Song of the Day - Turn the Beat Around - Vickie Sue Robinson

There's a reason for today's Song of the Day and it's all related to last night's Sea Tea cruise in NYC. You see, last night was the last cruise of the season and my friend Rich suggested we attend.  It turned out to be a perfect day yesterday, cool, comfortable temperatures and awesome skies, and of course, the beautiful backdrop of the NYC skyline, so we were hoping for a great night out on the boat to end the season.  Well, as I've said in previous posts, the makings of a night on the Sea Tea has a lot to do with the music that's being played.  When the deejay is spot on, it's great, but when he's not....ugh!  Unfortunately, such was the case last night.

Though unadvertised, it seemed as if last night's theme was disco, because that's all that was played from beginning to end, which is okay, really, There are plenty of great disco songs out there, and an evening of great disco music can make for a nice evening.  DJ Robbie Leslie played a few of them...snippets of Last Dance, Heaven Must've Sent You, Electric Dreams and such blared out of the speakers, whose sound was a bit muffled, as well.  The rest of the evening, as my friend Dita put it, was "a whole bunch of B-sides from old disco songs that nobody knows."  Now I've been around the block a few times, and I did more than 12 years as a deejay myself, and even I hardly knew much of what was played last night.

I love to dance, especially in that atmosphere, but when the music is obscure it's not so much fun! The mark of a good deejay is one who watches his audience and plays accordingly.  Keeping in mind that guests of a place like the Sea Tea, just like the guests at a wedding, come to dance, and they're gonna dance no matter what is played, the dance floor is not always an indicator of how good he music is.  I used to watch people's mouths when I deejayed, to see if they were singing along.  That's surely a sign that they're enjoying the music.  With the exception of a few songs, no one was singing along for most of the evening, and for good reason,  They didn't know the songs!  The deejay was playing what he liked, and that's really too bad because it could have been a perfect night of dancing instead of an okay night waiting for something good to come on...Ugh!

So here's a real disco song, whose title would surely send a message to DJ Robbie Leslie.  You shouldda turned those beats around dude...