Web MasterIt’s Saturday night at the Living Room, a plush, exclusive night club in downtown St. Louis, and Hugh Tychsen is making some quick decisions. He’s spinning records for a lively crowd of drinking, smoking, dancing party-goers, but he has to be careful what he plays because of a few important people in attendance. One of those people is Nelly, whom Tychsen wants to be especially careful not to anger by putting on the wrong record, since tonight is Nelly’s birthday.
“I didn’t play any Eminem because he’s got a problem with Eminem supposedly-a little underground problem,” Tychsen (pronounced Thai-sen) relates with a grin. “I thought about who else would be there and who they had a problem with. I didn’t play any KRS-One because [Nelly’s] got a problem with KRS-One too. I also couldn’t play Eminem because Justin Timberlake was there. And I didn’t play any Nelly songs when he was in there, because artists don’t usually like that. So I didn’t play any Justin Timberlake, any Fabolous, any Nelly, any Lunatics, which was kind of hard because all of those guys have big songs out right now.”
Sitting across from Tychsen as he dishes out anecdotes of a flashy night of flowing Courvoisier, celebrity-ducking rap stars, scantily clad groupies, and burning cash, the listener is almost incredulous. Tychsen looks pretty much like your average Washington University sophomore-he’s soft-spoken, clean-cut, and dresses in discrete shades of black and grey. But as he explains to you in his animated but smooth voice how he went from being a clueless, new Wash U student a little over two months ago to landing a highly-coveted DJ gig playing for some of the rap industry’s biggest stars, you realize that there is a quiet drive, and a remarkable confidence behind his dark, smiling eyes.
There is a clear pattern in the way that Tychsen so breezily picks up opportunities. He spent last year studying abroad in Paris, and even though he hardly knew a word of French when he got there he quickly found himself a job. He described how one night he visited a popular club on its hip-hop night, “I talked to the DJ for a bit, and I saw that I was about as good as he was, and so I kind of talked him into letting me open up for him every Thursday night. So I played until midnight every Thursday night for three months.” Tychsen is anything but a hustler, but he’s confident, and he has an uncanny ability to gain people’s trust very quickly.
When he was still studying in Columbia, Tychsen made an important encounter that was to set him up later with the Nelly gig. While DJing at Tonic, a popular area nightclub, he met another DJ named Rob Lemon, who is considered the top house DJ in St. Louis. The two got along well, and when Tychsen told Lemon that he was moving to St. Louis at the end of the summer, Lemon told him that he needed a roommate and invited him to move in.
Since the beginning of the school year, Lemon has helped Tychsen become established in the St. Louis promotions scene. And as the director of one of St. Louis’ biggest promoters, Velocity Promotions, Lemon helped Tychsen get his first big break.
Tychsen remembers, “Justin Timberlake came down, approached the owner of the Living Room, and said ‘I want to rent this club out. I want to throw a party here for Nelly.’ And he asked the owner, ‘Who are the best promotion people in St. Louis,’ and my roommate (who is also the DJ for the Living Room) was there so he goes ‘I am.’ So my roommate got that gig, and they needed a hip-hop DJ, and I’m his roommate, so that’s how I got it.”
Seeing Nelly without the band-aid
Tychsen seems perpetually calm and unperturbable, but he says he was giddy as he prepared for his set on Saturday. “I was really nervous. I had done a lot of big crowds before, but it was just the fact that there were so many celebrities there that was so nerve-racking.” But he thinks the performance came of well: “I knew when Nelly was standing right behind me, and I was scratching and cutting and everything was on time. Now I’m a lot more confident to do more, because I didn’t mess up when it came down to it.”
He manned the tables for two and a half hours, from 10-12:30, until Nelly’s personal DJ, DJ S&S took over until 2 am. Afterwards he got to get a taste of the life that he says matched up well with the glitzy image projected in music videos and songs. “It was really glamorous. They were just throwing money around. And there were just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girls everywhere. Everyone was drinking Courvoisier, and Remy Martin, and ‘Dom P.'”
He was surprised at how down-to-earth the star of the evening was. “I had been waiting to talk to [Nelly], and I said ‘Hey man, I DJed before your DJ.’ I didn’t even know if he’d recognize me. But he said ‘Yeah man, you did a good job, thanks a lot.’ I didn’t even wish him happy birthday I was so star-struck.” He was surprised at how much the rapper seemed to want to shy away from his superstar image. “I’d say the entourage guys were trying to act like they were Nelly, and Nelly was trying to act like he was a nobody. They were like ‘Yeah we want some Dom P up here’ and Nelly was just like ‘Can I get a coffee.'”
Maybe more than anything, Tychsen was struck by the huge amounts of cash being thrown around at the party. Apparently Justin Timberlake, who recorded a song with Nelly on his last album, Nellyville, spent $35,000 renting out the club, and Tychsen says he “saw Nelly write a $10,000 check to pay for his bar tab.”
Humble beginnings
Tychsen says that when he first picked up a set of turntables as a high school student at Priory School here in St. Louis, it was almost impossible to imagine he would ever get good at the skill. “I was horrible,” he remembers, “My friends wouldn’t come over anymore after a while. I spent two years trying to figure it out, but I just couldn’t figure it out, so I basically gave it up.”
After graduating, he enlisted in the Marines for a year and left DJing behind. But as his active duty came to an end, and he was preparing to start his studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he thought he would give DJing another chance: “When I was in the Marines, I saved up a lot of money, so I decided when I got back that I would actually buy the good equipment, because that’s what you need to be good.”
With the help of a friend, he secured a gig spinning at By George, a Columbia club, on Wednesday nights, “when not one person would walk in.” He started off practically as a beginner, but doing the four-hour show every week gave him an opportunity to focus on his skills. He started picking up tips from other DJs, in particular a house DJ named John Millard, who would “come up there every couple of weeks, hang out for about half an hour, and just show me one or two little things that I’d practice over and over for a couple of weeks until the next time he’d come up, and show me a couple of more little tricks.” “All I did for six months until I got a bigger night” he recalls, “was just sit up there and learn how to mix beats, speed one song up and slow down another.”
These days, Tychsen has to juggle a hefty course load with his burgeoning DJ career, and he says the latter is suffering at the expense of the former. Wash U students can find him in the Rat on Thursdays DJing for happy hour, but he’s courting the promoters at bigger clubs like the Cobalt, Have a Nice Day Caf‚, and Lucky’s. In any case, he says he loves the mix of the rigors of Wash U and the music of his nightlife. “I’m like an intellectual during the day, and this hip-hop DJ guy at night,” he says, “and I like that balance. You DJ from 10 to 3 in the morning, and you can study during the day. You just try not to get early classes, right?”
Likes and dislikes of DJ Hugh “Entyse” Tychsen
Five albums I can’t part with:
Dr. Dre The Chronic
MOP The Warriorz
Dirty Vegas: Days Go By
Eminem 8 Mile
Jay-Z: The Blueprint
If I could DJ for any rapper it would be:
Dr. Dre
Worst mishap:
I was DJing at this huge ladies night at By George Dance Club and someone pulled out the power plug in the back room, and the entire club went down. All the lights went out, the music completely stopped, the emergency lights came on, and everyone started screaming at me. I was in the booth elevated above the dance floor, and it was horrible. It took about two minutes too fix after the manager went back there, and the guy that did it got thrown through about six doors on the way to the parking lot. Then the music got back turned back on, I told the crowd what happened and they were cool about it.
Favorite movie:
Menace II Society
Drink of choice:
Well, after the Nelly concert, Courvoisier (laughs).