LOCAL
“I WAS A BROKE COLLEGE STUDENT. I LEARNED TO PRETTY MUCH DJ ON-AIR.”
BEAT
{BY NICK KEPPLER}
WORKIN’ PROGRESS
INFO@ PGHC ITY PA PE R.CO M
BRAD WAGNER CD RELEASE. 7 p.m. Sat., Aug. 17. Club Café, 56-58 S. 12th St., South Side. $5. 412-431-4950 or www.clubcafelive.com
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Oil City grad: Damian Higgins, a.k.a. Dieselboy
GROWING UP Still giggin’: Brad Wagner
“She wears tight pants / says she’s gonna be a star,” sings Brad Wagner about a fictional young wannabe Florence Welch, on “Little Julie,” from his album Barfly. “But there’s a guy in my band who’s 43 / Been sayin’ that same damn thing since he was 17.” A concept album, Barfly is a deglamorized, disillusioned description of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle from someone who has been in it long enough to see dreams shatter, youths misspent and, occasionally, spirits endure. Wagner, 51, has gigged at Pittsburgh bars since the mid ’80s and has played in a variety of party bands and Springsteenesque working-class ensembles — all while holding a variety of day jobs. (He currently drives a truck for the post office.) Though there is a heady dose of humor, Barfly echoes with the jaundiced view one only earns through putting in that many years in a hardscrabble career. “I bounce around from job to job / Never gettin’ one done / We just sit around and mumble / ’Bout our insecure state / And we blame politicians / As we commiserate,” he sings of a group of pub musicians reaching the half-century mark without serious résumés. Wagner says he isn’t exactly speaking in his own voice but that of a made-up character from a similar background. “I wouldn’t say it’s totally autobiographical,” he says. “I have embellished to make the character more dramatic.” A concept album is an unexpected endeavor for an everyman rocker like Wagner. He says the project came about organically: “I had a few songs with these sentiments and wrote about a few more to flush it out.” The end result “shouldn’t be read as one storyline, like a play, but there is a thread running through it.” Despite his obvious anxiety about a creative life, Wagner says he’ll probably keep it up until he’s gigging in the community room of his nursing home. “If you can’t be discouraged enough to stop after a few decades of playing to 100-person rooms, you can’t be discouraged by anything.”
{BY RORY D. WEBB}
D
J AND producer Dieselboy is well known internationally, but when he was coming up — going to college at the University of Pittsburgh and leaning to DJ on WRCT at Carnegie Mellon — drum-and-bass was just getting its start. Now the electronic subgenre is a good 20 years old, and Dieselboy is a big name in the field, with plenty of feats under his belt — like DJing for 35,000 people in a hockey arena in Russia. After spending his early years in small towns in Florida and Colorado, Dieselboy (real name: Damian Higgins) moved with his family to Oil City, Pa. After graduating from Oil City High School in 1990, he travelled about 90 minutes south to study information science at the University of Pittsburgh. “I was a broke college student,” he explains. “I DJed on WRCT with these guys I know called the Techno Terrorists. They had a show, so I would go on there every Friday and I would spin for an hour. I
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 08.14/08.21.2013
learned to pretty much DJ on-air, which is, like, trial by fire, ’cause I didn’t know how to beat-match or anything. But a couple years after I started DJing, my mom bought me turntables, and that’s when I started to be able to practice at home.
SHIPWRECKED 2013 FEATURING DIESELBOY, SCHOOLBOY, AK1200, MUST DIE
8 p.m. Fri., Aug. 16. Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum, 7310 Frankstown Ave.,Homewood. $30-45. www.facebook.com/dieselboy
“I wanted to DJ as a hobby and it just got to the point where it became my job. Pittsburgh had a pretty small scene, it was kind of self-contained in a way. But, you know, we did our own thing. We had a drum-andbass night called Steel City Jungle for a while, which had some good notoriety.” Steel City Jungle was Dieselboy’s first
weekly event series, which he co-DJed with friend and fellow local DJ Andy Sine. Before he relocated to Philadelphia in the late ’90s, house parties and events at clubs like Metropol, in the Strip District, became common gigs for him as the EDM scene grew in popularity. “There were raves that happened,” he recalls. “One of them was inside the Corliss Tunnel, it was called Tunnel Vision.” The event took place in June 1995. “My friends who threw it convinced the city that they were shooting a video,” he says. “They did video the show, but the city thought it was a music video, so they managed to shut down an entire traffic tunnel and have a rave in it, which was unreal. It was super loud, and they actually had cops directing traffic and helping out. The next day, the people that were hearing the music all night were so upset. And then when they found out it was a rave it got to, like, the number-one news story of the year. People were like, ‘How the fuck does this