His bronzed, buff, conventional Caucasian classmates voted him “Most Unpredictable.” He knew about four people who were even remotely like him, and even among them he felt like an outcast. By his senior year at Newport Harbor High School in 1995, he had morphed, almost magically, into a teetotaling vegetarian skateboarder with bleached Raggedy Andy hair and a burgeoning music collection. The boy listened, and listened some more, bought a turntable, and began obsessively collecting records. The bands were outsiders, with exotic names like Minor Threat and Gorilla Biscuits.
The music was like nothing the boy had ever heard. One day, a kid in his class gave him a mix tape. “I wanted to be like every other kid,” he would later remember, “but I could never fit in.” Another time, a kid at the local pizza place conned him into dropping acid-an experience so terrifying that he didn’t touch another inebriant for eight years.
Classmates who visited remember an exotic place where “the shoes came off when you walked in” and “there was always rice cooking.” Once, when he was in grade school, his best friend was co-opted by the kid brother of a skinhead and the two hid behind a bush and threw rocks at him, shouting racial epithets as he rode past on his bicycle. The boy’s house was a far cry from lavish he lived with his mom, his grandfather and his two much-older siblings in a bluff-top development of suburban tract houses. His father, the founder of the Benihana restaurant chain, was on the other side of the country, a faraway rich man whom the boy saw on vacations. His mother, an immigrant, spoke Japanese at home. His parents had been divorced since he was a baby. indie rock scene- before his Hollywood record label, before his celebrity as a DJ, before his clothing line and his corporate sponsors-before all that, there was a 13-year-old boy in Newport Beach.
Before Steve Aoki became the star of the L.A.
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