Chris Dooley is a one-man force of nature. The Holyoke resident has produced, promoted, played in and DJed hundreds of shows over the last several years in every kind of space imaginable: basements, bedrooms, warehouses, bars, art galleries, VFW posts—you name it.
He’s been at it almost as long as he’s been bipedal, delving into music around the age of five with piano lessons before deciding that “reading music off a sheet was boring.”
As a teenager, he bought a Sears brand Terminator electric guitar that had a built-in speaker. “Things went downhill from there,” he says.
Dooley taught himself to use and abuse all sorts of instruments, along with ways to make noise with electronics, and began playing shows in his late teens. He might pick up any instrument at any time during a show, but thinks drums might be his weapon of choice.
“I don’t know if I have a favorite instrument, although drums are a lot of fun to play, but not much fun to move and set up,” he says. “Loud amps sound really nice, but are bad for my back.”
Over the last decade, Dooley’s been able to effectively funnel his seemingly inexhaustible energy and passion for music and community through Easthampton’s Flywheel Collective. He was volunteering before its 1999 opening on Holyoke Street, and became a board member in 2002. Countless shows can be attributed directly to his efforts.
Dooley has formed numerous projects with interesting monikers—Ski Mask, Gastric Lavage, Cattle Funeral, The Laudable Pus—and he’s collected a lifetime’s worth of memories as both player and booker.
“Ski Mask played a lot of random shows when we first started playing,” he says. “I thought one time when we played with this thugged-out NYHC [New York Hardcore] band we were going to get beat up, but they wound up laughing and enjoying our set. Ski Mask played a couple of great sets at Mystery Train in their old location.
“When I booked a show for Wolf Eyes about five years ago, another band invited themselves onto the show. I tried to get them to stop playing after the 15 minutes I allotted them, but I guess they were into the light show I started to put on with the house lights, and continued to play along with the hip-hop CD I was blasting through the PA at Flywheel.”
Dooley also regularly rocks the turntables as a DJ under the handle DJ 12xu—a name taken from an angsty, frenetic tune of the same name by English post-punk pioneers Wire—where he is known to spin all sorts of music from an encyclopedic vinyl collection that runs the gamut from hip-hop to punk to free jazz to reggae.
He’s released several cassettes and CDs, and hopes to record a bunch more this year—to complement a mind-numbing schedule of shows, of course.”
For more info, visit www.myspace.com/dj12xu.
