computer consulting firm. Due to the winter holidays, many of us employees came back to the office with not much work to do, and the big boss man would not be for the duration of the work week. We had some non-work related spare time to consume that day.

The whole conception of this album started out as a fluke. While conversing with numerous non-work related topics with other employees, the subject matter of classic rock music came into the conversation. This conversation caught the ear of a co-worker who was the main network maintenance expert as well as dealing with work supplies, security, etc. We both discussed similar bands that were our favorites: The Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra, Alan Parsons Projects, etc. And then something popped into my head.

I was bringing up the point that it would be awesome to create a custom CD album, just like I use to do in my high school years through the mini-cassette media, recording from my stereo system. I thought that would be so much better, selecting a personal set of songs and creating a new and organic album, instead of buying multiple CDs and then enjoying one or two songs from the whole set. I recalled a news TV segment long ago about a music record store that gave you that ability but recorded it on cassette instead of CDs. As mentioned on the news segment, the customer would select a list of songs they would like (in their particular order), and the store clerk would automatically record, or dub, those songs onto the cassette.

Remember that in 2001, the ability to burn CDs was not a practical ability at that time. Having a CD-ROM burner was the latest technology for most businesses and not readily available for personal use.

I mentioned to this network employee that I already created my personal and prized album DJJD 1987, recorded on a TDA SA 120-minute Super High-Resolution cassette. While I was reminiscing about this to him, he was nodding his head and basically saying that we have the ability to do this right now. My jaw dropped! How!?

Well, he mentioned to me this new and controversial software called Napster, which was the big talk at the time. The major music industry was fighting over the whole existence of this software, where people can swamp and share songs throughout the internet completely free. A cunning and mischievous proposal he made. He proposed installing this Napster software for a brief amount of time, just enough time for me to extract the songs I selected. After that, he would uninstall it immediately, so it would not affect our network security, and not get the big boss man angry. He had just installed a CD-ROM burner on another machine not that long ago. We could extract the music files from the network and burn them directly on the CD. We had a span of about 30 minutes to do this.

Jumping from my chair like a kid opening up presents on Christmas morning, I said, “Yes! Yes! Let’s do it!” So I began writing up my list of songs to extract, while he installed Napster. These songs were on the top of my head that I really wanted badly at that time. Most of them were soft rock and pop songs I will admit, but that was the mood that I was in at that moment of time. We extracted the songs, I put them in the order I selected, and he burned the CD for me.

What I selected was basically what is on the final album, except for the song Classical Gas by Mason Williams (eventually added to DJJD Volume 2 and Draggin’ the Line by Tommy James & the Shondells (eventually added to DJJD Volume 6). The quality of the audio of those songs was not that great, many of them, not full tracks (cutting off in the beginning or ending of the tracks) or were just a purely bad recording.

I needed to print a disk label on the CD – nothing fancy since we did not have colored printers. The label would contain the basic information – Album Title, date of creation, and who created it. I was trying to think of an Album Title. Since my cassette album, DJJD 1987 was fresh in my memory, I decided to title the CD album DJJD Volume 1, thinking that this was the beginning of things to come.

The total time in the effort that day took roughly two hours, only 30 minutes to extract the songs; the rest dealing with the song order, burning the CD, and creating the disc label. I was so excited after it was completed, thanking him many times that day and later that week. For me, I was like a child on Christmas Day. It was wonderful. He would have not known later that his efforts would spark me in creating than 30 CD albums, various DVD videos, and creating this document that is being read right now. He helped respawn a wondrous and creative monster – that doppelganger of myself DJJD.

It all started on that on a calm, cold, yet bright winter day.

Thanks again, that nice and wonderful network co-work of years past. You will not be forgotten.

Origin of DJJD

DJJD was a concept that came to me in my personal “great musical awakening”, which occurs around the mid to late eighties. By the end of 1985, I was getting completely fed up with top 40 music. The golden age of New Wave (MTV) music, starting out in 1981 was not so golden anymore. The quality of the music was going downhill. Michael Jackson and Madonna were the big giants in contemporary music, where their performances became more important than the actual songs themselves – basically style over substance. The video was more important than actually listening to the music. Hitting in that teenage rebellious age, I became abhorrent to the notion of what my so-called peers told me was good or bad. Who cared if it was hip or not, or if it was in the “Top 20 countdown” or not. Was the song good enough to stand the test of time? I did not want to be bounded or limited to just contemporary genres of music. At that time, my knowledge of music and its history was quite limited, and that included the Beatles and any other great classic rock/pop bands. In fact, I was exposed and mocked by some peers when ignorant of what album the Doors’ song Spanish Caravan resides. “You say that you are a fan of the Doors and you don’t know that basic information? You are a fake.” That affected me a lot, promising that this will not be the case in the future.

During this great awakening, I was recording songs from the best classic rock station at that time WYMG 100.5 on my father’s stereo and eventually on my new stereo system starting Christmas of 1986. I began dubbing whole vinyl albums on cassette that I checked out from the local library: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, songs from the Doors, Elton John, and so on. I was also digging up my parents’ vinyl record collection, recalling the times I would listen to them in the late seventies as a kid.

I was so enthralled and absorbed into the old universe of classic rock/pop that I felt that I was becoming my own DJ. Then a moment of inspiration hit me. I was trying to think up a cool DJ name for me, just like Dr. Johnny Fever from that classic TV Series WKRP in Cincinnati. I looked at a distance at my parents’ record collection, all ordered in alphanumeric order. The first album exposed in the container was mom’s ABBA Greatest Hits vinyl album, I got the idea to label any cassette I created with DJJD: DJ (Disk Jockey) + JD (Jonathan Dysart). It just fit perfectly.

A month or two after finishing the cassette album DJJD 1987, my father passed away. After that experience, the alias DJJD has been burned in me ever since and still used today. It’s basically been my alter ego.

Start of the Concept Album

I can write a whole thesis on this statement: The order of the songs on an album does affect the enjoyment of the music, whether it is emotionally or spiritually as well as what the creator of the album is trying to convey to the listener.

History of the LP

To get a point of reference, let’s look back in popular music history. Before the release of the Beatles’ famed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967, and the Beach Boys Pets Sounds, most LP (long player) albums were pretty much a collection of songs from the artist or composer. It would contain basically one or two hit songs with the rest being filler tracks that no novice fan would listen. Most music consumers bought 45 RPMs, just to listen to their singles.

Then many artists like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Moody Blues, The Who, etc., came to town and changed the whole perception of the LP. Even in the early recordings, the Beatles emphasized giving their fans quality songs (not fillers) on their album, promising to release their singles separate from their album so that their fans would not be cheated. This mentality spread to many other rock bands, added credibility and the demand to buy LPs albums.

After the release of Sgt. Pepper, the idea of actually using an LP album to create a piece of art instead of a collection of songs spread among the mainstream bands. The idea of the concept album blossomed, whereby the album has a theme, concept, or specific message that they could convey to their listeners. The theme could be a common melody style, like the Beatles Rubber Soul or the Beach Boys Pet Sounds. It could be more poetic and message-driven, like Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It could be a broad concept, like the Who’s The Who Sell Out (whereby the album sounded like a typical British radio broadcast in hip London) or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (whereby the album is a concert of a fictitious band). And finally, it could have specific story concepts or ideas, like the Who’s rock opera Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. These concept albums made rock music more of an art form (more substance than style) instead of a just another means of storing a collection of songs.

Unfortunately, many artists today have retorted back of old, where they're known for only their hits and not their albums. MTV and MP3 have played a big role in breaking up the concept of an album. I am just attempting to bring that back in my own little way.

Order of the Songs

In classical symphonic music with the likes of composers Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etc., there is a certain order and structure of the music at large, which takes the listener through a musical journey, either in broad generalities or specific ideas. Use Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony as an example. The symphony is broken down into four “movements” or sections of music. Everyone is familiar with the famous “duh duh duh duh” portion of this Symphony; it’s full of energy and not subtle. That famous piece of music is actually the first movement of four in Beethoven’s famous symphony. The other three movements are not as known and not as energetic as the first movement. But what if the first movement that everybody knows was actually the third movement or the fourth movement? It would be out of place when listening to it linearly. The first movement is composed and designed to grab the listener’s attention immediately.

To go back to the point of the LP vinyl, it has limited space. To fit Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony on the vinyl, it would be broken out into a double album. The first two movements would be the first LP (Side A and B). The last two movements would be on the second LP (Side A and B). If you translate that to the storage capacity of a typical CD (which is 80 minutes) to the vinyl LP, it would approximately be the size of a double LP album.

Concept Albums to Reference

For an associated example of rock music, two great albums come to mine in this regards: Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Beatles’ White Album. Both of them are double LP albums.

Pink Floyd’s The Wall is a concept album which presents a story of a man named Pink, who reveals to his audience his whole life from birth to the present and all the pain in his life. There is a definite order to the double album. The song Another Brick in the Wall: Part 1, located on Side A on the first album, in about how Pink observes British schools as being like a prison. The Trial song, located on Side B on the second album, is the climax to Pink’s emotional trauma. What if the order of the songs were switched? It would be completely awkward listening to it in that random order. It would be like reading the last chapter of a novel in the middle of the novel.

The White Album is not a concept album in regarding to a specific story or message, but the songs are arranged in a way that allows the listener to follow a musical journey – not by lyrics but by melody. Paul McCartney’s song Back in the U.S.S.R., the first track of this double album, is energetic and catchy. It’s a song that’s comfortable listening to first to open the album. The song Birthday is also energetic and catchy, and it’s the first track on the second disk of the double album. John Lennon’s songs Julia and Good Night are tracks that songs that feel perfectly emotionally to be played last. In this case, they are both the last song of each of the double album, Julia on the first and Good Night on the second.

Another factor of the White Album is that it contains a wide variety of songs and styles: small and big tracks, soft and hard rock, pop and advent garde. Many critics and fans of the White Album accept the fact that the songs were not truly Beatles songs, but a combination of material done by the four separately. You can know what track is a Paul McCartney, a John Lennon, a George Harrison, or a Ringo Starr song. These multitudes of songs with variety in style all combined into one organic and cohesive entity. In that case, it is a Beatles album.

I use the White Album widely is the template when selecting and ordering songs that I compile into every DJJD album CD. I try and make each album stand out as a separate and unique entity. The album DJJD Volume 1 has a different tone and concept that to DJJD Volume 5 or others. When trying to make a concept album that expresses specific meanings, I try and use Pink Floyd’s The Wall as a template.

Changing the Perception of a Song

If a thought has occurred that I am being snobbish or being full of myself, let me show you an example of how a listener’s perception of a song by itself can be completely altered. Two excellent examples of this are done by movie directors: Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino.

The classical track Also Sprach Zarathustra from composer Richard Strauss and On the Beautiful Blue Danube from composer Johann Strauss II, was just classical masterpieces in their own right. Director Stanley Kubrick incorporates those two pieces into his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the release of that movie, those two musical classics are forever associated with this movie.

In the rock and pop world, there is a somewhat obscure song in 1968 called Son of a Preacher Man by female artist Dusty Springfield. Director Quentin Tarantino incorporated the song into his movie Pulp Fiction, forever changing its perception to the listening audience. Other songs that Tarantino transformed were Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel, Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Nancy Sinatra, Woo Hoo by The 5,6.7.8’s, The Lonely Shepherd by Gheorghe Zamfir, and lastly Misirlou by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones.

Conclusion

If it’s possible to alter the song’s perception within a movie by a director, then I believe it is possible to do so when compiling them into a new album concept. I believe it is possible to arrange the track order to create a new musical journey for a listener as well as creating a new and organic entity onto itself. That’s has been my artistic and creative challenge to do with all of my DJJD CD collections from the beginning, where I sometimes fail or succeed at this.

To implement this challenge, I consciously broke down the 80 minutes CD as a double album or four sections: Album 1: Side A / Side B; Album 2: Side A / Side B. Take the tracks that I selected and arrange them in a particular order. Throwing a bunch of songs together into a CD (or MP3) just for the sake of holding it is a waste of potential, boring, and lacks any artistic challenge.

But the funny thing about this whole idea is taking the challenge, try it out, and the attempt of expressing yourself through the creation of your own CD album. Is that the essence of art anyway?

Concept and Theme of the Album

When creating the covers of these albums, I try and conceptualize a picture of what the general theme and concept will be. Just like the concept of the album, this could be something specific, general or broad stroked themes, or have an emotional impression.

As I mentioned before, this album was created on the fly. It was my first time doing this since and had limited time to do so. In hindsight, these songs I selected could have been what I felt emotionally or subconsciously at that time, thus giving it an overall personal and emotional impression. Looking back at that time of this creation, I was at the forefront of a deep and emotional depression that lasted several years, going through a complete sense of loneliness, despair, and a total lack of control of my life. I was having serious doubts about my faith and what was right and wrong. Those emotional impact, I believe, betrayed itself in this first album DJJD Volume 1.

Like the album cover, my emotional and spiritual life was in utter chaos, like a bad and rushing storm. The album contains songs of sadness with some fun and happy song, as well as fantasy dream songs of escape from my dreary world at that time. Even though comprised largely of soft rock tracks, the musical journey of this album is emotionally up and down, like a roller coaster or a bipolar patient. The album then ends with a complete escape from everything into the vast expanse.

DJJD Music

Thursday, June 6, 2013

DJJD Volume 1

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