Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

914 DANCING WITH TEARS IN MY EYES

DANCING WITH TEARS IN MY EYES(Look for a post this Saturday thanks to donations topping $100 in the top jar! -ctan)*************************************When you go to a wake organized by a disc jockey, you do your grieving while dancing.

I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot of people were there not because Freddie Mercury meant anything to them, but because they couldn't afford to miss being there. It bothered me. I felt like it was disrespectful to the dead, I guess, to be there for any reason other than to respect them. Does that make sense? Why it mattered to me, I don't know, but I was really nagged by it.

The fact that my own relationship to Freddie–or what Freddie stood for?–or whatever was still murky and unclear to me probably had something to do with it.

The fact that I couldn't look at a group of people who were self-professed parts of the music industry without being that cynical probably does, too. What did I expect? You get invited to a private party by an influential record producer, of course you're going to go, whether you give a hoot about the bloke that died or not.

Let's put it this way. I wasn't in a cheerful mood, but you're not supposed to be at a funeral.

Jordan got up in the DJ stand after a while, though, and at first I thought he was going to give a speech or something. The music up until then had been generic dance pop, but as he went up to the open booth, the lights trained on him and the sound potted down. He had put on wraparound sunglasses like the ones he'd been wearing a lot back when we'd worked on 1989; he probably needed them given how bright the lights were.

Jordan was not a guy who said a lot, though. He didn't give a speech. He cranked up the speakers and hit play on David Bowie's "Let's Dance."

People took it as a command, I guess, beginning to fill the dance floor and strut their stuff. See and be seen, that's the name of the game, I thought to myself.

Ziggy grabbed me by the hand (the good one) and pulled me onto the dance floor. I resisted for a moment, but only a moment. If he was going to dance, I sure as hell was going to dance with him. And dancing beat standing around feeling cynical.

Getting on the dance floor was the right thing to do. The bass thump of "Let's Dance" morphed into the riff of one of the best-known Queen songs, prompting a smattering of boos from a few present but the moment of gallows humor galvanized everyone. The dancing went from tentative to fiery, from obligatory to fierce. People shouted along, "Another one bites the dust, hey hey!" with their teeth gritted and their fists in the air. This was a community that had already lost so many to HIV and AIDS, were there even any tears left for its most famous, most infamous, son?

Well, yes there were. Angry tears, helpless tears, tears of grief and tears of joy. A huge shout went up as the graphic on the projection screen above the DJ booth showed "Silence = Death." This was the same roar I'd heard that day at Pride, after the moment of silence.

Jordan worked his magic from the turntables as he always did, mixing songs together and adding in samples... I confess I don't actually know how he did half of what he did. It was a lot more than just putting on record after record and hitting "play"–that's true of any good club deejay–but it being Jordan he had backing tracks and samples that no one else did. Many times at Limelight when he'd been deejaying I'd heard riffs that I myself had played but which had never appeared on any record.

But he had also picked a playlist where a lot of the songs seemed to have a message in context. Bits of R&B classic "Ain't No Stopping Us Now" matched up with "You're My Best Friend" and things like that. I don't know how long we danced but that was one of those things Jordan was good at–getting you on the dance floor and then keeping you there because you didn't want to miss something good. Easily an hour, though. Maybe longer.