CHARACTERS 46 | BOROMAG.COM | OCTOBER 2014 One Ver y Select Sunday Brunch DJ Before the masses commiserate for hours in front of Queens Comfort on 30th Avenue and Steinway Street, anxiously awaiting their turn to enjoy a BYOB Sunday brunch among He- Man toys, wrestler dolls and framed kid photos of regulars, all somehow jealously peering at patrons’ pulled pork breakfast sandwiches and artful benedict plates, DJ Rob Select unloads four milk crates stuffed with records from the back of his old, gray minivan. He’s tired. Last night he got home at 5am. His long hair is still wet from the quick shower he took after getting just a couple hours of sleep. He says goodbye to his wife Alexandra who drives the car back to their East Elmhurst home and he readies himself for six hours of spinning. Fortunately for him—and everyone else in attendance, including the wait staff that are constantly in motion delivering food, taking orders or otherwise dancing to Select’s songs— it’s what he enjoys doing most. “From the age of five I can remember an obsession with records,” the fifty-year-old Rob Select—whose real name is Robert Yenco— says. “If my parents went out somewhere, they had to come back with a 45 to make me happy. It was a bribery thing to keep me behaving myself.” Select’s uncle, who had a sizable vinyl collection, lived a couple floors above him in the Corona apartment building where he grew up and exposed the young Select to all the bigname artists of the ’60s. He still has an Iron Butterfly “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” record from 1968 that his uncle bought for him. In the top left-hand corner on the back of the cover is a circled number 6, indicating it was the sixth album Select ever owned, and the oldest of his collection that now totals about 30,000 records. By the time Select was fourteen years old, he was already doing gigs as a “portable alternative DJ,” pairing up with a grammar school friend of his, Paul Bellisario, who built his own mixing board and somehow got his hands on a turntable from Studio 54. Select mostly spun punk and glam rock from artists like the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, T. Rex and others. He might have mixed in some Bob Marley, but he never played disco. For their inaugural show in 1978 the tandem rented a hall in Bayside, the neighborhood Select’s family moved into when he was about nine. “This is the age where there’s no Facebook,” Select says. To invite friends, “you call some people up.” In the hall, Bellisario mounted the turntables and connected the PA, and then handed out aerosol cans of haircoloring spray. “He would set up everything for me,” Select says of his old partner. “And I would come in like a rock star and just play.” Bellisario and Select had only expected about thirty friends to be at the hall, but through simple word-of-mouth, news about their first gig spread throughout the area. So when Select walked up to the DJ board in a pair of spandex pants and with green-highlighted hair, he was shocked to see over a hundred people in attendance. Though Select and Bellisario implemented a cover charge and made some money from the event, the two were asked to return to the hall a day later by its manager to clean up the mess left behind by their new fans. “Little did we know the sprays we gave out were going to go on the walls, everywhere,” Select remembers. The post-party manual labor did nothing to dissuade them from founding their own DJ business, “Rock Inc.”—a moniker they would scrawl on flyers for their shows. Select DJ-ed birthday parties, middleschool dances, and a variety of other events throughout Queens during his teens, graduating to Manhattan lounges and bars in his early twenties. He skipped college altogether, and he and Bellisario enjoyed “a partnership that worked well for some years,” Story By Michael Stahl
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