MIDNIGHT RIDERS

At midnight, Orange County’s busiest club deejays, having been booked months ago to work the evening, will whoop and holler, kiss and toast along with the guests. But it’s all business. Spinmeisters pocketing up to $2,000 per gig must be part music historian, part hipster and part social behaviorist. They’ve got to hide their age to appear ever-young. And they’ve got to know what’s in (techno jungle), what’s out (glam metal) and what’s back (electronica), where to buy it and how to mix it, so that one song slides seamlessly into the next. If the music’s bad, says local club promoter John Joyce, the clientele “will never come back.” The deejays profiled here talk about what it takes to keep the dance floors full.

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Beej Ryan’s co-workers wear thong bikinis, but he doesn’t seem to notice. As co-founder and lead deejay of one of the most successful clubs in county lore, Disco 2000, he’s used to go-go dancers in cages, and anyway, he’s got work to do.

Like a short-order cook during the lunch rush, he’s a study in perpetual motion, silver-ringed fingers flying from vinyl to turntable console to record bin.

Mixing, as this art (or is it science?) is known, looks easier than it is. A deejay must synchronize the BPMs (beats per minute) of the tune that’s playing with the tune that’s up next. The two mingle briefly before “the break,” an opportune rest or mood shift in Tune A during which Tune B takes over, he said.

Side-by-side turntables (most deejays prefer the sound and feel of vinyl to CDs), a monitor to hear what’s playing, headphones to hear what’s on deck and a practiced hand are imperative.

“Three or four years ago, I’d sit at home and mix for an hour before going to a club,” Ryan said on a job recently at Club Rubber. He still makes the occasional mistake: “I just missed my break.”

Among the Huntington Beach resident’s regular gigs is the kinky Club Rubber, held monthly at Santa Ana’s Galaxy Concert Theatre. There, flanked by tall speakers and gyrating go-go dancers, he rotates house, techno and progressive sounds from a spot-lit command post on a large proscenium stage.

“Believe it or not, it’s kind of a stressful, demanding job,” he said between sips of beer. “You can feel personally responsible for whether or not the party goes on. I’m sure I’ll have hypertension any day now.”

Ryan, who’ll be working tonight in Las Vegas, crashed his first club a decade ago using a fake ID, and he hooked his first deejay job a few years later at a place in Norco. Arriving that first night, he freaked. He’d messed around on twin turntables in a friend’s Melrose Avenue music store, but . . .

“The professional equipment, I had no idea how to use it.”

The inauspicious debut, however, immediately paid off for Beej, probably best known for the wildly successful Disco 2000, which drew 2,000 dancers weekly at locations in Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and Santa Ana from 1992 to ’96. He discovered that mixing isn’t everything.

“I learned that it mattered what you played, not how you played it.”

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DJ Roly picked a down-tempo song for a recent Friday night’s first song at Costa Mesa’s trendy Shark Club, “because nobody’s going to dance yet.”

Of course. Nobody goes near the floor at this early hour. But how would he know they were ready?

“You watch everybody’s body language,” he said, scrutinizing the half-populated bar and self-conscious stragglers on stools encircling the floor. “Right now, no one is drunk.”

In fact, another hour would drag by before the club looked like a party. Biding his time, Roly Quiambao stuck to slower, less familiar tunes while greeting a stream of friends and keeping an eye on the floor.

He noticed the spectators’ heads begin to bob to the rhythm when the first dancers broke a sweat. Meanwhile, the martinis flowed and the line grew outside the front door. Roly soon unsheathed vinyl by Toni Braxton and Groove Theory, and the mass of bodies near the bar began to merge onto the dance floor.

“That means I’m on the right path,” said Quiambao, a Sunset Beach resident who has been spinning in Orange and Los Angeles counties since the early ‘80s. He’s working tonight at the Doubletree Hotel in Costa Mesa.

Quiambao leaped from his first local job at Anaheim’s defunct Pink Cadillac to such well-known O.C. danceterias as Disco 2000, Roxbury South (also closed) and the Rhino Room.

All that experience told him not to panic when the momentum he had been building at the Shark Club abruptly faded. The alcohol still hasn’t had its full affect, he explained, “or they’re waiting for something really popular.”

He could have jumped ahead, but the danger of using big hits to mobilize a crowd too soon is burnout. “You want to save some head room for later,” Roly said. He’s got to keep the floor hopping until 2 a.m.

The pace picked up as quickly as it had faded, and Roly predicted that dancers would start to request their faves--another guaranteed mobilizer.

“Can you play a little bit of Janet?” a clubber asked.

Roly agreed, and a cut from the latest release by Michael Jackson’s famous sister did the trick.

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DJ Daniel, a mainstay for the past three years at Irvine’s long-running Metropolis, can divine a danceable tune from a dud in seconds. That’s a good thing, because he has to spend hours shopping for new music every other week.

Among his stores of choice is Noise, Noise, Noise in Costa Mesa, which has one turntable for sampling tunes but tons of vinyl. Recently hunched over its racks, the deejay surnamed Park flipped through records rapid-fire, pausing only to pluck out potentials for brief inspection before rejecting or putting them aside for a listening test.

Park knows an encyclopedic array of musical styles: jungle, tribal, trance, drum-n-bass, trip hop, old school, rare groove, rare techno, house, deep house, Italian house, acid jazz, funk, retro, hard-core disco, soul, high-energy industrial, West Coast breakbeat and Orlando break beat.

He can handily define most. “Orlando break beat is more booty-shakin’,” he said. “People on the West Coast dance with their hands.”

Yet he always feels behind the curve.

“There’s so much more music out there to know. Every time I turn around there’s a new form,” said Park, who stays on top of things via radio, industry mags and a “record pool,” wherein for a monthly fee he receives new music from record company marketers.

While shopping, imports tend to catch his eye, said the Orange resident. “It’s a big thing for a deejay to play an import before it’s released domestically.”

Perhaps the toughest part of the job is remembering whether he already has a record in his collection, which he began amassing as a deejay-trainee (learning from a friend) in 1989 and which now numbers roughly 45,000 records.

“They’re in one room in my house, stacked floor to ceiling,” said Park, who typically lugs 400 LPs to each gig. He’ll probably bring a danceable version of “Auld Lang Syne” to the New Year’s Eve blowout he’s spinning tonight with DJ Roly at Costa Mesa’s Doubletree Hotel. But it always pays to be prepared. Having the right song on hand once snagged him a $50 tip.

“Some guy wanted something for his girlfriend,” Park said.

Occasional tips help take the sting out such occupational hazards as hearing loss, secondhand smoke and rude party people.

“They’ll make a request and say, ‘I hate this music!’ or ‘This music sucks!’ I never understand it.”

More often, however, Park gets praise for the job he does, though he never wants to let it go to his head.

“It’s a good thing I have friends to kick me around and remind me that I’m just helping people dance,” he said. “It’s not brain surgery. I’m not saving lives or anything.”