Being wedding DJs wasn’t their first gig, but it pays the bills and serves a purpose

Jesse Kivel and Michael David have toured the world in their electronic pop bands Kisses and Classixx, performing and DJ-ing to all kinds of festival and club crowds. But the show with the elephant in the audience was a first.

“Oh, yeah, we’ve played a traditional Indian wedding with the full elephant,” Kivel said, rattling off a few of the unusual side gigs he’s booked with his L.A.-based weddings-and-events firm Dart DJ. For that set, there was a steep learning curve. “We did have to consult pretty heavily on the playlist,” David said. “It would have been super offensive to get that wrong. But it was so, so much fun.”

Weddings are sometimes the gigs of last resort for musicians — sweating through a rented tux, awkwardly MC-ing the bridal party introduction and getting a front-row seat to humanity’s foibles by the open bar. But it’s a job that Dart DJ’s founders approach with an atypical panache and sincerity.

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Their aesthetic — hip but populist, with tunes ranging from ‘70s punks Television to Beyoncé — appeals to creative-class millennials approaching life milestones like marriage. But Dart’s success also says something about the new ways that musicians are making a middle-class living today. “We like that it’s a little blue-collar,” Kivel said.

And there are worse crowds to play for than champagne-swigging lovers having the rowdiest night of their lives.

“The problem with indie music is that you have to act like you don’t care and just hope someone notices you,” Kivel said. David agreed: “Some of our guys enjoy Dart shows more than a lot of club gigs. They see how those moments resonate.”

Kivel and David run Dart DJ out of an airy office in downtown L.A.’s Arts District. There’s a bright pink neon sign with the group’s logo hanging over the workspace. But the centerpiece is a walnut-colored, polished-wood coffin case that houses the group’s turntables and mixing console. “We have kind of a midcentury modern taste in furniture,” Kivel said. When asked how many hundreds of dollars a bespoke getup like that costs, he sighed. “I wish it just cost us hundreds.”

But it’s the kind of attention to detail that’s made the 3-year-old Dart stand out in a niche that’s practically shorthand for middle-of-the-road music.

The two got the idea after collaborating on a record from David’s band Classixx, a neo-disco combo that performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2014. Kivel and David, each married and in their early ‘30s, had no trouble cajoling friends into playing their own weddings. But “all our friends were getting older and married, and we realized there were a lot of people who liked cool music but didn’t have that friend” who could capably spin a reception, Kivel said.

Dart DJ co-founder Jesse Kivel, left, speaks with colleagues while DJs Aaron Castle, center, and Dan Terndrup spin records during a gig at the Ace Hotel in Downtown LA.

(Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of our friends have good taste, but it’s all in the execution,” David added.

A wedding requires a different skill set than a headlining gig or a nightclub DJ set and has its own challenges and rewards. “We kind of approach it as a carpenter would,” David said. “You have to figure out how to get people to go crazy while still playing it cool.” That, Kivel added, is trickier than just playing hits. “You have to be attentive to the whole night, and not just the dancefloor portion.”

But the relatively stable and lucrative wedding business was a nice change of pace from the anxiety-wracked, economically perilous world of indie music.

“The industry is such a nice one,” Kivel said. “The outpouring from reps and planners was so encouraging. They kept saying, ‘What you’re doing has to be better than what we have.’”

Kivel and David take long conferences with the couple and their event planners before the ceremonies to help suss out their tastes and how clients’ favorite songs align with the arc of a long party. One recent client was a huge Ryan Adams fan, and they figured out how to mix Adams’ melancholy alt-country into quieter moments between the dancefloor material. The wedding format “lets us take some chances with ideas,” Kivel said, like dropping Elvis and doo-wop singles in at peak moments.

Though they’ve been careful to pitch Dart as a separate experience from their active creative lives (“It’s not like, ‘We’re broke, so Kisses and Classixx will play your wedding,’” Kivel said) their wedding-biz colleagues agree that their reputations as artists make this project unique.

“There can be a stigma about wedding DJs,” admits Robin Rabb, a wedding and event planner at Gather Events who has worked with Dart on several projects. She was impressed by how David and Kivel “love get to know their clients, and trade playlists with them so that when they get up they have a great arsenal to play with. The Dart guys always seem to be having the most fun of anyone there.”

That approach reflects their creative-class peers’ artisanal-everything approach, even when it comes to something as traditional and populist as getting hitched.

“We knew we wanted other options, after being at some many weddings where the DJ would just play ‘YMCA,’” said Madison Miller, who hired Dart to spin at her 2014 wedding at the Hotel Metropole on Santa Catalina Island. “They seemed super cool and so knowledgeable.

“They topped the night off with LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends,’ and it was such an unbelievable ending,” she said.

Back in the Dart office, the duo debated the go-to tracks that can win any crowd — Whitney Houston’s 1987 hit “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” was a consensus pick. The company has expanded to around seven DJs and assistants available for booking in L.A. and San Francisco, and Dart is working out the final kinks on a new revolving live-band setup stocked with USC music-school students who can take on bigger, more demanding gigs.

A cracking covers act isn’t exactly the kind of live band they’d expected to be assembling today (and each of their own bands are still touring and recording). But after a decade of hot lights and late nights in L.A. club music, they’ve come to appreciate the earnest atmosphere that comes with this line of work.

“If people want to mock it, bring it on,” Kivel said. “I’m so sick of people posturing as cool all the time. The reason people hire us is because they have a great time.”

august.brown@latimes.com