Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (53 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Pulling both their own crowd and the people who’d come for the rival rave, LSD was a huge success, spawning a series of sequels. Like Borsai, Michaels became obsessed with dazzling the kids with spectacular, ‘fully themed’ productions involving up to five separate installations per event. ‘We worked with a performance artist on huge performance pieces that involved hydraulics. One was modelled on Ancient Rome, with this 400 pound guy called Fat Freddie wearing a toga and sitting on a throne. All of a sudden Rome crumbles, the columns crash down. Then hydraulics lift everything back together. The kids flipped for it.’
Going solo, Daven began his Paw Paw Patch series of parties. Paw Paw Ranch – 27 June 1991, in the desert city of Hemet, Riverside County – was LA’s first outdoor rave, ‘the first party where the ravers saw the sun go up’. Because the idea of travelling outside the city limits was then unusual, Michaels says ‘We had to trick people so they didn’t realize how far they were really driving.’ A year later, when desert raves were well established, Paw Paw Ranch II took place at Horse Thief Canyon Stables in Orange County; Michaels hired ‘a ghost town from a company, prefab, which we transported there and erected’.
Although the British expats got the LA rave scene off the ground with their clubs (‘English weeklies’) and medium-scale one-offs, their following was older and relatively sophisticated. Rave ringmasters like Borsai and Daven the Mad Hatter pulled a younger, more suburban crowd who were really there to
rave
. ‘To an extent we commercialized it,’ admits Daven. ‘The English guys never sold out . . . Whereas we were always outdoing each other. And we really spent a
lot
of money outdoing each other. In the beginning, events cost between five and fifteen grand, but by the end the costs were running to well over a hundred thousand dollars.’ With tickets selling from $20 to $25, and crowds between four and six thousand, ‘we had to run a pretty tight ship just to keep up with each other and still make a few bucks’.
The most extravagant and over-the-top South California rave ever was probably Gilligan’s Island, which took place in a Catalina casino-cum-ballroom. 1200 people were ferried over to the island on two ships. ‘The budget was massive,’ says Wade Hampton, ‘there was never even a possibility of recouping what they spent. Eventually they took over the island, ’cos the cops wanted them to stop but they wouldn’t. It was the pinnacle of Los Angeles rave – so outlawish, so brilliant, like Sunrise taking over the M25 highway in 1989. From then on, people were trying to match that vibe.’
Hampton claims that DJs were flown into the event ‘on Lear Jets paid for by hot cheques’ and that ‘virtual crime’ was rife amongst LA promoters – credit cards scams, cellular phone fraud. ‘A lot of parties were boosted by doing mad things with other people’s money. It was the beginning of the end.’ For the honest promoters, the game was getting too risky: the huge events couldn’t evade the police’s notice, and a busted gig could obliterate the profits from several previous triumphs. Inevitably, LA rave began to move towards fully-licensed legimitacy. Instead of the flyers/voicemail/map-point system, promoters started to sell tickets at stores, then graduated to working through Ticketmaster. By mid-1992, LA rave was losing its outlaw edge, even as the potential profit margins were attracting fly-by-night entrepreneurs and serious criminals. But for about eighteen months, LA had the most full-on rave scene in America. It even had a techno radio station, Mars FM. Starting 24 May 1991, Mars broadcasted ‘the new music invasion’ all day long, interspersed with the station slogan ‘we want our techno’. There was also an explosion of rave fashion on LA’s streets. According to Hampton, many kids adopted the raver look first, then got into the music. ‘Fresh Jive, Clobber, all these rave oriented clothing lines became very influential. If you had flyers designed by Fresh Jive, loads of kids would come to your parties. Through the desktop, computer graphics revolution, the whole culture got very visual.’
Fashion and ‘balls out hedonism’ (as Hampton puts it) defined Los Angeles rave, then. But there was a utopian aspect to Southern California’s rave scene – the racial mixing that was going on. ‘It was the first time in my lifetime I saw people from every neighbourhood – San Diego, Riverside, San Bernadino, Long Beach – coming together’, says Todd Roberts. ‘Every weekend you’d see a lot of people you’d never even come into contact with. It was especially nice, being African-American myself, to see [black youth] involved and not just a bunch of white kids acting weird. Rave allowed me to talk about and see LA as a better community than most people give it credit for. It
is
a very divided city. But this was the first time those walls were breaking down . . . Utopian? It was as utopian as LA could get!’
Crashing the Party: US Rave Descends into the Darkside
 
Ecstasy culture pivots around a utopian/dystopian axis. Any given rave scene seems to enjoy a honeymoon period of two years, tops, before problems begin to appear – the shift from Ecstasy use to abuse; MDMA burn-out and the lure of amphetamine as a cheap, dependable surrogate; polydrug experimentation. The resulting paranoia and mental confusion is aggravated by taking place in a context of drug rip-offs and criminality. First ‘in’ and therefore first to burn out, the scene’s prime movers succumb to ‘lifestyle dysfunction’, even mental breakdown.
The hardcore hedonism caught up with Frankie Bones in August 1993. ‘On the weekend of Labour Day, I had a seventy-two-hour thing where I was eating everything – acid, Ecstasy – and smoking angel dust . . . Towards the end of my mission, my mother caught up with me,’cos I’d wrecked my car. I was doing really weird things – the way my uncle described it to me, I didn’t care if I lived or died . . . My uncle had a neighbour who worked in the hospital. I was only supposed to go there for some tests, but they found so much shit in my system, they locked me up and put me on medication.’
Seven weeks later, Bones was released and went back to live with his mother for the first time in ten years. ‘All I wanted to do was eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner, and watch TV. I had no interest in music.’ By the end of 1993, Bones was off the medication, but his career was in tatters. It took him a year to get back into regular DJ-ing.
Bones’s misadventures weren’t abnormal. In Long Island, Caffeine’s ‘just like the sixties’ vibe went from 1967 euphoria to a 1969 death-and-madness trip. ‘If you exceeded your limit five times over, you were probably at Caffeine,’ says Bones with a wry grin. ‘Kids couldn’t afford Ecstasy so they did LSD as an alternative. I remember this girl on acid just flipping out and running amok, we had to hold her down.’
By late 1993, the East Coast was ‘at the bottom of the US rave scene, we went from totally the best to a bunch of bullshit . . . The “poly” is what fucked everything up,’ Bones says, referring to his doctors’ original diagnosis of “poly-substance abuse”. Finding that E alone wasn’t getting them high enough any more, kids were mixing all manner of drugs into potent, unpredictable cocktails that blew their teenage minds but created an anti-dance vibe. ‘Kids were combining Special K, angel dust, E’s, acid, and they’d just become a ball of jelly, sitting on the floor.’
NASA was also succumbing to the darkside. ‘People started taking Limelight drugs,’ says DB, referring to the rampant abuse of drugs like ketamine by more cynical Manhattan club kids. ‘People were lying in hallways, it wasn’t so euphoric.’ By 1993, says Scotto, ‘the drug dealers were the heroes of the scene – you were either a promoter, a DJ or a dealer. Then the dealers were getting paranoid, having these fantasies of being a Mafia guy or a gang member.’
At one NASA night in spring 1993 – a few months before the club closed down – a girl handed me a photocopied pamphlet. Framed with smiley-faces, happy goldfish and handwritten phrases like ‘group hugs’, the leaflet was a heartfelt, heartbreaking plea for a return to lost innocence:
WHY ARE YOU AT THIS EVENT? THE RAVE SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNO. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT DRUGS. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT FASHION. IT IS SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT UNITY AND HAPPINESS. IT IS ABOUT BEING YOURSELF AND BEING LOVED FOR IT. IT SHOULD BE A HARBOR FROM OUR SOCIETY. BUT OUR SCENE RIGHT NOW IS DISINTEGRATING! OLD STYLE RAVERS – REMEMBER WHEN EVERYBODY HUGGED ALL THE TIME – NOT JUST TO SAY HELLO AND GOODBYE? REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE JUST SAID HI FOR NO REASON EXCEPT TO BE YOUR FRIEND? REMEMBER HOW GOOD IT FELT? WHY DON’T WE DO IT ANYMORE? NEWCOMERS – YOU ARE WANTED AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THIS SCENE IS ABOUT OPENNESS. WE ALL SHARE A BOND – THE DESIRE TO GROOVE TO A GOOD BEAT ALL NIGHT LONG. AND NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. EVERYONE NEEDS FRIENDS AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS TOUGH ENOUGH. WE DON’T NEED FRONTS AND ATTITUDES IN OUR SCENE. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND LET THE GOOD FEELINGS FLOW . . . RAVERS UNITE AND KEEP OUR SCENE ALIVE.
 
What’s truly poignant about this leaflet is that the golden age being lamented had occurred only
nine months earlier
– an indication of just how swiftly Ecstasy burn-out and polydrug mind-rot can set in. Over in San Francisco, many of the major players in the Anglo-cyberdelic milieu were succumbing, Bones-style, to drug-induced malaise. ‘There’s specific people who got into serious drug trips, using speed, heroin, ketamine,’ says Jody Radzik. ‘Key people really fucked up.’ Radzik himself began dropping out of the scene in February 1992. ‘Just through getting involved in raving and Ecstasy I uncovered [personal problems] that I had to deal with. I developed a lot of insecurities, socially, and just had to remove myself.’ Radzik says he ‘went through a little psycho drug period too. . . . Maybe it
helped
in that it made things a lot worse. The Ecstasy, the speed, exposed all these huge inner flaws that I had to [deal with].’
In the spring of 1993, a tragedy occurred that cast a pall over the ailing San Francisco scene, but that also, in a weird twist, opened the way for a partial regeneration of idealism. After a Full Moon party, the Wicked crew were driving back in their van. In the back, asleep, was Malachy O’Brien, plus the spare sound-system he’d brought along in case the event was busted. ‘We came off the road up at Candlestick Park, ironically near where some of the early Full Moons had happened, and ended up in the Bay,’ says Malachy. The driver may have nodded off at the wheel after partying too hard (a common cause of post-rave accidents); there might also have been a mechanical failure. Whatever the crash’s cause, a speaker impacted Malachy’s head, bending it so badly his neck was broken. He was left a quadraplegic.
It’s a testament to Malachy’s character that he’s capable of talking about the accident in terms of good fortune – ‘It was a lucky escape, there was a generator full of gasoline.’ Despite his personal catastrophe, Malachy also stresses that the tragedy reunited the divided San Francisco scene, with promoters coming together to organize a series of benefit raves to pay for his hospitalization and physical therapy. The flyer for the first benefit – called Come-Unity and held in April 1993 at Richmond Civic Center auditorium – beseeched ‘Music Is a Healing Force, Dance Is a Healing Energy, Join Together and Dance For the Healing of A Troubled World and the Healing of Malachy’. During the rave, the DJ-ing was interrupted by a healing ceremony guided by a shaman and a Zen monk, with Malachy appearing on a video screen and addressing the crowd. Today, Malachy has recovered some movement in his biceps, allowing him to operate his joystick-controlled wheelchair and use the track-ball on a computer. After a period of intensive physiotherapy in England, he’s back in San Francisco and still involved in the house scene, helping to run Come-Unity.
Although Malachy accentuates the positive, other scenesters responded to the tragedy as an ill omen. ‘When that happened, it was the beginning of the end for me,’ says Nick Philip. ‘I don’t think everybody believed anymore that we were going to save the world. It was just so weird that it happened to Malachy – the nicest guy, and the person who really
lived
it. A lot of people spouted the philosophy about saving the planet and global consciousess, but Malachy really lived it, he gave his [proceeds] away to fuckin’ charities [like Greenpeace] . . . It happened to
him
, and that freaked people out . . . A number of things happened – drug related incidents, busts, someone shot at a rave in Santa Cruz – that turned the optimism into something different.’
Tweaked Out
 
Meanwhile, down the coast in Southern California, the LA rave scene was being killed by its own success. The syndrome was similar to England in 1989: media outcry, police crackdown, rivalry between promoters, gangsterism, bad drugs. The LA riots provided the
coup de grace
, destroying the precarious trans-racial alliances.
There was a symbolic death-knell in July 1992, when Mars FM dropped its techno playlist in favour of alternative rock. Protests and petitions by a group calling themselves Friends of Techno and Rave Music led to a brief restoration, but by September techno was dropped again, for good. It was probably a sound business decision, based on the realization that the record industry was backing grunge as the new youth-cultural cash-cow, not rave. The major labels had signed up a bunch of British and European rave acts; American’s supremo Rick Rubin seemed briefly enthused by the idea that techno was the new punk. But grunge was a better bet. Guitar riffs, gruff vocals, a little bit of old-fashioned rebellion – this was something the record industry understood, and bands were something that could be marketed, unlike DJs and ‘faceless techno bollocks’.
Mars FM’s turnaround was probably also influenced by the tarnishing of rave’s image in LA. The local media had discovered that the dance parties, far from being innocent extravaganzas, were bacchanals fuelled by Ecstasy. There was also a scuzzy substance seemingly unique to the West Coast scene: nitrous oxide, sold in balloons at raves for around $5. The harmless associations of ‘laughing gas’ were shattered in March 1992, when three young men were found dead in a pickup truck on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The cabin’s windows were rolled up; the kids, high as kites, had left the valve open on their nitrous canister and asphyxiated. As drug researcher Dr Ronald Siegel put it, ‘they basically crawled inside a balloon’.

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