The first thing you should know about Riz Rollins is that he’s a charming motherfucker. No less than a dozen people stopped and talked to us while we sat inside and then outside Pettirosso in Capitol Hill on a sunny, unseasonably warm September afternoon. Another dozen or so yelled his name or said hi while walking past. One guy stopped and said, “I can’t help touching you,” when a hug turned into some light petting. I was nervous to meet Riz, having known him on the radio since I moved to this area ten years ago and having experienced what I will now call the “ministry” of DJ Riz on the dance floor several times. 

(An aside: if you’re not already listening to Expansions or Monday night’s Variety Mix regularly, or even if you are, go to the KEXP archive and pull up his latest set. Now. Let this serve as a background for the rest of this column.)

I was nervous to meet him, but when I saw the easy way Riz had with every person he encountered as he walked into the café, I was put immediately at ease. Any trace of anxiousness evaporated when I held out my hand to introduce myself and he said, “Girl, are you kidding? Get over here” and gave me the biggest hug.

The first thing Riz tells me is that I have to excuse him, he is having a bad day, the worst, has canceled everything on his schedule for the day except for this. I feel bad, worried that maybe he didn’t cancel because he had no immediate way to reach me. It’s taken us weeks to set up a time that works for us mutually, but I ask if he wants to reschedule. He looks at me, gives me a conspiratorial smile, and says, “No, I think this will make me feel better. Absolutely not, but you have to go easy on me.” I tell him I can’t promise anything.

“That’s fair,” he says and laughs. “Is that just coffee you’re drinking?”

It’s just now noon. “Coffee with a little extra.” So he orders the same: coffee, with Jameson on the side.

I have so many questions to ask, have spent weeks relistening to his sets, reading about him, feeling the permissioned stalkery-ness one gets from being assigned an interview. I have so many questions—about transitions and compression in sound, about his dream venue, about his least favorite songs, what he would listen to if the world were about to end, whether when spinning he ever follows something of a narrative arc (with either music or lyrics) or if he just goes by gut reaction and adapts to what the audience wants or how he’s feeling, what job he would have if he wasn’t spinning, and (most important and self-interestedly) about his favorite DJs in town—but I never get to any of those. We talk inside for over an hour—about relationships, about gay sex, about Whitney Houston, and the expert fashion sense of children (when a small child with pink shoes, a pink bow, and the raddest pink hair bobbles past). He notices men; I notice the ladies. We trade semi-lurid comments on both.

“I like the drinks and pastries here,” I say, “but I come for the waitresses.”

“Oh, they are pretty. And fierce. Are you going to put that in the article?”

“I might.”

“It might get you somewhere.”

We move to a table outside, the Irish coffee moves from hot to iced, I order a bagel, Riz takes a few phone calls, I look through my notes, I flip through whatever book I have at hand, I roll up my sleeves to take the sun more fully on my arms, the parade of eye candy we experienced inside has now increased exponentially.

Riz hangs up the phone, and says, “how long have you lived here?”

“Ten years last month.”

“Ten years.”

“Ten years in the area.”

“I moved here in 1980,” he says. “Is the tape recorder on?”

“I may just make it all up.”

“My grandmother said, ‘When I die you can do whatever you want to, you can make up stories about me. But one thing you cannot do is serve food at my funeral. I will not have anyone eating ham while I’m lying up in some corner cold.’”

“That’s logical,” I say. “The culture around funerals—the food and whatnot has always been weird to me. I’ve only ever been to one, but eating was the farthest thing from my mind.”

“’Eat when you get home. I’m gonna haunt you,’ she said. Girl, write this down: ghosts can deal with a lot, but they can’t do ham.”

I write it down.

We are interrupted again, by a handsome young man who tells a story about his jacket (which Riz has just complimented), how it was given to him by a stranger who was sure it would look better on him. “And did it?” I ask. “Honey, what do you think?” He spins around, and the cut does look even better from the back. We promise to watch his bike while he’s inside and Riz turns back to me and says, “We’re not having the right conversation, are we?”

“No,” I laugh. “No, we definitely aren’t.”

“Did you have questions and stuff to ask me?”

“I do.”

“Before we get to that: what is it that you do? How did you come to be sitting here with me?”

At this point I tell him how I know Jake. I tell him I’m a poet, pull out a copy of my most recent book, and hand it to him. “A gift,” I say. And then he makes me sign it, which I do. And then I hand it back to him and (this is totally self-serving, but I’m going to include it anyway) half in a daze I have one of the most dreamy moments of my entire career thus far where he draws a parallel of me signing my book to not-yet-famous Nirvana signing a copy of Nevermind for him in the studio. And then Riz Rollins proceeds to read one of my own poems out loud to me.

He looks up. “You just got me,” he says. “I’m going to read you what I just read.”

“Okay…” I say.

“Okay?”

“Alright.”

And it was more than all right.

At this point we’ve been sitting in the sun for over an hour, plus the hour or so inside. And I am starting to feel a little anxious that I still haven’t asked him anything. Though we’ve talked about gay pride parades and good make-out sessions and closeted celebrities and crockpot cooking and our mothers and Joni Mitchell (who Riz’s mother hated… “songs are like tattoos, you know I’ve been to sea before – ‘what is that white woman yodeling about? Turn that shit off!’”). None of our talking has been related to any of the questions I had about his life and art. So I glance back at my notes, full of bolded things and underlined things and circled things. I have numbered questions in order of importance to me. As I look at the system, which made so much sense in the morning, I realize two hours with Riz has made me curious about different things.

“So,” I say, “if you’ve got the stamina, I can ask a few of these questions now. Otherwise I could email…”

“Stamina?” he laughs. “Hey, if there’s one thing I can do I can run my mouth.”

“Okay. I guess one of the things I’m most interested is whether—and how—other forms of art come into play with what you do as a DJ. Are you influenced by things you read? By film? Can something you see in a painting, for instance, set you in motion for the way you start a set?”

“Hm.” Riz takes a thoughtful pause before looking intently at me. “You know, I don’t consider myself an artist.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. That I get to do creative stuff is a total surprise to me. I have no discipline whatsoever. What gets me to get something done is a deadline. So as a DJ the deadline is now, it’s the moment. When I’m writing, the deadline will be the date I’ve been given. Left to my own devices I wouldn’t get anything done. I didn’t start writing because I was a writer, for instance. I wrote because somebody asked me to.”

“Let me just… so you don’t think you’re an artist?” I am sundrunk and a bit tipsy from the whiskey, sundrunk enough to say, “That’s crazy! Of course you are.”

I am thinking of the moments of lying in my bed reading or dicking around on the Internet on a Sunday night with Expansions on the radio across the room. It is meant to be the background, but something happens and I drop the book to my chest as I listen to a song play out. I quit clicking as I get lost, heart dropping into the expert transition between two songs, a transition that makes me feel.

“That’s crazy,” I say.

Riz shrugs.

“Do you think that’s the difference between being an artist and not being an artist? The internal versus external motivation?”

“Well I was inspired to hear Jack Nicholson say when somebody asked him, he said, ‘I’m not an artist, I’m an actor.’”

“But one could argue that acting is an art form, that putting songs together in a set is an art form,” I say.

“Maybe, maybe. But I don’t create anything,” Riz tells me. “I try to breathe my life into what’s happening. However good I am at what I do, I don’t create what I do. What I do already exists.”

I am thinking, no no no. I am thinking of a set as a creation, a collage of things gathered. I am thinking of the spaces in between. I am thinking of my heart dropping between songs.

“Particularly as a DJ,” he says, “I feel much better understanding myself as a conduit. It is also much more immediately dependent upon your response, particularly on a dance floor. On the radio it’s much closer to writing in that it’s an imaginary kind of dialogue. I’m going to play something and hopefully you’re going to react to it. I’m going to play a lot of things that are going to be connected to each other and I hope that you’re following that.”

“And you don’t think that’s art—making those connections?”

“No.”

“Wow, Riz. That’s fascinating. Because I feel those connections you make—I really feel them. The emotion is not just in the music, it’s in the transitions. It builds through those connections. You put two songs together in the right way and you make each of them mean more.”

“Oh, definitely.”

“I mean, I really feel transitions in a good set—to me that’s the point of great interest—the way I feel when I’m moving between poems in a good book of poetry, or in the movement from scene to scene in a film. There has to be a logic, but also some gap, and that’s where the best of meaning is made.”

“Absolutely.”

“So we agree! See, I think what you do is art.”

“Well, I think it’s something. Something that’s really substantial, but I think it’s more comparable to vocation. Not everyone can do it. I mean, what I do is what I do and what you do is what you do and I appreciate what you do as an artist. But what I do? I don’t have precise language for it. But the best I can come up with—what I do is ministry. That was the milieu in which I grew up. It’s what I was called to.”

“So it’s more spiritual than artistic for you?”

“Well, see, but there’s no break between these two.”

“Agreed.”

“I mean, we’re not so far apart. We’re not disagreeing about semantics here. I’ll accept the mantle of artistry, but precisely what got me into it was the dynamics of ministry.”

We spend some time talking about Riz’s childhood in Chicago; the church he went to (“we fucked around with snakes”); his early fascination with good preachers and their movement between text, context, and insight; about the role of Christianity in the evolution of music (“if it weren’t for Christianity we wouldn’t have Rock and Roll”); about his time in Bible college.

“So how did you make the shift from Bible college to DJing?”

“Somebody asked me,” he says.

And Riz goes on to talk about his first writing job—a food column (“I realize they wanted me because I was corpulent”), about getting on with The Stranger (“they told me I could write whatever I want. For most writers that would be the motherlode, but I thought: ‘I don’t know what I want!’), and about his first job as a DJ.

“I was working in a record store on Broadway when someone asked me. With everything substantial I’ve done in my life, somebody asked me to do it. I’m not good at aspiration, but I’m good at opportunity.”

“That’s key,” I say. “For me, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given as a writer is to say yes to everything. Everything that makes sense. Especially if it pays.”

Riz nods. “Saying yes changed my life on every conceivable level. As a queer person I spent all my life saying no no no no. And I said no for a variety of reasons. I finally ran out of no’s.”

“How so?” I ask.

“It came in the form of a prayer. I was 30 years old. I said, ‘Look God I’m trying everything. I’ve had sex with women, I’ve not had sex at all, I’ve tried everything. And the only thing that I haven’t done is say yes. So I’m almost desperate—almost at the bottom of the barrel. I’m going to say yes. I’m not going to say kinda. I’m going to embrace this and try to be happy. Everyone says it’s evil, and if that’s true, God, you can kill me.”

I’ll blame it on the blinding sun again, but I’m tearing up a bit at this point.

“Girl, don’t get me started,” Riz tells me. “Part of me thinks we’re going to be friends forever and ever just because of today.”

I laugh. “I’m okay with that.”

“I like long courtships,” he says, “but I like fast and furious too. I got at least one boyfriend this way. Then he dumped me because I couldn’t have babies. I got philosophical and said, you know, I think children are a product of a relationship and we haven’t gotten that far. And he said, no you can’t BEAR babies. Wait a minute, because I can’t push a child out from between my legs? He said, yes. I said, baby what are you thinking? Where have you been? I fried you chicken!”

“Fried chicken is way better than babies!” I say.

“Well, it tastes better.”

“Riz, you know I’m going to quote that directly.”

At this point we need to wind down. We’ve been warming these seats for too long, and we both have late afternoon appointments elsewhere. So I decide to ask one more question, though it isn’t on my list. And it’s not so much an interview question, but is a question I have asked most of the people I know.

“What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?”

“Oh, wow…” A long pause. “So many wonderful shows… The first show I ever went to—there were a lot of other people on the bill, but I went to see Dionne Warwick. This was in the 60s, when she was still deep in her Burt Bacharach phase. Every single song she sang I thought oh my god oh my god oh my god, you know. Fly Away Kentucky Bluebird—I don’t even know what the fuck that means. I used to love hearing that song, and I’d sing along with it. Walk On By? ‘If you see me walking down the street and I start to cry each time we meet—walk on by.’ I was like ten years old.

“I saw Aretha once. She sang two songs and they stopped her because she was about to destroy the place. I’m serious. Aretha on the piano alone, Orchestra Hall, Chicago. She sang two songs. One was ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’ and I thought Oh My God. It’s really something to be moved by Aretha, or Mavis Staples, or Prince, or David Bowie. You ever seen David Bowie?”

“That was my first show.”

“That was your first show?”

“I was twelve years old, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.”

“David Bowie ain’t no joke.”

“It’s still one of the top five best shows I’ve ever seen.”

“David Bowie live is no joke. The Rolling Stones, live. Stevie Wonder, live. Stevie Wonder will make you holler like a white woman. He can make grown men lose their fucking minds. They do.”

“It’s about the music,” I say. “But it’s really about how well a performer can manipulate the audience.”

“Yes.”

“That’s art.”

“Yes.”

“Figuring out what people need.”

“Yes.”

“That’s art to me. That’s not something everyone can do.”

“Let me tell you about the Jacksons. I hated the Jacksons, haaated. But my sister loved them. So when I was in my first year of college they were coming to Chicago, The Jackson 5. And my mother had gotten tickets for my sister to go. ‘I need you to take your sister,’ my mother tells me. Fuck that. I don’t want to see them. I hate them. So I go to see The Jackson Five and those boys hit the stage and my jaw hit    the    floor. And the whole concert was that.

At one point Michael Jackson was completely tangled—a total sarcophagus—in this microphone cord. Michael popped his hip and that shit fell to the floor and my sister had this orgasmic gasp. [makes the sound] And I said, ‘oh my goodness.’ And still I wasn’t sold. I bought Off the Wall. I was so embarrassed to like Off the Wall that I went to Fred Meyer to buy it, rather than get it at my regular record store. I couldn’t stop playing it. And then when Michael Jackson died?”

Magically at this point, Michael Jackson is playing over the speakers in Pettirosso. And I am thinking, there is nothing not magical about this day so far.

“We decided for my wedding,” Riz tells me, “we were going to sing “I’ll Be There” – ‘you and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back.’ Then he died on that Thursday and the wedding was on Saturday—and I’m thinking oh fuck!—we’re going to sing this song.”

“Oh no!”

“I had to go downtown to buy some shoes. My mother was in town and we were all out of sorts. And the woman who was selling me shoes said are you okay and I said Michael Jackson died. And she said, ‘Oh, I heard. That’s so terrible.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m getting married Saturday and we were going to sing this song at my wedding and I don’t want to sing this song. I don’t want people to think I picked the song because he died. I’m thinking about not singing the song.’ And she says, ‘Why not sing the song? You didn’t kill him!’ So we did.”

We both laugh.

“You had just the right bit of advice at just the right time,” I say.

“You talking about crying motherfuckers.”

“’Build my world of dreams around you…’ He didn’t even know I was going to sing to him. He gasped and started crying.”

I ask about other songs at the wedding. We talk about West Side Story. I say I think all the world’s problems should be worked out through choreography, which is something I heard someone say once, but take credit for it. We talk about some of the tricks he’s used as a DJ, songs he’s used as a joke, but that somehow became exactly what people needed (“Rainbow Connection,” “Beer Barrel Polka,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” to name a few). The sun’s still hot, but getting lower and I can feel the burn setting in on my arms and chest.

“I think I’m going to have a red V on my chest.”

The waitress brings the check. I look at my watch. It’s quarter to four, and I’m not sure where his appointment is.

“Is it time?” he asks.

“Quarter ‘til.”

“Did we cover everything?”

“I think we covered everything.”

“So what did we learn?” he asks.

“Say yes to everything?”

“Yeah, that’ll work. Do good work. Pay attention. Be a conduit to whatever spirit moves you. Say yes to everything.”