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At 8pm on a Friday, the night still hasn’t started at The Boom Boom Room, an intimate venue for live groove music. Still, Dav Id K-OS, the house DJ since 2013, is filled with energy.
Spread out over a red booth is a trove of jewel cases and vinyl sleeves from nearly three decades at his craft. He picks up a signed copy of George Clinton’s “R&B Skeletons in the Closet” and flips it over to show his name on the album. Next, he finds The Digital Underground’s “Sex Packets” in a stack of CDs and reminisces about his work on their hit song “The Humpty Dance.” He rifles through eras and genres, seamlessly mixing in stories and wardrobe changes that include the retelling of a battle with DJ Qbert and the donning of a black cape bequeathed to him by Clinton. Two turn tables and a mixer sit behind him. There is no cutting-edge technology in sight. “The original computer,” he said, pointing to his head.
Beyond the task of sifting through his catalog of original and remixed music just to switch out CDs, never mind forming a cohesive track, K-OS has learned to mesh his encyclopedic knowledge with a live band’s sound to add another layer to the audience’s experience.
“I think of it as making a mix tape for the entire night,” he explained. “I listen to the sound checks and go off that to find the vibe and give the night a flow.”
The Boom Boom Room sits on the corner of Fillmore and Geary, in the building that housed the second incarnation of Jack’s Bar, a legendary venue that was dubbed “the oldest blues bar west of the Mississippi.” Zander Andreas, a Fillmore native and former bartender at Jack’s, opened The Boom Boom Room with blues guitarist John Lee Hooker in 1997 to pay homage to the old juke joints in the area he poked his head into as a kid. Not only is it a venue in its own right, but it doubles as an after-hours spot for bands playing The Fillmore, which sits across the street, and The Independent on Divisadero. "Some nights, I’ll go until 4am," K-OS laughed.
Born Anthony Bryant, K-OS grew up in West Oakland, an upbringing he described as “basic training in the ghetto.” He came across turn tables at house parties and taught himself how to scratch. After high school, he landed a job at the Record Factory, a music store on 26th Street & Telegraph in Oakland, where he traded scratching lessons for mixing lessons with assistant manager Terry Ward.
By the time K-OS started to perform publicly a year later, in 1985, Aerosmith and Run DMC’s single “Walk This Way” began to make it socially acceptable for more diverse groups to listen to rap and rock. K-OS embraced the détente, spinning for up-and-coming bands like Primus at the now defunct Berkeley Square and moving past the overused breaks DJs leaned on.
His watershed moment came in 1987. He was on his day off from the Record Factory when the manager called him in to DJ for George Clinton’s in-store promotion. K-OS scratched and mixed some of Clinton’s records for the man himself. Clinton, a performer K-OS was already drawn to and familiar with, saw first-hand the benefits of a skilled DJ.
“The only DJ stuff George heard before me was Jam Master Jay. He realized that by using his own stuff in remixes it was a way to keep his music alive,” K-OS said.
K-OS worked on Clinton’s last solo album for Capitol Records before he released a solo record of his own with his childhood friend Em Cee Quick. The Boom Boom Room started to appear on his radar time and time again as the venue of choice for bands he collaborated with.
He first performed at the venue as a member of the band Katdelic, a funk group started by RonKat Spearman, a veteran member of George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic, around 2005. Spearman refers to K-OS as a “living library of funk,” noting his ear, not showmanship, as what sets him apart.
“You can be playing a live set, and K-OS will put a record on in the middle of the show that syncs up perfectly with the tempo of the band,” explained Spearman. “The guy has so much musical knowledge.”
The Katdelic gig led to his epiphany about the possibility of a house DJ. K-OS noticed a lull in energy when the band was off-stage, a point that was reaffirmed when half the audience was still outside for the start of Katdelic’s second set. He struck up a deal with Andreas and is now one of two house DJs, along with Kevvy Kev, at the venue.
“K-OS has a sensibility for drawing on bizarre mash-ups that don’t sound good on paper—like David Bowie and Daft Punk—but work,” said Andreas. “I can’t categorize him; I call him the intergalactic space DJ.”
K-OS said the last year-and-a-half has highlighted digital technology’s creep both in the form of smartphones at the venue and computers on the craft. A self-described dinosaur, he is beginning to accept state-of-the-art hardware and software, but knows you need humans to drive progress.
“A computer makes it easy to not listen and not make mistakes. You need accidents and screw-ups. That’s where the new stuff comes from, it pushes you to do new things and act in the moment,” he said.
He still works on studio projects and consults for other DJs, but he can’t imagine The Boom Boom Room off his schedule.
“There’s a family vibe here,” he said. “The bands come up to me and tell me they dig my stuff, and the audience comes up to me and says the same. You don’t get that at every place.”
The Boom Boom Room, 1601 Fillmore St., is open Tuesday-Sunday; Sun.,Tues.,Wed.,Thurs.: 4pm-2am; Fri.,Sat.: 4pm-3am. For tickets and calendar info, visit boomboomroom.com. For more on K-OS, visit his Facebook, soundcloud, and reverbnation pages.
