photo by Erin Landry
It was, in many ways, a typical Rock Dee event. The setting was The Highbury bar in Bay View, there was the usual mix of music, drinks and dancing until late into the night, and Rock, wearing a white, button-up dress shirt, was the man of the evening, spinning the music and keeping the beat going. What made the event unusual was that it came on July 26, the eve of his birthday. For many years, almost since Roderick Schaeffer adopted the stage name Rock Dee, the entertainer had avoided any celebration of the day he was born.
The significance of this only began to dawn on friends and relatives five days later, after Schaeffer went home, sat on the bed, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It was 1:30 in the afternoon of Aug. 1. He was 40 years old.
News of his gruesome death spread quickly. Within 24 hours, musicians and music lovers in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, all cities where Rock Dee had left his mark, were buzzing – and wondering – about the news. Anyone who’d gone to a club in the last 15 years had probably danced to the musical mixes of DJ Rock Dee and had encountered a charismatic personality who seemed to love every minute of it.
Dee was a RadioMilwaukee deejay. He had been involved with bands like Gumbo and helped in the early formation of Arrested Development. He had helped create and oversaw the DJ stage at Summerfest. He had helped build a hip-hop clothing line and a quarterly music magazine, both based in New York. His circle of friends was large, their impact even larger: Some went on to become radio DJs, like Fresh G, while others became nationally known musicians, like Speech from Arrested Development. They were hugely influential in Milwaukee’s rap and hip-hop scene, and standing at the center was Roderick Schaeffer.
Dee had a second wife, Marylisa, as well as their 2-year-old daughter, Victoria, and three children from a previous marriage. He seemed beloved by many, had performed thousands of times at clubs over the years and always seemed to have a friendly word for people he encountered. So why throw all that away?
Somehow, a man who’d lived nearly his entire life in the spotlight had managed to keep his innermost feelings a secret. From his early childhood, Schaeffer had surrounded himself with people. He was a people person, his magnetic aura pulling people in toward the personality known as Rock Dee. But few ever got close enough to know the man behind the stage name.
Roderick David John Schaeffer was born July 27, 1968, the first child of Robert and Rebecca Schaeffer, who had married two years earlier. It was a mixed-race marriage – Robert is white and Rebecca is African-American – and in the 1960s, that was a challenging proposition. But their love persevered. When Roderick was 9 years old, the family bought their first home in the 4800 block of North 67th Street. Today, the couple still lives there, in a home that would become a central hub for Milwaukee’s hip-hop scene as Roderick became a teenager.
Religion was important to Roderick’s parents. “We went to church and got him baptized,” his father explains. “We sent him to a Lutheran school.” He attended Milwaukee Lutheran High School from 1982 to 1986.
“He had a good Christian upbringing,” his mother adds. “He was an acolyte, an altar boy.”
The creative spark that would shape Roderick Schaeffer into Rock Dee began in a restaurant. Schaeffer’s younger sister, Selena, recalls the exact moment. “We went to a party at China Kingdom and he was watching the DJs performing there – and it just clicked for him.”
Schaeffer, then 15, began bugging his parents for his own set of turntables, and they soon agreed. “He’d play his music so loud,” his mother recalls, “and I’d get on him. He’d yell back at me, ‘But, Mom, I like my music loud!’ ”
So the Schaeffers did what most parents do. “We moved him into the basement,” Rebecca says.
It would soon become a sort of mad scientist’s laboratory for all of Roderick’s experiments in sound. And a place where musicians gathered. “All of those hip-hop guys were hanging out down there,” Rebecca remembers. “Fresh G, Dr. B, Reg Peeps … all used to hang out in our basement.”
All three went on to some level of fame in the local hip-hop scene. Even more notable was Todd Thomas. Today known as Speech from the band Arrested Development, he fondly remembers his early basement-dwelling days with Schaeffer, who had already adopted the name Rock Dee.
“Some of my most developmental years,” Thomas recalls. “He impressed me as a wholehearted lover of hip-hop and the art of deejaying, so I asked him to be in my first group: Disciples of a Lyrical Rebellion. That group consisted of me, Headliner and Rock Dee, and was basically a precursor to Arrested Development.”
Rock worked with the Disciples group for nearly two years until Thomas moved to attend the Art Institute of Atlanta. There, Thomas created Arrested Development, which had a national hit album with its debut record 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of…
Dee had missed out on that success, and soon set his sights on an entirely different kind of life.
He met his first wife, Deanna, in high school. They were classic high-school sweethearts. “They got married right out of high school,” his mother remembers.
Rock asked for his parents’ blessing, but only after the couple got married. They exchanged vows on Nov. 12, 1986, just one month before Rock was to start basic training for the U.S. Marines. He was 18.
“They eloped without even telling us,” Rebecca says. “I told them they were too young, they should wait until after he got back from basic training, but they had already done it.”
At basic training at Camp Pendleton in California, Rock suffered a severe injury. During a climbing exercise on its infamous training hill, a soldier climbing above him fell backwards on Schaeffer. Schaeffer fell and landed on top of a boulder, severely injuring his back. He suffered permanent damage to it, and the Marines soon discharged him.
“That was crushing for him,” says Marylisa. “He had always wanted to be a Marine. He did everything possible to try and go back, but medically, they couldn’t let him. But he never gave up, up until a year ago when he tried joining the Coast Guard without even telling me. He just couldn’t do it with his chronic back pain.”
What may have helped fuel his desire to re-enter the service was what happened to his brother Ronald. Just three years younger, Ronald grew up with Roderick and hung out with the same kids. Ronald would follow his brother into the service, joining the Navy in 1990, just a few months out of high school. He was sent to fight in the Gulf War, where he was killed at the age of 20.
“They were very close,” says his mother. “It was completely devastating for Rock. He couldn’t focus on anything.”
By then, Schaeffer had created a new, nonmilitary life. He had settled in with Deanna and they had three children: Ricky, John and daughter Secelie. He was building a reputation as a deejay, and now everyone knew him as Rock Dee. But he was young, restless, and still bothered by the loss of his brother. Three years after his brother died, Rock separated from his wife of eight years, and began to see his children less and less.
“I was probably 12 or 13 when I stopped seeing him,” remembers Secelie.
Years later, Rock would try to make amends with his children. But for Secelie, it was too late.
“I had so much anger and resentment because he didn’t want to be there,” Secelie recalls. “So when he started making an effort three or four years ago, I blew him off. I regret it now, but I was an adolescent and still held that resentment. I was like, ‘You went and did your thing, and now it’s time for me to do my thing.’ ”
It was shortly after his brother’s death that Rock began avoiding holidays and family functions, including his own birthday. It became a habit right up until five days before he killed himself.
“He’d always say, ‘Mom, I just don’t like birthdays; I can’t celebrate them,’ ” his mother recalls. “He didn’t want anything to do with them; didn’t want to go out to dinner, no cake, nothing. I’d just give him a card for his birthday and that was it.”
A great deejay has to be a great musician, though with a different kind of instrument – the turntable. When Rock Dee got his start in the late 1980s, he would work with two turntables and a mixer, going back and forth between two vinyl albums, creating a seamless segue between two songs, and scratching the vinyl to add beats and texture. Eventually, Dee and other DJs made the switch to digital, using music files stored on their computers and mixing and matching the sounds digitally.
It’s a craft that can become obsessive. DJs dig through crates of vinyl or thousands of digital files in search of that one beat to fill the hole in a musical puzzle they seek to create. And few did it better than Rock Dee. He was a born performer. He would scratch records with every body part he had, from the tips of his fingers to his nose to even his tongue. He put on one hell of a show.
If there was a DJ night at a local bar or club, chances are Rock played it. Beginning in the late 1980s, he began performing at now-defunct clubs like Emerald City, Matisse and Maryland’s. He performed at Good Life, Live, Decibel, Highbury, Ladybug Club and Mantra Lounge. He played all over town, but concentrated heavily on Milwaukee’s East Side.
But by the mid-1990s, Rock was dissatisfied. After seeing so many of his friends hit it big, Rock decided to take the leap himself and headed for New York.
“It was easy to be the big fish in a pond like Milwaukee,” says a friend. “But he wanted a bigger pond.”
The water was promising for a while. Along with his longtime friend and fellow Milwaukee native Tyrone Christopher, Rock helped create both a hip-hop clothing line called True Baller and a quarterly print magazine called Mob Candy. True Baller brought the insight and stylistic sensibilities of a Midwestern hip-hop kid to the East Coast. Mob Candy focused on the gangster lifestyle often celebrated by rap music – expensive suits, stiff drinks and imported cigars.
Both True Baller and Mob Candy are still going strong today, a testament to Dee’s creative vision. But the restless rocker came back to the Midwest. Some believe he was still searching for greener pastures, others think that he regretted his children were growing up without their father.
First he tried life in Chicago. He spent two years there, but would come back to his hometown regularly to play gigs at the old clubs that had made him a legend in local music. In 2000, while playing a gig at Milwaukee’s Mantra Lounge, Rock met Marylisa Ayala.
Then just 22, Marylisa had heard about the legendary Rock Dee, who was 10 years her senior, but had never seen him deejay. “I was sneaking into clubs since I was 16,” she explains, “clubs like Emerald City and Maryland’s. But for some reason, I had always just missed him.”
Rock had a way of connecting individually to people on the dance floor – particularly the ladies. “He would search you out on the dance floor and point at you and be like, ‘This song is for you,’ ” Marylisa remembers.
Most people only saw Rock’s brilliant façade, the face he put on as DJ and entertainer. But he showed another side of himself to Marylisa.
“We almost didn’t talk for the first six months,” she explains. “He would come over after a club and just lay in my lap. He’d say, ‘I just need to fall asleep and feel safe.’ We did that for so long; we’d talk without talking. That was the most beautiful thing.”
In 2001, after a yearlong, long-distance engagement between Rock in Chicago and Marylisa in Milwaukee, the couple got married. Soon, Rock did what he had been resisting for years – move back to his hometown.
He had long been a Jack Daniel’s drinker, sometimes even working a bottle of Jack into his deejaying contracts. But he stopped drinking, made a conscious effort to take care of his body and became a Catholic, converting to Marylisa’s religion. He also tried to reconnect with his children. He started attending family get-togethers and holiday celebrations. He wanted to “do it right this time,” he told friends.
And after Rock and Marylisa had their daughter Victoria, Rock’s father noticed the change in his son.
“He tried to be more of a father to Victoria,” he explains. “With Deanna, he didn’t spend much time with the kids. But I saw more and more affection for Victoria from him and, in my mind, he was probably trying to make up for what he had lost.”
His bid to become a stable family man got a boost when he was hired as a deejay at the new FM station, 88Nine RadioMilwaukee. The station was looking for someone who could attract a larger audience, someone who was a people person and a performer wrapped into one talented package. Rock already had a built-in audience of people he could convert from listeners into fans.
In January 2008, Rock was assigned RadioMilwaukee’s morning drive show from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., as well as a Saturday show from 8 a.m. to noon, giving him 24 hours of air time a week.
Compared to the inconsistent work and late hours of club work, the radio gig meant a steady check and daytime hours for Rock. It seemed the perfect job, but he soon began to feel restless, friends say. His thoughts of being a big fish in a little pond returned. And he missed the interaction with people at the clubs.
The DJ booth at RadioMilwaukee is located deep within the gray, bureaucratic walls of the Milwaukee Public Schools administration building at 5225 W. Vliet St. Most of the time Rock was there alone, with no people to interact with and no windows that looked out at the world. Dee felt stifled in the sound booth, and would call people just to have someone to talk to, Marylisa says.
He was a skilled DJ. He would use people’s names over the air and talk about phone conversations he had just had with them. This made his listeners feel special, like he was tailoring the show to them, just as he had done at the clubs when he would point to someone dancing and play a song just for them.
But the loneliness of radio work began to get to Dee. Seeking more social interaction, he began playing live gigs. Some nights, he was barely finished with the club work when it was time to drive to the radio station for his 5 a.m. start. He would often sleep at the station, and was drinking lots of caffeinated beverages to keep going. The nonstop lifestyle began to take its toll.
Some 20 years of performing had completely transformed Roderick Schaeffer into Rock Dee. He had all checks made out to either “Rock Dee” or one of two business names he had incorporated: Just Rockin’ Music or 12/10 Entertainment. He lived almost every moment as “Rock Dee,” striving for and thriving on public attention. He guarded his private life even from friends, they say, always opting for small talk and a quick joke over anything that might have offered a clue to darker currents within him.
And then there were the women. He was a ladies man; a smooth-talker skilled at charming members of the opposite sex. “There were numerous women in and out of his life whom he loved,” says a good friend of Rock’s. Besides the three children by his first wife and the daughter with Marylisa, Rock had fathered a child out of wedlock with another woman.
About two years before his death, Rock got involved with an educator at a local college, and what began as a sexual affair eventually became a more complex relationship of love and genuine emotion.
In early July, Marylisa had taken their daughter to Puerto Rico to visit family. Rock did not accompany her. According to friends, she had learned of Rock’s infidelity and was using the trip as a way for the couple to have some space.
The night before his suicide, with his wife and daughter out of town, a second birthday party was thrown for Rock, this time on an Edelweiss boat tour of Lake Michigan. In attendance were many of his best friends, including the woman for whom he’d fallen so hard.
It was another late night for Dee. By 5 o’clock the next morning, he was broadcasting for RadioMilwaukee. He took calls, played requests and spoke with listeners and friends over the phone. At the end of his show, around 9 a.m., he closed with three final words to his listeners: “I love you.”
The details of what happened during the next four and a half hours are sketchy, but what is known is that he put on music when he got home, soft love ballads that were far from the rap and hip-hop genre that had turned Roderick Schaeffer into Rock Dee. And then, he picked up the phone and made one final call. Not to his wife and daughter, whom he was supposed to fly out and reunite with just days later, but to the college instructor that had so attracted him. And with her still on the other end of the phone, Rock Dee put a gun to his head and fired.
The woman, say friends of Rock, called a mutual acquaintance and asked her to check on Rock. She arrived to find Dee dead, killed by a single gunshot wound to the right front side of his head.
Rock’s son Ricky would eventually write a grisly MySpace item about cleaning up the pool of blood and the blood-stained mattress where his father ended his life. “It gives me nightmares and I’m sure it will for the rest of my life,” he wrote.
Two weeks after his death, another party was held for Rock Dee, a daylong wake of sorts. The party was at the Wherehouse, the near South Side club in the old industrial district along the inner harbor, just behind the bar called Hot Water. The event featured nearly two dozen live acts, many of whom had worked alongside Rock for years.
Family, friends and fans mingled and reminisced while DJs spun and bands played. Music poured out of the building and echoed over Lake Michigan. The suicide still seemed shocking, inexplicable. “His life wasn’t scandalous or slanderous,” says Rock’s longtime friend and collaborator Ed Macon. So how could he die such a lurid death?
The autopsy by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner offered no clues. There was no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system, save for caffeine, the drug he more than likely guzzled to get through his morning shift just hours earlier.
The news coverage said little. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to Vital Source to OnMilwaukee.com, the story was the same: a well-loved DJ known for his warmth and humanity had died. He was survived by a widow and five children and his parents, who now had to bury their second and last son.
At the Wherehouse party, the walls were lined with photos. Some showed a fresh-faced Roderick Schaeffer decked out in his early garb as an entertainer. Others showed a grown-up Rock Dee posing behind his instrument of choice: the turntable wheels of steel. And finally, amid literally hundreds of photos were those taken the night of his 40th birthday party at The Highbury: pictures of Rock performing, being embraced by friends and hugging people he had known for decades.
But underneath all the apparent joy of these photos was something haunting: a blankness in his eyes; a sense of detachment that couldn’t be seen in all the other photos. The Rock Dee of the birthday party photos didn’t appear to be the same man whose well-known catchphrase around town was “No stress, God bless.”
Perhaps all the disappointments of life – his failure in the army, his brother’s death, his unsuccessful first marriage, his failure to gain the stardom some of his boyhood friends had achieved – had finally taken their toll. Perhaps the months of doing double shifts and fueling himself on coffee had made him lose perspective. Perhaps he had been hurt by his last lover and this helped push him over the edge.
No one among his friends and family could say for sure. As Macon puts it, “Rock would do whatever he was going to do at that moment. It’s just who the man was.”
The Wherehouse event was one of several parties at clubs done in Rock Dee’s memory. But his funeral was a very private affair, for family members only. Roderick Schaeffer was buried on Saturday, Aug. 9, the same day he was supposed to have flown to Puerto Rico to be reunited with his wife and daughter.
Justin Shady is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer who has written comics, graphic novels and a children’s book. Reach him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
