On 22 March 2013 I was standing in an empty clubhouse on the Jaagpad in Amsterdam, holding a bottle of rum. It opened the next evening. Six years and nine months later it was over. In that period I was the owner, the barman and the house DJ there.
"Which I have been running since this week"
That is how I announced it, on the invitation for the opening on 23 March 2013:
"Allow me to warmly invite you to attend, from 20:00, the opening of the clubhouse of tennis club Joy, which I have been running since this week, together with my business partner Rene van Steen."
From 31 March 2013 to 31 December 2019 I was registered as director and owner of Club J, Joy Jaagpad Amsterdam. On paper a tennis club. In practice a room, a bar, a sound system and not a single neighbour.
No neighbours
That last part is not a detail. When the Koh Phangan magazine Phanganist asked me in January 2017 what kind of club I had in Amsterdam, I answered:
"No, it's a tennis club. They come to play tennis and we get everyone as drunk as possible. It seems we're pretty good at it. We have no neighbors so that means we can have mad parties, which we do."
Every Saturday I was behind the decks myself. In that same interview I still described myself simply as a hobby DJ, perfectly content with his small tennis club.
Cheesy hits
In the DJ world there is a fair amount of looking down on what we in the Netherlands call "foute hitjes" - guilty-pleasure, cheesy hits. I played them there for six years. As I put it myself later:
"While managing the bar at tennis club Joy Jaagpad with a team of dear friends, such as Maarten Blokland, I got to play 'foute hitjes' (as they say over here). That was a lot of fun… but Joy members know."
That is a training no club DJ ever goes through. You play for people you know, who you will see again the next morning, and who tell you to your face that it was rubbish. There is no anonymous crowd to hide behind, and no genre to disappear into.
What running your own place teaches you that a gig never will
- An empty room at eleven is your fault, not the crowd's
- The takings behind the bar tell you exactly whether your set worked
- You cannot walk off after your last record, because you are locking up too
- The same people come back next week, or they do not
What was on
In August 2013 I put a line-up on at a tennis club: "Party at the tennis club tomorrow night, dj jurgen, dj jean, joy de la rosa and dj erwtensoup playing into the small hours. We start at 21:30, and you are all invited!" That last one, DJ Erwtensoup, was me. I booked myself at the bottom of my own poster.
After that came the Friday-afternoon ball, the Joy anniversary gala in September 2016, club championships with themes like Jungle Joy and Jetset Joy, a Delahiti tournament with apres-ski, and a winter Friday drinks called "DE BALLEN". At the closing party of the autumn competition in October 2019 the announcement said that jack.orange had brought "loads of new music" with him. By then I had been turning into somebody else for three years.
I never kept attendance figures for the nights themselves. What I did write down, on 11 July 2015: "Place absolutely packed, brilliant night! Best one yet!" And in March 2016, more briefly: "full house at Joy."
The last party on the old grounds
On 2 September 2017 I turned forty. The announcement said it "also happened to be the closing party and tournament", and the very last party on the old grounds. Robert Leroy would come and sing, Sjaak Sinas would play. A birthday, a farewell and a tournament on the same evening - that was Joy in a nutshell.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world
While all of this was running, I disappeared every winter. From 2014 to 2017 I spent three seasons on Koh Phangan, playing at Fubar, where the name Jack Orange was born. I was running a tennis club in Amsterdam and holding a residency on a Thai island at the same time.
That story is here. The two ran side by side for six years: the same man played cheesy hits for tennis players on Saturdays, and in December played a beach in Haad Rin at four in the morning.
Why I am writing it down
On 6 June 2019, six months before I stopped, I put this on Facebook:
"30 years ago I dreamed of seeing the world. Check. 20 years ago I dreamed of being a real DJ. Playing for thousands of people and flying around the world for it. Playing live on the radio, making a record. Check. 10 years ago I dreamed of being my own boss. Check."
On 31 December 2019 it ended. What remains of it is the most important skill I have: I can read a room, because for six years I got the bill whenever I got it wrong.
A company party or a casino floor is the same puzzle. No single genre that works for everyone, and a bar that only runs once the music is right. That is not a humble beginning I have outgrown. That is the job.
