I was interviewing an industry legend from Chicago a few months ago (I mean, it’s my job) who told me about this strange experience he had in Ibiza last summer. He arrived on the island early, he said, and went down to check out the club he’d be playing at the following day. Advanced scouting: it’s what the pros do.
That night a guy he’d never met before recognized him and began to tell him how important his records had been. This must happen to “industry legends” in nightclubs all the time, I suppose, but what was odd about it is the stranger was the headliner that night. The unreserved show of praise came from Josh Wink.
You have to go pretty far in this industry to find a more congenial and genuinely authentic person than Josh Wink. I think that natural warmth and unpretentiousness comes across in these transcripts from interviews Michaelangelo Matos published today in City Pages in which Wink talks about the foundational moments of the electronic music scene Philadelphia:
I used to want to come up to New York to hear Repete and Charlie Casanova to do their Future Shock Fridays. I’d talk to those guys and we worked it out: “Why don’t you do a rave bus? You could play up in New York with us, and bring people up.” That’s how I really started playing more often at the Limelight in New York—I would hire a Greyhound bus for a night trip, and people would come up. I think it was $20—you would get round-trip from Philly to New York, entry at the club. And they’d go back down.
The interviews were conducted in 2012 and 2013 for Matos’ The Underground Is Massive, but these bits of offal from the cutting room floor are priceless.
