Bootie LA
Safari Sam’s
Hollywood, CA
October 6, 2007
By Victoria Joyce
(SugarBuzz Hollywood)
SugarBuzz Magazine
Our little Adrian is all grown up! We can’t get over it. All grown up and building a multinational mashup empire. Pioneer of musical pairing, Adrian, the former lead singer for Blue Period moved on to DJ’ing in the San Francisco clubs after BP broke up in 1997. (Was that really ten years ago?)
It’s the first Saturday of the month and Bootie LA has opened its doors at Safari Sam’s in Hollywood. Adrian and Co. are making their monthly visit to Hollywood. This club is built around and by mashup DJ’s and this is the So Cal version of the original, Bootie SF.
“If you want the people to come to your gigs you have to have a club just like Club Glitz.” Glitz was Blue Period’s legendary monthly soiree that featured the best in Glam, Punk and Pop with the hair dressers, make up artists and performance artists with cans of Redi-Whip thrown in.
With his partner The Mysterious D, Adrian (who go by A+D) have refined mashups to an art, expertly mixing music styles across genres and decades with taste and vision. And it’s caught on big. There are now clubs in New York, Paris and Munich.
Adrian tells us “These aren’t just a rap track with a drum beat. To get a great mashup have to be an engineer and producer with knowledge of song structure and musicianship. Ideally you bring together artists that would never be in the studio together.” It’s sculpture with sound.
Adrian also produces fabulous flyers for these clubs, Photoshopping amazing images reflecting the music; Siouxie and the Banshees vs Justin Timberlake or Billy Idol vs Pink. Posters of two fabulous faces into one decorate the walls of Safari Sam’s for tonight’s show.
The music is loud and fun. The dancers are digging it. The bar is raised. No, not the one with the beer glasses on it. It’s the level of appeal that’s smarter. The crowd is mostly young, lots of Latin club kids shaking it with a nice mix of artisans, musicians and drag queens. Our kind of people.
The LA club has the added talents of the amazing Paul V, who has two shows on Indie 103.1, The Smash Mix on Fridays at 5:35p and Neon Noise on Saturdays, midnight to 3a. Paul is a educated man and a rock warrior who’s produced, managed and promoted music in Hollywood for 20 something years. Love his stuff. He spins epics like Ulysses, layering and mixing music and voices that make serious sense. The cherry on top for Bootie LA.
Back in San Fran, Adrian and Mysterious D’s monthly club at the DNA Lounge, south of Market Street, Bootie SF features the only live mash up band, Smash Up Derby, fronted by, who else? Adrian. Nice to know he is keeping those lead singer chops alive and kicking. Adrian described it as “singing a Billy Joel lyric to the Scissor Sisters.” We gotta get up there for that.