Tommy Lee Crashes Clubland with Cutting- Edge Tech & Filthy, Dirty Sounds (2008 Attic Archive)

Houston, Texas—After already catching five gigs of the Electro Mayhem fall tour, I should’ve become accustomed to the relative circus that follows Tommy Lee & DJ Aero wherever they spin. Not only is it an “official big night out” for the clubbers, but there’s always a little more action in the room. It’s not a sense of danger, more one of unpredictability. But it’s always there.

At Hartford’s Room 960, it seemed to be “Desperate Housewives Night,” as the suburban 35-and-over crowd collectively poured themselves into their tightest outfits and pressed up against the stage—cellphone cameras clicking away. At Manhattan’s Rebel, NYU students were slip-sliding on spilt beer and cocktails—yes, cellcams a-clicking. At New Jersey’s Bliss, the audience was amped and responsive to the pair’s brand of dirty electro—but more than a few bathroom visitors ended up wearing their drinks (and dinners) that night. Messy.

So, at Rich’s—Houston’s venerable venue—the room was going off properly. The cell phones had been put away and people were digging the big-time crunch that the pair was bringing over the raging club system. Of course, it couldn’t all go down that easily because by mid-set, we were graced with a visit from one of Houston’s legendary music figures: Bushwick Bill, the one-eyed, rapping dwarf from The Geto Boys. And he wanted to rock the mic.

The party was storming along, but Aero slowed it down, looped up some beats on the CDJ-1000 and Bill busted out The Geto Boys’ creepy-great 1991 hit, “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.” The crowd loved it, the hometown hero got his props and Tommy and Aero eased back into the big, bangin’ jams that had made the night so tasty. It’s always something, and that moment was no different—everyone, it seems, wants to party with Tommy Lee.

Why? Because everyone knows Tommy Lee. He became a rock star as the drummer for Mötley Crüe. He became a tabloid item by marrying a couple of television stars. In time, he became a television personality himself. His stories end up in the most salacious books, internet links and MTV specials. Almost everywhere he turns, there’s drama.

But not so much in the DJ booth. When he teams with Aero, it’s all music—though certainly with a bang-the-party urgency—and it serves as a welcome refuge. Of course, we’ll see how long that lasts, because at some point the question from the DJ peanut gallery will become: Who is Tommy Lee to think he can DJ like us?

If you aren’t moved by the crunchy, punchy, squelchy, bangin’ electro sounds of Justice, Deadmau5 or Fedde le Grand, I don’t know what to tell you. You may not like it. And then again, if you caught the show—with their custom videos, one-the-fly stutter edits, nasty build-ups, and non-stop energy—you, too, might be convinced. I sure was. Fact is, there are few DJ duos out there bringing as much to the party these days.

So as the pair prepared to head into the studio with Deadmau5 (EDM’s star producer of the moment), DJ Timescaught up with L.A.-based Tommy Lee and DJ Aero (aka Chester Deitz) to talk tech and, thankfully, music.

DJ Times: Aero, you came from that early-’90s L.A. rave scene, which was a pretty mad time. What do you remember about those parties?

DJ Aero: Yeah, well, back in the day, you’d actually have to get a map at a “map point” and drive to a hidden warehouse, where they stole the power or had some hidden generators. You’d usually have local DJs from L.A. and you partied until the cops came and raided it. And, to be honest, that was what was the most intriguing thing—the “map points.” That’s what got me hooked.

DJ Times: So what made the parties special?

Aero: People would go and literally dance the whole night. They would dance for dancing. It was just about fun. There were no cell phone cameras, no media, just kids who just liked this new sound that was coming out.

DJ Times: DJs from that era?

Aero: Barry Weaver just destroyed it. I remember Doc Martin playing “Rockin’ Down the House” by MI 7, “Cookin’ Up Yah Brain” by 4 Hero, “Bombscare” by 2 Bad Mice. Now those tracks would be considered breakbeats or hardcore, but back then, house DJs were playing them, guys like Steve Loria, all the DJs. And nobody cared—it was just good music. People weren’t putting it into genres.

DJ Times: A lot of what you became known for—scratch DJing and tagging—came more from the original hip-hop culture.

Aero: Absolutely. I’ve spent a couple nights in jail because of graffiti. [Laughs]

Tommy Lee: And he’s good, too, real good.

DJ Times: So who are your heroes in the turntablism world?

Aero: Mix Master Mike and DJ David from Germany—he’s kind of obscure, but he’s the first guy I ever saw do a hand-stand on a turntable. I thought that was cool. The Skratch Piklz with QBert—all those guys took turntablism into the mainstream and people started accepting it. Of course, they were the people I looked up to for inspiration. Those people were the pioneers.

DJ Times: Tommy, how did you get so hell-bent on electronic music?

Tommy: We all have many highlights in our life and this was one of them: It was New Year’s Eve and I was in London with Pamela [Anderson] at the time and we decided to go to Ministry of Sound. I’ll never forget walking into one room and seeing a warning sign that read something like, “In this room there are excessive decibels—enter at your own risk.” I thought, “That’s my fuckin’ room!” So I’m standing in front of the speakers, it’s midnight, and I heard “Higher State of Consciousness” and I said, “What…the fuck…is this?” I heard these frequencies coming out of the speakers and, for the first time in my life, I was actually ducking. It hurt.

Aero: As someone who knows Tommy Lee’s ears, I can tell you that that’s a big statement.

Tommy: I flipped out. And for the first time in my life, I ran to the DJ booth and said, “Who is this?” Of course, the DJ said, “Oh, it’s Josh Wink.” So once I found the track, I lost my mind. I took samples of that, chopped it up and put it into a drum solo on electronic pads that I was doing with Mötley at the time and people were like, “What is this?” Still, to this day, I have visuals of looking out there during a Mötley show and seeing these full-on rock kids duck, like, “What is he playing?”

DJ Times: I know you came across Aero during your Methods of Mayhem period. What impressed you about Aero that made you want to work with him?

Tommy: I’m pretty much a passion guy and I saw him technically do his thing, but I saw his passion for music, life, and technology. He just loves all the newest, craziest, best stuff. I’m like that, too. I like to call us “gizmologists.” Musically, personally, technically, those are some big boots to fill and I saw that in him. We just hit it off.

DJ Times: Is there something specific about electronic dance music that appeals to you?

Tommy: It’s not really about the scene—it’s about the sound. I watched this documentary about Bob Moog—the guy who built all those synthesizers—and it was amazing. He was breaking down synthesis, but he didn’t explain it in technical terms, schematics or algorithms. He talked about music. It’s about the thing that happens to you when you grab a drum stick and whack a drum. Or you grab a synthesizer, hit a note and it’s this big, crazy sound going, “Wup-whoooooop!” Or a guitar, and it’s on 11 and it’s just, “Kerrr-rang!” It’s the feeling that you get. So I’m not about the scene—the scene is whatever with me. It’s the feeling I get when I hear electronic music. It’s night and day from rock music.

Aero: And seeing people dance is great, especially when they’re not worried about who’s DJing.

DJ Times: My favorite definition of dance music came from James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. He said, “Dance music has a point. If you dance, it works. You can actually measure it.” End of story.

Aero: That’s like Tommy’s T-shirt.

Tommy: Dude, I got the greatest T-shirt—well, it’s got some vodka-cranberry and Jäger stains on it now—but it says, “You Play Good Music, I Dance…You Not Play Good Music, I No Dance.”

Aero: It’s that simple. And that’s our job, obviously, as DJs to play the right music in the right setting.

Tommy: He’s got a great sensibility about music and what feels right and he’s got a drummer who has the same sensibility. So whenever we agree on a track—and we don’t always agree—we’re a pretty good barometer on what’s good.

DJ Times: Does having a drumming background give you any insight on what makes people move?

Tommy: Yeah, it does, exactly. I’ve got firsthand experience. I mean, you’ve got 20,000 people in an arena and certain beats work and you see people jumping up and down. With other beats, people are getting up to buy a beer. Those are the beats you want to avoid. [Laughs]

DJ Times: OK, so when you were a kid worshipping John Bonham and later living the rock-n-roll dream, what did you think of disco and funk and that kind of music?

Tommy: You know, I loved it. When I was coming up and playing drums and just starting things with Mötley, I was this closet guy who just loved dance music. I’d never played it for anybody or showed anybody that I loved it, but if you had a hidden camera in my hotel room, I’d be in the corner dancing to “Saturday Night Fever.”

DJ Times: You’ll have to forgive me on this one, but somebody gave me the Nikki Sixx book [The Heroin Diaries] and I just finished reading it. So, in it, he mentions that you two were going to a “sick underground dance club.” This is 1987—do you remember that?

Aero: Yeah, where was that?

Tommy: Well…what I do remember is that when we were recording Dr. Feelgoodin Vancouver, we’d go to this dance club called The Warehouse. We’d bring in rough mixes to check them out on the club system. My whole life I was trying to corral the guys and say, “Dude, check this [music] out, it’s amazing. If we mixed this into our music, we would kill people.” [Laughs] But, you know, certain people are just not open to it.

DJ Times: Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine Mick Mars getting on the good foot.

Tommy: Yeah, [laughs] and the whole time, all these remixes you hear from Mötley Crüe—“Shout at the Devil” or “Kickstart My Heart”—and stuff like that we’ve done, that’s always been me saying, “C’mon guys, we gotta do a mix for the club or the DJ who wants to play ‘Shout at the Devil,’ but with beats—not my beats, but beats on top of beats!” So that’s always me flying the flag for something different. I’m that guy. I’m just pissing everyone off, I guess.

Aero: What it is about Tommy is that he’s not stuck in the past and everybody else is. It’s weird.

Tommy: Yeah, I always feel like I’m always dragging people up the ladder, like, “C’mon! It’s amazing up here!”

DJ Times: So, Tommy, are you still into rock music?

Tommy: All the time.

Aero: Tommy just wrote a song that is K-Rock-ready, no joke.

Tommy: I’m not over rock music. I’ve said that there just hasn’t been anything new that’s blown my skirt up. But I’m not over it, no way.

Aero: Lukas Rossi from Supernova came over recently and recorded this banger. Tommy called me up in the middle of the night to hear it. There’s some heat coming outta there, and it’s rock music. When you hear this guitar riff…

Tommy: It’s this track called “Better Than I Remember.” It’s in that OneRepublic flavor. It’s just beautiful. Musically, I’m just all over the place. I always have been. I always will be.

DJ Times: Onto the DJ world. You’re booth setup is anything but ordinary.

Aero: Yeah, if Tommy needs more gear, then we’ll have to see if we can get it past immigration. It’s gotten to be like, “Please let our equipment into the country.”

Tommy: I’ve been doing this for a long time and I can’t do anything half-ass. I mean, go big or stay home. When Aero and I do our thing, it’s like, “How can we take this to the next level?” I got a link to a Chemical Brothers’ show and all I wanna do with this project is get it to that level. Production is not an option. I know how to do it right because I’ve done it for so long and a lot of clubs aren’t capable of pulling that off, so it’s almost like you have to do a legit arena thing…

Aero: And you gotta give props to people like Justice, and the way they set up their Marshall stacks and modular gear out front to make it look bigger than it is. I mean, those speakers are not on, but it looks like they’re on. Methods of Mayhem had the right idea by showing what that kind of production could be, with synthesizers bouncing on springs…

Tommy: It’s entertainment. At the end of the day, you want somebody, hopefully everybody, walking out of the arena, going, “Dude, that was insane!” You can’t listen to it on your iPod. You can’t watch it on your computer. You have to go there and see it.

DJ Times: So what’s going on in your booth?

Aero: I’m using Serato with two Pioneer CDJ-1000s to control the computer with the music. We use a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer and there’s a send-and-return bus that I can assign to either my left CDJ or my right CDJ. So I can send one signal out of the send-and-return into Tommy’s computer and it gets processed to this program called Artillery [by Sugar Bytes]. So then from Artillery, it goes either into a Pioneer EFX-500 or EFX-1000, and we create kind of a loop—a send-and-return chain—and that goes back into my mixer, which, in turn, the house hears. So basically what happens is that I’m able to send Tommy a “one-track” and he can do whatever the hell he wants to it and I can mix another track on top of that, so that we can continuously remix and make the sound fresh.

Tommy: And in that chain, there’s a USB keyboard which operates Artillery, so if Aero sends me something, I can grab it. There are filters, distortion and stutter edits. You’ve got your quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth, thirty-second notes, etc. I can grab any piece of audio at any time and effect it with that keyboard, like [makes stutter-edit sound.]

Aero: That’s the biggest question we get asked. Whenever Tommy and I DJ or do a sound check, every DJ who sees us or every DJ we talk to wants to know how exactly we get that sound, because it’s always on-beat. How? The Pioneer mixer actually sends a MIDI signal to Tommy’s EFX unit and then Tommy makes sure that the computer is matched up with the MIDI tempo and it’s always on-time. So, whenever Tommy hits a button, it’s perfect. And Artillery is so cool because you can create your own effects in the keyboard range.

Tommy: You design the effect and you tell the effect when and what to play by pressing the keys. It’s pretty amazing program.

Aero: And it’s all scaled, so if you press a C, then you go to D and E and F, those can all be different time values that get repeated. And the great thing is: It doesn’t let go of the sound. It grabs the sound that’s already getting repeated. Like Tommy says, the stutter edit is so important to the sound of dance music, that we’re able to do any stutter edit or any build-up on any sound. So we can do build-ups where, in the normal song there wouldn’t be a build-up, it would be a straight beat.

Tommy: Aero and I are pretty much doing live remixes. Another cool thing is that once in a while Aero will bust the live mic through Artillery and you can grab it and loop it, distort it, flange it, phase it. We should really do a lot more of it because I think using Artillery with vocals could be a great hype machine for DJs out there.

DJ Times: Where do you get your tracks?

Aero: Beatport definitely is a spot. Trackitdown.net is another one. Also, I love DJ Culture, a record shop owned by my friend Simply Jeff, who’s a pioneer in breakbeat music. That was one of the first record stores which helped us when we first started out. Also, people send us a lot of tracks.

Tommy: A lot of producer friends hook us up—Adam Freeland, Erick Morillo, DJ Rooster and Sammy Peralta, the Deep Dish guys, a ton of people.

DJ Times: You guys performed at Pacha in New York for the launch of the Pioneer SVM-1000 mixer. How does that unit address your needs?

Tommy: That thing is sick. There are so many crazy features, but one of my favorites is being able to type in whatever you want, text-wise, and blast it on the screens. It’s really fun. It makes it really live—you can go with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, not something that you’ve already edited together, something you play all the time. You can assign audio effects, like flanging and delays, to video, which is amazing. You can stick a quarter-note delay on this video clip, or flange it, or chorus it—and it takes the exact image and duplicates it as chorus does with audio, but it’s with video. It’s just incredible. It’s about time we had something like that.

Aero: I really believe that if you don’t begin to incorporate video into your show you’ll be missing out.

DJ Times: What obstacles have you encountered since you took this act on the road?

Tommy: Early on, it was like, “Oh, they’re not playing rock music?”

Aero: Or we weren’t playing mash-ups. That was a big thing.

DJ Times: Tommy, considering all the times you’re in the news for things unrelated to music, does the DJ booth offer any relief?

Tommy: Dude, it’s the best ever. Aero and I don’t do this for the money, but it’s such a release—you have no idea. It’s so much fun. I’m sure there are a few haters in the room criticizing—there always are—but it’s not like there’s a front row full of photographers all running back to the rock magazine. But we haven’t released any original tracks yet, so…

Aero: Yeah, we’ll get the haters, but at the end of the day, that’s how it is. We’re about to do a week of studio work with Deadmau5—we’re so stoked.

Tommy: I can hear it now. We finish these tracks, and they’re bangers—I know they’re gonna be because we wouldn’t put them out if they were anything less. But I can hear it now: “Oh what? Tommy Lee thinks he’s an electronic-music guy now?” I can just hear it, so I’m sure it’s out there. But, trust me: I’m not going to pay much attention to it because I do this purely for the love. I just love this music.

By Jim Tremayne