What makes a good DJ? Somebody who knows about music, somebody who can make you dance, somebody who knows how to keep things fresh? Legendary DJ Mark Farina has been in the game for decades. He also pioneered mushroom jazz, which is still popular today. We had the opportunity to talk to the Chicago house legend, and ask him where he got his start and how different DJing is today.
What is your origin story and how did you become a DJ that you are today?
I grew up in Chicago, which is a good place to be growing up in the 80s for a DJ, and I’m 50 years old, so you know, I graduated high school in 1987 in the Chicago area. My friends and I started going to teen clubs in the Chicago area when it was like 18 and under, that is what they had back then, and that’s where we first saw DJs when we were sophomores in high school.
Also in Chicago on the radio there were DJ mixes all the time on the main urban stations. WBMX and WGCI would have mixes and we would sit there with our cassette players and record DJ mixes, and also at the time in music clubs they were still in that 80s period— there was a lot of new wave and industrial music, like Depeche Mode and Ministry.
On the radio at that time was all early house mixes; like the DJs were the Hot Mix Five and Jack Master Funk, and all the early first generation of Chicago House DJs, so we would go in between the 2. Some of the clubs we would go to at that age there would be one room that would be a new wave room, and another room that was a house room, so we would go back and forth. I think seing DJs play records at a young age especially when you’re interested in that sort of format and concept is a great bonus to be able to go to clubs and stand next to a DJ and see what they’re doing.
So we sort of picked up on that, and one of my friends his dad had a little Radio Shack mixer that he used when he had theme parties in the basement, like toga parties, and you get on the microphone and talk. So we saw this mixer there, after we saw DJs using a mixer. So we would use the mixer and I would bring my turntables over to his house—back when you get like a stereo setup, and a turntable cassette deck, and a receiver, and speakers, and you would have 2 tables—and we would hook it up to this mixer and we started mixing. So we were like sophomores in high school and the turntables didn’t have any pitch control or anything like that. So yeah, you just use your finger and we sped up the record and slow it down and you know that’s how we started DJing. We’d save our lunch money and buy records and you know, that’s how I grew from there.
Do you remember who gave you your opportunity to do your first DJ set?
It was at Club Medusa. I met a DJ there who was the regular named Terry Martin and he was coming out of the club. This was back when you know, the vinyl days, so also back in this time frame in Chicago, DJs would play all night. There wasn’t this multiple set existence like we have nowadays. Back then, it was always one DJ does the whole night, so it’d be like 10pm to 4 in the morning.
So he was coming out of a club, he had a delivery-man-kind-of trolley full of like 4 crates of records. It was pretty obvious back then who the DJ was because they obviously would be carrying a whole bunch of records, unlike today you can stroll into a club with headphones and a USB stick. So I saw this guy standing outside of a club with all these records and I’m like, “Hey you’re the DJ in there!” and started hanging out in the DJ booth. I was interested in mixing and it was at Medusa’s, but I kind of got my foot in the door.
Back then, Chicago DJ booths we’re kind of off-limits unless you knew somebody in there. Back then it was a thing to have DJ booths with doors you couldn’t just walk up to a DJ; in a lot of places in the 80s it was sort of a closed-off thing. It was like an unwritten law you don’t pester the DJ so that sort of allowed me by meeting him to hang out in a DJ booth. And I think one night, I was making a comment it was like the peak of the night, crowded room, I don’t know like a good 600 people and I was saying, “I think you should play one song,” and he’s like, “Why don’t you get it, you play.” He just left the booth and left me. I was like…I hadn’t played out anywhere anything like this I was completely nervous and shaking. He eventually came back after 1 or 2 songs. He put me on the spot and it was definitely pretty nerve-wracking. To start DJing in the middle of the night to a full crowd unexpectedly was a pretty eye-opening experience.
As a DJ what does your work say about you and how do you want a crowd to feel when they go to a Farina show?
I’m grateful that I’ve been doing it for so long and trying to keep my standards the whole time, I’m trying to find new music and bring up the good oldies that people might have forgotten, and in terms of people on the dance floor, I always want people just to explore their own world, give them a musical path to do their own thing, give them a good soundtrack to explore their imagination.
Can you talk Fusion magazine something not too many people know about you?
I was a big soccer player from the age of 4 to University; I was on the University of Arizona Soccer team and then eventually had to stop playing soccer because soccer and club life didn’t go well together. You know you have a game at 10 in the morning and you were out DJing until 4 in the morning, and that didn’t go so well. So then I switch colleges from the University of Arizona to Columbia College in Chicago and they didn’t have an official soccer team at that University sanction, so then it kind of worked out.
Go fill up the dance floor and be sure to catch Mark Farina at CLUB HERE I LOVE YOU February 28th.
