Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face / And stars fill my dream / I’m a traveler of both time and space / To be where I have been / To sit with elders of the gentle race / This world has seldom seen / They talk of days for which they sit and wait / All will be revealed / Talk in song from tongues of lilting grace / Sounds caress my ear / And not a word I heard could I relate / The story was quite clear
It’s difficult to sum up the life of a human with just a few words, yet the tale of Matt Dike is a rock ‘n’ roll tale, and this Idelic Hour of songs is my best pitch.
In the ’80s, Dike was LA’s coolest—the kid from the New York suburbs who turned DJing a dorm room into rock legend. The guy had it all. Taste, looks, charm, charisma, and a fun sense of humor. For the two to three years we ran underground nightclubs together, Dike was my best friend and constant companion.
It came as no surprise that Dike named his label Delicious Vinyl. Dike was a vinyl collector of epic proportions. Records literally meant the world to Matt, for it was his DJ sets and a collector’s nature that were at his core, his soul, his god. As Dike’s business partner, it was part of my job to protect “the records” over all else. Money, the sound system, the staff, as he bluntly explained, “can be easily replaced, but my records would take years.”
In the heat of running a sometimes illegal party, the stacks of heavy milk crates could really weigh a dude down, but fuck man…so many great times. And all of them revolving around songs and record collecting. We used to sit and eat the $2.99 breakfast special at the greasy spoon joint on Santa Monica Boulevard and discuss his DJ sets, freaking about that magical, unpredictable record that would seem to drop out of left field and rock an unsuspecting dance floor into both sweat and ecstasy. “How about ‘Atomic Dog’ into ‘How Soon Is Now?'” a then new single from The Smiths.
“Intensssseee!”
That’s what Dike used to say with a big smile. We had our own slang, and looking back, we were more young and silly than cool. A girl was a “mystery tour.” Making people dance was a “planetary invasion,” and what we did when we set up a club or party was “invade.” What we did to your “weak world” was to “planetize” it. For us it was black or white. You were either “weak” or “intenssseee!” We loved screwball comedies like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World and A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to The Forum, and somehow saw our lives as part of one of those wacky adventures, often casting our friends and foes as characters.
I saw Matt’s older brother Lane the other day. Unlike Matt, Lane had never changed and it was great to hang with him, just two old school homies. Lane told me Matt didn’t want anyone to know that he had died when he was gone. In a way, Dike feels more among his friends this week than he has been in the last 30 years. I’ll certainly never look at a crate of records without thinking of him.
As we all know, sometimes the brightest stars burn out the quickest. This week’s Idelic Hour is a Matt Dike planetary invasion. Listen to some of his favorite songs and feel him smile from above.
The Idelic Hit of the Week: Ty Segall – The Last Waltz
