Pulse: A&E: DJ Touch Tone

The first time Olney’s Anthony Stevenson took a needle from a turntable and scratched it against a record, he was a 13-year-old radio buff. The record was Rick James’s Street Songs; it belonged to his mother, and when he was done, it was totally ruined.

“I got my ass whupped for that,” he says. But a career was born. Since then, Stevenson, now known as DJ Touch Tone, has learned to scratch properly, as well as mix songs and edit sound bites for his popular Saturday night hip-hop party at Pinnacle nightclub and his show on 100.3 The Beat. All of which, considering he’s been blind since birth, is pretty extraordinary, although “The World’s Number One Blind DJ”—as The Beat has dubbed him—wouldn’t have you think so.

“I’ve always known this is what I wanted to do,” says Stevenson, who’s been featured in The Source and on BET, “and so I found a way to do it.” Which was definitely worth losing a Rick James record for.