Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (51 page)

Read Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Online

Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
12.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
As Gatien’s right-hand man, Lord Michael became a major clubland power broker. ‘When he met Timothy Leary in the Limelight, he really just flipped the script, he really wanted to be, like,
kingpin
,’ says Bones. In a 1997
Village Voice
exposé of Lord Michael headlined ‘The King of Ecstasy’, Frankie described his erstwhile buddy as ‘the Al Capone of raves’. Bones also alleges that The Limelight tipped off fire marshals about a Storm Rave on 18 July 1992, because ‘we were hurting the business in [Gatien’s] club . . . The marshal came with six fire trucks . . . Conveniently, as everybody’s leaving the party, there’s people handing out flyers and saying “now come down the Limelight!” ’
By the end of July 1992, Storm Rave had an ally in the struggle against the Limelight’s commercialized version of hardcore: NASA. Located at Shelter, a club in deepest downtown Manhattan, NASA – short for Nocturnal Audio And Sensory Awakening – was the brainchild of Scotto and DB. Scotto was an in-demand lighting-director who had toured with Deee-Lite. London-born DB had moved to New York in 1989, where he DJ-ed and ran a peripatetic outlaw party called Deep with a proto-rave vibe, plus smaller events like Orange which catered to English expats with a mix of house and Madchester style indie-dance.
Kicking off at the end of July 1992, NASA was full-blown rave. The music was a different version of hardcore than either Storm or Future Shock offered – NASA’s DJs favoured the breakbeat-and-piano driven tunes that were peaking in England that summer. ‘The first six weeks, we lost money every week,’ says DB. ‘But I knew in my guts that if we stuck with it, the thing was going to pop. After six weeks, there was a line around the block, and these kids were not jaded, they didn’t want to get in for free like typical Manhattan clubbers. To this day, I’ve never seen dance energy like it in New York.’
DB and his fellow DJs like Soulslinger and Jason Jinx were pushing the proto-jungle tunes from UK labels like Reinforced, Formation and Moving Shadow. The first time I went to NASA, I was thrilled to hear tunes I recognized from the London pirate stations. But by this point, the winter of 1992, the crowd’s vibe was lagging behind the music’s madness. The peak ‘only lasted three or four months,’ admits DB, ‘it quickly became way too young, way too druggy, way too cliquey-fashion-bullshit.’ Unlike the dressed-down, jeans-and-trainers Storm crowd, the NASA kids were inventing the look that became the dominant US rave style. ‘It was the fusion of hip-hop culture into rave,’ says DB. ‘Super baggy trousers halfway down their arses, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo – preppy gear that became hip-hop clothing and then entered rave. But back in 1992, it wasn’t so label oriented – lots of backpacks, lollipops, flowers in the hair, smiley faces. Very kiddy-innocent-looking – nineteen-year-olds trying to look like they were five-year-olds.’
‘NASA was where that whole style of East Coast rave dancing was invented,’ says Scotto. ‘That dance where there’s a little snakey thing going, and little bunny hop steps – that was created at NASA by this guy Philly Dave. He was an Ecstasy dealer, he wore these big white gloves, and he would come up from Philadelphia every week. One night he was fucked up and mesmerized by his own gloves, he started these moves, and that’s how it started. The kids worshipped him, he was an icon. Unfortunately, he OD-ed.’
Despite being portrayed in the Gen X-sploitation movie
Kids
as a den of debauchery (chemical
and
sexual), NASA’s atmosphere was initially rather fresh-faced and idealistic, thanks to the collective MDMA honeymoon. ‘You could hear it in the conversations,’ grins DB. ‘We were going to print a T-shirt with “I really love you” on the front, and then on the back, “It’s not the drugs talking”.’ The same was equally true of the Storm milieu. Heather Hart, then only eighteen, was putting out the fanzine
Under One Sky
, which rapidly progressed from purely musical coverage to ‘a very spiritual angle’, incorporating poetry, art and letter pages where kids would testify to life-changing experiences on the scene. Four years after England’s 1988 rave-olution, New York was experiencing its own Second Summer of Love. The Storm-NASA axis was bolstered by the arrival of Caffeine, a rave-club in Deer Park, Long Island, where party-hard kids from NASA and Storm would end up on Sundays. Here – according to a condescending report in
The New York Times
– the universal refrain on every other teenager’s lips was: ‘It’s just like the Sixties.’
For Dennis The Menace, the pinnacle came at a Storm rave in a trucking depot. ‘At the end of the party, we were winding down, the sun was out, everyone was feeling pure and alive, in that communal unity feeling. Then someone in the middle of the floor started holding hands and putting their hands up in a circle. Kids were jumping from the back to put their hands up to touch the centre point where all the hands interlocked. People had tears in their eyes. We were just looking at each other, so happy, so open to everything. At the peak of all of it, with everyone trying to let go as much as they could, the belt drive on the turntable bust. Everyone stopped and looked at Frankie, and he kept trying to keep the record spinning with his finger at the right beats-per-minute – just to continue what everyone was feeling.’ Although MDMA catalysed that communion, Dennis insists that ‘The reason these kids were going out wasn’t the ecstasy in the pill, but the feeling you got when everyone was together. Group energy, where one person triggers the next person who triggers the next person . . . You could feel it vibrating between everyone. You can’t put that in a pill. There’s kids I know that were totally straight, who never did drugs, and who were there dancing as hard as anyone ’cos they could feed off that energy.’
Live Fast, Dream Hard; San Francisco’s Cyberdelic Visions
 
If New York’s rave scene can be traced back to Frankie Bones’s experiences in England during the summer of 1989, the West Coast’s scene was directly catalysed, in large part, by British expatriates. In San Francisco, a remarkable number of the prime movers were from the UK: Mark Heley, the guru behind the Toon Town raves; most of the Wicked collective; Irish promoters Malachy O’Brien and Martin O’Brien (no relation); Jonah Sharp, founder of the Reflective label and music-maker as Space Time Continuum (named after his pioneering London ambient parties, Space Time); clothes designer Nick Philip.
A particular techno-pagan strand of English rave ideology was also disproportionately influential on what happened in San Francisco. The principal font of this cyberdelic philosophy was Fraser Clark, the original hippy-turned-zippy (zen-inspired pagan professional) behind
Evolution
magazine, the
Shamanarchy In The UK
compilation and London’s New Agey trance club Megatripolis. Another influential figure was Psychic TV’s Genesis P. Orridge, who actually ended up in SF after exiling himself from England when the authorities threatened to take his children into care. One SF party organization called Mr Floppy’s was affiliated with Orridge’s cult The Temple Ov Psychick Youth.
P. Orridge was actually a peripheral figure in the UK’s acid house scene. But his widely disseminated ideas – psychedelia/sampladelia = the creative abuse of technology; house’s 125 b.p.m. = the primordial trance-inducing, alpha-wave triggering tempo that connects Arab, Indian and aboriginal music; the manipulation of sonic frequencies to achieve ‘metabolic engineering’,
à la
Aleister Crowley’s dictum ‘our method is science, our aim is religion’ – pretty much defined the San Francisco scene. In the more hyperbolic West Coast versions of rave’s history, P. Orridge is credited with actually introducing acid house to the UK in the first place – a total myth-take.
At the same time, there were plenty of local sources for San Francisco’s neo-hippy version of rave: the neuroconsciousness movement’s covert research into designer drugs and archaic plant psychedelics, the Internet/Virtual Reality/posthuman/‘extropian’/
Mondo 2000
scene on the fringes of Silicon Valley; New Age culture; Haight-Ashbury’s history of acid rock and psychedelic happenings (‘Be Ins’, ‘Love Ins’). It didn’t hurt that much of America’s drug supply comes from West Coast labs, making for especially strong Ecstasy in the Bay Area.
Finally, San Francisco was a fertile area for house music because of its indigenous disco scene, a by-product of the city’s allure as a liberal, laidback Mecca for gays from all over America. The first clubs to play house were mixed gay/straight clubs like DV8, Doc Martin and Pete Avila’s club Recess, and its successor Osmosis. According to Jody Radzik, a key cyberdelic ideologue who helped out at Osmosis, the latter was ‘one of the main conduits for rave ideas into San Francisco. Then the British rave mafia took over.’
Beginning in the early summer of 1991, Mark Heley hooked up with Diana Jacobs (who’d been involved in the gay club scene) and her partners Preston Lytton and Craig Valentine to promote a series of parties called Toon Town. ‘The first, a collaboration with
Mondo 2000
, didn’t work out, the second one got busted,’ says Radzik, ‘But when they moved it to this strange little club in South of Market – the office/ industrial area where most of the clubs are – Toon Town really took off.’ A Toon Town rave on New Year’s Eve 1991 pulled a then astonishing 8000 punters.
If Diana and Preston provided the organizational skills, Mark Heley was the guru who articulated the vision. A Cambridge graduate who’d written about cyberdelic culture for
iD
and
Mondo
, and had run a ‘brain gym’ in London, Heley is mythologized in Douglas Rushkoff’s
Cyberia
as a modern shaman wont to warn his acolytes that ‘bliss is a rigorous master’. ‘Heley pioneered the whole cyber-rave trip, he brought VR and brain machines into it,’ says Radzik. Heley also forged contacts with the Bay Area neuro-consciousness wizards like Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Bruce Eisner and Allen Cohen, and brought in a character called Earth Girl to set up a Smart Drinks stall. These psychoactive cocktails – briefly popular throughout the US rave scene – were more hype than anything else, although those containing ephedra gave you a sort of sub-MDMA rush.
Like Heley, Radzik was a bit of a seeker. Enrolled in a Consciousness Studies degree at John F. Kennedy University and an adept of Bhakti yoga, Radzik had cobbled together a syncretic religion out of ‘psychedelic, shamanic, and Hindu Bhakti practices’. Weirdly blending prophet and profit motives, Radzik marketed his knowledge of youth fashions to the sports wear company Gotcha. But this canny business sense was all part of the techno-shamanic role, fashion being a crucial medium for the dissemination of cultural viruses (or in cyber-speak, ‘memes’). ‘I felt I was an evolutionary agent, these ideas were channelling through me,’ says Radzik. ‘We thought we were setting up the morphogenetic field for rave – the idea of rave was alive, it wanted to express itself, and it was using the culture as a medium.’
Strip away the posthuman discourse, though, and the nature of the enlightenment offered by rave was actually quite straightforward. ‘You go to a rave for the first time, take Ecstasy, and you’re in this context of bright flashing lights, different sorts of images projected on the walls, crazily dressed people, normally dressed people,’ says Radzik. ‘People you don’t know are smiling big at you. Everyone else is on E so there’s this huge bath of acceptance. That’s a tremendous experience – it changes people, turns them into ravers.’
In the UK, people had these life-changing experiences, but they didn’t necessarily dress them up in cosmic significance; most people enjoyed them as relatively local transformations in their modes of self-expression and the way they related to friends and strangers. But in San Francisco, the Fraser Clarke/Genesis P. Orridge derived anarcho-mysticism went into cosmological overdrive, thanks to booster-doses of Terence McKenna’s eschatological, drug-determined theory of human evolution. McKenna argues that human consciousness may have been spawned by primordial man’s consumption of magic mushrooms. In this lost Edenic phase of prehistory, psylocibin’s effects of ‘boundary dissolution’ worked to sustain an anarcho-utopian tribal society, organized around orgiastic mushroom-eating ceremonies enacted every full-moon. Plant-based hallucinogens (psylocybin, DMT, peyote) act as an innoculation against the ‘tumour’ that is the ego, a ‘cyst’ which ‘keeps wanting to form in the human psyche’. Climatic changes led to to the disappearance of the mushroom cults, and thus to humanity’s Fall from paradise: the ego formed in tandem with the dominator psychology of territoriality, property, sexism, class, ecocide and war. But wait, there’s hope: ‘. . . the ego is the pathological portion of the human personality. Like any other pathology, it can be treated with pharmaceutical substances. It can be treated with plant psychedelics and it can be cured.’ Rave, as a trance-dance drug-cult, is part of the ‘archaic revival’, helping to end our alienation from the ‘Gaian matrix’, the womb of Mother Nature.
This sounds reasonable enough, but McKenna has more outlandish beliefs, like the Mayan notion of End Time. Technological progress is accelerating History towards a ‘bifurcation point’ circa 2012, at which point human consciousness will abandon its bodily prison and merge into the Overmind. This is basically a cybertronic rewrite of the biblical notion of The Rapture. If Rushkoff’s
Cyberia
can be trusted, Mark Heley seemed to believe that rave was part of this escalating evolutionary thrust towards End Time.
San Francisco rave’s cyber-mystic shtick manifested itself most blatantly through fashion and flyers. Nick Philip’s clothing company Anarchic Adjustment went from purveying skatepunk wear to being ‘a mouthpiece for loved-up ecstasy consciousness’. T-shirts bore slogans like ‘open your mind’ and ‘empathize’. ‘We were the first to put aliens and UFO’s on shirts,’ claims Philip. ‘One of the most popular featured a Buddha with a circuit board and the slogan “Spirituality Through Technology” . . . In San Francisco, a lot of interesting things collided together because [graphics] technology had developed a lot further than when rave started in England.’ When Photoshop design software arrived in 1989, ‘half the rave designers didn’t know anything about design, but they had all these new tools and they were really experimenting, rather than just using old design paradigms. With the people who did rave flyers in early nineties California, the attitude was just get on the computer and make it as
mental
as you can.’ Of course, the results were often cyber-kitsch, riddled with ‘far out, man!’ clichés. ‘No one understood that we were almost spoofing ourselves for being so high,’ says Wade Hampton, by this point flitting between LA and San Francisco. ‘We’d put little tag lines at the bottom of flyers like “Live Fast, Dream Hard” – things the inner core of people would giggle over.’

Other books

Yew Tree Gardens by Anna Jacobs
Interference & Other Stories by Richard Hoffman
Newly Exposed by Meghan Quinn
The Man Who Ate Everything by Steingarten, Jeffrey
Whiskey on the Rocks by Nina Wright
Conqueror’s Moon by Julian May
PHANTOM IN TIME by Riley, Eugenia
Gift of Revelation by Robert Fleming