| An Interview With Bad Boy Bill |
 America's favorite House DJ talks about his CD/DVD Behind the Decks Live, the world's best clubs, and why coming back to Cleveland is always a good thing...You've been in the business for a long time; can you describe how the scene was back then and how you started as a DJ? When I first started as a DJ, it wasn't exactly the coolest thing. It was kind of like tucked away and as time progressed it kind of became the focal point. But musically, its still the same concept, your job is to make people have a good time and to entertain people with playing really good music. I think it's a little different but it's also the same at the end of the day. Looking at clips from the 1989 DMC DJ Battle, do you think doing things like that helped you become popular and helped in any way promote yourself? A little bit, but what's funny about that is that I have been a DJ in Chicago in the radio. My mixes were being constantly played throughout Chicago on the radio. I almost didn't join it. I was already well known and I didn't really want to be battling but they were like, well, you can represent Chicago, kinda talked me into it. I think it exposed me maybe on a national and worldwide level. But in Chicago, I kind of already built a name for myself before joining the DMC. How do you think your style of DJ-ing has evolved since then? Basically, I just changed with the times so I have done different styles and various forms of dance music. I have always played house music kinda like what I started with. And in my early days of DJ-ing house music was kinda of like being created here in Chicago so I've always had a base of house music. But you know there was hip house music, there was techno, there were a lot of different forms and a lot of different styles that I played as well as some hip hop back what you saw in the DMC Battle days. So I kind of like always progressed and changed as far as styles of music and my style has changed. But at the end of the day again, my goal is to play the most-cutting edge stuff and play what actaully is gonna get people moving and make people have a good spin. You and Richard Vission teamed up for House Connection in 1997, had a reunion tour in 2006: any plans to do House Connection 3? We talked about it, its just his schedule has been so busy, and my schedule's been so busy that its just been very difficult to find time to do something like that, so I mean, I'm not ruling it out, he's not ruling it out. It's just a lot of things have to align for us to be able to do something like that again. You've been all over the world and have played in the best clubs, where is your favorite place to spin? I gotta tell you, I just played at this place in Korea called Club Volume. Tiesto just played the night before me and I played the next night and it was probably one of the coolest clubs. If you go to badboybill.com and look at my galleries right now there are pictures from there. It's just the whole set up, they have these massive LED screens, and cameras on me and they would project the image on the LED screen and they had these huge lasers on me. It was probably one of the coolest clubs I've been into just because they had the Funktion-One sound system, so the sound was amazing---the crowd was just so into the music. It was probably one of the better gigs I've done in a long time and probably one of the coolest clubs I've ever seen. Let us talk about your CD/DVD, Behind the Decks Live. Can you describe the production aspect behind it? I've done mixed CDs for so long that I was like, its at that point now that where if its just a mixed CD, might as well download it off the internetÖyou gotta give more than that. I kinda just grew out of the mixed CD format, so Behind The Decks, I added a DVD, and then Behind The Decks Live, I took it to another level, saying, you know what, I'm gonna actually film the mix as its going down, as I'm mixing it, it will be a live mix and people can actually be inside the club, and see people responding to the mix and everything. That was the concept, you know, and we didn't really know how what to film, so we decided to just film it in three different cities and see which one came out the best and we'll use that for the DVD. It ended up being LA and Denver looked the best so we kinda split the DVD up so the first half of the mix in LA and the second half is the Denver On the DVD as well, we have the whole behind the scenes in the extras section which shows the making of the DVD which shows how we put the whole thing together, the crew, and you get to see interviews with some the club promoters, so its good, a whole well-rounded thing. portion. The concept was to bring people into the club and to actually give them the experience what its like as I'm mixing and maybe some people have never seen something like that. What was the most exciting thing about the whole project for you? We had never done anything like this before so it was a huge undertaking and to be honest with you, the whole thing was like the biggest project I had ever undertaken and we didn't know what to expect so a lot of different things came up. I think it was kind of the excitement of not knowing what was gonna happen...there was a point when I thought the whole thing just wasn't gonna make it into the marketplace cause there were so many issues or problems you gotta deal with . The whole experience was unlike anything I have ever done, so that kinda kept it exciting, that kinda kept me on my toes so to speak. What is in store for your fans after Behind the Decks Live CD/DVD and the tour? Right now I am working on my artist album. I am currently working with a bunch of singers and musicians. It will be all completely original music so it won't be a mix CD of other people's music. It will be all my own. That's what I'm working on right now. It should be out late 2008, early 2009. I'm sure all your Cleveland fans are looking forward to your upcoming show. What do you want to say to them? I can't wait to come. It was a great show the last time and I got a lot of new music. Just came back from WMC so there were a lot of DJs and producers that gave me some new tracks, some unreleased stuff. I've got a lot of dust to play so I'm excited to expose it to Cleveland. Cleveland's always shown me a lot of love, its one of those cities...I mean Ohio in general, I played a lot of raves back in the day in Ohio. Between Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, you know all these different cities, I've always got so much love from the whole of Ohio. But Cleveland's always special...its just one of those cities...people just understand and get the music. |
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