I often get asked what is the drive behind DJTees, these past 23+ years. As you can imagine we get endless offers to pay to write posts. I wouldn’t be interested in that anyway, but it’s clear that none of them have the first idea of the spirit behind it all and think it’s just a merchandise website. That it’s all just products like a standard shop.
Usually I don’t bother to explain but I was talking to Andy the other day, just to outline the DJTees culture, which I’m inculcating into him, though he kinda understood anyway. Someone had just bought a James Gang and a Paul Butterfield and Quicksilver gig poster shirt and it seemed that order was what we’re all about in terms of both each artist’s place in rock’s pantheon. Not really known outside of the classic rock community but loved within it.
To think we’re celebrating artists that were briefly popular 50-55 years ago is what has always driven us. Things that I’ve loved my whole life get forgotten in favour of the latest thing today. But I knew I wasn’t alone in appreciating the full extent of rock and also in appreciating it through vinyl. It was never about being fashionable. Quite the reverse.
But of course, there’s no point in pretending there’s a huge untapped market for the shirts of often minor bands and musicians from 50-60 years ago, 23 years has proved to me there isn’t. But that’s why we’re creating new designs most weeks. It means while nothing at all is very popular, or even slightly popular (if we sell 20 of a design in a year it'd be a rarity and make our top five) but if one or two people buy a shirt, we’ve done our job. It’s why it’s quite commonplace for us to sell 10 or 20 shirts in a day and for all of them to be different designs. In fact, that’s usually the case.
I suppose it’s all about appealing to several different niches musically and culturally all at the same time. I never wanted to water down that spirit. Because going back to 2002 when we started, my hunch was that though I have a comprehensive rock brain for music made between 1965 and 85, I not only wouldn’t be the only one but that within that were myriad passions for different niches. I was right, as the customer who bought a shirt of a Paul Butterfield and Quicksilver poster proved. I get so much pleasure from that, knowing that they must’ve listened to those bands in their corner of the world in Des Moines for maybe 50-55 years. And that they also likely know that not only do I know who the bands are but also that I have their complete discographies.
They say that authenticity is the most important thing these days and I suppose that is in everything we do because if, to use that example again, I didn’t know Quicksilver, Paul Butterfield and the James Gang’s music or their place in the scheme of things, we’d never have created those shirts in the first place. Similarly, I think people expect we’d sell hundreds of some designs. But that’s very far from the truth. They tend not to appreciate how niche it is to sell t-shirts of bands that split up in 1974 or understand what the aim behind it all is.
What I don’t know is if any of this is appreciated or understood by visitors to the site, especially as they’re often conditioned to think everyone on the internet is just selling disposable products produced without any culture or history behind it, certainly not a massive rock music nerd of 50 years. Indeed they would probably not know what that would even mean.
Fortunately for the last 23 years there have always been a circle of people who do understand what it’s all about and come back time and again. It’d be nice to have a lot more but that’s not likely to happen, at least I assume. But I take comfort in knowing some really do get it.
