Sharing the Gig Love Interviews, How-Tos,and more

Here is a very special 80 minute long phone interview with ever friendly and talkative Carlos Correal. Imagine how painful it was to type up all of that. But it’s worth it. Read on…

Baris: …So, do you have any other questions or shall we get started?

Carlos: No, I don’t have any more questions. Now it’s your turn to ask me questions.

Baris: Ha ha ha, cool…First of all, thanks so much for your time. I am sure you’re very busy. Before talking to you I checked Opium Group’s website and all the clubs associated with it. The calendar is packed with events. I know you are putting it all together and that must be a lot of work. So thanks for sparing your time. Can you start with telling us a little bit about your background? How did you get started promoting events and now you are a part of the Opium group…I know you were in Canada for quite a long time. So can you start from there and bring us to today?

Carlos: Sure.

ALWAYS THE LAST ONE TO DANCE…
I am 36 years old now since August 9th. And I started when 20 years old. I have always been a fan of music overall. I played classical guitar for like 13 years, when I was living in Spain and even when I got back to Canada at age 16, I was still doing classes of classical guitar. But dance music was always … – you have to understand – when I was a kid, in family parties, I’d always be the last one to dance.
I have always loved dancing, I always loved joyful music. So at the end, I think, my background at the university was, I went to the University of Montreal and I did my bachelor’s degree in chemistry. It’s a long story. I wanted to work for the police initially. This is very funny …a completely different business. I wanted to go into cinema and communication. My parents did not believe that that’d really help me succeed in life. They think that whatever is in the field of cinema or communications, you do not need to go to university to learn these things. You can learn by yourself.

Baris: Yeah, I heard that before.

Carlos: And they are totally right. If we (are to) pay all your studies, you should go and learn something that will give you a solid background and guarantee you a job. We will pay for everything, if you go to law, medicine or sciences. I have always loved sciences, even though I don’t do chemistry in my life, sciences teach you the protocol of work, of how to get from point A to Z which really helps me in my work now.

It was always a dream. I mean I started to DJ when I was 18 years old. But it was never – when I had the opportunity in the club, I arrived in the DJ booth, I completely got scared and ended up never spinning. I was too scared, too shy, you have 600 people in front of you. I don’t know…it’s like doing speech in public. It looks easy when you see people doing it, but it’s like doing a public speech or doing a play in theater, if you fuck up, it’s not …If you fuck up, people will hear you fuck up. And you are going to look stupid. So I realized at a very young age that that was not for me.

THE BILLION DOLLAR BOYS
Carlos: …and because I was always a big fan of cinema and films, my whole idea, I was able to, I think my dream, my goal was to be  able to entertain people.

Baris: So you want to entertain the people without taking stage yourself:

Carlos: Yeah, exactly, a good way of entertaining people for me was to be behind the camera and to share with the public my own definition of a party.

And so starting from the marketing, in which I got heavily involved, I really made the ads of my events look like movie posters. Because the poster of a movie tells about 80% of what you should expect when you go and watch the movie. You should be able to convince the people right away when they see the image -  that (they should) understand what to expect from the movie and it should entice them to go and see it.
So doing the events, the same rule applies to doing the events. I started to do – the owner of the top club in Canada in those years  Francois Bazinet owned a very famous after-hour club – that all famous DJs that have been there for years would know – a club called Sona – which’s an Indian word and I don’t remember its definition anymore. He was a very good friend of mine and he wanted to me to get involved in doing monthly gay events with a gay friend of his. Because, he said, my gay friend really wants to do this but I really want you to get involved and coordinate and help put this together because I trust you.

And you have to understand that the gay scene – and this was before raves even started in Canada – we had the warehouse parties in Montreal which were underground. Warehouse parties but it was mainly a lot of people from gay community would attend those events. And as you know the house music scene, how it started was it was all the gay people listening. The only clubs where you could hear house music would be gay clubs, not the straight clubs.

I created a production name under BDB (Billion Dollar Boys) that presents “One night in Bang-Cock” – which was a play with the words. And the graphic designer who worked for Sona in those years – Martin Bruneau- which is funny now because he is now the Artistic Director of American Apparel in Los Angeles. You have to understand that American Apparel is a company that was based in Montreal and when they moved to LA and they brought a lot of graphic designers and artistic directors down there. Because American Apparel does not use an advertising agency they do everything in house – which is amazing. And you can see the results of those campaigns. They are incredible. And you look at American Apparel campaigns and if you look at old Sona fliers, you will be completely shocked to see how close they look like – the fonts, everything. Because that was Benno and Martin Bruneau – these two guys, Benno produced the logo of Sona which looks exactly like American Apparel and Bruneau was doing most of the fliers for the events of Sona.

SOME PAELLA AND WINE MAKE FOR A GREAT PUBLICITY
Carlos: So the first event I produced for Sona, I learned, I may be spent more than 400 hours putting that event together. I booked Victor Calderone for the first time in Canada 3 months after Madonna’s Ray of Light album was released. I wanted to book Junior Vasquez for the first event because Vasquez was the legendary DJ of Sound Factory. But I was told in those years that you know, he did not want to take the plane, he did not want to travel, he was exclusive to Sound Factory and you know the whole world wanted to book him, but he just had the contract with Sound Factory because he was the exclusive DJ there.

So there was a guy from Quebec that was living in Connecticut, his real name is David Bienvenue, and “bienvenue” in French means welcome so everyone called him by the name of Welcome. He was a big producer working for Junior Vasques and other artists. And I asked him who could I get? and he said why don’t you get Victor Calderone? He is the new remixer for Madonna. I didn’t know who the hell was Calderone, no one knew in Montreal who he was, so what i decided to do is I said I am going to have to press relations for the event to be able to get press out of my first event. So since i cook a lot – I think I am a very good cook – because my dream is to own my own restaurant. And the paellas that I cook are the best that you have ever eaten in your life – so I invited all the journalists, all the main journalists that cover music in Montreal, and all the main press from tv, magazines, to newspapers to eat paella at my house.

Baris: LOL…

Carlos: Very funny, because I had the fifteen of main music journalists at my house eating paella and I prepared the documents of the event to explain them who was Victor Calderone, blah blah blah. …Psychologically, morally and otherwise was a huge success which the whole city was wondering who the fuck was Billion Dollar Boys and I never accepted to do any interviews because I wanted the gay community and everybody else to think that billion dollar boys were a group of very rich gay guys doing those events.

Baris: And it sounds very much like so..I think you invented a couple of things there; first of all, was that a dinner or lunch?

Carlos: It was a dinner.

Baris: So we know lunch and dinner meetings but it’s typically pizza ordered to the office or people take team or clients out for dinner. Going to somebody’s house and eating home-cooked paella and listening to a pitch I think is pretty innovative.

Carlos: Yes it is. Listen, I was educated – you know I am half-Spanish, half-French Canadian. I was educated in Spain and there people, it is in their culture to receive people, to host people. So for me it was natural to invite these people to my house and serve the best food… and drinking the best wine. and no one does that. so for them it was very surprising and exciting. what I got out of that is all the major media covering the event and talking about Victor Calderone and Madonna’s album Ray of Light. And the big gay promoter who did Black & Blue which is one the biggest gay events going on in Montreal since 20 years started to follow what I was doing. Because then, when I did Calderone, it was a massive success. First time i did it at Sona the owners of the club said “it was not good for club’s image..we are not a gay event”, Carlos you should bring that to another gay club. And I approached Unity, the biggest gay club in Montreal, he accepted of course because of the success of the event to do that once a month in that club.

I did that for 2 years in that gay club. And Sona wanted me to keep doing events there so I started a production name called Michino which means “pussy cat” in Spanish. And I was doing techno events. Before house music, I was a big fan of techno.

Baris: Going back to that Paella night, why did all these guys show up? Was it because of your world-famous paella or was it Victor Calderone? Or did they know that your artist had something to do with Madonna?

Carlos: Yes of course. They all knew that the artist was remixing Madonna’s album.

Baris: OK, so that was the hook, right?

Carlos: Oh yeah, completely. In those times, more than 15 years ago, whenever you talked about DJs, it was such a new phenomenon that even a guy from NY that would come to Montreal that no one knows, it would feel very special with xxy that someone comes to my and puts music in public from another city. It was the strangest thing but there was a huge hype about that. We now know that no one gives a, no one really,  I mean things are now very different. But in those years, since it was a new phenomenon, things were different..I mean DJs have always existed but now we make them, you know, they are the superstar of the night.

NEXT: NEXT DRUG, NEXT REVOLUTION

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Tags: American Apparel campaigns, Carlos Correal, Marketing Events, Opium Group, Promoting gigs, publicist, Publicity, Victor Calderone