DJ Minx: Detroit's First Lady of Wax

When DJ Mag speaks with DJ Minx, it’s already been months since she came out, and she’s preparing to celebrate her 54th birthday. In the pale afternoon light, her thick-rimmed glasses and velvet red nails give off a playful but authoritative air. She’s an artful speaker, animated and humorous while paying attention to the flow of her storytelling. She’s also heavy on the cuss words, apt to recall an event with the same emotional charge she felt at the time. 

Much like her music, Minx’s DJ sets roll deep, spanning minimal house and brooding techno, to old-school funk and full-bodied tech, always with an eye on the groove. She’ll ride the pitch on a CDJ the same way she does when working the vinyl, more concerned with slowly locking in the beat than fashioning the perfect blend, and barely dips below 130bpm. It’s hard to think of anyone working these sounds the way she does — is there, we ask? She cracks a broad, knowing smile: “I always say nobody plays like me. I play so wild.” 

Having performed at every edition of Movement, Detroit’s annual flagship electronic festival, since its founding, set up more music businesses than she’d care to name, and nurtured a generation of local talent through her collective and record label Women On Wax — and all while working a full-time job — Minx is the true embodiment of Detroit’s colloquial motto: ‘Detroit hustles harder’. It’s taken her a while to get where she is today, and she has a few ideas about why, but there’s no doubt about the moment she fell in love with electronic music. It was the summer of 1989, and she was 21. 

“I lived in downtown Detroit at the time. Some of my friends were saying, ‘Let’s go to the Music Institute!' and I said, ‘Institute? What kind of institution is open this late?’” she says, mimicking her disbelief. “My friend Des goes, ‘It’s a club, and it’s right down the street.’” Minx would normally head to Taboo, an R&B spot also located downtown, or to the Time Zone Arcade in Hazel Park, a 15-minute drive away. The Institute was not on her radar.

“I said, ‘Okay, what kind of music is it?’ and he said, ‘That’s techno music.’ I thought, ‘Oh God, who wants to hear that?’” she drawls. “‘That’s the music they play on the radio that never ends. It’s just one long track, and you don’t know what the hell is going on!’”

Luckily, Des won out, and soon the group of friends were on the five-minute walk to the club. As they turned the corner onto Broadway, she felt the rumbling bass, and noted the long line of partygoers outside the venue. “This security guy at the front was picking people off and letting them in one at a time, Studio 54 style. I said, ‘We’ve got to get in there!’ Forget about the fact that I didn’t want to hear any techno. I wanted whatever was inside that club.

“I climbed up and stood in the back to watch [Derrick] May. When he saw me, though, I left, because I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to bother him. The following week I skipped [attending], but I went the week after that, back into the booth. He’s jumping around, he’s spinning — and then he turned to me and said, ‘What are you looking at?’ I said, ‘I can do that,’ and he said, ‘Oh, okay,’ and went on playing. I immediately left. I was like, ‘Why did I say that? Why did I say anything to him?’ The next week, I went back to the booth and he looked at me and said, ‘Are you doing this yet?’ I said no, and he replied, ‘Don’t come back until you are.’” 

“I thought, ‘What the fuck is wrong with this guy?’ I left the club and went back to my apartment. I was so embarrassed.”

Later, she spoke to her friend Gerry. “He said, ‘Well, you know what you have to do?’ ‘Yeah, nothing,’ I said. And he goes, ‘No, you have to start DJing. You don’t hear a challenge like that from Derrick May and do nothing. You have to DJ.’ I told him that I didn’t know how to, and he said, ‘Oh, but you’ll learn.’” 

Minx credits her music career to that moment of provocation. But the memory is bittersweet, after an investigation by DJ Mag earlier this year revealed multiple reports of sexual assault and harassment against May. How did she feel when she heard about the reports? “It was a bit heartbreaking to hear this was going on,” she says, after a solemn pause. “I just looked up to him as the person who got me into playing the music I absolutely love today. I felt kind of defensive for him, but I never really got to know him.” 

Over the next few months, in between her business school studies and a job at Rite Aid, Minx sat on her floor and practiced on the decks. She was also putting her business acumen to work. Inspired by the growing techno scene, she set up a mobile record store with Gerry and a mutual friend, ordering tracks from Downtown 161 in New York and other distributors. The trio would deliver records to local DJs in need of last-minute recommendations, often rocking up with curated selections from their collection. It was while delivering alone to local legend Bruce Bailey that she got her break.

“I went to deliver some tracks to Bruce, and while he was paying me, he said, out of the blue, ‘Hey, do you have a business card or something?’ I gave him this card Gerry had made for me, said, ‘Take care,’ and walked away. ‘Wait a minute,’ he shouted over to me. ‘You’re a DJ? Oh, shit! I’m having a party tonight. Do you think you could come by and play?’ I was like, ‘Where’s your party?’ Minutes later, Witcher was in her car, screaming at the top of her lungs. Bailey was known for hosting soulful house parties in and around the city. A well-connected DJ and booker, he was the kind of connection that could make or break a career. Minx immediately called Gerry. “Gerry’s always the coolest,” she recounts warmly. “He said, ‘Great, that’s awesome. What time are we going?’”

Hours later, Minx, Gerry, and six of their friends pulled up outside The Lofts club on Livernois. Located in Detroit’s Westside, the venue was similar to The Institute, with its sanded wood flooring and elevated DJ booth. But the soundsystem had its limits, and the crowd leaned toward the soulful side of things. The party was in full swing as the group approached the front desk, behind which sat two women.

“When I said I was the DJ, one of the ladies laughed,” she rasps. “The other said, ‘You’re what?’ I said, ‘I’m the DJ. My name is DJ Minx and Bruce has asked me to come play tonight.’ ‘I don’t see your name anywhere,’ says the other. I said, ‘Okay, thank you,’ turned around to leave — and Gerry’s right there, blocking me.”

The conversation enters a stalemate, with the door staff refusing to check the story with Bailey, and Gerry refusing to leave — until a friendly face intervenes. “Then the side door opens and this guy comes out and says, ‘Hey Minx — come on in! Where you going?’ I said, ‘Well, these ladies weren’t letting me in,’ and he looked at them and said, ‘Do you see that she has a bag of records? She’s not carrying it around as a purse.’”

A nervous Minx stepped into a pitch black room with a busy dancefloor, and was prodded in the direction of the booth. “They were playing a lot of soulful house, and I said to myself, ‘This shit in my bag is nothing like that. This is about to be different!’” she squeals. “My music was all deep and tech. That’s all I had, because that’s all I knew. That’s all I liked, and I only played what I liked.”

A sea of motionless faces turned to her as she dropped the needle on her first track — “they were all just looking up at me, nobody’s dancing” — but by the time she finished, some 20 minutes later, the dancefloor was heaving. “I looked to my left and I had two cheerleaders beside me: The women who were working the front door, they were screaming,” she smiles. “I’m still really good friends with them.”

The first outing was a success, but finding a way to play the sounds that inspired her, and in the style of her choosing, would prove tricky. The reason for this was the divide between the city’s soulful house and techno scenes. She straddled the two for a time, but her instincts began to lean in a new direction, not fully embracing either orthodoxy. Alongside Gerry, Minx found a trusted confidant in Kevin Saunderson. The two became acquainted in the mid-’90s through Minx’s then-husband, and have remained good friends since.

“Kevin’s like a brother to me. We’re really tight,” she says with real warmth. It was when Saunderson and his family moved in with Minx and her partner while his house was being built that they would sit up and talk shop. “We mainly talked about flawless mixing,” she remembers. “I was always intrigued as to how he got so good at what he did. He really flowed. Now, I knew how to mix back then, but I wanted to know how to mix better. I was always afraid to blend and ride the tracks together.” 

Up to this point, Minx, still working with her belt-driven JBL turntables, opted for quick transitions. She was also still building a collection based on others’ tastes, something Saunderson slowly moved her away from.

“He would tell me, ‘You have to feel it, it’s a feeling’. He said he did it with little or no thought. ‘It’s easy, girl’ — that’s what he said. ‘When you get used to it, it’s really easy. You’re not gonna even think about it. You already sound good but in a minute, it’s gonna be easy for you’. That’s what made me get to the point of choosing tracks that I was feeling, more so than tracks that people might like to hear. I got into what I liked, and it helped the flow.” 

By 1995, she started switching up her style, eschewing soulful house altogether, or only buying instrumentals and playing them much faster. The city took note, and she began to attract a different crowd. While some promoters turned their back on her more amped up offerings, others listened more closely.

Minx was working at General Motors and had just started touring internationally when Motor came calling in 1998. The venue, which would re-establish Detroit on the international DJ circuit, had opened in 1996 in Hamtramck, five miles north of the Motor City’s center. A riot the year prior had stalled the founders’ plans to purchase the old Music Institute location downtown, forcing them into the small city, which at the time, was mainly populated by Americans of Polish descent. In the short span of a year, it was attracting world-class DJs — Detroiters such as Saunderson, May, and Juan Atkins would, of course, frequent and play at the new spot, but so would Richie Hawtin and Fatboy Slim. Kraftwerk even dropped in for a memorable visit. A steady gig opening for top-tier international talent was just what she needed.

Bookers Linda G and Adriel Thorton got her on a three-way call, and G cut to the quick. “She immediately said, ‘So what are you doing every Saturday night, besides being a new resident DJ at Motor?’ Adriel was just laughing,” she chuckles. “They said they had been watching me, they loved the music I played, and that I was a good fit for a residency.” She accepted the offer, and in a full-circle moment, even opened for May. She remembers it like it was yesterday. “He came and stood behind me and watched. It was like my back was hot. When midnight hit and he went on, he said, ‘You know what, you really goddamn good with this. You are not fucking around.’” 

It seemed like Minx’s star was in full ascent, but she shares a few war stories from this period. One in particular has her close to tears. In the early ’00s, she was booked for an all-vinyl DJ battle at Club 246 on Madison Avenue. She was the only woman in the 10-person lineup — and to the annoyance of some, won.

“There was so much that I had to go through as a woman — we just didn’t get any respect, at least I didn’t. I’m trying not to cry. I swear, I hate this shit.” One judge was audacious enough to state she would have lost if another DJ from out of town had showed up. 

“A few days later, the gentleman that ran the battle said — and I don’t want to say his name, all the people that read about this fucker know who they are — ‘You know, they’re trying to do this over again, because they were saying that Steve wasn’t able to make it because of the snow.’ I said, ‘Well, doesn’t that disqualify him?’ They just voided my shit.” The battle was rescheduled and, with a heavy heart, Minx re-entered it.

“I had this feeling in my stomach, I was very upset.” The DJ who had failed to show in the first round was a turntablist living out of town. In a thinned-out lineup, with others having dropped out and her confidence diminished, Minx wasn’t in the game. “He’s very good and he won the battle. Guess who came second? Those are the things I had to deal with.”