A D.J. Recovers From a Nearly Fatal Accident on Tour




Four months ago Jonathan Toubin woke up in a hospital bed barely alive. Mr. Toubin, a 40-year-old D.J. and rising figure in the Brooklyn music scene, had been lying in bed in a hotel room in Portland, Ore., resting up for a show, when a taxi crashed through the wall and pinned him under its wheels.


“It’s a random, absurd thing that shouldn’t happen but happened,” he said.


His chest was crushed, his skull cracked, his clavicles and shoulder blades shattered; he nearly bled to death before a police officer and hotel workers managed to lift the car off him.


He underwent a week of surgeries and nearly died from lung problems before he emerged from a drug-induced haze. Then his doctors said it could take six months of rehabilitation before he could return to work. He lost hearing in both ears and his right hand was crippled with scar tissue.


But Mr. Toubin (pronounced TOW-bin) has beaten the odds. On April 22 he returned to his small apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and he plans a homecoming performance on Sunday at the Brooklyn Bowl.


“The nurse that discharged me said I was a miracle of modern science,” Mr. Toubin said as he sat next to a turntable in his apartment, with hundreds of 45s stacked around him. “I hate not working. That’s been killing me.”


The recovery has been a hard slog. He had to learn to walk again. Recovering movement in his hands took three months of squeezing Silly Putty and stretching the scarred tendons with painful exercises. He wears hearing aids in both ears, and has lost most of the hearing in the left one. He has also had to work through psychological scars, seeing a counselor to deal with claustrophobia, insomnia and panic.


His memory was affected as well. He has trouble recalling the nuances of his records. “These are tools,” he said, gesturing at boxes and boxes of old R&B singles. “You have to have an immediate memory of what they do.”


Mr. Toubin specializes in organizing dance parties with obscure pop music from the 1950s and ’60s: rockabilly, R&B, blues, rock ’n’ roll. He has built a lucrative business with his weekly New York Night Train and Soul Clap and Dance Off parties at Brooklyn clubs, among other regular events he hosts around town. “No one really brings in the young rock ’n’ roll kids the way he does,” said Matt Weingarden, a longtime soul D.J. on WFMU in Jersey City (91.1 FM).


The work depends on old-fashioned skills. Mr. Toubin unearths little-known music from the past — all on 45 r.p.m. discs — mixing the sound on the fly and matching beats with two turntables in the old-school way. It takes deft hands and keen ears. “I am someone who’s trying every day to convince people to listen to musicians they have never heard,” he said. “I have to present in a seamless fashion.”


Until the accident, things had been going well. He does more than 200 shows a year on the North American nightclub circuit and had a monthlong tour lined up in Europe. In March he was also supposed to be given a showcase for his Soul Clap party at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., where he went to college.


The accident prompted an outpouring from musicians and D.J.’s who are fans of his work. Benefits were held not only in New York, but also in Austin, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans. In Brooklyn the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played a benefit in his honor.


Mr. Toubin said the $100,000 these benefits raised has kept him afloat financially. Not only has he lost work, but he had no health insurance and racked up more than $650,000 in hospital bills in Portland. “It’s pretty wild all these people did that for me,” he said.


He says he has no memory of the taxi coming through the wall. He had arrived in Portland the night before, on Dec. 7. Exhausted from touring, he had booked a ground-floor room at the Jupiter Hotel to take a rare night off and sleep. At 11 the next morning he was still in bed when a Radio Cab taxi driver, Terry Uding, 52, lost control of her car in the parking lot, accelerated inexplicably and slammed through the windowed wall next to his bed.


When Mr. Toubin arrived at Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, his lungs were crushed, 12 ribs were broken, his pelvis was smashed, one scapula was pulverized, his carotid artery was slashed, and his spleen and liver were damaged. The tendons in his right arm and hand had been severed. Heavily drugged and breathing on a respirator, he underwent five surgeries in the first week, and the second week he narrowly survived a bout with pneumonia, friends said.