Sergeant Brings Latin Beat to Salt Lake City Published Feb. 28, 2006 By Staff Sgt. Lara Gale 419th Fighter Wing Public Affairs SALT LAKE CITY, Utah -- By 11 p.m. on Friday night, the upstairs dance floor at Club Vortex in Salt Lake City is packed. The music is the same style playing at every other club downtown, but the crowd here is dancing to a different beat. The lights start pulsing -- blue then green -- the beat picks up. Watching from the booth, DJ Panama waits for the moment to kick in a Latin rhythm. The floor goes wild. He smiles. This is why he stays in the music business. “DJ-ing is a feeling, a vibe with the crowd,” says Tech. Sgt. Roberto McFarlane of the 419th FW Communications Squadron. “It just comes really naturally for me.” When he was in basic training, the instructors called Sergeant McFarlane “Panama,” for his native country. The nickname stuck as he moved to his first duty station, which happened to be Hill AFB. When he was hired to DJ at the NCO Club here, it became DJ Panama – and the rest is history, he says with a laugh. Sergeant McFarlane’s DJ career actually started about ten years earlier in New York during a visit to America to see family in the Big Apple, where electronic music and videogames were just getting big. Sergeant McFarlane’s cousin took him to a party one night, and the DJ there showed him how to scratch disks on the turntable. “That’s what hooked me. I went home and spent all my free time playing with my dad’s turntable,” he says. McFarlane was a natural. He was already into music, he says. In band as a 5th grader, he picked up the clarinet -- which he promptly traded for a trumpet. “The clarinet was just so…high,” he laughs. He went on to play the trombone and the French horn. Though he hasn’t touched an instrument in years, he still has an ear for music. Styles and sounds have changed a lot over the 25 years he’s been mixing, so Sergeant McFarlane says he’s learned to be open-minded. “I think to be a successful DJ, you have to be,” he says even though he still has a preference for the Latin music of his home country. In addition to DJ-ing, Sergeant McFarlane has volunteered his skills to serve the Latin American community with music in other ways. He volunteered as a Latin radio show host on KRCL for eight years, playing the only Salsa and tropical music on the dial before Utah got a dedicated Latin FM station. At the same time, he was the entertainment coordinator for Utah’s Hispanic American Festival for four years. Today, he still has a lot of connection in the radio industry helps bring in Latin artists for concerts at major venues like the Utah Fairgrounds. These other angles of the music industry are piquing his interest, he says. “DJ-ing is starting to become a job now and I’m thinking seriously of retiring. It’s been almost 25 years, and I’m ready for new adventures.” Whatever he does, music will stay a part of his life, he says. It will never be more than a hobby, but life can always use a little Latin beat in the background.