The Memory Hole Of DJ AM
Expanded documentary reminds us of Adam Goldstein's immense impact
When DJ AM passed away in 2009 from a drug overdose in his New York City apartment, word of the DJ born Adam Goldstein’s death spread quickly on a then-three-year-old platform called Twitter, where era-specific celebrities like Ryan Seacrest, P. Diddy and a young socialite (influencer wasn’t a word yet) named Kim Kardashian all expressed their grief. Newspapers from Honolulu to Hartford ran the news in their A sections, the Los Angeles Times put it on the cover of its special Obituaries section and MTV News interrupted The Hills to bring its viewers Breaking News.
The tragedy was the final chapter in a salacious tale of celebrity and addiction. One that intersected directly with Hollywood starlets and platinum-selling musicians. DJ AM himself had elevated what it meant to be a DJ to the culture at large — with his own Nike shoe and the first million-dollar-plus DJ residency in Vegas. All while redefining the art of performing on turntables with his inimitable “open format” style.
Yet despite all of the accolades and infamy, the name DJ AM risks becoming forgotten among the younger generation of music fans.
“They call him the Babe Ruth or the Michael Jordan of what we did,” says DJ Kevin Scott, a close friend and resident DJ at the AM-owned LAX nightclub. “But it's very hard as the years go on to quantify because he doesn't have a discography. You can't go on Spotify and listen to what he did. And a lot of the mixes that he made, they're now 13-14 years old, so a lot of the music is older.”
In other words, just because a musician makes headlines during the height of their career doesn’t guarantee their fame will carry on, especially if their art fails to fit nicely into newer formats that mediate what gets heard in later decades.
Fortunately, the 2015 documentary about AM’s life, As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM, has reentered the chat with a slow drip of bonus content that is being released weekly on the film’s official website.
The revisiting of As I AM began in during the Covid lockdown when director Kevin Kerslake learned that his tribute to DJ AM was also in danger of being lost to the same forces that threaten to bury AM’s memory.
“At the beginning of Covid, I started getting messages, ‘Hey, where’s the AM doc? Is it streaming?’ I just sent everybody to the usual suspects and they came back with, “It’s not there!” says Kerslake, whose career began directing music videos and concert films for seminal 90s acts like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers before going on to direct full-length documentaries about Electric Daisy Carnival (2011) and Joan Jett (2018).
“So we discovered that the family had pulled distribution from all the platforms that it was on,” he continues. “And once we found out, we couldn't just reactivate the codes. You have to start all over from scratch.”
The hard reset compelled Kerslake to consider what the film might look like in 2023. He added seven minutes of footage to the original film. But the real feast for DJ AM fans is the hours of unreleased interview footage that Kerslake is assembling with the help of Scott, who stepped up from interviewee to advisor, and finally producer on the original 2015 film.
The pair devised a divide-and-conquer approach to the hours upon hours of unseen footage, with Scott compiling a three-part three-hour series about DJ AM’s musical journey and artistry while Kerslake took a deeper dive into the lifetime of trauma and subsequent addiction that both drove AM and led to his untimely demise.
The latter look at AM’s life is both richer in detail and more informed in its message, with a full decade’s worth of additional understanding about mental health than was available to the filmmaker when he made the original cut.
“I always wanted to explore the root system that fed into the trough of his dependencies,” Kerslake says. “Even some of the interviews that I was doing at the time with trauma specialists and addiction specialists, we always touched upon that stuff but none of those really dialed into these new therapies. The science has evolved so rapidly that I feel like that is where the [new] film can really help.”
All three of Scott’s segments, titled DJ AM: The Artist, along with the first five episodes of Kerslake’s 12-part series, Adam Goldstein: The Addict, are currently online, with the remainder to arrive throughout the summer. And the full package will return to the major streamers by August.
“It's coming out in a different universe,” Kerslake says. “Because we're rolling out the extended package week by week, we have to wait until all those are done before we can go back to Apple and Amazon.”
Another case of the platforms’ one-size-fits-all approach failing to accommodate the infinite number of ways creatives might want to present their work to the public. But regardless of the literal technicalities, films like As I Am are crucial in preventing a future where even relatively recent phenomena like DJ AM don’t get reduced to Wikipedia entries and broken Megaupload links.
As for filmmakers like Kerslake and Scott, they become essential storytellers that can link curious music fans to a past they either misremember or missed entirely.
“I still get bombed from random people asking what it was like working with Kurt [Cobain],” says Kerslake. “It's pretty strange, but it's great that people are still attached to that music because it was a great era for music.”
Some might say the same for the aughts.
TAKEAWAYS
Salient statements from this week’s music news.
1. CD Baby Ends Vinyl & CD Distribution
Artists have been given 60 days to buy back their stock or have it “recycled.”
Takeaway: At a time when vinyl sales are proving a consistent and important source of income for independent artists, CD Baby is abruptly getting out of the business entirely and without offering artists an alternative.
2. Armin van Buuren’s Armada Label Readies $100M Fund to Acquire Dance Music Catalogs
The fund is intended to grow to $500M in the coming years.
Takeaway: The label also said that the investment vehicle not only makes business sense but also fits into its love for dance music, with the firm mentioning the hope to “breathe new life into classic dance hits.”
3. Sony Music CEO Says Streaming Services are ‘Watered Down By Low Quality and Meaningless Volume’
Could the open-boarder days of DSPs be coming to an end?
Takeaway: Stringer also suggests moving to a new payment model to disincentivize fraud and bottom-of-the-barrel content.
