Louie DeVito is the top club DJ in New York, perhaps the whole country if you measure by how many mix CDs he's sold. The tally so far? It's approaching a million and it's certain to grow far past that when his new CD, New York City Underground Volume 5, hits stores this month.

DeVito has often been called The Man With The Golden Ear because he's shown an incredible knack for picking out the next big club hit. He's played those new hits at major East Coast clubs such as The Casbah in Donald Trump's Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, The Roxy in New York, Avalon in Boston, Shampoo and Eqypt in Philadelphia, Gotham City in Connecticut, Club Hell in Rhode Island, Neptune's in the Hamptons and The Surf Club in his home state of New Jersey.

Of course it wasn't always like that. Brooklyn born, DeVito was a construction worker ten years ago. He started in the DJ trade after seeing performances by a top DJ of the time, Franco Immello, in a Jersey Shore club called Temptations. Impressed by Immello's ability to mix several tracks and vocals at once, DeVito bought his first turntables and mixer, eventually landing his own club gig and, much later, a late Friday night mix show on station WKTU-FM with Riddla and DJ Scribble.

His first New York City Underground mix CD came out in 1999 as a totally independent production. Covering the distribution and marketing himself, Louie warehoused the first 5000 copies in his parents' garage. Volume 2 did better but it was Volume 3 that really broke all the notions about mix CDs and established Louie as a major force in club music. Because of the CD, several radio stations added Melanie C's "I Turn To You" and later Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft" to their playlist and the rest is history. Sales on NYCU Volume 3 are now around 400,000 copies, the highest selling dance mix CD ever.

After Volume 4, DeVito has gone on to produce three new offerings this year: Dance Factory, Trance Sessions and now New York City Underground Volume 5. Volume 5 may well be his best mix CD yet, a double disc dose of high intensity music that will get anyone's feet moving.

Though he's a top DJ now, Louie still has the powerful arms of a construction worker, a Brooklyn-Italian accent and an abiding interest in baseball. Serendipitously we caught up with him on the night of Game 4 of the World Series.

---

Cosmik: What are we doing here talking about music on a World Series night?

DeVito: I know. I assume you're rooting for Anaheim?

Cosmik: Actually, since Disney is part owner of the Angels and they fired Bill Maher this summer, I'm kinda rooting for the Giants just out of spite.

DeVito: There you go. You know what? It really doesn't matter to me, but being that the Angels beat my Yankees, and I'm a big season ticket holder -- I was in the World Series last year in Arizona with the Yankees -- at least if Anaheim wins it, I know the Yankees got beat by the best team.

Cosmik: They seem to be pretty strong so far.

DeVito: Yeah definitely, I mean scoring 21 runs in the last two games!

Cosmik: We'll have to see what the Giants can do. Anyway, I'm a long time DJ myself and I've really admired your stuff. I haven't heard Number 5 yet, but you've been pretty busy this year: three releases since last spring!

DeVito: Yeah, I'm trying. My goal is to put out at least four CDs a year. Every three months I'd like to put out something new. I've branched out to a couple of new series in my last two releases. Volume 5 should be the big one for the year, it's a double CD set that drops November 5th, so I'm pretty excited at that.

Cosmik: Are you saying that Volume 4 was out within the last year then?

DeVito: In October of last year; technically in a twelve month period I've done four CDs. Dance Factory was in April, Trance Sessions was in August. Volume 5 was supposed to come out like this week but we pushed it back two weeks. I took the safer route, you know which is always a smarter idea in the music business. There's no such thing as guarantees. It's such a fly-by-night business that I don't want to rush the CD.

Cosmik: What's the difference between Dance Factory and the Underground series?

DeVito: Dance Factory is definitely more commercial compared to the Underground series. With Volume 5 being 2 CDs I was able to go really commercial on one CD and a little bit harder on the other CD. Dance Factory turned out that it was half Best Of and half new music because unfortunately I was still getting turned down for a lot of licensing on a lot of older songs. When you deal with some of these major labels, it's still difficult, even with my sales record. I'm still not getting even all the old music that I want. I wanted it to be like the year in review, maybe even two years of the biggest songs. That's how it started out, using the Daft Punk and Modjo Lady and the Deborah Cox. I hit a wall trying to license some other songs, so that's when I started getting caught up in some of that new music. It was kind of a blend but it was a really successful project. I'm happy it turned out that way. It's just funny but maybe what I consider to be old, the average listener might consider new.

Cosmik: Oh to be sure!

DeVito: I educated myself a lot in the past three years since Volume One came out, almost three years to the day in 1999. Volume One was kind of a Best Of for 99 and the end of 98. The funny thing is all those people told me you're crazy, you're not going to sell, nobody's going to buy this music, these songs are six months or a year old. For a while I thought maybe they are right, maybe I made a big mistake. I had pressed up 5000 copies and I was actually using my parents' garage as the warehouse. I'd ask my mom to pull the car outside so I could fill it with CDs, and she goes like, "What are all these CDs?" And I go, "Ma, this is the new CD I'm doin'!" I was just looking at those boxes and I was getting orders from mom-and-pops, you know, like 60 here 30 there. I was saying to myself, "I don't even think I'm going to sell through the 5000!" My goal at that point was just to sell 5000 CDs. I thought, "if I can get rid of these 5000, I'll call it a day, and learn from this and I'll be happy." But the response, once I started advertising the CD, the response was overwhelming. I wound up doing around 60,000 for Volume 1.

Cosmik: I've always found that when I do a party most people are not very adventurous in their taste. I end up playing no more than 20 to 30% new stuff. What you called "old" in the club scene might have worked well for you because people are more familiar with it but they still weren't finding it on the radio. Obviously they did like it if it sold 60,000 like that.

DeVito: I learned a big lesson, which was don't listen to other people. On Volume 2 I put some newer music on, and with the latest, Volume 5, there are definitely some big club songs and some radio hits on there. There were one or two songs on Volume 3 that really drove sales in the beginning, that really blew up and crossed over months later and that's why Volume 3 was so successful. Volume 4 didn't sell as well being that it came a month after the tragedy of 911 and after Volume 3 so many people jumped into the compilation pool. They said, "Wow, you can sell almost a half a million of a dance compilation," but they didn't realize that it's not that easy to do that.

Cosmik: Seeing the people start to react and jump at a particular song has a lot to do with how successful I feel about a show. I tape the shows that I do, but the immediacy of the mix sometimes doesn't always come through when I listen back to the set. How do you make that excitement happen time after time on a CD?

DeVito: There's a lot of editing that's involved after the actual mix is done to create that energy. I always say that I like to use the best parts of the song. Not to say that there is a bad part of a great record, but there are parts that don't have as much energy. A lot of these mixers are producing ten, twelve minute mixes. In a nightclub it's great to play a song for ten or twelve minutes, but on a CD you're only dealing with 80 minutes. You can't possibly put a song on there for ten minutes. I don't care how great the song is, it's just not going to work. What I try and do is keep a lot of energy there and cut that ten or twelve minutes down to three or four, you know, the best parts, bring the vocals right up. There's remixes I get [on other CDs] where it takes three minutes before the vocal comes in. Three minutes in a club may not be that long if you're drinking, you're mingling, you're dancing, fine. But if somebody's in their car or working out or just listening to the CD, three minutes is like an eternity... I want people to listen to the whole disc, not go, "Oh, I don't like this part" and fast forward. I want them to say, "Oh my god, it keeps getting better and better!"

Cosmik: That leads into another question I had, exactly how much do you tweak a record that's on one of your CDs? Do you add vocal samples or drum tracks at all?

DeVito: Definitely. You can even hear it on Dance Factory, how on the mix DJ Sam did in "Heaven," the vocal is already playing over the mix. I love to use acapellas and have an acapella riding over the mix and when it kicks in it goes right into the hook of the song. We definitely spend a lot of time trying to create that. I always like to say the difference is in the mix. I think any good DJ can mix two songs back to back. There's a lot of great club DJs out there and to mix two records, we'll I've been doing this all of my life! I can mix two records! But I want to take that to the next level. Anybody can just mix, but you've got to take that same mix and add flavor to it, add an acapella, add three, four or five different elements going on, little things, subtle things, but just bring it together and just create something! I think that's one of the reasons why my CDs have been so successful. There's not too many CDs out there where they create like what I'm doing.

Cosmik: How much time per week do you spend listening to music, researching and experimenting with mixes before you go do a show?

DeVito: A show is whatever just comes to me. I experiment in the club, you know, "Let me try this!" I mean that's the exciting part about deejaying... Sometimes I think about music all day long. I just think like, "what's going to sound good together?" Sometimes it just comes to me you know? Sometimes if it sounds great in the club I might use it again.

Cosmik: Do you think there's a particular New York Sound to what you do?

DeVito: I wouldn't say there's a particular sound. It all depends on what I'm playing, there's really nothing specific.

Cosmik: Is it meaningful to say House Music anymore? It seems like it covers too many different kinds of music. And it's changed a lot over the years what it means. What's House Music to you?

DeVito: House Music is something a little more down tempo, like 120 beats per minute. It's so funny because I define anything you can dance to as dance music. It can be drum and bass, some people say they can dance to drum and bass. I've heard so many different categories, to say what I think, do I spin some House? Yes. Do I spin some Trance? Yes. Do I spin Progressive? Yes. I play to the crowd. The crowd dictates what I'm playing. I can't say that I'm playing this I'm playing that. The one thing I know I don't play is Hip Hop. When I was an up and coming DJ, I played Hip Hop, I played everything. I used to play happy hour at this one place down on the Jersey Shore; I was playing everything from Billy Joel to the Brady Brunch, you know what I mean? Just to have a paycheck coming in.

Two years ago during Spring Break down in Texas, South Padre Island or something and I was playing all my dance stuff and they said they wanted me to play some like party music and some Hip Hop. And I go, "Well I don't play that." They pulled me off after like nine songs, 45 minutes. It took me six hours to get there, two planes and like an hour car ride. It was a journey, like a quest, like I was going to Japan and I deejayed for 45 minutes! I mean they paid me really well, but I was so disgusted. I tell the guy, the manager of the club, I said, "Listen, you know my CDs from New York City... you didn't fly me in here to play the Macarena." That was ridiculous! So now my biggest thing is that if people book me, I'm going to play stuff off my CD because that's what the crowd wants to hear. If they want to hear hard, progressive stuff that's what I'm going to play. I go shopping for imports every week, I spend three, four, five hundred dollars a week on records. Anything "dance" I can play. The crowd dictates it.

Cosmik: Four or five hundred in records! That must add up to an awful lot of listening time all by itself!

DeVito: Oh yeah! I obviously listen to it in the record stores, but then some records I bring them home and I think "What was I thinking buying this record?" and there's others like "Wow, thank God I bought this record!"

Cosmik: So there's a lot of imports and stuff like that; who produces the most reliable dance records?

DeVito: To be honest with you I'm in my DJ-room-slash-office right now and I'm just looking at pounds and pounds of stuff I've got to listen to. Between working on Volume 5 and last week I deejayed the GQ Man Of The Year Award Party and there was rehearsal every day for that because it was being nationally televised on NBC [scheduled to air December 15th], you know so I definitely fell behind. I know now the CD's done and after this week and working all weekend, you know next week I'm just going to lock my door and just sit in here and turn my phone off and start going through some music. It's exciting but like I said you know you don't want to overlook like just one record, that one record could be the biggest dance hit of the year. It's definitely a chore.

Cosmik: What are some of the big tunes that you wanted on Volume 5 but got away?

DeVito: On Volume 5, (pauses) I hate to say this but nothing! I don't think I missed a beat on Volume 5; I got every song I wanted. Dance Factory, there was a lot of music that I couldn't get. Volume 4 has a lot of great music but between not dropping it in the summertime and September 11th happened, it just dropped at the wrong time.

Cosmik: I actually have a copy of Volume 4 but I've never heard Volume 3. Volume 4 I thought was a very good CD.

DeVito: We were first planning to release it in August and then we said let's push it back two more weeks and then we wound up having to push it back six weeks because of September 11th. I think it still sold over 180,000 copies. It was a great number but if it had come out a couple months sooner it probably would have done a little better.

Cosmik: I have a hypothetical question for you. If you were a manager for a well-known group or a boy band or something like that, what would you tell them to do to make a hit dance track for the clubs?

DeVito: Hmmm. I love songs that have a lot of keyboards, something that has energy to it. So keyboards, a song that's high tempo, you know, at least 130 beats per minute, 135. Definitely the keyboards, a strong hook in the melody and I don't know, just keep the energy there. I think that really helps a song.

Cosmik: I guess the last question isn't really a question but do you have any words of wisdom for the DJs that are trying to make it in the club scene or trying to do mix CDs like you?

DeVito: I hate to say this, but it's not about the music.

Cosmik: Really?

DeVito: You know what? It's a business like any other business and that's unfortunate. I did this for the love of music and I still do it because of that. I get so excited when I know I can use a song on my CD and when I can't use it I'm like a little kid in a candy store and my mother's telling me I can't have that piece of candy. It's so frustrating. It's unfortunate because there's not enough people out there that are in it for the music. That's what makes it tough. It is a business just like any other business and the same thing goes with radio. It's so frustrating that there are so many great songs out there and so many radio stations won't touch them [because they say] "It's too dancey," I don't know if that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard somebody say. How can a song be too dancey?

I consider dance music as feel-good music. That's why I did it and I think I've had some success; I did it because I love music. I didn't do it because I said, "Omigod, I wanna make money!" Being successful is great but I'm just thankful that I'm doin' something that I love. I refer to it like baseball so much, like Derek Jeter or someone like that, they're just thankful they're getting paid millions of dollars to play a kids' game. It's a great feeling getting paid to do something that you love. I'm not on the baseball field, I wish I was because I love baseball but I'm in the DJ booth and that's the next best thing. Me up there and the crowd goin' crazy, you know I'm like, "Wow!"

There's clubs I DJ at, and I would never tell these clubs this, but if they didn't pay me I would still DJ there! It's such a great feeling! You work at some of these clubs and there's 2000 people, and at the end of the night they're going crazy cheering, "One more song!" People come up and say, "Louie, I've driven two hours to come see you!" You can't put a price tag on that. So many times I walk out of a club and I'm like, "Wow, I can't believe I got paid for tonight!" I'm still like that, even though I've been deejaying for over ten years, it still excites me when I DJ.

Cosmik: I know just how you feel. I'm actually just over 50, but the music keeps me young.

DeVito: You know what? I'm 33 and I'm deejaying in clubs where you know sometimes it's 18 and over, I'm doin' Teen Night. For me to go in those clubs and hang out, yeah I would probably feel out of place, but when I'm up in the booth, I'm on the level of somebody who's ten or fifteen years younger than me. Because of the music, we have something in common. I say the same thing, the music keeps me young. Some of my friends are married with two, three kids and like that's their life. I'm in a club for my life, but I love it; that's what I love to do.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes