Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (52 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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This blend of tongue-in-cheek, retro-hippy references and genuine Ecstatic idealism also informed the first stirrings of San Francisco house music. At the fore were the Hardkiss Brothers. Their brotherhood was spiritual rather than genetic. Gavin Bieber and Scott Friedel had met at college in Philadelphia, become friends through a shared passion for Prince, then swerved from a suit-and-tie future to music, inspired by a series of revelatory experiences in Tenerife, at England’s Glastonbury Festival, and at a Frankie Bones party in Long Island. The pair followed Scott’s old friend Robbie Cameron to San Francisco in 1991, where they threw weekly parties like Sunny Side Up and started the Hardkiss label to put out tracks (Gavin recording as Hawke, Scott as God Within, and Robbie as Little Wing).
Their music’s vibe wasn’t cyberdelic techno so much as ‘psychedelic funk’, says Scott, ‘influenced by live, traditional music as much as electronic, futuristic music. A lot of people in this scene are obsessed with the hottest and latest, but personally I have yet to hear a dance record that rivals the Beatles’ singles!’ One contemporary record that did deeply influence the Hardkiss aesthetic was The Future Sound Of London’s sublime 1992 rave anthem ‘Papua New Guinea’, with its softcore breakbeats, ecstatic wordless vocals (sampled from Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard) and blissed serenity.
Hardkiss’s own tracks resemble Prince’s psychedelic phase circa ‘Raspberry Beret’ filtered through Balearic house: just dig titles like The Ultraviolet Catastrophe’s ‘The Trip (The Remixes)’ God Within’s ‘Raincry (Spiritual Thirst)’, Hawke’s ‘3 Nudes (Having Sax on Acid)’, the latter being Hardkiss’s all-time shimmerfunk classic. The halcyon imagery reflected the honeymoon period that all ravers, and rave scenes, experience with MDMA. ‘It was a magical time in San Francisco,’ says Robbie. ‘We were going to these outdoor parties, stepping out and creating our own lives after college. We truly believed we were creating our own family – not just us three, but extending to girlfriends, wives, close friends. It was a magic burst, and you can’t repeat it . . . It’s like the first time you take Ecstasy, or the first time you fall in love – it never feels like that again.’
Moonstruck
 
For all the retro-kitsch knowingness, there was a genuine spiritual yearning behind San Francisco’s positivity, expressed through imagery of Gaia and Goddess worship. Take the following pamphlet entitled ‘HOUSE MUSIC & PLANETARY HEALING’:
When used with positive intention, Group energy has the potential to help restore the plan of Love on Earth . . . When you open your heart, and trust the whole group you dance with; when you feel love with everyone, and they return it, a higher vibration can be reached. This happens when a crowd is deep into the vibe of House . . . In the true sense of rhythmic movement, the affect is to align the physical, mental and emotional bodies with the Oneness of All that Is . . . Help push the consciousness another level into Enlightenment . . . Don’t put out negative energy and feelings. Leave the old ways behind. Throw yourself into the winds of transformation and sow the seeds for a new world – one where the human family is together again. When people respect and care for each other as a community-organism. It’s up to us to spread the vibe. Spread the Peace!
 
This leaflet was circulated by Malachy O’Brien, a British expat from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland who was involved in the weekly club Come-Unity and later worked with Martin O’Brien on the irregular rave The Gathering. Strongly redolent of the Spiral Tribe’s terra-technic philosphy, the leaflet’s idea of house music as biorhythmic synchronization with Gaia was crystallized in Come-Unity’s logo: a child-like drawing of a house superimposed over Planet Earth.
The legendary Full Moon outdoor parties were where San Francisco’s back-to-Mother-Nature spirit found its fullest expression. Full Moon was the brainchild of party collective Wicked, which largely consisted of English expatriates – Alan McQueen and his girlfriend Trisha, DJs Jeno, Garth and Marky Mark – and had links with UK free party sound-system Tonka. McQueen had been friends with Heley in London and was on the same ‘Terence McKenna techno-shamanism trip’, says Nick Philip. But when the increasingly spectacular and successful Toon Town started to inspire ‘copycat raves with VR and all this shit,’ people felt the scene was getting too commercial. So the Wicked crew said ‘fuck it, we’re just gonna have a sound-system and maybe a strobe.’
As in Brooklyn, most of the underground parties were warehouse break-ins or jams thrown under bridges, beside train tracks, and (in a nice San Francisco-specific touch) in disused tram yards. But the Full Moon parties were held outside the city limits and under the sky. Typical locations included disused military bunkers overlooking the Bay and secluded sea-shore spots like Baker’s Beach. ‘With the high cliffs, and if the cars were parked well away, you could escape notice and party till noon,’ says Malachy. ‘At one Full Moon, I was directing people across the sand dunes, and as I got near I was thinking: “What the fuck’s up with the sound-system?” I reached the crest of a dune and all I could see was a sea of people, bonfires, dogs running wild, someone juggling with firesticks. Then the sound kicked in and all the people rose to their feet at the same moment. With the moon out there low over the water, it was a pretty awesome sight!’
Like Spiral Tribe’s rural raves, the Full Moons were free parties. Nobody was benefiting financially, but there was still a competitive spirit of oneupmanship between San Francisco promoters, albeit on a more spiritual level. ‘It was about how you could take care of people and impress them with something very psychedelic,’ says Wade Hampton. ‘In San Francisco, it tended to be much more natural and human-driven – hang-gliders, unicyles, anything you could possibly imagine was hauled off to the parties.’ Ravers competed too – to intensify the vibe by wearing wacky clothes or by freaky dancing. ‘It might be something like bringing an antique bicycle with a really big front wheel and riding it around on the beach til noon. It was a
Dali scene
.’
It was also a drug scene. ‘Being San Francisco, there was a lot of psychedelics,’ says Malachy. Not just Ecstasy and LSD, but ‘San Pedro cactus,
ayahuasca
, Syrian Rue’. The latter is a plant-derived substance rich in a chemical called harmine, whose MAO inhibitor effect intensifies the visions caused by psychedelics. Amazonian shamans combine harmine-rich plants with the hallucinogenic tree-bark DMT to create
ayahuasca
, a potent brew that triggers ‘extremely rich tapestries of visual hallucination that are particularly susceptible to being “driven” and directed by sound’ (Terence McKenna).
With all these psychoactive substances circulating in the Full Moon milieu, it’s hardly surprising that there were incidents of mass hallucination. At one party in late 1992, several hundred people ‘saw the same spaceship come down and land,’ claims Wade Hampton. ‘There was this acid floating around called Purple Shield. That party is legendary in San Francisco. After that party, most people walked away
as one
.’
Take It to the Limit: the Los Angeles Rave Explosion
 
While San Francisco ravers talked about reaching ‘higher awareness’ and celebrated the DJ as a ‘digital shaman’, the house party scene in Los Angeles was more about fashion-conscious hedonism, rooted in the popular demand for after-hours dancing. In 1989 – 90, there were parties that mixed a bit of house in with hip hop and funk, like Solomon Monsieur’s Dirtbox, Steve LeClair’s OAP (One Almighty Party), and a series of clubs and one-offs like Alice’s House, Deep Shag, and Stranger Than Fiction put together by a guy called Randy. After moving down from San Francisco, Doc Martin DJ-ed house at Flammable Liquid. There was also a long established all-night dance culture amongst Latino youth on LA’s East Side.
Most clubs in Los Angeles had to close by 2 a.m. By 1990, ‘you started seeing flyers for psychedelic after-parties,’ says Todd C. Roberts, editor of
Urb
, LA’s DJ culture magazine. ‘Normal clubs started kicking people out at about 1.45 a.m., so there was lots of drunk ’n’ horny guys and gals wandering around.’ As in San Francisco, the key promoters who spotted the potential for all-night clubs were mostly English. Steve Levy was DJ-ing at his own Santa Monica club, West Go West. After a trip back home to London in 1989, he returned with a stack of acid house 12 inches. Following the warehouse party blueprint he’d witnessed in London – word-of-mouth, flyers, voice-mail, meet-points – Levy founded the illegal after-hours event Moonshine.
‘Our first location was a building this guy had been using for an illegal casino,’ remembers Levy. ‘The guy was a nutcase, dodgy enough that when he kept our security deposit we didn’t argue with him about it!’ After a few weeks, the party moved to the Fish Factory, the basement of a fish warehouse in downtown LA. ‘It stank, but you got used to it after a couple of hours. [Punters] had to go down a freight elevator. Halfway down, we’d turn all the lights out, ask everyone for the money, and search them. In LA, if you search a policeman, they have to give up the gun. Since they aren’t allowed to travel without a weapon, we searched everyone to stop undercover cops from getting in.’ Other locations came through contacts in the real-estate business.
After a dozen Moonshines, Levy decided to switch to legal venues. By this point – the summer of 1991 – Levy’s parties were pulling thousand-strong crowds. But they weren’t really raves – the party-fuel was still alcohol (hence the prohibition-era name Moonshine) rather than E, and the music was slanted towards hip hop rather than house. Levy’s next venture – Truth, at the Park Plaza Hotel – was closer. Hip hop and house were in separate rooms, but the funk crowd were getting seduced by the house room’s trippy projections and lasers. ‘Next week they’d be rolling up in their overalls ready to
have it
.’
Promoters in suburban Orange County were already throwing ravey events; following Moonshine’s lead, they started breaking into warehouses in downtown LA. If the English club organizers like Levy resembled Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling circa 1988, the Orange County impressarios were equivalent to Sunrise and Energy in 1989: entrepreneurs with the guts and ego to take it to the next stage. As with 1989’s orbital rave explosion, the result was an escalating spiral of friendly-but-fierce competition to throw the most spectacular events in the most audaciously outlandish locations.
‘For me it was all about the production, the idea of having a vision and then building it up from the ground,’ says Les Borsai. From his beginnings with Steve Kool-Aid throwing parties like Double Hit Mickey and Mr Bubble, Borsai progressed to increasingly grandiose raves in downtown LA warehouses. For King Neptune’s Underwater Wet Dream, ‘We painted the whole warehouse fluorescent, using stencils of seahorses and fish and sharks. We put up blue lighting and bubble machines, made the whole club look fuckin’ spectacular.’ Suddenly helicopters and police arrived to arrest Borsai and his team. Managing to wriggle out of the law’s clutches by claiming they’d only been hired to paint the place, Borsai faced the challenge of finding a replacement site within twenty-four hours. ‘We found a massive underground parking structure, painted it, and brought in a huge water truck and twenty cases of shampoo. We foamed up the whole dancefloor.’ But two hours after the rave kicked off, the police shut it down and arrested Borsai.
Fed up with the precarious nature of unlicensed events, Borsai hooked up with rock promotions company Avalon Attractions. The result was a series of fully legal raves that grew ever more spectacular. For a 1991 rave in a Pomona cow pasture, Borsai rented an entire carnival. Techno Flight One took place in a Disney facility which housed Howard Hughes wooden aeroplane the Spruce Goose. ‘The plane sat in a moat, and Disney created dry ice effects so it looked like it was floating on clouds. This plane must have stood fifty feet off the ground, but people were so off their heads, the kids were dancing out on the wings. It was
madness
!’
When it came to rave extravaganzas, Borsai’s major rival was Daven Michaels, who cultivated a larger-than-life persona – Daven the Mad Hatter – and even hired a personal publicist. Collaborating with early partners Beej and Sparky, Daven threw a rave called LSD (Love Sex Dance) which, he claims, ‘changed the course of LA’. His tale illustrates the flagrant law-bending and logistical cunning required to promote raves in LA during the scene’s outlaw phase. The location was ‘an incredible space called the Bingo Building, which the realty management company would rent out for movie shoots. I pretended I was a location scout and kept asking them to hold it for us, saying “We’re going to have a production meeting, I’ll get back to you.” That way, we kept the space open right up to the last minute.’
But on the day of the rave, Michaels discovered that a rival promoter was advertising a rave at the very same space. ‘I hopped in my car, threw on a tie, and drove down to the building, where the kids are setting up their event. I say: “Guys, I’m John Stone from this [realty] company, you’ve set off a silent alarm, and you have ten minutes to get out before I call the police.” ’ Having routed the panicked kids, Daven locked the building’s entrance, then noticed that the rival promoters were still hanging around. Thinking on his feet, Michaels decided to disguise the rave as an after-concert party for Madonna, performing in LA that very night. After informing his usual security team of this ruse, Michaels hired
another
security company and fed them the Madonna after-party line, so they’d sound convincing if challenged by the police.

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