Every field has its masters. In art, there are Michelangelo and Picasso. In literature, there are Cervantes and Hemingway. And in turntablism, there are Grand Wizard Theodore, DJ Kool Herc and Mix Master Mike.
Now, Mike Schwartz might object to being included alongside his own heroes, but there's no denying the 36-year-old played a key role in the evolution of the turntable as musical instrument long before he became famous to a new generation as the DJ behind hip-hop group The Beastie Boys.
Widely credited with being the inventor of the "tweak scratch" (in which the record is moved back and forth manually while the turntable motor is off), Mike was also a founding member of the groundbreaking group The Invisibl Skratch Piklz—a collection of turntablists that also included Q-Bert, Yoga Frog and Shortkut—back in 1989. Mike, Q-Bert and DJ Apollo formed the world's first scratch band and won the prestigious Disco Mix Club World Championship three years running. "It was the heyday of the battle era," he says.
But the times, they are a-changin'. Today, you're more likely to see, and hear, a DJ using Serato Scratch Live or a similar chunk of hardware to emulate with digital music files the same techniques Mike and others pioneered. But he has no hard feelings about the developments that have had such an impact on the turntable and electronica scene.
"You've got to run with technology, you know what I mean? You've got to use technology in your own way. Back in the day, you had two turntables and today you're still using two turntables. Most cats are using laptops now, but it's 2006 now," he says. "There are different DJs out there who do different things. I just think it still has room to grow. I'm still experimenting."
It makes sense Mike is comfortable with new technology, since he claims some of his inspiration came from a culture far more advanced than ours.
"I'm in my room and I'm scratching and making beats and stuff like that, and I look out into the soccer field and I see these three light beams," he recounts. "These three balls of light rotating in some sort of weird formation. I get the inspiration that what I was doing in my room attracted those lights. My intuition told me that it was some extraterrestrial beings that came to visit. Kind of investigating me."
The sci-fi beliefs haven't stopped since, though they're noticeably more tongue-in-cheek when talking about his frequent trips to Las Vegas and the secret studio he says he has somewhere in the mountains outside of town.
"It's kind of like the new Area 51. But this is like if you put GPS systems and satellite systems to try and track it, you will never find it because it's under this vortex," he says. "It's like a fourth-dimensional dome feature that I activate and nobody can find it. You can't even Google it. It's Google-proof."
Talking about DJs as stars (the terrestrial, not celestial, kind) brings Mike back down to earth, though:
"I think it's gotten corny over the years. You see a lot of commercials, and they're kind of portraying the DJ as some kind of cool fad or something like that. I recall seeing a Heineken commercial where it said, ‘the birth of the scratch' and this dude was scratching and knocks over the Heineken bottle which spills all over the turntable, and he grabs the record and he scratches it. It just got a little too corny commercially.
"For me, as long as they're introduced the right way, you know what I mean? Kind of pay homage to where it started, like pay respect to Grand Wizard Theodore, who invented the scratch, and Kool Herc. In order to move forward, you've got to know where it started."