Still spinning After vision loss, DJ Hunnicutt remains a local dance party legend By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 4:00 AM CST Monday, Dec. 23, 2024

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This article was published 23/12/2024 (308 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They say some have a face for radio.

One Winnipeg DJ jokes he landed that gig because of a different shortcoming.

“I was voted to be the DJ because of my voice,” says Tyler Sneesby, recalling his collaborations with rapper friends in the early ’90s.

“My voice sounded like a Muppet.”

That decision was clearly fateful: as DJ Hunnicutt, Sneesby is one of Winnipeg’s best-known and favourite live DJs.

His self-comparison to a Muppet is debatable. One thing is certain: Sneesby has the right hands for turntabling. They’ve spun records for some of Manitoba’s most memorable dance parties and hip-hop shows for more than 30 years.

Sneesby has shared stages — from Winnipeg and Brandon to New York City and Berlin — with vocalists including James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) and Biz Markie, and local music vets Pip Skid and Nestor Wynrush, his longtime friends.

Compared to those voices it’s easy to see why the DJ might be laid-back when it comes to the mic. But there’s little retiring otherwise about Sneesby, who at almost 50 years old continues to perform full time as a DJ in the face of a considerable obstacle.

Sneesby is legally blind.

“In the last two years, he lost 90 per cent of his vision,” reads the intro for DJ Interrupted, an AMI-produced documentary about Sneesby released in 2022.

“You know when you used to grab an armful of 45s and flip, flip, flip, flip, flip?” he says. “Looking at one record now takes me like 30 seconds … digging for records is not fun anymore.

“I’ve learned to live with the vision loss.”

Nowadays, most DJs use digital turntables, connected to music libraries with weeks’ worth of music, rather than actual record players. These are useful to Sneesby, though he worries the innovation has contributed somewhat to what he calls the “homogenization of music.”

In earlier years, says Sneesby, “There was an understanding that, ‘OK, I just can’t go up and request the new Britney Spears record or whatever because they’re not necessarily going to have it.’”

When listeners finally did get the mega hits, it was with a dose of mischief and originality.

“(We were) able to just make our own remix and then play it out that night.”

As when watching a skilled jazz band deconstruct and improvise over the showtunes of the day, audiences knew they were in good hands.

Sneesby’s love of analogue was honed as a somewhat lonely hip-hop fan in rural Manitoba in the early 1990s.

“Nobody was really into rap music in Brandon. We just were looked upon like a bunch of weirdos,” Sneesby says.

It wasn’t just that he and his friends were pushing skateboards and messing with dual cassette tapes in a town best known for its hockey and farm culture. This was also at a time before acts such as NWA and Tupac Shakur had elevated hip-hop into the pop stratosphere, meaning it was still a counterculture almost everywhere in Canada.

“We would special order our tapes from a store called Country Music Centre in downtown Brandon. Pip (Skid, a.k.a. Pat Skene) and I stayed in Brandon until we couldn’t stand it anymore and eventually moved to Winnipeg,” he says.

But the move happened after Sneesby helped launch — with Skene and founder Rod Bailey (a.k.a mcenroe) — the Peanuts & Corn label.

As author Nigel Webber writes in Gritty City: An Oral History of Winnipeg Hip-Hop Music: 1980-2005: “Brandon can lay claim to being the (incubator) for three people who would shake up the Winnipeg hip-hop scene for decades to come.”

He’s referring to this trio, who also performed together as Farm Fresh. (Among other local hip-hop acts Webber’s history covers are two-time Grammy-nominee Fresh I.E., the young pre-politics Wab Kinew and Mood Ruff, whose Odario Williams is heard across the country almost every weeknight on the CBC Radio 2 program Afterdark.)

Sneesby worked not just as a musician, but as kind of impresario in Winnipeg.

As far as Midwestern and Prairie cities go, Winnipeg’s dance scene is dwarfed by certain hubs below the border. But if Winnipeg in the aughts had anything approximating Detroit’s techno raves and Chicago’s house parties, it was events such as Grippin Grain and Funk Boat, a tipsy shindig on the Paddlewheel Queen, that ran for years.

Sneesby DJ’d those parties with various collaborators including DJ Co-op (Tim Hoover) and DJ Mama Cutsworth (Sarah Michaelson, to whom he’s now married).

As a musician he continued to work with Farm Fresh and the soul-funk act the Hummers, scratching records and integrating samples into their live shows.

One of the latter’s final performances was in the late aughts at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival, where Sneesby eventually became marketing and promotions manager. During his tenure, the festival attracted such performers as the Roots, Killer Mike, Al Green, John Legend and BadBadNotGood.

Sneesby comes by his curatorial knack honestly. He cut his teeth musically in an era of hip hop where samples reigned supreme, which sent producers and DJs on constant “crate-digging” quests to record stores to rifle through decades of soul, funk and jazz music.

Sneesby would continue to exercise his curatorial side as a founding owner and general manager of the Good Will Social Club, a Portage Avenue music venue that closed in late 2023.

It was during his time as the Good Will’s GM that Sneesby started losing vision in his left eye. An MRI revealed he had lesions on his brain and spinal cord, consequences of multiple sclerosis, with which he was subsequently diagnosed.

By the summer of 2019, he had lost vision in the other eye too.

“I felt pretty hopeless,” he says in DJ Interrupted.

“And then I ultimately decided to step down (from the Good Will).”

DJing first seemed impossible to Sneesby, who says he went through an identity crisis as the reality of his situation set in.

“I felt like I was just going to sit and live off the paltry sum that the government gives you for disability on a month-to-month basis.”

While the pandemic hit live venues with a special force, for Sneesby it was also a period of reflection and rehabilitation.

“It gave me the time I needed to learn how to be blind,” says the self-described urban hiker, who continued his annual walks from one side of the city to another after his diagnosis.

Sneesby started to learn the piano and involved himself in accessibility advocacy, finding a close ally in friend Wynrush, who uses a wheelchair. (Earlier this month he appeared in the holiday Hansel and Gretel produced by Sick and Twisted, the local company dedicated to improving the representation of deaf and disabled people in theatre.)

Then one day, after about a year hiatus, he opened his music software again, determined to relearn music production.

“I zoom in to an almost comical amount and put my face about two or three inches from the screen,” he says.

It’s also with this system that Sneesby now DJs. Another solution is a DJ controller, a compact device that’s much smaller than the turntables he formerly used, making them easier to manage and transport.

“Once I get the song loaded up I’m still the best,” he says with a laugh.

Winnipeggers can see Sneesby in action spinning records on Dec. 30 at 8 p.m. at his 50th Birthday Party, a free public event at La Maison des Artistes, 219 Provencher Blvd.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca