[ NIGHT LIFE ]
At right, DJ Daniel J spins at the "Garden of Eden" pool party at the Royal Garden Waikiki Hotel.
Daniel J marks
40th at Wave
NINETEEN years after he first set foot in Honolulu, local house legend Daniel J celebrates his 40th birthday Tuesday night at the Wave Waikiki.
Like so many others before him, Daniel John Ward came to Hawaii for a vacation and found the pull of paradise too strong to ignore.
Daniel J's 40th Birthday Party
Where: Wave Waikiki, 1877 Kalakaua Ave.When: 9 p.m. Tuesday
Admission: $5 before midnight, $7 after, 21 and over
Call: 941-0424, ext. 12
Born and raised in San Francisco, he started spinning records in an all-ages nightclub at 11 years of age and had a steady gig rocking crowds of almost 3,000 people for $200 a night by the time he hit 15.
At about the same time, he collected the equivalent of a G.E.D. and started attending community college. For the next six years, Daniel J worked regularly at various nightclubs in the Bay Area, but it was a personal relationship gone bad that ended up leading him to the islands.
"I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and my mom flew me out to Hawaii for a vacation," he said during an interview earlier this week. "My third day here, I met Sonya Mendez."
THE 21-YEAR-OLD DJ was lucky enough to meet the lead singer of Sonya and the Revolucion, one of the most popular local acts of the '80s. She introduced him to Jack Law, owner of the Wave Waikiki and Hula's Bar and Lei Stand.
"He auditioned me the next day at Hula's," said Daniel J. A few days later he was hired as a resident DJ at the Wave, and his one-week visit ended up as a permanent vacation.
With the start of the "Love Club" on Monday nights in 1987, Daniel J opened the door for house music in Hawaii.
"At all the (other) clubs, these poor people would hear the same music five nights a week," he explained. "This was a place that you could come, drink, have a good time and hear music that you didn't usually hear."
Another first Daniel J lays claim to is the introduction of a mix show to local radio airwaves. In 1988, he was the first DJ to convince station management at KIKI-FM (or Hot I-94, as it was also known at the time) that such a show could be successful.
"I did a bunch of demo tapes to talk the program director into doing the show," he said. "I developed the idea and brought the whole (thing), including advertisers."
Other firsts include the first live, in-club mix show ("Dance Floor Democracy" on Radio Free Hawaii) and the first rave in Honolulu (at the old Pink's Garage).
DANIEL J is also a smart businessman, having learned early on that one needs to wear many different hats in order to be successful.
"It used to be you worked five nights a week for one club and you got paid 200 bucks a night," he said. These days, there are very few DJs who are able to work that often and make that much money. "If I relied on DJ-ing just to be my income, I would be having a very difficult time."
Along with mixing regularly at the W Honolulu's "Wonderlounge," the Wave's "Pussycat Lounge" and the Hyatt Regency's "Feng Shui" weeklies, Daniel J also works as a promoter and producer, owns his own sound and CD duplication companies, is a partner in a local hair salon and maintains a successful real estate portfolio.
"For me, as long as I keep making income in other ways, then I'll always be a DJ," he said.
ALSO JOINING in on the celebration next week is San Francisco-based DJ M3, one of Daniel J's good friends and a mainstay on the Bay Area's house scene since the early '90s. He'll play an opening set downstairs, followed by the birthday boy later in the evening.
And since it is his birthday, we had to ask Daniel J what he's wishing for this year.
"I would like to see the house scene come back," he said. "Just to see happy people dancing in a good venue -- that's what I'm looking for."
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