True to the Track

A young Sean Spencer ’86 walked into the decorated, dimly lit cafeteria at St. Ambrose Catholic School and was immediately drawn to the corner of the linoleum dance floor. Between thumping speakers, a folding table supported two turntables, a mixing console with an array of rotary knobs, and a milk crate full of records. The DJ wore one headphone pressed to his ear, nudging a spinning record back a split second before releasing it in perfect rhythm. For a few beats, two songs played at once, drums locked in step, until one track seamlessly gave way to the next.  

“How do you do that?” Sean shouted, eyes wide. The DJ knelt and Sean listened, rapt, as he explained the basics of beatmatching. When he got home that evening, he begged his mom for an audio mixer. 

By the time he started at Mount Saint Joseph as a freshman, Sean had already begun experimenting with sound, mixing tracks with just one turntable and a boombox. At the end of each school day, he would rush home with his cousins, Mark ’86 and Marlon ’86 Bates, to tune in to the local AM radio station, WEBB. “They were playing the fresh new hip-hop and electric dance stuff,” Sean says. “It was fascinating to us.” 

One afternoon, the radio jockey introduced new music by The AP Crew, one of the region’s first hip-hop groups. “They had dancers and DJs and MCs, and they had done this mix,” Sean recalls. “And I thought, man, I can make one of those. So, I studied what they were doing, and I got this tape together.” 

He convinced his mom to take him to the radio station to drop it off. The next day, he rushed home as usual and turned on the radio. “They were playing my mix right then and there!” Sean says. Eager to claim his work, he called the request line repeatedly until he finally got through to the announcer. “You’re the young man who gave me the mix tape,” he said. “Well, what’s your name?” Sean thought for a second. “DJ Spen,” he replied with bravado. “And are you part of a crew?” the announcer asked. 

“I said, ‘Yeah...’ And I looked over at my Numark mixer and said, ‘We’re the Numarx,’” Sean laughs. “But it was really just me, so I had to figure out how to create something out of absolutely nothing because I just lied to this man.” 

He called up his childhood friend Wayne Mallory and told him about his opportunity. That December, at 13 years old, the pair played their first-ever show as Numarx—an opening act at the Baltimore Civic Center. With the addition of Kevin Liles, Darryl Mims, and Rodney Holloman, the hip-hop crew quickly grew into a quintet and, by 1983, was performing all over Baltimore. They opened for rap icons LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., Heavy D & The Boyz, and EPMD, and their music could be heard on the city’s top-rated FM station, V103. 

“When I look back at it in hindsight, I think to myself, ‘Wow, we were really doing something,’” Sean says. 

Between the limo rides to late-night gigs and sessions in the studio, Sean still had school to attend. He maintained good grades, but his teachers were equally impressed with what he’d been able to achieve outside of the classroom. As a senior, he was invited to present to his classmates at Mount Saint Joseph’s Career Day. 

“My classroom was packed,” he recalls. “I had a rival that lived in Catonsville but didn’t go to MSJ. His name was DJ Scratch. We did a straight up battle in front of one of the classes. I broke out every Led Zeppelin record, The Beatles, Van Halen—whatever I could to keep everyone engaged.” 

One summer, Sean, Wayne, and Kevin landed part-time jobs telemarketing timeshares. They didn’t realize it at the time, but one of those cold calls would change the course of their music careers. When Bill Pettaway picked up the phone, the coincidence was too great to be considered anything other than fate. Bill was a musician himself and had been trying to get in touch with Numarx after hearing their mixes on the radio. “He and Kevin start talking, and next thing we know we’re going down to Annapolis to meet this guy,” Sean says. 

Bill had a basement studio where he helped produce some tracks for the popular R&B band Starpoint. While looking around, the group stumbled upon the beginnings of a song Bill was about to scrap. They put the demo on and heard nothing but potential. “You can’t throw that away,” they told him. “That’s killer!” 

“So, we convinced him to let us work on the record. Kevin wrote most of the lyrics. I added beats and scratching and all that,” Sean says. 

Soon, that song salvaged from the junk bin became “Girl You Know It’s True,” famously covered by lip-syncing German pop duo Milli Vanilli. When Numarx released it as their second single, it became a regional hit. Though it didn’t match the national success of their first single, “Rhymes So Def,” the song did find its way across the ocean into Germany’s vibrant, underground club scene, and Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian took notice.
 

About a year later, Kevin was watching MTV when a hook he knew by heart caught his attention. He called Sean: “Dude, there are some guys jumping around singing our song on TV!” The Milli Vanilli version of “Girl” became a global sensation, selling more than 10 million copies and peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. 

Sean and his friends hired lawyers and eventually received the compensation they deserved, but Numarx didn’t last long after that. “The group kind of imploded from a lot of peer pressure, people going around saying, ‘Well, y’all let those guys steal your song,’” Sean explains. “We didn’t understand the industry at the time.” 

Sean graduated from Mount Saint Joseph, and his parents announced they were moving to Virginia. With a basement full of sound systems and records, moving into an apartment wasn’t exactly an option. So, he bought their house with the royalties he’d received from “Girl” and went on to study communications at Coppin State University. There, a professor helped him get an internship at WWIN, Magic 95.9, which kickstarted an exciting career in radio. 

“When it was at its height, you could have heard me on three different stations in the Baltimore–Washington area at once—two recorded, one live,” Sean says. “From Magic 95.9 to 92Q to V103, I was doing local radio about as big as you could do it.” 

At the same time, Sean had also begun producing dance music with The Basement Boys, who remixed or produced artists such as Paula Abdul, Michael Jackson, Crystal Waters, and Ultra Nate. By the mid-’90s, he’d released his own dance music production and performed his first international show at the Ministry of Sound in London. “It just took off from there,” he says. 

Europe, Australia, Asia—he’s been traveling the globe ever since, bringing energy and joy to some of the world’s biggest stages. He’s played festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, which draw crowds of more than 200,000 people. Even now at 57 years old, with decades of experience performing live, he still gets butterflies when he hits the right vibration in a set and feels the audience respond. 

“It’s euphoric,” he explains. “I think it’s one of the reasons I haven’t really done anything else—there’s no feeling like it. It’s like I’m a maestro conducting an orchestra.” 

While his love for mixing music hasn’t changed over the years, the instruments surely have. Gone are the days of carting crates of records to and from gigs. With the digitization of music libraries in the early 2000s came the emergence of software-based DJ systems. These innovations have allowed DJs unparalleled access and creativity. 

“Coming from vinyl and playing vinyl for as long as I did, I realize the box that vinyl will put you in,” Sean says. “There’s only so much you can do. But with digital, man, you think it and it can happen. I love that.” 

Sean launched his own record label, Quantize Recordings, in 2011 to support other artists in the soulful house music genre. He has also watched his son step onto the DJ scene and is continually impressed with the younger generation’s musical education and autonomy. They mix genres and tempos, free to experiment in a way that wasn’t available to record-store era DJs, whose catalogs were confined to what they could carry. 

Watching his son find his own rhythm behind the turntables, Sean often catches himself thinking about the 13-year-old kid spinning records in his parents’ basement. If he could talk to him now, his message would be simple.

“Maintain your focus. Don’t let the residual noise or the peer pressure get to you. And keep God first,” he’d say. “You’re doing fine. You’ll do just fine."