Disk jockey BBP’s Friday night lights are green lasers and strobes. Behind the booth, he is seven caged tigers condensed into one man. He plays music out of a classic Buick cut in half behind a bar at club Spannk. Completely in control of the massive, pumping sound and the young, hot partygoers, he can turn the crowd from a breeze to a sandstorm in about a half-second. In his nondescript black “BBP” cap and shirt and with neatly trimmed facial hair, he punctuates every collision of hand to button with a full body thrust.
A Miami native since he was 2 years old — after he moved from Cuba — Peter Pancho is the consummate self-made man. He plays house music, a style of electronic dance music with heavy bass breaks and rolling changes, every Friday night and packs the place. Things were not always so easy, though.
As a teenager in Hialeah, Pancho fell in love with the South Beach electronic music scene. He started working clubs when he was 17, and he got good gigs in Miami clubs playing popular music, but he felt he was wasting his life away.
“I came up to Gainesville for Gator Growl one year, and I just fell in love with the place. It’s the perfect party town. Exactly the scene I was looking for,” Pancho said.
Pancho struggled and hustled his way up to Gainesville, saving up the money he made from those Miami gigs. He got an associate degree from Santa Fe College and studied for one semester at UF before dropping out to pursue his music career full time.
“School is not for me, bro. Music is my passion,” he said.
Pancho made a name for himself as a DJ at club Boutiq. He worked there for a year and a half but had to leave after a disagreement over the type of music he should play.
“They wanted more top 40 stuff. I wasn’t feeling that. I wanted to bring the house music that I heard in Miami here to Gainesville,” he said. “At the end of the day, I can’t do music that I don’t like.”
He was back at square one. After a few months with no work, he ran into a promoter for the newly opened club Spannk, and he pitched the idea of an all house music night at the club. It was a rocky start.
“At first, no one was showing up. Over the course of a couple months, it really started to get hot. By three months, it was a revolution. The club is always packed with a good crowd, and I can bring in artists from all over to DJ here,” Pancho said.
In addition to working at Spannk, Pancho also remixes tracks and sells them online at ratedh.net. One of his signature remixes is of the Gators fight song with snippets of Tebow’s famous “you’ll never see anyone work harder” speech.
Pancho is passionate about working hard and chasing his dreams.
“Anything that you love or want to accomplish, you can, no matter what anyone says. Don’t listen to the negativity or the naysayers,” Pancho said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s house music or Chemical Engineering, just give it your all and don’t let anyone stop you.”
All of Pancho’s hard work has recently paid off. He’s been invited to play Ultra Music Festival in Miami, the biggest electronic music festival in the world with more than 85,000 people in attendance in 2009.
“Eight years ago I went to Ultra for the first time, and I knew that I would work my ass off to get to that stage. It’s an honor,” he said.
During his set, Pancho frequently builds his songs into crescendos, and it’s like being on a perpetual roller coaster. The rise is slow and dreamy. There’s a pause at the peak just before the explosive drop that you can feel in the pit of your stomach.
At the end of the night, when the crowd is filing out toward the door, a young Spanish man in a nice button-up shirt leans over the bar toward Pancho and yells,
“You are the best f***ing DJ I have ever seen, bro. Thank you so much.”
DJ BBP puts his hands together and does a short bow.
“No bro, thank you.”
