Mixing consuls

>> Buying out their old haunt on the Main while planting their flag in L.A. and striving for an Olympic gig, the Team Canada DJ duo of Grandtheft and D.R.One are making mighty moves at home and across the globe

MAPLE STAPLES: Grandtheft (L) and D.R.One

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Pure in Vegas is maybe the hardest club in North America to get into as a DJ. They just don’t bring guests,” says Aaron “Grandtheft” Waisglass, who with Raph “D.R.One” Kerwin comprises the Team Canada DJ duo.

“I can’t believe our Vegas debut was at Pure, at Paris Hilton’s birthday party. Seems like every week there’s stuff like that, though. That was in mid-February, and since then we’ve been to China twice, to the Dominican Republic for an MTV party and all over the States, and we’re opening our own bar. It’s like, wow. It doesn’t even make sense anymore. Things are moving too fast.”

There’s poetic justice to Waisglass’s anxious “whoa Nelly,” as he and Kerwin have a history of playing it fast if not loose on the decks together. “We’ve always been pretty physical with it,” Waisglass says of their mixing style. “We play songs real fast, real attention-deficit. People say we mix too fast—people come up to us and say, ‘I requested that song and you played it for 20 seconds!’ Well, you’re gonna hear 500 songs tonight, and everyone’s going crazy.

“We’re all about the drop, packing in a lot of songs and a lot of reactions. You get a reaction every time you drop a song, so we’re getting 500 reactions in a set.”

Multiply that by crowds in the four- to six-digit range on a weekly basis, across the continent and beyond (“beyond” meaning, say, their recent gig in Shanghai for David Beckham and his L.A. Galaxy teammates), and it adds up to a whole lotta reactions for Team Canada lately.

Blue Dog, new tricks

Both the origin of Team Canada as a duo and the latest news on the pair can be captured in two words: Blue Dog. That’s the St-Laurent bar where both Waisglass and Kerwin held down nights, going back a decade now. The space has been out of use for a couple of years, but in 2005, after Kerwin roped Waisglass into an alliance at his Back to Basics night, the two had the Blue Dog bumping, bouncing and banging with their machinegun mash-up style.

The pair knew each other well—Kerwin had crafted beats for Waisglass’s hip hop unit Offsides, Waisglass had covered for Kerwin at his Kingston, ON residency—but the B2B parties honed the intricacy and intuition of the interactions on the decks.

The joint was hardly run like the Ritz, but for all the grime and punishments involved, they were fond of the space. Fond enough that Team Canada have gone full circle and bought the damn bar. Next weekend marks the launch of the rechristened Blue Dog Motel, the suffix a reflection of the retro decor they’ve chosen.

“It’s pretty set up,” says Kerwin, showing little in the way of opening-night jitters. “We’ve been working hard to get the right DJs in there. We’ve been pretty selective because we’re DJs ourselves, we’ve been in the game, promoting and DJing. We’re not just doing it for the money, it’s so much more than that.”

It’s a place to call home base, for starters, tellingly outfitted in the rent-a-room chic all too familiar to the frequent-flying dyad. Team Canada will be saving their Sundays for the hometown crowd. “We don’t get to play small venues anymore, ever,” adds Kerwin, “so it’ll be nice to come home and do that rather than doing here what we do everywhere else.”

“Ring,” on fire

What they’ve been doing “everywhere else” is enhancing their high-test hip hop sets with funny flourishes and in-a-flash, vinyl-only mash-ups drawing heavily on hard rock hits, a style which they pioneered alongside Americans like Z-Trip and their buddy/booster DJ AM. “Those are the homies,” says Waisglass. “They picked up on what we were doing, and that’s the reason we got on in the States.

“When we made the transition from hip hop to all types of music, we had to learn all that music and how to mix it together. We did that four or five years ago. When we travelled, we started taking really crazy chances. It was all about Beyoncé and Sean Paul in the clubs, really jiggy. We were playing rock and ’80s, and no one was doing that in the big commercial clubs.”

The gamble paid off. Team Canada’s calling card is their jam on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” with Obie Trice and Black a cappellas, off their 2006 mix CD Classic Material Volume 1. “It was never serviced online, never blogged, just ripped off our CD and traded virally,” says Kerwin. “Z-Trip started playing it, Jazzy Jeff, Muggs, a bunch of the New York guys—everyone was playing that song.

“Z-Trip texted me the other day. He was in Kuwait, playing for the troops. There must be 100,000 troops there. I can’t even estimate. It was spinetingling. One song in, he plays our Johnny Cash remix for the troops, and they’re just going off.”

T-CAN WITH A PLAN:
Team Canada (L) with their Eh! Team crew

Special blends

Team Canada aren’t resting on their laurels though. “Playing Nirvana in a club when people are expecting to hear ‘Crazy in Love,’ that was real crazy five years ago. People would just lose their minds,” recalls Waisglass. “Now it’s become kind of the norm—people expect that, they expect it of us, they expect it of everyone. So we’re looking elsewhere to push people to something they’ve never heard before, to take it someplace else.

“I’ve gone back to get schooled on house and electro, and producing that stuff—just for our sets, I’m only blogging a bit of it, though we share it with AM and some of our DJ friends. Our sets are full of a lot of original music now. Or remixes of ’80s, rock tunes and hip hop songs, but uptempo club mixes—not necessarily B-more or electro, but our own kinda thing. We call it Canadian club.”

Their “Canadian club” is clearly of export grade. L.A. has embraced the duo, hence the Hilton hook-up. “AM’s manager signed us,” says Waisglass, “so we’re on a team out of L.A. with AM, Steve Aoki, Spider, Fashen, Pase Rock, Eli Escobar, DJ Scene—a lot of top guys from hip hop, mash-ups and electro. It’s a tight scene. They picked us up in September and opened up some of the bigger markets in the States to us. At the same time, we decided to do something similar and sign our four guys from Canada.”

Kerwin rattles off the members of Team Canada’s expansion kit, christened the Eh! Team. “DJ Illo from Ottawa, Jr. Flo from Toronto, Pump from Calgary and Hedspin from Vancouver. It’s growing—the name is becoming recognizable in Toronto and Vancouver. They’re all fantastic DJs and good dudes, which is why we brought them on. We’re about to start moving those guys into the States too.”

TWIST OF FÊTE: Waisglass with Paris Hilton

Toting the torch

Team Canada themselves, meanwhile, are looking at an overdue debut Euro-tour, and eager for a fifth visit to China, where they’ve planted the Canadian club-kid flag on tours with East Asian superstars. Witnessing China’s explosive rise and its impact on nightlife in Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere has left them gobsmacked. “It’s insane how stuff is done there, and the scale it’s done on,” says Kerwin. “You have as many lights, screens, tables and staff as possible, that’s the attitude. Go as big as possible. No holds barred.”

Sports nuts both, as their moniker suggests, Team Canada are gunning for a gig at the Beijing Olympics (and for good measure, Vancouver in 2010), but they are aware of the controversial ramifications, amplified after the Tibet crackdown. Waisglass is understandably torn.

“Music, parties and sports are what bring people together, and that’s a big part of the point of what we do. So to take that out, or turn it into being about something else that we can’t fully understand over here, that’s tough for me.

“There are a lot of other things at stake. It’s not just about our personal experiences. We were the first Canadian club DJs to go over there, and I’m proud of that. Not to just preach Western music, but to also learn about their music, buy Chinese records, learn about the artists there who we can talk about and introduce here.”

Kerwin’s more pragmatic in his assessment. “If the whole Team Canada doesn’t go to the Olympics,” he shrugs, “then we probably shouldn’t go.”

It’s not like they wouldn’t have literally a world of other options, and Team Canada aren’t the types to pass up an interesting opportunity. In fact, that’s what got them where they are.

“A lot of people won’t give up their $200 to gig locally, to go play for free somewhere else,” says Waisglass, “but if we could afford the plane ticket, we would just go. Eventually people started to take note, because we were doing something different. If you’re doing something creative, someone’s gonna give you a shot. You can’t expect money, but go take a chance.

“For us, it worked out,” he chuckles. “A whole lot better than it should have.”