Be Like Mix Master Mike
It’s taken Michael Schwartz — a k a Mix Master Mike —
twenty-eight years to hone his cutting and scratching chops to
perfection. Now he’s so busy he doesn’t just juggle records, he
juggles projects: The DJ’s touring with the Beastie Boys through
September, promoting his new debut solo CD,
Anti-Theft-Device (Asphodel), working on the soundtrack
for an upcoming Playstation video game, and recording a full-length
CD with his crew, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, for their own
Skratched Records label.
So just how did Mike impress the Beastie Boys enough for him to be
invited into the fold? “They knew about me from all my DJ battles,”
Mike says. Anyone keeping up with the hip-hop/DJ/turntable scene
knows that the Piklz have won so many turntable battles that they
were finally asked to retire and become competition judges — you
know, to give others a chance.
Second, there’s the matter of taste. “[The Beasties] liked my
style,” says Mike. “It related a lot to the Beastie style. On
“Jimmy James,” [the Beasties] scratched Jimi Hendrix guitar riffs;
I do the same thing. So, it’s like the same formula there, the same
chemistry. They like me because I show them what comes from my
heart and I don’t hold nothing back. If I don’t like something, I
let ’em know.”
Third, Mike worked it: “I met Adam Yauch at the Rock Steady
anniversary in1995 and, ever since then, we exchanged phone numbers
and kept in contact.When he wasn’t home, I would leave these crazy
scratch messages on hisanswering machine, which drove him berserk.
He called me up to work on [theBeasties’] Hello, Nasty.
After that project, he asked me to become theirpermanent DJ. Who’s
gonna refuse that?”
Now that he’s the man, do the Beastie Boys ever sort of, well,
suggest whathe should play? “Sometimes they do,” he admits. “They
don’t tell me how to do it. They just bring it up to me.
It’s a suggestion. They put it in thesuggestion box.”
Mike is more of an artist than a craftsman, drawing on
spontaneousinspiration instead of prepared routines. “It just comes
from my heart andhow I’m feeling at the time,” he says. “I have so
many tricks in my head,and whatever I remember at the moment —
like bend the record or do a lazyscratch here or a one-hand
hydroplane scratch here or juggle two records atonce — it just
goes in order of the way I feel. I’m not into sitting in myroom and
perfecting the whole DJ set. That’s too robotic for me. I likestuff
random. I move at a random pace.” At a recent performance at the
World Trade Tower’s posh Windows on the World, Mike busted out with
Rush, Hendrix, and countless other barely identifiable song samples
that flew by as fast as his hands could cut, scratch, mix, fade,
juggle, whatever. The crowd ate it up.
Mike can shift work modes without missing a beat, playing with the
Beasties(“more mellow than you think”) one day and the Piklz (“one
gigantic scratchrobot”) on another, noting that the experiences are
like night and day.”When I’m with the Invisbl Skratch Piklz, we’re
a scratch band, a scratchorchestra,” he says. “Being with the
Piklz, my hands are constantly movingto keep up the drum beat or
scratching a hi-hat or horn riff. Being with the Beastie Boys, I
just kick back and let them ride, and wait for my part to come in.
I’m more relaxed up there. It’s totally improvised. They let me do
whatever I want.”
What Mike really wants is to help spread the turntable word. “I’m
trying topush this whole turntable phenomenon universally just to
show the wholeworld that the turntable can be an instrument also.
And hopefully, one dayyou can walk into a Tower Records and they’ll
have their own category likescratch music or turntable music.
That’s what I wanna do.”