DJ Cassidy on spinning for Beyonce and JLo: ‘Everyone has their songs’
DJ Cassidy — already underage at 18, but looking “like I was 8” — got his big break on one slow, rainy night at the club Lotus in NYC’s Meatpacking District.That was back when there was more beef than beats in the neighborhood’s nascent nightlife days, and, that night, there was a certain hip-hop mogul — Sean “Puffy” Combs — in the house as Cassidy was filling the largely empty space with the soulful sounds of Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and Luther Vandross.“And so Puffy goes to the floor and essentially dances by himself for two hours,” the now 42-year-old DJ — who will headline Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall with his “Pass the Mic Live!” concert on Friday — told The Post.“At 5 in the morning on the way out, he walks by the DJ booth … and he wrote down his name and number on a napkin and said, ‘Call me tomorrow.’ ” And when he talked on the phone to Combs the next day, Cassidy Podell got “the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.”“He goes, ‘How do you know how to play all those records like that?’ And I said, ‘Like what?’ And he goes, ‘Like you lived it.’ ”A white, Jewish kid from the Upper East Side, Cassidy was too young to have heard many of the black classics he was spinning when they were first released.But with his signature mix of old-school R&B and hip-hop, DJ Cassidy would go on to become spinner to the stars — from Puffy and Jay-Z to Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez — as well as rock the White House at not one but two presidential inaugurations for Barack Obama.Now a star in his own right, he looks every bit the part in a custom-made pink suit ahead of his “Pass the Mic Live!” show on Friday at Radio City.