noizemagazine - Index

noizemagazine - noiZe Magazine Issue 58 October 2008 - Index

Halloween in New Orleans in 1994,
when he was just 18.
“In 1994, there was great music,”
he recalled. “I hadn’t heard 80 percent
of that.” He joined her fan
club. (Who even knew there was
a Morabito fan club?) He started
seeking out and collecting all of
the music he heard her play: “Every
extra penny I earned working at the
Gap went to music.”
Finally, after two years, he had
enough mix tapes to get hired at
Oz, where he started out as one of
the house DJs, five times a week—
but no nights. It wasn’t until eight
months later that he got his first
nighttime slot.
“Things were different back then,”
he noted. “It wasn’t the age of
the traveling DJ. Clubs relied on
resident DJs. One of the regulars
got sick, and I went up to Johnny
Chisholm, Oz’s owner, and asked
for one night.” As the old show biz
movies would have put it, he went
in there a kid, but he came back out
a star. He soon after stepped up to
a Saturday night residency.
He first visited New York in 1996
and immediately fell in love with the
city. He had planned on a December
2001 move, but 9/11 postponed it
for a few more years. As soon as he
got there, he became a fixture on
the local scene at storied clubs like
Limelight (later Avalon), Twilo (later
Spirit), Crobar, Splash (then SBNY,
then Splash again), and the Pavilion
on Fire Island.
He also began releasing compilation
CDs. He even became a Billboard
reporter. It didn’t hurt that his brooding
good looks made him so photogenic.
He ended up gracing the
pages of Out and other magazines—
all before he was 30 years old.
Through it all, he’s kept a special
fondness for his native city. He
returns every year for at least a few
gigs. He was a vocal advocate and
booster after Hurricane Katrina.
His family (unaffected by the hurricanes)
still lives in suburban Metairie,
in Jefferson Parish, just across Lake
Pontchartrain.
And now he’s exchanged coasts. He’s
not one to bemoan the state of New
York nightlife. He sees it as a cycle,
and the city may be in a down period
right now, but “if you go to any
small town, you’d be thankful of all
that’s here. Things change. When the
Saint or Twilo or Roxy closed, people
thought it was over. Then something
else came along.”
For now, however, he’s perfectly
happy in L.A. He’s planning on a lot
more mixing and even producing.
His remix of “Give It” by X-Press 2,
which is the last song on his Winter
Party CD for Masterbeat, has been
in heavy rotation on the dance floor.
“I’m still finding what ‘my sound’ is,”
he said. “Whenever I play today, half
is either done on my own, or songs
I’ve taken and not just rearranged but
added sounds to it to make it unique.
That’s how I’m getting my feet wet.”
He’s even going to get a driver’s
license and a car.
14
Happy Am I! Healthy Am I! holy Am I!