interview: Orangepeelmoses.com

image: Krijn van Noordwijk

Lipgloss, one of Denver's longest running club nights, recently celebrated yet another Mile High milestone--its seventh anniversary.  NY-based DJ Tommie Sunshine was on hand (accompanied by his gorgeous girl Daniela) to oversee the festivities through his characteristically dark shades.  Image Magazine seized the opportunity to pick the surprisingly intact grey matter that lives beneath Tommy's lengthy locks. 

Birthplace? Rochelle Park, New Jersey

Fam Damily? Crazy.  Fuckin’ crazy.

First musical memory from childhood? My sister claims to have a cassette of me singing “Benny & The Jets” a capella, with no accompaniment, at three years old. She keeps saying she has this cassette, but hasn’t yet produced it.  But, apparently, I knew the words to “Benny & The Jets” at three years old.  You can guess that there are many musical memories from a very early age. 

Music educated or self-taught?  I was really bad whenever I tried to learn an instrument.  I took guitar lessons and I was really bad at it.  I played drums in the school band but was too much of an ADD nightmare to be in the band.  I don’t take instruction well, so lessons were never really my bag.  But then, I never really thought I’d make music, honestly.  DJ-ing was something that kind of ended up in my presence and then, all of a sudden, making music kind of fell into place.  Felix da Housecat was the one that kind of saw me and went, ‘Do you make music?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well you should, ‘cause you know too much about music not to make music.’  ‘Well, okay, fair enough.’  Here we are, ten years later, it’s kind of crazy.         

 Embarrassing musical phases during adolescence?  To me, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.  I love pop music, I always have.  Growing up, I was into hair metal.  I was into death metal.  I was into punk.  I was into break dance music, early electro, Kraftwerk.  I never thought there was a boundary.  I never thought of music as ever having boundaries.  As long as you never really think that, there’s nothing that stops you from jumping from place to place. 

You’ve conspired with a lot of musicians since Felix, who are the most entertaining or enlightening individuals that you’ve worked with?  I think that everything I’ve been involved in has been pretty great.  All of the people that make their way to me are good people.  I think they see something in me that they’d like to align themselves with, it seems.  Especially lately, there’s a whole list of new collaborations that I’m gonna be doing this coming year, working with people like Benny Benassi and David Guetta, really, really cool guys, totally at the top of the heap but still have their head about them.  It’s really easy in this business to get chewed up by it.  Once you start to read your own press and you start to believe your own hype, you can go really the wrong way.  You think of all these situations and you look back at the people who we’ve admired in music and you’ll get somebody like Kurt Cobain who clearly wasn’t prepared for what he got.  It’s not that he didn’t want what he got, but he wasn’t prepared for it.  As much as he loved The Melvins, he loved The Knack and he wanted to be The Knack.  He wanted to make “My Sharona.”  He really did, which he did.  “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is “My Sharona.”  He did what he wanted to do, but he didn’t really think about what that meant.  He was the magical age of 27, which Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison and everybody else.  I remember 27 very well; 27 was hard.  It was really hard, it was one of the hardest years of my life.  It was so difficult, because you’re standing on the verge of so many things.  You’re forced to tuck away your childhood and you’re forced to tuck away so many different things in order to evolve.  But once you get to the other side of it, it’s beautiful, it’s a glorious other side, but you really have to get hit with a lot of swords to get there.

You’re in seemingly perpetual touring motion, where are the most interesting scenes on the planet?  Australia.  We’ve been there only once together, but I’ve been there four times.  I did a CD for Sony there that went gold.  I have a gold plaque from Australia.  And this year, I’m putting out two singles in Australia.  I did a song with the Aston Shuffle, I sang on their new single, and Muscles and The Bloody Beetroots did the remixes on it.  Then, I did another single, which is coming out in Germany first, but then it’s getting licensed to Australia, which is another original track.  And that’s remixed by Tocadisco, Nick Sarno, in conjunction with Crookers, and Alan Hostage.  It’s gonna be a crazy year.  We go back in November to a festival tour with Crookers and Moby and all these big guys and we’re doing like seven cities and it’s gonna be crazy.  It’s a whole other story.  First of all, it’s gorgeous there; they live in a really great place.  And the original people of that land, the Aboriginal people, were really intense, spiritual, musical people.  It’s crazy.  Didgeridoo and really heavy shit.  Shamanistic stuff.  When you have that as a basis for a society, people are gonna wanna go out and have a good time.  Plus, let’s not forget, it’s a fucking penal colony.  That place was a jail.  That’s where they sent criminals. 

Which animals do your favorite sounds remind you of?  Wow.  It’s kinda strange, because when I think of music and I think of what really good music is, I think it’s a mix of many things.  When a track is building up, you think of a leopard or a tiger running.  Then, when the track is at its absolute peak, it’s something like a grizzly bear.  And then, after that, it’s an eagle, it just goes.  You have to remember, I’m three years sober.  So, when I DJ, music, for me, is a narcotic.  When I’m playing records, I don’t want anyone around me, I don’t want people in the booth, I don’t wanna talk to anyone.  That, for me, that’s my drugs, that’s my booze.  Now, I work all week and go to the studio and make music and live the life that her [Daniela] and I live.  When the weekend comes, when I have headphones on my head, God forbid you tap on my shoulder, that’s something you don’t wanna do, ‘cause I’m in some other place.  I’m only thinking about flying and grizzly bears and leopards and shit.  I’m not thinking about anything tangible at all.  Music, for me, takes me somewhere totally else.  I grew up in Chicago, in the rave scene, where when we went out, we didn’t want to hear anything familiar.  I think that it is the most important thing to play music that is just familiar enough to people, and has enough things in it that ground them to the familiar, but the rest of it just needs to completely wash their brain out, ‘cause we’re living in a really fucked up time.  I think that now, more than ever, people need to let go.  They need to kind of reconsider.  The only way that you ever grow as a person is when you do kind of turn your brain off and trip out a little bit.  And then you come out the other side and you have a little hindsight and say, “Oh, that’s what that is…”  If you just go through your life with the same old shit every day and you just burn through things, you can get really misled and end up in some really bad places.  This is why people wake up 20 years into a marriage and say, “What the fuck am I doing? Who am I?”  Because they never figured it out.  And they have a bunch of kids and they think that that’s the way to do it.  But then, all of a sudden, all of their kids grow up, and they go off to school and they’re at home while their husband’s at work and they’re like, “Who the fuck am I? I never figured it out.’  These are things that are best figured out in your 20s.  That 27 nervous breakdown is kind of crucial to your growth.  If you don’t have that, you have it later.  You really only have to have it once.  I wasn’t a creative person until after that age.  When Felix found me in Atlanta, I was 28 or 29.  It was just around the time that I could begin to take what I was doing seriously.  Before that, it was just one giant swimming pool of alcohol and drugs.  All of a sudden, there’s potential here to really do something.  The people who mattered to me the most were the ones who not only made music, but actually stood for something and were upstanding men.  People like Lennon, who didn’t just make amazing music, but they actually gave a shit about what went on in the world and didn’t keep quiet about it either.  Being really outspoken these days is not very sheik.  I get in a lot of trouble for having a big mouth.  People don’t like the truth.  This modern era is not about truth.  Our culture is not based on truth; America is not a truthful culture.  Our entire M.O. around the world is based on lies.  It’s all based on lies, we get ahead by lying.

(long time Lipgloss resident Boyhollow hands Tommie a fresh soda)

It’s tastier when it’s fresh.  Simple pleasures.  There’s an Oscar Wilde quote, and I’ll paraphrase, ‘The last thing that the intelligent people of the world have to cling to is the very simple things.’  Daniela was born here in America, but she was raised by her father in Rome and having European perspective growing up and learning English second, speaking Italian first and learning English second, was I get it from traveling and I also get it from her.  I get to look at the American experience and what I grew up experiencing in upper middle class white America and she grew up in Queens.  Not really the same thing, but it’s amazing how similar you life is.  That’s the other thing that America really misses out on is that we don’t understand how similar we are to the rest of the world.  I think the statistic is that 7% of Americans have a passport.  When 93% of your country has their head planted firmly up their @$$, how are you supposed to have empathy for a country that we’re at war with?  You can’t, because it doesn’t matter because they’re not real people.  Not in the eyes of most Americans.  They’re a fictitious nation, that’s fantasy land over there, except for the people that are sent there.

Imagination Land, like on South Park.

No, it really is.  And the South Park about Britney Spears is the most brilliant thing that anyone’s done social commentary-wise in years.  Did you see that one?  She blows her head off and she’s just a neck and a body and they continue to make her sing and stuff.  And it’s so fucked up and it’s really the darkest South Park they’ve ever made.  But you have to watch it.  You can go online and there’s a vault now of every existing episode and you can watch them streaming.  Watch it.  It matters.  It says a lot about how we exist in the moment.

You’ve been considered an authority on dance music by several high profile sources, Peter Jennings included, why do you think people come to you for insight into an entire movement or scene?

I’m one of the people that still has a fucking brain and can articulate my memories of my time in the scene.  Most people are too drugged out and crazy to sit and do an interview.  But I always saw this as something other than just a music scene.  I’m not gonna lie, some nights you walk into a club and you definitely know that you’re not preaching.  You know what, you think that, but every time there’s always one person in that club and as long as that one person walks out of that club going, “Fuck, that was awesome.”  People don’t take into consideration that not everybody is as belligerent as most are in modern culture with their bananas MySpace page and their fun walls and their bull shit online.  Most people that go see artists, when they really like them, stand in the back.  They don’t wanna talk to ‘em, they don’t wanna meet ‘em, they don’t want their picture taken with ‘em.  They just wanna fuckin’ hear ‘em play.  I’m playing for those people.  Those are the people that matter to me.  Those are the ones who make the difference and they’re the ones that come back the next time with half a dozen friends.  And they’re like, ‘You have to hear this guy play.’  The kids in the front are just having fun.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, you need that for the party, but those kids aren’t gonna remember who I am next week. 

You know what?  Listen, I don’t think that what I do is out of the ordinary.  I don’t think that what I do is more important than anybody else.  But what I do think, is that I try to steer people and my peers in a better direction.  One of the boldest things I ever did in America, was I called out Steve Aoki for what he was doing in the moment.  Two years ago, I did an interview and I said that the lowbrow music taste of America was his fault.  And I said that he fucked this up, that he took DJ culture 15 years backwards, because we had all been mixing and he was showing up to parties and playing J.Lo records and fucking stupid 80s music and really really soiling the legacy of dance music.  By pointing him out like that and making him feel bad like that in the press, cut to two years later, Steve’s running DimMak, in association with Downtown, just signed MSTRKRFT for the world, just signed The Bloody Beetroots for the world, and he’s handing out giant record deals to dance music producers and is DJ-ing only electronic music now.  So, was I wrong?  I definitely fuckin’ got on a lot of people’s shit lists at the time and pissed a lot of people off, including him.  He came up to me totally defeated and said, ‘How could you do that to me?’  ‘Steve, you don’t understand how important it is that you play serious music.  You’re the biggest DJ in the fucking country in this scene and everyone’s counting on you.  Pedro is counting on you.  Boys Noize, all these guys who are on the verge of breaking through this scene to the mainstream, we all depend on guys like Steve to support our records.  By being bold like that, by actually having a bit of a forked tongue, look what it did.  I’m not saying it’s my words that made him into what he is now, but it definitely made him think and it made him reconsider what he was doing.  It’s so much better that he’s in that place and he’s guys like Crookers playing in L.A.  That’s fuckin’ great.  It’s way better to have a couple of guys from Italy playing serious music to a crowd in LA than whatever fuckin’ guitar player from whatever hipster indie band who can’t mix. We just had dinner the other night.  He and I and Crookers and his two little brothers and Daniela, we all went to dinner.  Yeah, he’s forgiven me.  I told even in the moment, ‘This is for your fucking I’m just trying to open your fucking eyes.’  The thanks is his support of the music.  I don’t anybody to thank me for anything.  I just wanna see this move forward.  And as long as we have forward momentum, that’s all I care about.      

DANGER: So, what influences do you have?

I think the best influences I’ve ever heard and they were interviewing Penn from Penn and Teller and he said that his influences were, and I quote, ‘The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Bob Dylan, Harry Houdini and Don Rickles.  Get the fuck out.

Come on, if I was to be totally honest, off the top of my head, if I was to say who influences me, it’s Warhol, it’s Serge Gainsbourg, it’s Gauguin, it’s Scott Walker.    

Can I say one last thing?  If I have anything to say to anybody, I just feel like people need to consider the fact that we’re living in an incredibly beautiful time where all things are within everybody’s reach.  We are more connected than we’ve ever been.  You don’t need to spend 10 hours a day on Instant Messenger.  You can teach yourself some things and you can become a better person and maybe actually make this place, specifically America, a better place, because if something doesn’t happen soon, we’re doing 180 towards a brick wall right now.  It’s pretty bad.  It’s gonna take decades to change what’s gone on in the last decade and it’s not gonna be an easy task.   People just need to want better things and as long as they keep looking towards the light then I think we’re alright.               

myspace.com/TommieSunshine