Back on Track
After a brief chill-out, globe-trotting DJ Sandra Collins is in demand again
You can smell Sandra Collins's Hollywood apartment from a walkway outside. Sweet, strong aromas hit you like the odors from a Bath & Body Works store. Once inside, you see the culprits - candles glowing with a yogic, aromatherapeutic vibe. The wood-floored, deco unit is bare - many of her belongings are boxed in storage - and guests sit on a pillow.
Collins poses for a photographer, bare feet apart, hands in the air, chromatic hair abloom with the help of an old stylist's trick - baby powder. This is her serene sanctuary, if only temporarily, and the first lady of American DJ-ing is in control, even if she's always in motion.
Collins is a notorious party animal with a penchant for tardiness and diva-esque behavior. There was a time when it wouldn't have been surprising if she had spun out of control, like so many of her disc-wielding contemporaries. But - with a major two-CD mix compilation being released this winter on Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto label, a headlining gig alongside superstar Oakenfold at the 10,000-capacity Giant New Year's Eve party this week, and a new vision to make it as a music producer - she's back on track. It's not an easy feat in the club scene to survive flavor-of-the-month disease, but Collins has persevered with the patience, experience, and wisdom only a survivor of global underground bacchanalia could muster. She's still a ball of energy, but she's also focused and serene, like a woman who enjoys her candles and hot baths as much as her lasers and sweltering clubs.
"The Gabriel & Dresden remixes brought me back down to earth," says the thirtysomething of her new musical inspiration: part trance, part progressive house, all bliss.
Collins says she started spinning records in the late '80s in Phoenix. She was the granddaughter of comedian Milton Berle, and she grew up around some Hollywood royalty, but for the most part, home life wasn't ideal. Her mother died when she was a teenager, and soon Collins was a beauty-school dropout. After attending a legendary Flammable Liquid underground party in Los Angeles in the early '90s, Collins found her calling and moved to the City of Angels, joining the hips of one DJ Taylor as he provided the proto-trance soundtrack for after-hours party Sketchpad.
"That scene definitely was dark," she says. "It was out of control. But I don't regret it. It was the boot camp for what I am today."
In the mid-'90s, she followed Taylor's rising star to club Metropolis in Irvine, where he forged a strong weekly Thursday-night following. By 1997, however, Collins took off for an even bigger DJ "residency," this one at famed New York club Twilo. There, Collins spun alongside global luminaries Sasha and John Digweed and forged her own blend of simmering progressive house and chilly, moody trance. Her reputation as a crowd-pleaser soared as Twilo - with its Richter-scale Phazon sound system - grew to become the favorite haunt of the world's top jocks. Even before the club closed in 2001, Collins had moved to Orlando, Florida, hometown of many of America's best DJs, including Twilo's Jimmy Van M. and globetrotters Chris Fortier, Icey, Kimball Collins, and Tim Skinner. The move proved to be relaxing, but it was not a shot in the arm for her career. "Orlando was too comfortable, and the last thing on my mind was work," she says.
Returning to Los Angeles last year, Collins was dating remix star Dave Dresden, whose enthusiasm for dance music is perhaps unparalleled. "Music had become all the same - that was what was wrong with me," Collins says. "Dave saved me musically. He handed me all this music, and it was always the best stuff."
Meanwhile, there was a resurgence in demand for her to play at U.K. super-clubs. Oakenfold and BBC Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong, whose Essential Selection is perhaps the most influential dance-music show in the world, were huge supporters. Tong put her onstage last year to spin live for his British listeners from the Winter Music Conference in Miami, where she was also awarded DanceStar's 2003 "Best DJ" award, which sits on a shelf in her apartment. But last year she also lost her passport, so she had to sit out the globetrotting until just recently in favor of tinkering with her Perfecto Presents: Sandra Collins mix-CD, which she worked on for more than eight months. The collection recalls icy moonscapes and driving sea swells and is equal parts moody and calm. Ambient washes, which Collins produced with her engineer, bridge some tracks. It was all put together via Logic sound-editing software, so the whole two-disc set is more like a blended remix project than a traditional DJ compilation.
She put a lot of time and sweat into the project, which is due out in February. "People were saying, 'It's just a mix-CD,'" Collins recalls. "But nobody tells Tom Cruise, 'It's just a movie.'"
These days, she's fending off lesser offers (Playboy came calling, but she's not interested in going nude) while she gets her head around original productions. "I'm working my way up to an artist album," she says.
Collins is also thinking of moving on again, this time to San Francisco. "It almost feels like things are about to pick up," she says. "I'm ready for anything."Published: 12/24/2003
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