Chicago named me
after the city
I left

I was born in Boston. I moved to Oak Park the summer before my freshman year of high school, and everything changed.

I didn’t know anybody. What I found was the teen club circuit — Zero Gravity out in Naperville, Medusa’s in Elgin, the Warehouse, whatever party would let us in on a weeknight. That was the first place I belonged to. Everybody there called me Boston, because that’s where I was from and because I clearly wasn’t from here. It stuck. For years, that was my whole name.

I didn’t start behind the decks. I started as a promoter, running nightclub events for Addictive Entertainment — flyers, doors, getting people through them. That taught me the thing most DJs never learn: a room doesn’t fill itself, and playing to an empty floor is a different job than playing to a full one. Then Frankie Howland put me on. He showed me how to DJ, and I spent the next few years doing nothing else. Boston became DJ Boston.

From 2005 I worked. Studied audio production, left school, kept producing anyway — put records out as 2D Electro on Dance More and Moon Records. Through 2013 and 2014 I was working as 2D Electro and with Chris MD as Disobey DJs — Sound-Bar, Dolphin, Crocodile Lounge, Sláinte, Medusa’s out in Elgin, Midwest Freakfest at the Riverside Complex twice, a Getter tour date at Allure. Daytimes I was the DJ for Guess on Michigan Avenue, and I covered the Oak Brook store when they needed me — both are gone now. Retail is a different job than a club: you’re holding a room that didn’t come for you, at a volume people can shop over. It taught me more about reading a floor than any nightclub did. By 2017 I was all over the city: Soundbar, Trophy Room, Debonair on Milwaukee Ave for Don’t Drake & Drive, the Annex, Evil Olive on a bill Gant-Man was headlining. Fridays at Ironside on Wells. I was in a room somewhere most nights of the week.

Then 2020 happened, and I stopped. Not just the DJing — I put the cameras down too. I don’t have a dramatic version of that story. Work dried up, and I decided I needed to be away from it for a while. That lasted longer than I planned.

What brought me back was a phone call. Astro asked if I’d take Fridays at Fitz’s Pub in Elmhurst. I said yes, and I’ve been there every Friday since. Other nights came and went along the way — Wednesdays at Waterworks in Lyons, Saturdays at S2 in Maywood, Blackout Wednesdays at Scratch Public House, corporate work at Lucky Strike in Wrigleyville. Fitz’s is the one that stuck. I’ve played their St. Patrick’s, their Fourth of July, their Halloween. That’s not a thing you get handed. You earn it a Friday at a time.

The same year I came back, I started His Revenge — a clothing brand built on the idea that every setback is fuel for a comeback. I wear it every week I play. I make the clothes, I shoot the campaigns, I DJ the nights. I’d been shooting photo and video the whole time anyway; now it all goes in the same direction.

Twenty years in, I’m still the kid Chicago named after somewhere else. I just know what to do with it now.