Monday, January 19
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I wasn’t able to participate in this show, but Drew is back with the 43rd installment of his highly rated podcast. Usually I’m co-hosting but I had to play at Howl at the Moon last night. But here it is for you to enjoy sans-Diggz….
Drew is back! Diggz is not. Drew takes calls from haters, as well as the usual suspects; talks about the Magic, Hudson River plane crash, and John Cusack, PLUS, he delivers an impromptu expose on the McDonald’s breakfast agenda. 1:54:00
A question I get frequently is where did the “Diggz” of “Johnny Diggz” come from? I figured that since I’m only 37 and it’s still (relatively) fresh in my mind, I’d fully document it. It’s the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s…Micky’s at my sister Cara’s bridal shower and I have nothing on my plate. And you, being my humble reader, have suddenly found yourself sucked into my story…
The “Official” Johnny Diggz story, the one that has been often reprinted is, of course, a fabrication. It’s not even a little bit true! Can you believe it? Blender Magazine’s Senior Editor Tyler Gray likes to describe the “official version”:
“Johnny Diggz?!?…oh jeez! Well the official story goes — and this is SO off-off-off the record — He was born in a tuxedo on New Year’s Eve / Didn’t know how to play, didn’t know how to sing / He saw those three wise guys and they started to jive / That’s when Diggz took the stage (Why?) Cuz he is alive!”
The truth is, humble readers, Tyler was just quoting the first verse of “(The Not Quite So) Ballady-Ballad of Johnny Diggz”. The REAL origin of the name Johnny Diggz is this:
When I was growing up I had a nickname “Higgs”. A few people still call me Higgs, but it’s pretty limited to my older sister and my Dad…and even then it’s rare. Higgs always made sense…I have the same name as my father and so rather than call us both John, they called me Higgs. It wasn’t officially a nickname until around age 9 when someone (I think it was my mom) got me a brown beach towel with the name H I G S patched across the top in big block letters.
This is also when I first discovered that no matter what your intent, until it’s actually PRINTED somewhere, a nickname is malleable. So, even though in my head it was spelled HIGGS, now that it was in print as HIGS, it was going to be an uphill PR battle to change the spelling. And that was a PR battle that this 9-year-old wasn’t willing to wage. Not in a Carter administration.
Between 1989-1993 I wrote and recorded a bunch of songs. While I never actually “released” any of them, I gave cassette tapes to a few friends and family who I thought might enjoy it. I titled that compilation “Higsmuzak”.
So flash forward a few years. I was dating Brenda and flying down to South Beach on the weekends. Southwest Airlines had this great deal…$44 roundtrip MCO to Ft. Lauderdale, which was like a 30-minute drive from Brenda’s place in North Miami Beach. So I used to go down on the weekends and go clubbing. Liquid, Groove Jet, Mac’s Club Deuce…lots of places that don’t exist anymore but at that time were “THEE place”. Supermodels, hollywood actors, internationally touring DJs…for the first time in my life I walked amongst the glitterati.
Let’s face it, there’s not a whole lot you can do in a nightclub. You have to scream to be heard over the music and you’re lucky if you can see more than 3 feet in front of you. Lights are flashing, $14 dixie-cup intoxicants washed down as fast as you can throw the bills at the bartender (assuming you can get their attention), the bass so loud it feels like your heart is doing hiccups. So you order drinks, and you dance and then you decide that the place sucks and you go on to club #2….and so on.
It was in this alcohol-chemical brothers-fueled world that I first discovered the “celebrity Disc Jockey”. Before then, to me a DJ was the guy at the skating rink or part of the “Morning Zoo” on BJ105. Not so in the club industry. Over the course of a couple of years, I got exposed to some of the cream of the trancey/housey/progressive DJ crop from around the world: Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Digweed, Kimball Collins, Noel Sanger, Luis Diaz.
Coming from a music background, this phenomenon astounded me. These guys were playing RECORDS! And they were getting hot chicks! And flying all around the world and making fist-fulls of cash. I wanted me some!
I thought it would be funny to invent a character who was THE WORST DJ ever. The DJ would be Dumb-and-Dumber stupid. He’d have lots of tattoos and bling bling. He’d play only the most popular “anthem” songs and always talk over the big parts of the songs, pointing out to the bewildered dancers that this part…THIS PART RIGHT HERE!!!…was, in fact, his favorite part of the song. Sort of like a Tony Clifton with 2 turntables and a microphone.
I called him DJ Diggs. I’ve always been a fan of names that sound like verbs. “Sting” has a great stage name. Diggs was an amalgamation of Higgs, super DJ John Digweed, and my friend JJ’s dog, “Mr. Digger”. And it was a verb. And it was just sort of an inside joke between me and Brenda and a couple of close friends. Nobody had actually ever met DJ Diggs, although I did dress as him for Halloween one year.
I actually found this recording (circa 1998?) of Orlando radio talk show host, Drew Garabo, where he talks about the early work of DJ Diggs. You can listen to it here —– > Drew Garabo talks about DJ Diggs
Check back for Part II: “The Last Rave: Tortoise in the Sun”, and the birth of Johnny Diggz.
So I was just thinking of a couple of “Firsts” for me at Howl at the Moon last night. It was my third shift since my “official” training ended. I was paired up with Joe, who I hadn’t played with in a couple of months.
Joe’s the “Head Chief” of all the entertainers at howl. He travels a lot, much of which is to help ensure some level consistency of entertainment throughout the chain (I think there are like 10 of them around the country). He auditions and hires (and I can only assume, fires) entertainers. But his home is in Central Florida, so the Orlando Howl is his home base. He also happens to be one entertaining mo-fo. It must be the shaved head.
When I started training, I played almost exclusively with Joe for the first couple of months. He’s primarily a guitar player, but this guy’s no slouch on the keys. Or the drums. Or the Bass…and his vocal range….fughettabout it. He’s a regular one-bald-man-band. He taught me the ropes. The basics…like…”hey, asshat….the audience is THAT way!” (I had a bad habit of looking at my partner instead of the audience…one I’m still working on).
But, like I said, Joe travels a lot, so just about the time I figured out which direction the audience was, he passed me off to Ken, who taught me the importance of smiling a lot. Two very important things to know in the dueling piano business, when combined it sounds very simple, but is so very true: Smile at the Audience! Sounds simple enough, huh? If it were only that easy. 
So firsts for my third shift:
1. First time doing a “call-down”.
So “call-downs” are when someone has a birthday or anniversary or whatever they’re celebrating. Usually their friends will write their name down, wrap it in some $ and stick it on the piano. So the player calls them down to the stage and (hopefully) a funny bit will ensue. Technically it’s “UP” to the stage…we should call them “Call-Ups”.
There was a girl having a birthday. I’d never done a “call down” before…I’ve always passed them off to my partner. But here was $5 in front of me and I figured I could give it try. I was going to do the BOLOGNA song (I learned it from Ken, but I don’t know where it came from originally…I imagine it’s been around for years and years in varying versions). Basically it’s a parody of the Oscar Mayer jingle involving a penis and a vagina. You get the idea.
So I call this girl, Heather, up to the stage (ahem…Call-UP?) and she looks very nervous. And I don’t know why, but at the last second I changed the song to “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling”. Don’t know why…never done that song as a call down…just did it. Anyway…it didn’t flop…wasn’t particularly entertaining, but I broke my call-down cherry. Heather didn’t even know she was my first.
2. First time playing Bass
I’ve held the bass. I’ve tuned the bass. I’ve even played along to songs before my shift once or twice. I’ve played the drums a couple of times during shows (not well). But never the bass. So we’re towards the end of the night, and we had some band requests. They were songs I didn’t know on piano, so Orin takes off the bass, hands it to me and says, with a grin, “learn it, NOW!”. So I played bass. I didn’t play fancy bass. But after some fumbling, I was grooving to “Love Shack”. And then “Don’t Stop Believing”. There was a third song in there too, but it’s already left my memory. Now I need to actually buy a bass and get some real practice time in, but for now it is good to know that, in a pinch, I can fumble my way.
3. First time leading the hand signals for “Joy to the World”
I’ve watched. I’d never done. Which was really stupid of me…I’ve seen it done by others dozens of times, but never actually physically done it myself. Joe played it, so I did it. If you’d have told me a year ago that I’d be getting paid to stand on the tops of two baby grand pianos, and lead a hundred drunk people to grab their balls and boobs, I’d have said that’s just crazy talk.
So those are just a few of the firsts from last night. I played a couple of songs that were new, but those weren’t the highlights of the evening.
Sure, nothing compared to Sunday night’s Captain Crunch Smugfest on the Drew Show. We had comedian Tom Rhodes in the studio. The podcast is up at www.drewshow.com if you want to check it out.
