Pebo Rodriguez Frank Del Rio Marty Guzman (Cirkis)
The Legendary PEGASUS (1979 - present) - Part 1
The Cerda Family has gathered to share this true story with you. It is a bio and documentary of what started out as a family hobby and later evolved into one of LA’s Best Mobile DJ’s in the late 70’s and 80’s. The success of this venture led to the best years in Mobile DJ History. It is our hope that you relive, reminisce and cherish some of the best parties and friendships ever created during that era!!
This adventure began when Vinyl records on turntables was the only way that DJ’s performed. This produced the best sounding, high quality/clarity of music! At that time, there were no CDR writers, mp3 players or Ipods. These gadgets hadn’t even been invented. Of course there were no websites, emails or message boards to spread the word to the thousands of happy party goers….The passing and receiving of well designed flyers or by word of mouth, a telephone call, and the posting of billboards on street posts or paying for radio spot advertisement, were the only means of promoting parties.
"HOLD ON TIGHT, THIS IS WHERE WE SPREAD OUR WINGS AND FLY...."
Bobby - aka "The Founder"
Since the beginning, Bobby’s major interest was collecting domestic and imported vinyl records. Bobby was a member of several record pools and would travel to various record stores throughout Los Angeles. He would order imports from New York City, Canada and other foreign countries. Bobby had accumulated an extremely large record collection, which was sorted and stored in massive amount of crates. He is currently adding to this collection by purchasing rare vinyl through Ebay and other great websites.
To start, we designed and fabricated 4 prototype speakers loaded with ann internal crossover of Altec Lansing Horn and speaker. It was pretty basic and worked fine. We also invested in a very large array of Disco Lights. A GREAT Lightshow consisting of our base Four Border strip and quite a few spinners, beacons, oscillators, strobe lights, etc. etc.
Bobby, who began this hobby, was initially the main DJ for PEGASUS. Here is a rare Photo of Bobby in action.
The turntables were direct drive and of course not even comparable to the now popular Technics turntables. Please note the original PEGASUS sign, which was designed on an Computer CAD system. This very same sign was later reshaped and used on the DJ Booth for our many future thriving events.
"HOUSTON, we have a problem!" Our powerful amps were continually overloaded and frazzled the Altec woofers, which just frustrated us. That’s when Bobby decided to go BIG!.
In 1980, we began a quest for presenting one of the largest Mobile
Lights and Sound systems in the Los Angeles vicinity.
Bobby invested
in this hobby by purchasing a huge sound system with line of various Cerwin
Vega speakers varying from the deep B-48, L-36, B-36, to the mid B-119 and
up to the High end Altec horns with Cerwin Vega drivers and lacedd with C.V.
piezo. tweeters.
GGabriel at the time was very young. He was 16 years young and had an unbelievable talent and mastered a Club style mixing of beats, blending and arrangement of music consisting of Disco/High Energy Disco, New Wave and funk. From this point on, we all agreed that Gabriel would be the only DJ to spin and perform for the crowd pleasing mighty PEGASUS Mobile DJ. He was very selective on the music he played. Gabriel too became an avid vinyl collector with a quest to find the latest and greatest danceable crowd pleasing music. Gabriel and his good friend Rene (DJ La Vin Rose) would travel and around the LA and Hollywood area shopping at record stores such as Ron’s Record, Prime cuts, Tower records, Roadhouse, Music Plus! Many Mobile Dj's in that area struggled with the club style mixing. At that time, Gabriel became famous for his unique style of mixing.
TThe now widely used Truss stands were either too expensive or not available at that time to prop our four strip lights and lightshow. So we initially devised a Galvanized Pipe rack in order to display our large Light Show. We later upgraded to Truss stands setup.
PEGASUS was at the top of list with quite a few promoters that
existed. A few had pretty
unique names such as Cheri Amor Production, Seville Productions, Cowboys
Production, Ramon Prod, Tommy Arenas, Party Sweets, Party Happy People
(PHP), Rock of the 80’s (Bugsy), United Dj’s Association, Le Vissio all the
way to up through Orange County and of course there were many many other
popular Productions.
We have huge collection of colorful flyers that were very well
designed. These flyers were strategically passed out from the different
Productions. Productions
commonly matched PEGASUS with many other Popular Dj’s….
In the early 80’s, PEGASUS was matched up with other DJs with their
systems. DJ’s such as Audio
Climax, Vinde Champagne, Brittania, Climax, Ooh La La, Theo Vaness,
La Vin Rose,
Galaxy, Alpha Surveyor, Face 2 Face, Paradise, Chaz, Hot Shot Disco, Manage
a’
Trois, Butt to Butt are some Djs that we encountered in that era.
In the mid 80’s other Dj’s emerged. We had the pleasure to play on
several occasions with Rio De Jenaro, Ultimate Crave, Elektra, Infinity,
Magnum, Risque to name a few….
One particular event that stands out is when
(Ramon) Production was the first to place Pegasus and Audio Climax together
at the Bank of America Hall.
Pegasus, with its Classic Disco and Audio Climax, with their classic New
wave sounds. It was a clash of the titans; everybody who was somebody was at
this event. The Pegasus Dancers had performed on stage and there were well
over 800
partygoers allowed in. Some of
the desperate followers had crashed thru the back glass doors causing major
damages to the hall. It was a
party to remember!