In 1989, New York techno legend Frankie Bones was invited to perform at one of the massive British “hangar raves.” He left that party of twenty-five thousand dancing revelers deeply affected and changed. Electronic music, something that had started in the United States, had gone overseas and become a new thing, something massive, something culturally subversive. It had become a rave.
Within a few months of his return, Bones put on what is now credited as the first true American rave: the Storm Rave. With this party, a music genre and cultural scene that had been invented in the Black neighborhoods of the American Midwest and then appropriated by Europe, had alchemized into something else entirely, which was re-appropriated into the American cultural milieu. Most early American ravers had no idea that what they were participating in was a homegrown phenomenon. They assumed that it was a benevolent gift from Europe, like horses, muskets, and venereal disease.
The beginnings of electronic music were, much like every popular form of music in the last hundred years, very Black. Detroit. Chicago. Kids from the poorest parts of town were pulling apart the meaning of what synthesizers were supposed to be used for and creating something new. Something from nothing. Or, rather, from the ashes of something else.
In the mid- to late 1970s, disco was king. It had congealed the pre-AIDS sexual permissiveness and the vestiges of the love-everybody hippie movement into a dance club culture where the only important thing was feeling good and dancing better.
With the full-frontal assault of the disco hit machine taking over, music tastemakers rebelled. Then came the backlash. No doubt fueled by antagonism toward the Black and gay subtext within disco music, “true rockers” began to thumb their meth-addled noses at the simplicity of message in disco.
The death blow was dealt on July 12, 1979. The Chicago White Sox, faced with declining ticket sales due to the fact that they were losing games and the fact that baseball is a crushingly boring sport, reached out to notorious anti-disco crusader and shock jock morning DJ Steve Dahl to cook up a promotional stunt to bolster ticket sales.
The premise was to bring a disco record to the doubleheader that night and receive admission for a mere ninety-eight cents. Between games one and two of the doubleheader, Steve took to the field and wheeled out the pile of records (which, by the way, contained plenty of non-disco records…many were just records made by Black artists. Close enough! Stay classy, Chicago!) and literally detonated a bomb on the field, destroying the records while the crowd of fifty thousand anti-disco White Sox fans rushed the field with their battle cry falling from their lips: “Disco sucks! Disco sucks!”
The ball field was completely fucked due to the fact that they had DETONATED A FUCKING BOMB on it, and the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game of the doubleheader. Disco music had lost, too. Steve Dahl and his rockers had broken America’s disco fever.
Disco was soon thought of as a minor and laughable blip in music history. Silly, meaningless, and very gay. But on the South Side of Chicago, the shards of those exploded disco records were being slowly pieced back together into a brand-new, homegrown music form. Enter: house music.
It would be hard to overstate how “underground” a music form this was. No one cared. No one was listening. The artists in the early years of house music were children, sitting in their basements, looping bass lines from classic disco tracks and adding booming drum kicks from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.
The music was future primitive. It was beyond simplistic. This was not music made for the mind; it was music for the body. As Eddie Amador said in his famous track “House Music”: “Not everybody understands house music. It’s a spiritual thing. A body thing. A soul thing.”
And as Joe Raver said: “Omfugking god I’m so high this music is melting my braaaaaaain.”
Something happened in those basements that was really inexplicable. The sound produced by those first kids in south Chicago, artists like Chip-E, Jesse Saunders, Frankie Knuckles, Joe Smooth, and Marshall Jefferson (along with the singers, sometimes known as “divas,” who would shape house’s sound—women like Martha Walsh, CeCe Peniston, Robin S., Crystal Waters, Barbara Tucker, and many more), tickled some deep part of people’s brains and turned them the fuck on.
In Detroit soon thereafter, a similar group of young Black teenagers, in particular the infamous Belleville Three—Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson—influenced more by Kraftwerk than Donna Summer, were taking things a step further and stripping away the warm and lush disco sediment and just keeping the machines.
This was robot music. This was techno.
With the one-two punch of techno and house, a new American music form was born. Electronic dance music.[*1]
The problem was, almost no one in America was listening. It wasn’t until the music made its way to Europe that its very obscurity would become its defining principle and codify it as the new music of the underground. Europe also provided one essential element in the metamorphosis of “new genre of music” to “a scene,” the epidural of the birth of the rave scene: MDMA, or ecstasy.
Once the music hit England, they took to it like it was a subcontinent prime for colonization. Soon after that, Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, and some other early producers from Chicago got an offer to play their music in the north of England. To play their fucking bedroom tunes. Imagine their confusion when their tiny record label, Trax, which was essentially some sketchy local dude mashing new music onto used vinyl, called and was like, “Uh, we have an offer for you to play…England?”
Off they flew (some of them for the first time in their lives) and arrived in Manchester to find a sold-out show of white Europeans screaming in recognition of the tunes. The juxtaposition between their status at home and their reception in England blew their minds. It was like a dude clanging a fork on his pot in a hobo encampment and then finding out that in Nepal the Sherpas were all about “the fork master.”
Somehow this strange cocktail of American electronic music and designer drugs tapped into the whole of the unease of England’s youth. Rife with the anti-establishment sentiment of the punk scene and sick to death of the repressive regime of the Thatcher administration, England’s cool kids were thirsty for something that could unite them, something less angry than punk, something filled with love. And with that, house music and ecstasy sparked a new cultural epoch. Fuck the system but love your brother. The rave baby was crowning. And with one synthetic push, it was alive.
It spread through England powerfully and quickly. Raves were held illegally in abandoned warehouses and in empty fields in the English countryside. Anywhere where the cops weren’t looking. In England these now-legendary “parties in a field” quickly got noticed by authorities. All round the M25 highway that surrounds London, thousands of MDMA enthusiasts would pick a dairy farm at random (I just assume all fields in England are on dairy farms and I’m not looking it up; I’m tired of looking things up), hoist up speaker stacks, and run interference on whichever Downton Abbey–looking man in rubber galoshes and foxhunting garb came to complain. England being a smallish place, the cops figured out what they were doing and in short order moral panic set in. Members of Parliament were freaking the fuck out about raves and the commensurate decimation of Stilton cheese production that was sure to follow. They hastily rushed through a bizarre law called the Criminal Justice Act that, to this day, outlaws any unpermitted gathering of twenty or more people listening to music whose “sounds [are] wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” They outlawed raving, and an already-underground scene dove deeper beneath the surface. The parties didn’t stop, of course. They spread. That’s when Frankie Bones took that chance trip to Europe and, like a sailor taking shore leave in a red-light district, he brought something home and infected people.
After the Storm Rave in New York, the scene swept from New York back into Chicago and Detroit, then marched across the United States just in time to meet me in San Francisco in 1995.
My first party. My first rave. I had seen a special on 20/20 a few years before I attended. Some vaguely alarmist journalistic fluff piece about the new, scary ecstasy parties taking place in warehouses. I was intrigued, but I was also eleven. Then when I was twelve and I got into drugs myself, I was far too interested in pretending to be a gangster to involve myself in anything as soft as a techno party.
Then I got sober. And went to those AA dances. Then I started trying to dance. For a fifteen-year-old white fake gangsta, there are few positions more compromising than dancing. The real and palpable terror of engaging in dance and exposing your goofball, White Men Can’t Jump two left feet was a risk not worth taking. Don’t get me wrong. I had danced before that, but in a single, extremely safe style. I called it the Booty Grab Slow Dance.
It was a technique that I learned in middle school. It was the way anyone could dance and look almost cool at the same time.
It worked like this: You’d dance with a girl, as close as you could get, and stomp around in a circle. Her arms on your shoulders, your arms on the small of her back. Bend the knees. Lower. Lower. Get low, motherfucker! As you sunk into the circular groove of this foolishness, your hands would slowly, painfully slowly, creep down and down until you were just about to reach out and grab her butt. Just seconds, milliseconds really, before you took that deep, trembling breath and fully committed to this low-grade sexual assault, her hands would dart, quick as a jaguar, down to yours, pull them back up to the safe zone, and the dance would start anew.
Foiled again.
Every time I tried this, I’d look across the room and see a cool Black kid, decked out in Guess overalls with one strap hanging down, or a hot pair of Z Cavariccis and a rayon paisley print shirt; his hand firmly attached to the ass of his partner, a willing participant in the booty dance. I’d die with middle-school jealousy.
In AA I learned to respect women and to not grab their asses without permission, so that left me with very few dance options but the “butt clench.” Instead of clutching others’ butts, I just clenched my own. It was a lonely time. I’d stand at the wall of the AA dance as the music slipped from “Funkytown” into Nine Inch Nails’ “I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal,” a sure sign that the AA dance had transitioned into the risqué final quarter of the festivities. I’d clench my butt cheeks to the beat, each bass drop a new clench. It was the best I could do.
Then the DJ at one of those dances dropped Crystal Waters’s “100% Pure Love,” a house track that had somehow made it onto the radio and therefore onto the playlist of the glorified wedding DJ at the Danville veterans hall that night. My feet started to move a little. This was the first time I’d ever moved my feet to a beat without a girl next to me. What was I doing? I was moving. I was dancing. Had you been at that dance, watching me groove my way from what I thought was gangster caterpillar to dancing butterfly, it likely would have looked to you like a barely moving brown moth, wings weakly fluttering. But it felt like a huge, sweeping flap of the wings.
A few months later, I picked up a flyer to the Coolworld Cyberfest ’95 rave at a record store in Berkeley. I still remember that flyer. It was huge and colorful, a cybernetic beauty graced the entire front of the thing: a future woman, her head covered in robotics and circuitry and metal spikes. On the back was a list of countless DJs I’d never heard of. This was a massive rave. A huge lumbering mega party, sagging under the weight of its own commercialism. Promised were experiences of unimaginable delights like Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome. Ferris wheels and slides and other ding-dong bullshit. It sounded fucking amazing.
I decided to go.
I don’t know why I made that choice. I didn’t know a single person who was into that kind of shit. Maybe it was that Crystal Waters song shaking my feet into action. Maybe it was that 20/20 special. Maybe it was that stupid sexy terminator lady on that flyer. All I knew was, I had to go. I scraped up some money and bought a ticket.
I started the evening by attending an NA meeting across the street from where the party was. This was in downtown Oakland at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, and the meeting that night was not filled with burgeoning rave children. I raised my hand and explained to the room of fifty-year-old Black and Latino recovering addicts how my journey of recovery had allowed me the freedom to attend the psychedelic drug and techno fest across the street.
No one had a clue what I was talking about. But fuck ’em. I was ready to rave.
Only problem was, I didn’t know how. I didn’t exactly cut a swath as a techno party participant. I had my hair slicked back under my hat and wore sagging pressed khaki pants and a Fila shirt in honor of the company that had given me my identity. Back then, I was known as “Fila” by the other young people in AA due to, you guessed it, the amount of Fila gear I wore. Every day I wore a hat that spelled out FILA in big bold block letters that spilled down onto the brim. I needed everyone to know that this was the Italian sportswear company that defined me.
So that night I wore my ubiquitous cap and sagging pants and brought with me, in my bag, a full bottle of the cologne I slathered myself with daily: Escape by Calvin Klein.
I rooted through my bag and decided that I’d need weaponry that night to protect myself against unknown enemies. This was my modus operandi. Wear Fila, talk Southern, have weapon. To clarify, I have never used a weapon on anyone. But it felt really nice to pretend.
And I was from the streets!
Only, not really.
Until just recently I’d been a very liberal N-word user. Not in the extremely bad racially hateful way, just in the also extremely bad only maybe not quite as bad but hey maybe just as bad racially confused way. The user-(un?)friendly version that ends in an “a.” That is to say, I used it as “an ally.” I figured I had enough Black friends to have gotten a pass.
One day, outside of a meeting, my friend Larry threw me up against a wall and revoked my pass. Larry was Black and older than me and I looked up to him as someone who had been sober a long time but was still pretty young. He was my friend. He threw me up against that wall and got in my face: “N*gga, stop saying n*gga, n*gga!”
I was taken aback. “Okay, I’m a little confused by the context switches in there, but I believe you are telling me to stop saying the N-word? You know I don’t mean anything by it. It’s how I talk. Just some North Oakland shit.”
“Stop saying that shit, too. You ain’t from North Oakland, you’re from northern Oakland. You live on Piedmont Avenue.”
This was (and still is, even though I’m forty-three now) a true bane of my existence. Piedmont Avenue, the street I grew up on, the place my mother rented a $400 flat paid for by her paltry, state-supplemented SSI check, was a nicer part of town, and it also happened to share its name with the pathetically suburban, lily-white rich-kid city next door: Piedmont, California. As a result, even though I slogged through Oakland public schools and had been rejected as a nonresident when I tried to do a district transfer into Piedmont High after running out of educational options during my drug days, everyone thought I lived in Piedmont because I lived on Piedmont Avenue. But I lived in Oakland, goddamn it! Just not really, in any way, a truly rough part of Oakland.
“Well, Piedmont Avenue is technically North Oakland, it’s just a little nicer…” I meeped out.
“Stop saying n*gga, stop claiming North Oakland. Next time I hear you doing either, I’mma beat your ass.”
I stopped that night. Some personal growth spurts happen slowly, over time, as the universe reveals its will for you and your mind blossoms like a lotus. Sometimes a kid who’s bigger than you threatens to beat your ass, and you change all at once.
Larry graciously put a stop to my highly suspect word choices, but he couldn’t take the streets all the way out of me. So back to the rave prep. Mission: weapon.
I took that bottle of Escape cologne and stuffed it down into a sock. I took the potpourri-scented blackjack into my hands and gave it a couple of good swings. “Just in case I have to crack a n-…” I stopped myself, reconsidering. “Just in case I have to crack a muthafucka over the head tonight.”
Feeling safe against no one in particular, I headed into the party.
By the way, I’m not setting this weapon thing up as some kind of Chekhov’s gun foreshadowing device. The Escape bottle never gets used. I never had to crack a muthafucka. I just want you to understand the brain I brought with me to Cyberfest that night, want you to understand my process. I want you to see the conditioning I’d been shaped with that would make fashioning a weapon even seem like a reasonable necessity. I had been so thoroughly through the emotional gauntlet that I was fried. Spiritually crisp. I couldn’t have told you then, but even at that point, months after I had gotten sober, I was still terrified. Terrified of my heart, of being seen for who I was: a severely damaged kid who had never had a chance at a normal childhood. I was too busy running from my life to have had an opportunity to experience it. I never could have told you that what I needed most of all was a chance at another life. Not to build from where I was, but to smash into nonexistence the foundation of my old life. To dig below the firmament of that life and inspect the wooden pylons beneath the earth that had been holding me up: rotten wood, scored through with the termite damage of drugs and violence. Soggy, dank, stinky wood that was barely supporting me. I needed to dig down deep and throw that shit away. I needed to build a new foundation.
I needed rebirth.
I dropped the Escape sock in my bag, sealed it, and walked into the womb.
The Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center is an ugly utilitarian building now shuttered from years of neglect. Bare, stark, and devoid of life, the walls are shot through with exposed steel beams and the most function-first kind of architecture. But what I walked into that night was a dream. A transformed shock of a space. A portal to another zone. A fucking Cyberfest!
Sharp green lasers darted around the room and strobe lights flashed, creating a stuttering silhouette of the thousands of people dancing. Thousands of people dancing. The hall was filled with shapes, images of people, huge pants, colorful backpacks, some people wearing huge Mickey Mouse hand gloves that pumped the air in excitement. Some wore fairy wings. Some wore Cat in the Hat hats that bobbed and dangled off of their heads. People sucked on pacifiers and danced. I mean, they fucking danced. They jumped and shook, they moved violently. Focus your vision and individuals moved hard to the beat, widen your aperture and the whole crowd became a throbbing entity. A gyrating mass of thrill and energy.
My God. My God.
My God, these people looked like fucking idiots.
But I never noticed. I was too busy getting mauled by the speakers.
The speakers were enormous columns of sound that crawled to the roof like the Tower of Babel. They kept the secrets of Babel, too. They spoke unknown languages. They screamed at me, they pulsed at me. I’d never heard anything, never seen anything like this. It was pandemonium. It was bacchanalian. It was a true goddamn rave. I set my bag down, replete with weapon, never to see it again.
What was happening? My heart was being punched by the music, but that wasn’t it. I seemed to be moving. Something strange. I was being thrown around. Why was I moving?!
I looked down at my feet. My God, I was jumping. I was shuffling. There was no concrete on my feet anymore, there was only air. Only light. I was moving. I was moving. I was dancing!
The individuals surrounding me melted into a single unit, and I melted into it, too. I was in the crowd. I was the crowd.
Somehow, in the course of a few hours, I’d gone from gangster to ballerina. I swear to God by the end of the night, I was skipping, prancing, doing pirouettes. A gay couple, out of their faces on ecstasy, approached me from either side, picked me up, lifted me high, and kissed me on both cheeks when they dropped me down to the ground. “You dance beautifully!” they told me.
What the fuck were these motherfuckers doing? Touching all on me. Kissing all on me. Didn’t they know I’m a fucking G? Couldn’t they tell? Couldn’t they smell the dangerous combination of foot sweat and Escape emanating from me? Well, I’d let them know. I knew what I had to do. I grabbed both of them by their heads, pulled them toward me, and hugged them close. “You’re beautiful, too!” I yelled.
Pretty much everybody has an image in their minds when they hear the word rave, and I’d wager few conjure up an image of the kind of transmutative elixir I found that night. People mostly scoff at the notion of the rave and the raver. But when I stumbled into that party, I encountered something still quite alive and potent, still laden with its cosmological forces. Today the shreds of the rave scene have been overlaid on music festivals and the techno beats of action-movie soundtracks. But at some point it was alive. I had the rare privilege of observing the heights and the death of the American rave scene all while completely clean and sober. The sobriety is significant only in its deviation from the norm and my ability to have observed the scene crumble from its roots as a genuine form of cultural subversion into an overwrought neon underage sex and halter-top celebration.
I honestly can’t tell if the rave scene still exists in some different form and I am unable to identify it due to a curmudgeonly perspective warp so pronounced that when I see what “kids these days” call a rave I feel like I’m a Bill Haley and His Comets fan listening to Black Sabbath and declaring, “That’s not rock and roll!” I just know when I see a DJ in a Halloween mask pressing PLAY from behind a laptop during an afternoon music festival sponsored by American Express, when I see a seventeen-year-old girl vomiting up Heineken and Molly pills in the corner of an inflatable Red Bull TECHNO GIVES YOU WINGS tent, it just doesn’t feel like what we were talking about back then.
Although there are certainly people who’d scoff at my claims of being some kind of old-school expert on the topic myself. I remember at one of my first parties in 1995, I was talking to a British guy on a patio who was looking around, shaking his head, and telling me he couldn’t identify with what the scene had become. He was among the first generation of people who had brought the rave scene into the Bay Area, and what he saw that night was unrecognizable; it was big and dynamic rather than small and totally secret. To him, its very vitality was a death pang. I still remember looking at that guy and wondering why he couldn’t see the beauty around him. It was like we were looking at the same painting and while he sneered at the banality of the Mona Lisa, having moved on to the modern art section of his art history class, I was standing there, staring at her sexy little smirk and the hot hot heat of that brown robe gripping her medieval Italian titties.
Perhaps that’s just the cycle of things: Someone invents something new and fresh, and it keeps shedding its skin into something slightly different and slightly bigger until, eventually, the inventor cannot identify his creation and a new squad of tinkerers convinces themselves they are, in fact, the masters of the new creature until they also cannot tame the beast.
That’s my claim when it comes to electronic music. I wasn’t there at the beginning; I was there at the beginning of the end. I was there at its underground apex, the moment before its slide, the last years before it burst above the Earth’s mantle and made it possible for Paris Hilton and DJ Pauly D[*2] to see electronic music as some sort of viable career extender. It never occurred to us back then that anyone could or would make real-world money on this stuff. The highest heights that we could imagine with raves and electronic music was that, someday, someone in the mainstream would catch the interest of the world and act as a translator, allowing the masses to understand what we saw in the repetitive throb.
One of the most baffling aspects of the rave scene to an outsider who didn’t understand what we were doing was our worship of the DJ. The prominence of the DJ as the alpha performer at most raves was evidence that the emperor of our electronic kingdom was wearing no clothes. “So you go to watch a person play other people’s music? That’s not musicianship. That’s a guy playing records.” It just didn’t make sense back then (and to some people now) how you could even compare a DJ with a band whose members were playing instruments, creating the sounds, playing songs they wrote. At least with hip hop you could look at the cutting and scratching as a sound that was being made by the DJ, independent of the record itself.
The misunderstanding comes from looking at a digital scene with analog eyes. The electronic music DJ wasn’t a person who played an instrument. They were the instrument. Producers made their music to be mixed. They made their records for the DJs. The record wasn’t just a record, it was a string on the guitar. Unlike the musician, who makes something from nothing, the DJ took two somethings and made a third thing. So the complaint that the music was too repetitive and simplistic was based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of what the point of the music was. It was repetitive by design, not by lack of musical capability. The DJ is a fundamental interchange. When the DJ takes two house records and slides the crossfader into the middle of the mixer so that both records are playing simultaneously often for minutes at a time, the sounds you hear have never been made before. It’s a third thing. A creation. A collaboration based on blind trust. Record one might’ve been made by a bedroom producer in Berlin, record two might be a classic from a long-dead Chicago house icon, and the person who stands behind the decks, playing them together, has created a temporary, momentary homage. He has done his due diligence. He has changed the air in the room.
After that first party, I was never the same person again. It was an instant and extreme change. I caught the bus home in the morning after Cyberfest ’95 with the music still pounding in my ears. I held an elaborate burial ritual for all my Fila gear that night. Never again. I needed pants. Big ones. Goofy ones. Rave ones. Thanks be to Allah, Ross Dress for Less had caches of rave clothes that could be obtained on a pauper’s salary. The Ross philosophy is to sell clothing that only the very poor or the very blind could love. Irregular mismanufactured T-shirts with pant legs accidentally sewn onto the sleeve, turtlenecks designed for giraffes only, Mickey Mouse boxer shorts with Mickey’s hand raised in a Nazi salute, that kind of thing. One buffoonish item at a time, I built an identity.
JNCO brand jeans were the preferred pant selection for the proper raver.
The JNCO family is an old and storied clothing manufacturer. Its patriarch, Salvatore Jnco, was a master tailor in Monaco and hand sewed the most famous harlequin costumes of his age. Sadly, when Mussolini came to power and outlawed the Italian circus, the Jnco family loom came to a grinding halt. Salvatore died of a broken heart a year later. His son, Giuseppe Jnco, took the family secrets and boarded a ship to America with dreams of fashioning oversized garments for the hardscrabble Yankees, who he figured must be in need of pants forty-seven sizes too large. Day and night he sewed those pants in obscurity until, finally, techno parties made such culturally oblong garments a must-have.
Absolutely none of what I just wrote is true. But what is true is that I had to have JNCOs, and they had to be big.
There is much debate on exactly how ravers cracked the code on dressing so poorly. Whether a by-product of psychedelic vision quests or simply the unlucky result of a social scene that takes place in mostly dingy, poorly lit warehouses where people take drugs that affect their visual acuity and make them think everything is fucking beautiful, ravers have long been the vanguard of taking a rather Ringling Brothers approach to street fashion. Huge pants, chain wallets, and childish iconography were staples of raver fashion. But just when you thought it couldn’t get worse than a pair of pants more suitable for a “before” photo on an advertisement for gastric bypass surgery, the ravers took it a step further and invented kandi. A sort of fashion-based, imposed infantilization that took the form of piles and piles of charm bracelets, stacked and layered around the neck and wrists like a kind of Mr. T of the homosexual child community.
I got big JNCO jeans and corduroys with huge paisley inserts sewn into the seams to make them comically flared and large. I bleached my hair white blond and sprinkled glitter in it. I’d bought a packet of baby barrettes and clipped them into my frosty blond locks. I curled my hair into little Björk buns. My brother was away at college and returned for a visit about a month into my raver rebranding.
“You look like my brother, but I guess you’re my sister now?”
Nothing he had to say bothered me. I knew I looked foolish to other people, but I just didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I didn’t care. I’d been stripped of my callous Oakland exoskeleton, and the soft tissues of the little worm I actually was were exposed to the sunlight. Exposed to the air. I loved how it stung. I loved how it burned. I crawled to the next party.
My second rave was a wholly different affair from Cyberfest. It was an underground party. And it created yet another transformation in me.
This guy Jeremy, an older, more experienced raver who had recently gotten sober, too, whispered the secret of this party into my ear at the tail end of my last ever AA dance. I was still split in two. All dressed up with nowhere to rave. Posters for Cyberfest had been stapled on every telephone pole in Oakland and tickets were available at Ticketmaster. Easy to find. But I didn’t know how to get to another. Some raver I was. Big pants, big dreams. Still no plans better than an AA dance on Saturday.
Jeremy smiled at me. “You look like you know how to dance. You go to parties?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve been to one and bought these pants, which have essentially alienated me from all my old friends, so I’d say yeah, I go to party. Singular.”
He laughed. “What party did you go to?”
I shuffled, embarrassed. “Cyberfest?”
He laughed again but kindly. “C’mon, dude, lemme show you a real party.”
We piled into his car and took off. The moon shone bright and full in the suburban sky. That was significant. I just didn’t know it yet.
The full-moon parties were a pivotal party in the San Francisco rave legend. Every month a crew called Wicked threw renegade gatherings under the light of the full moon. They were outdoor parties that you’d chase down via rumor and voicemail messages instructing you on where to go. Call the number. A click. A pickup. Over the phone you’d hear music play. If you’d made it this far you were almost home. A British accent, a voice dripping with secret possibilities, said nothing but an address. A street corner. An intersection.
Start the car. Drive. Be cool. On the corner was a man holding slips of paper. He handed one over with a wink. Almost there. The small note read “Bonny Dune, Santa Cruz.”
As we rounded the bend on California State Route 1, it was nearly two a.m. The cars parked on the side of the road told a story I liked. Alien heads and psychedelic flower stickers stuck to the rear windows meant we’d arrived at the right place. We parked. Opened the door to the car. Heard the throb. Somewhere nearby there was a party. We just had to follow the sound. That far-off pulse of a party happening without you is one that nostalgic ex-ravers know well. It was like a bread crumb trail for Hansels and Gretels hungry to dance. We followed the trail. Walking through the brush and the clifftops of the beachhead, we peeked a hundred feet down to the beach below. The moon lit the way like a disco ball suspended in air. Way down by the water, five hundred, maybe a thousand kids crowded around an altar built in front of the DJ. Huge speaker stacks raised the question, How had anyone dragged those things down that far? I yelled, “See you down there!” to Jeremy. I took off running. Down the sandy dune as fast as I could go. Sand flew up the enormous opening in my newly purchased raver pants. I didn’t care. It was time to dance. Two a.m. seemed like a nice time to start the real party.
The scene couldn’t have been more different from Cyberfest. These kids were hippie ravers, psychedelic denizens. The DJ stood tall, long dreadlocks tangled up in his headphones. The music was slower than at Cyberfest, deeper, it ground down into the beach below. This was the psychedelic disco sound that the San Francisco rave scene was underground-famous for. This was a real fucking party. The wisps of the original flames that lit England ablaze burned bright here. If Cyberfest was Kenny G, this was John fucking Coltrane.
Let me stop here. Let me go back a bit. Actually quite a bit.
Let’s go back to 1979. Six days before that shock jock DJ poisoned the well of disco, I was born in Queens, New York. According to Jewish custom, the firstborn son is to be named by the mother. The second belonged to Daddy. My older brother was David. I was number two. My father stepped forward proudly upon my birth and declared my name: MOSHE!
“No way!” My mom laughed. “We can’t call him Moshe! That’s a ridiculous name. It sounds like Moose. We’ll call him Mark.” Let’s all keep in mind that my mother is deaf and has never heard the word Moose and cannot hear the name Moshe (pronounced MO-shuh) or the name Mark. But for some reason, against the rules of logic and tradition, my mother won the argument that day. The name on my birth certificate: Mark Moshe Kasher.
When my parents split, the one small battle my father never stopped fighting was over that name. He never referred to me as Mark. To him I was Moshe. To my brother, I was Mo. To my mother, I was Mark Moose Kasher.
I never identified with the name Mark. Never. But I was hardly brave enough to step into an Oakland public school classroom and declare, when the teacher called out roll, “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind calling me by my biblically mandated name, Moshe, the patriarchs and I would really appreciate it.”
So I stayed Mark. I stayed Mark even when it became a commonly used hip hop slang insult. A mark was a bad thing to be. It was a nerd, a fool, a coward.
“You a mark, Mark,” the kids yelled at me and howled in laughter.
“Hell yeah, you a mark ass busta!”
“At least I’m not a moose!” I snapped back to the confused silence of my tormentors.
And the truth was, I was a mark. I was a fool. I was a coward. At least I felt like one. Always. I’m telling you that, always, I felt like an oblong, misshapen fool.
Then I found drugs and booze and forgot about my shape altogether. Mark went from a fool and a coward to a fool and a criminal. He ran like hell to outpace the crushing reality of how he felt.
There is a videogame, a real classic, called Katamari Damacy. In it you play a prince, small and insignificant, who rolls a little sticky ball in front of him as he runs through the land. The ball is so sticky that it picks up everything in his path. Small things at first, thimbles and threads, pieces of straw and dander. It gradually gains in size and scale until it’s picking up buildings and mountains and the heavens themselves. Eventually that ball is so big and powerful that it’s used to rebuild the moon. And that night, under the light of the real moon, the full moon, I stopped pushing my ball for good.
You see, I was just like that little prince. I started running and gathering everything in sight that could cover up the little Mark that I was. Small things at first, an embarrassed swallowing of the pride, a slight change of my accent, until eventually I was snagging everything in sight. Trauma, court cases, drug addiction, all of it. Then when I got sober, I pushed that ball into the AA meetings with me. It had swelled and ballooned to unimaginable size. There was much more ball than there was me. I was all ball. I got swallowed up in it, too. It towered over me, threatening me with each massive rotation.
The first thing people asked me when I arrived in AA was, “What’s with the fucking ball?”
“You’re asking me? That thing is why I came here in the first place! What do I do?!”
“Stop running!” they said.
I was shocked. “But if I do that, it will run me over!”
“You’ll be fine!” they yelled back.
“I’ll be fine? You sure?”
“You’ll be fine,” they reassured me.
I stopped running. I stopped pushing my ball. It stopped short. It teetered. It groaned. It rolled back toward me. It ran me over. I was flattened by that fucking thing. Like Wile E. Coyote creamed by an Acme Co. steamroller, I was ground into the dirt. It nearly destroyed me.
“Why did you tell me to stop running?! That hurt like hell!”
“Ha-ha, yeah, it does hurt!” They laughed. They laughed! They knew this would happen!
I got up. Puffed some air into my flattened body. Brushed the dust off.
“Well, what the hell do I do now?”
The ball had stopped moving, but it was still there. Looming. It was a relief not to have to keep pushing it, but it still defined me. Still surrounded me.
“I said, what do I do?” I was pissed now.
Somebody in AA walked over, handed me a small hammer and a chisel, and said, “Get to work.”
I’d been chipping away at that ball ever since. It was smaller these days. Smaller every day. But it wasn’t gone. Remember, just last month I’d reached into the ball and pulled out a bottle of cologne stuffed into a sock. My mighty weapon.
Despite my Jesus-in-the-desert moment at Cyberfest, that ball still followed me down to the beach that night. It was raving right beside me. But I was ready for a change.
I sat down with Jeremy at a bonfire as the party raged around me. He introduced me to a friend of his. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Hell, every woman here was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“I’m Alona,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“It’s…”
I looked at the ball.
“It’s…”
I heard the music.
“It’s…”
I looked at the full moon, felt its light. It seemed like maybe it needed to be rebuilt.
“My name is Moshe.”
Jeremy smiled and hugged me to him. “Well, all right!”
Alona smiled, too. “It’s nice to meet you, Moshe!”
“Oh, have you met my ball?”
I looked over to where that ball had been sitting. Hmm. It was gone.
The moon seemed a little fuller than before.
I have never gone by anything but my real name since.
Never seen that fucking ball, either.
Physically rebuilt and spiritually reborn, I was now truly bathing in the reality of my new image. I was a raver. I had never had so much fun in my life. Every weekend was spent chasing down the next party. All week long I waited for the weekend. I began to lose weight, too. There are few fat ravers. Something about the combination of amphetamine drugs and twelve-plus hours of hard-charging warehouse cardio dancing will melt the pounds away. Of course, I had no amphetamine. But I was kept moving by the psychic amphetamines of the new community. Their energy seeped into me. I really think I was as high as anyone else.
There’s an old joke about the rave scene that is really an old joke about the Grateful Dead:
Q: What did the raver say when he sobered up?
A: This music sucks!
But it didn’t. Not to me. I was sober the entire time I raved, and I loved every second of it. Loved every mechanical bleep and blorp I heard. That experience I was having didn’t exactly translate or make sense to the other sober people in my life.
I brought this kid, Casey, to one of my earliest parties, a rave called Chrysalis that took place in a small warehouse loft space in downtown San Francisco.
After an AA meeting one night, I told him where I was off to and invited him to join me. We jumped in his car and crossed the Bay Bridge. The moment we entered that loft, we were slammed with a wall of heat and moisture, stink and sweat. You put enough dancing kids in a loft space meant to hold forty people and you are quite literally going to change the atmosphere. Casey thought he was on his way to a nightclub that night, because that’s the only thing he’d really have to compare it to. A big technologically savvy space with lighting trellises set up by interior design engineers. Girls dressed up in heels and halter tops, ready for a “night on the town.” But what Casey saw that night freaked him right the fuck out. Twacked-out hippie kids with their heads stuck literally all the way into the speakers, screaming in demonic orgasmic delight. Girls with their shirts off, walking freely, no one giving them a second look. Crowds of people standing in awe around a single doofus with a couple of glow sticks in his hands making the light dance in the air. Nag Champa incense burning from an altar that hung from the ceiling, statues of Shiva and Vishnu bookending an array of Native American smudge sticks and Santeria crosses, the confused spirituality of the hippie rave movement on full display. He saw all this stuff, and it didn’t compute. But worst of all was when he walked into the chill room and saw me. I’d become one of them.
Chill rooms were a ubiquitous part of the raves back then. They were quiet, calm spaces for people to come lie down and ride the rest of their psychedelic trips out. The chill room DJ’s sole job was to create a music and atmosphere so relaxed and trippy that the partygoer forgets he’s at a party and thinks he’s on a one-way spaceship trip to Andromeda. If all that wasn’t trippy enough for poor Casey, there were also the cuddle puddles. I really am sorry for the name, but that’s what they were called! And honestly, as corny of a name as cuddle puddle is, there is no better phrase to describe them.
Ecstasy makes touching things feel great. Kissing, touching, hugging, massaging, every one of these experiences feels like God’s reaching out and touching Adam’s finger. Shockwaves. When enough people at a rave are high enough on ecstasy and wander into the chill room at the same time, it reaches a critical mass and the gravitational pull is simply too much to resist. The cuddle puddle would congeal organically in the chill room with two people, then three then six people reaching out to touch one another in whatever way felt safe and good. From people staring deeply into one another’s third eye all the way to sticking their fingers into one another’s second hole, nothing was taboo. It felt totally regular, despite the heavy drugs everybody was on and the open displays of sexualities. It somehow felt totally innocent.
With Casey upstairs wandering around dazed, I ran straight into the cuddle puddle and joined the writhing mound of love that was undulating and shifting the subspace between bodies at the loft that night. I connected deeply to a stranger in the puddle, and as we touched each other lightly and absorbed into one another like a Changeling connecting to the Great Link in Deep Space 9, the puddle began to chat, as one, “PLUR! PLUR! PLUR!”
PLUR indeed.
PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect) is an absurd acronym that was the unofficial core philosophy of the rave scene. The great irony being, of course, that it’s nearly impossible to respect someone who yells “PLUR, man!!” at the top of his lungs when a DJ drops a particularly “dope beat.” Nevertheless, at the time, the PLUR code was taken pretty seriously. Everyone was welcome at the early parties, whatever your race, whatever your orientation, whoever you were, you were welcome to rave. The dance floor provided a safe space of nonjudgment and equanimity. There was no hierarchy here; we were just there to dance. Sadly, over time, PLUR became a mostly forgotten relic of a scene that got commodified. It now exists only in tattoo form, a painful reminder to people who got a little too swept away by those early parties. A guy I used to rave with once pulled off a fresh bandage and proudly showed me his new ink. It read: 100% San Francisco Raver, PLUR! He looked in my eyes expectantly waiting for the “Fuckin’ right on, man! Your commitment to this scene is incredibly admirable. Before I thought you might have been as low as 75 to 80 percent San Francisco raver, but now that I see this incredibly large and permanent logo you’ve affixed to your forearm, I realize my folly!” Even then, as swept up in the raver madness as I was, I recognized that tattoo as a fatal flaw in a person’s long-term hopes for success. I hope I’m wrong, but I imagine that guy today, every time that tattoo flashes past his eyes, just thinking, “Shit, I haven’t been to a rave in twenty years. I should’ve gone to law school.”
Anyway, beneath that throng of humanity, I peered up and saw Casey looking for me. I yelled out to him, “Casey! What’s up, dude?” He looked around, confused. “I’m down here, dude! Look under the guy in the fluorescent soccer jersey, just to the right of the butt cheek of the gal sucking a Kermit the frog pacifier. See me now?”
Casey squinted, then his eyes went big. “Moshe! Hey, man, what are you doing?”
I smiled. “Getting my cuddle puddle on!”
Casey nodded, clearly thinking I had relapsed in the car on the way over the bridge. “Uh…I think I’m gonna take off. This isn’t exactly my scene,” he said. It was at this moment that I realized that what I was doing was a refined experience, not for everyone. Casey left and I kept cuddling, kept connecting, kept raving.
In very short order, AA meetings took a serious back seat to parties. I adorned myself with kandi jewelry, bought a pacifier,[*3] and started bringing a stuffed monkey puppet with me to raves. I softened. Deeply.
I also started meeting and hooking up with girls at these parties. The rave scene had much of the free love of the hippie movement laid into its foundations. The bacchanal of that first night didn’t wear off at all. Sex was everywhere, and it was wild, easy, fun, and exciting. I was young, sixteen when I first started going to parties, and the girls I was meeting and making out with were nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three…and so beautiful.
Prior to the raves, my sexuality was largely informed by lessons gleaned from West Coast gangsta rap. The first Too $hort song I heard made every sex ed lecture my mom ever gave me fall entirely out of my mind. I mean, who knew more about fucking, Too $hort or my mom?[*4] As a result, all I really understood about sex was that at the end I was supposed to say, “Awwww, yeeeeeeeah!” and then leave. I knew and understood nothing about sex, sexuality, women, pleasure, and what they had to do with one another. AA helped a lot by introducing me to strong, powerful women, some of whom were instrumental in helping me get sober. None of whom had the slightest bit of romantic interest in me. Even in Young People’s AA meetings, the average woman was much older than me, and so I made many older sisters but no lovers. And it’s not like I was particularly attractive back then. Pimply faced, angry with an attitude, I greased my hair with Three Flowers (a Mexican hair product), talked with a Southern accent (a Black affectation), and was loud and obnoxious (a white behavioral tic). I sweated the Three Flowers onto my face, which created a ring of acne around my chin. I guess what I’m saying is I was chronically unfuckable when I got sober.
Underage, unattractive, and ugly tempered? That’s a combo every woman in Oakland AA was able to resist. Which was nice. Everyone treated me like a little brother. All the women babied me, picked me up for meetings, spoke to me kindly. It was a kind of healing. I slowly learned about treating women with respect by learning to respect these recovering women. Then, when I started to drop the more unattractive aspects of my personality, shed some baby fat by dancing all night, and took the grease out of my hair, girls started to think I was cute. By the time that unexpected bonus of life came around I was transitioning into semi-nice-guy territory. My personality was also coming alive. I was starting to feel comfortable in my own skin. I could be funny and charming.
The rave scene was oozing sexuality. Everyone was down to fuck everyone. Sure, it wasn’t completely healthy and there were some scabies outbreaks here and there, but it was just part of the big incestuous family I had just joined. So what exactly is therapeutic about a sixteen-year-old kid getting laid after a big warehouse party where he spent the night dancing and lying in a pile of people out of their faces on Molly and ketamine? It was, through admittedly unconventional means, rewiring me, re-creating me, and forging a new identity that would last me the rest of my life.
Looking back, I now understand the dolls and the glitter, the free love and the pacifiers, the cuddle puddles and the infantile fashion, the fingering and the fucking as a lay experiment in a neural rewire. What the rave scene did for me was similar to the work the people at MAPS[*5] do with MDMA, the drug of choice of the rave scene and PTSD-addled combat veterans. In a calm setting, clinicians give the former soldier a dose of MDMA and slowly, as the drug comes on, guide them back into the mental space of where their trauma took place, opening it up, letting some sunshine in, breaking down the barrier, and allowing them to reframe their world going forward. The Molly breaks down their fear of approaching the trauma, trauma so deep that to even look at it will spiral them into a rage or a breakdown of terror. It’s the kind of trauma something like the twelve steps can’t sufficiently heal you from; it’s radioactive, charged with mental explosives that any approach will detonate. The Molly acts as a MacGyver, sneaking past the barbed wire, swimming through the moat, crawling to the explosives, and gently clipping the wire. The drug makes the trauma threat, the huge, dangerous lumbering monster, shrink down to real size. The trauma can then be reapproached; the experience can be reexamined, reexperienced, reprocessed, and recovered from. Without the MDMA it would have stayed unapproachable for life. It would have stayed trauma. Malignant. Festering. Unhealed.
Pretending to be on MDMA did that for me. Dancing did that for me. Glitter did that for me. And, of course, I know my trauma doesn’t compare to an Iraq war vet’s, but it still had a stranglehold on my life. I missed so many milestones of development. So many innocent journeys that kids go on to discover themselves were abandoned for a blindfolded cliff jump into the churning waters of teenage drug addiction.
I started molting, shedding old, calloused skin, moving back, back, back in time. As fast as I was developing, I was also de-developing.
The glitter and the barrettes and the dolls and the bright colors and, yes, even the fucking pacifier provided me an artificial, hyperbaric chamber of a second chance at childhood. The cuddle puddles and the dancing and the hugs gave me a new and refreshed idea of manhood and masculinity. The raver girls and the free love and the JNCO dry humps reset my ideas of women and sex and sexuality. Did I immediately begin treating all sexual partners with the utmost respect and communication, never ghosting anyone, never objectifying, always the perfect progressive boy-feminist? Of course not. I was still a heterosexual teenage male, the glitter notwithstanding. It wasn’t that I became a perfect enlightened and evolved being. I became how I imagine I would have been had I not fallen into an abyss of addiction, crime, violence, and ethnic hair care products. I was so far on one extreme of teenage life and the rave scene pulled me so far to another that eventually it could swing back to the middle.
I reapproached old ideas and replaced them with new ones. I was made totally unafraid of the process by the euphoria of the cultural contact high. The vibe was my Molly. The scene was my clinician. The future was mine. The pendulum swung into areas that were absurd, sure, and I know that it’s not common for a teenage wannabe to find a therapeutic breakthrough with a gorilla hand puppet on one hand and a glow stick in the other, but that’s what happened to me. This community, these people, these drugged-out scenesters, were just as significant for me as AA was. They saved my life, recovered my mind, and spun my perspective 180 degrees. As cheesy a credo as PLUR was, it certainly beat “Trust no bitch.”
My transformation complete, I quickly had to wrestle with a dilemma. Raves were expensive, and I was seventeen, unemployed, and broke. I needed to either find a way to buy a ticket every weekend or find a way to get in free.
Sneaking in wasn’t really my thing. AA enforces a kind of pilpul rule following morality that seems to suggest things like sneaking into raves are a surefire shortcut to relapse. That said, I do know the greatest techniques for sneaking into parties from years of working the door: the box and the moonwalk.
These are not the brutish, “Goths sacking Rome” inelegant techniques of hopping an unguarded fence or finding a group of like-minded goons to run full-speed into the entrance of a party; those techniques are for barbarians. Barbarians are not my people. I prefer the sophisticated technique of the sneaky thinker. I like elegant attempts so nimble they are as akin to psychological experiments as much as they are attempts at trespass.
“The box” relies on simple consumer psychology. People want to feel like they know what’s going on; confusion or uncertainty is embarrassing. Put simply the box is…a box. A plain cardboard box will do, but a milk crate full of equipment-like stuff works even better. Make it big, big enough to slightly obscure your face but not cover your eyes. Your eyes are important. They do the talking for you. You simply put the box in your arms, walk right to the entrance of the rave or music festival, and (this is incredibly important): look like you and your box have an important function inside the party. Something about a confident person walking with purpose with a box in hand renders a door guy incapable of saying anything door guy–ish like, “Hey, what are you doing?” “Where are you and that box going?” “Does your box have a ticket to get in?” or “Cool box but no dice, Buster!” Door guy can only stare in admiration and think, “That box and its handler need to get somewhere. I better not get involved.”
The other ultimate sneak-in technique, the moonwalk, is my favorite because it incorporates psychology, illusion, and kinesiology in a grand and elegant dance. The technique is simple. Walk to the exit of a party, where a throng of ravers are walking out of the party, making their way home or to their car to grab more pacifiers. Now, flip around so your back is to the exiters. As the crowd moves outward in one direction, you slowly and seamlessly walk backward into the party using the forward movement of the crowd the way a cheetah uses tall grass on the savanna to obscure its movements. This illusion creates a nickelodeon type of movement: You move backward but no yellow-windbreaker-wearing security guard is capable of seeing you. It’s amazing and works 100 percent of the time and absolutely cannot fail.[*6]
None of these techniques were for me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t admire them. Also, observing them from afar set me up for the years I would work the Gate at Burning Man, searching cars for stowaways, but we’ll get to that later. Since I wasn’t down to sneak in but absolutely had to rave every weekend and absolutely did not have money to pay for admission, I needed another way.
I had a major realization, one that sounds like a monologue from a David Mamet play: There is an invisible line in the population at every rave, in every scene, maybe everywhere. On one side of the line are the people who paid to get in, the masses, the throng that pays for everything to get done. They aren’t cool but they are necessary; without them the show can’t go on. On the other side of the line is a much smaller group: Those who don’t pay. They, for whatever reason, have figured out some way to get in free or even make money from the party they are attending. I wanted to be on that side of the line. I wanted to be a professional raver. Over the years, in scene after scene, I would hop this invisible line repeatedly, the one from participant to professional, from patron to paid; again and again I would have the same realization often coming too late to do anything about it: Once you come into the “free zone,” the spell is broken. It’s like being on the guest list to a magic show, but the only way to get to your seats is to walk through the backstage, watch the magician mid–costume change, a huge metal contraption affixed to his waist that, when covered with velour, looks like a floating orb but from back here it looks like a cheat. Being a pro in your scene is cool and exciting—it pays well in social currency and power and eventually even real money, but it strips away the thing that made you love the scene so much you wanted to turn it into a full-time pursuit in the first place.
But I didn’t know all that then. I just knew I needed to get to the other side of that line. I started passing out flyers for the following weekend’s party at the exit where people, if they were smart, were moonwalking past me. I did this long enough to want desperately to have my own party. Nothing on Earth seemed cooler and more important to seventeen-year-old me than to have a rave of my very own.
I approached a slimy businessman / bar mitzvah DJ I knew in AA who owned a sound system with a proposition for the ages: If he’d invest in my rave production company and foot the entire bill, I would give him…and the Jew in me is very ashamed to admit this…100 percent of the profit. He eagerly agreed. I would do all of the work, book the DJs, hire the lighting guy, pass out the flyers, promote it with the skills I’d learned at the exits of the raves I’d been handing out flyers at, and he would get literally all of the money.
It took me years to look back and realize how profoundly unethical you’d have to be to hear a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old’s pitch to work hundreds of hours in exchange for absolutely nothing and shake on it with a smile. You’d think he’d have at least peeled me off a few hundred bucks but no, he had his mark and to be fair, I conned myself. It was my idea.
My first party was called Meridian and the flyer I designed used, I believe, a stock image of dancing figures I found on a clip art website. Under the block letters MERIDIAN was a laughable if laudable mission statement: “Dedicated to Taking Our Scene Back.” Back from what? I was seventeen, had been attending raves less than a year, and already wanted to “take our scene back.” Back to, I guess, nine months earlier when raves were still underground. Ah, the salad days of that past September.
Saturday, April 27, 1996. I found a small warehouse space South of Market in San Francisco. A “virgin” space. Ravers were obsessed with this, with popping the cherry of an abandoned office building or former lumberyard. The sound system would be provided by my investor over at “Hava Nagila Inc.” I would book the DJs and the nitrous dealer. I actually got in a little trouble for this. As a sober guy, I was somewhat lost when it came to the drug options for my potential guests. I wanted it to be “as rave as possible,” but apparently nitrous oxide (or “Hippie Crack,” as they called it) created a vibe of fiendish ravers lining up, desperate to get their balloons filled, waving them in the air like refugees waving immigration paperwork at a border. It was a gray-area taboo. I knew none of this. I was aware that alcohol was forbidden. I know, hard to imagine, but at early raves, booze was a social no-no. Ecstasy, ketamine, and GHB were warmly welcomed as consciousness-expanding drugs, but booze was looked at as a kind of “bad vibe” drug of mainstream society. Instead of alcohol, makeshift bars at early parties would serve “Smart Drinks,” smoothies that were stuffed full of amino acids and herbal supplements that had supposed psychedelic drug–enhancing properties. This is all before the Jamba Juice–on-every-corner revolution, man. That’s right, folks; I remember smoothies back when they were still underground. That’s how cool I really am.
Entrance was five dollars before midnight and seven after. Though you’d have to pay me exponentially more with each passing minute to get me to arrive at a party that late now; the peak hour of a rave was way past the witching hour. Two a.m. This is when you’d have your best DJ, this is when the people would be highest on whatever drug they were on, this is when the vibe would explode. We went all night long. We raved till dawn. We moved until we couldn’t move. We beat the sun. Any real raver worth their salt will tell you the most euphoric feeling back then was dancing and dancing and dancing until, from the eastern corner of the warehouse wall, soft, pale fingers of light drew themselves onto the shoddy cracks in the corrugated steel walls of this most incongruous of dance spaces. The light spread across the room until it became a participant in the party. Until it became the reason we partied. We danced until the light was there.
That’s how we danced.
As the party approached its peak, its, forgive me, meridian, I walked down the hallway connecting the main dance floor to the chill room at the back of the warehouse. A guy I knew from the scene approached me and gave me a hug, his kandi necklace grinding into my collarbone. “This is the best party I’ve ever been to, man! Thank you for putting it on. PLUR, brother.”
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. On the dance floor, three hundred kids writhed and pumped to the DJ, perhaps having their own pupa-to-butterfly moment like I’d had at Cyberfest. In the chill room, smiles were huge and the puddles were a-cuddlin’. I’d done something special. I’d made a rave. This was, without exaggerating, the first thing in my life I’d done right. Middle-school dropout, rehab flunker, teenage drug addict, but now: rave promoter (unpaid).
The party went off without a hitch. It was a huge success for my investor and a huge moral victory for me. I was now a rave promoter, and that meant I was now on the side of the “doesn’t pay” line. But I was also on the unemployment line. I decided I would become a full-time rave promoter and, inspired by the cool figures I danced in front of every weekend, a DJ. One small problem was, of course, I did not know how to DJ. DJing required expensive equipment. I threw another party, this one with slightly better terms for me, and with the money I made I was able to buy myself two Technics 1200 turntables and a mixer.
Now it was time to practice.
On this front I had a massive advantage: I still lived with my mother, and my mother is deaf. I could spend all day long trainwrecking techno beats[*7] and no one would ever complain. I slowly got better and felt ready to start performing at parties. I hustled my way into a few gigs playing in the chill rooms, which had a lower barrier of entry than the main dance floor lineups. I understood the irony of a two-years-sober guy, still attending AA meetings, stealing off on the weekends to sonically guide people peaking on acid or writhing in MDMA euphoria. I loved it. I would spend my days poring through bins at the Amoeba Music record store trying to find obscure new age music from the seventies like Ray Lynch’s “Deep Breakfast” and mix it with a Chaka Khan a cappella track. I’d mix Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” sped up to 45 rpm with a fast ambient jungle track. I’d play Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” and mix in a DJ Shadow instrumental beat back and forth to make the song last for ages. Over this I might play “Blackbird” by the Beatles. What I lacked in DJ skills I made up for in taking wild, risky mashup swings. I wouldn’t say I got popular, but people liked what I was doing because it seemed no one else did it. I started to make a tiny name for myself and got booked more and more. I was a small-time rave promoter, a small-time chill room DJ, and was having big-time fun. I became like the mayor of the San Francisco rave scene. I started to know all the players, and they knew me. Every entrance to a party was like the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas, pointing, shaking hands, pressing the flesh.
There was a high-powered rave promoter named Craig who ambled up to me during one of his smaller parties (still five times bigger than the events I put on). After I’d finished up playing my chill room set, he told me that he was impressed with my set and with the fact that he’d heard I was sober. He was, too.
Craig was, let’s say, a unique guy. He was built like a ninja, covered in tattoos, and had a single dreadlock growing from the back of his head.
His car, a 1989 Mitsubishi Eclipse, was hyper-customized to create a “Batman” vibe. Actually, no, vibe is the wrong word. He was trying to build an actual Batmobile on a Mitsubishi chassis. The license plate read BATCAVE and the brake lights had silhouettes of the Batman symbol placed inside the plastic so that every time he tapped the brake to slow down, a shakily cut-out bat symbol would illuminate and announce to the world what his favorite DC Comics character was. The center console was cut and fabricated to have bat ears, fashioned out of fake leather and cardboard. There were secret compartments to hold…nerve gas, I guess? Those bat ears should have been a red flag warning me not to go into business with him, but I was seventeen, raves were by far the most important thing in my life, and Craig seemed like the coolest person I’d ever met. He was fucking Batman!
Batman took a shine to me. He told me that he was building a rave empire and that he wanted me to be his right-hand man, his Robin, if you will. He’d teach me all he knew about throwing massive parties and eventually turn the keys to his rave kingdom over to me. He’d also book me on every party he threw and help me grow my name as a DJ. Of course, a guy approaching me, a near stranger, and offering me a full partnership in his business should also have been a red flag, but I’d already ignored the Batman stuff so why not ignore this, too? After all, it was a huge opportunity. Never mind that Craig’s former partner, a kid named Slinky, had pulled me aside and warned me that Craig would use me, not pay me, and discard me when I complained about not getting paid, but again, I was already committed to ignoring red flags. Haven’t you been listening to me?
Now that Craig the rave king had taken me under his batwing, things changed for me in the scene. I was automatically added to every guest list for every party. I was in the 1 percent, firmly on the other side of the line. The access was dizzying and made me feel important. Every weekend, Craig would arrive approximately three hours after he said he was going to pick me up, not apologize for the tardiness, and we would zoom off in the Batmobile to a rave. We started to plan our first party together, a rave called Second Chakra. He wanted it to be a singular event. Craig, for all of his sketchiness, was an incredibly interesting and creative guy, operating on a much more innovative level than any of the other people throwing raves in the Bay Area. He was kind of a genius.
Most rave promoters kept things pretty simple. They knew that the party existing at all was enough for most attendees and that they really didn’t need to do much to satisfy the further needs of a bunch of kids on drugs. Rent a warehouse, a sound system, and some lights barely better than ones you would have gotten at RadioShack, and that would be enough to make people happy.[*8]
Not Craig.
He had a vision of opulence and fun that was positively Wonka-eqsue. His flyers moved away from the then-popular candy-wrapper-and-Lego-inspired renewed-childhood design and instead pulled in Renaissance paintings out of art history class.
Craig would emboss every thousandth flyer in gold leaf, and the embossed flyers would get the lucky recipient in for free, creating a kind of community game with the partygoers. His parties were ornately decorated, semi-Bergdorffian in their attention to detail. I spent hundreds of hours on top of a scissor lift hoisting up a mannequin painted fluorescent blue with huge Angels in America wings affixed to its back. Above the mannequin, we suspended a neon yellow baby doll, hanging in midair inside of an atom made of interlocked red hula hoops. This was the centerpiece, and in a line, we hung a procession of bright yellow female-formed angels as if paying tribute to the yellow baby and his blue plastic father. It was amazing. No one had ever done anything like this before. All the partygoers were dumbstruck when they rounded the bend into the main room and saw this fluorescent Sistine Chapel. I mean, in reality, it would have been laughed out of any art museum as corny and derivative.
But for the ravers that night, it was a slice of heaven.
Craig threw the coolest parties and I was his number one man, which made me the second-coolest guy in the entire San Francisco rave scene. I started getting booked at parties every weekend. I moved slowly out of the chill room and onto the main floor. Things were happening.
There was only one problem.
Despite the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent working on these parties, I never seemed to really get paid. Who could have seen this coming!? I was only given an explicit warning that this exact scenario would occur! Craig would give me money here and there—he’d give me a stack of bills at the end of a successful party, for instance—but it never seemed commensurate with the effort that I’d put in. It never seemed like number two–man money. It felt a little more like bottom bitch money.
When I complained, Craig fast-talked past the actual issue, which was to simply pay me fairly, and offered me…a different solution. I could join his other enterprise. Not as a rave promoter, but by providing a service just as vital to the rave experience as party promotion. And that is how, in 1997, two and a half years sober and two years after I started raving, I became a small-time ecstasy dealer for Batman.
I needed a job, and drug dealing is a classically well-paying profession. This was a very awkward time in my life. I’d become a petty criminal just after totally turning my life around. The rave scene was so socially all-encompassing that it never really occurred to me that I was putting myself at risk of arrest or getting robbed or anything. It just became what I did. I didn’t think about it all that much.
I’d stand at the entrance of every rave and mutter to everyone walking by like a very quiet barker at a Middle Eastern open-air market, “E? E? Anybody need any E?”
Ecstasy dealing at raves is an odd kind of drug dealing because it takes place all at once. Ninety-nine percent of E sales happened upon the phalanx of entry at the beginning of a party. Ravers would walk in with a mission: Find some E, drop it early, and then get the party started. After the first couple of hours of a party, the need for E would plummet to those who got sold fake shit or those who had drug problems and needed more shit.
My shit was good! Or so I was told. I’ve never even taken MDMA. I got sober too young and missed my chance at all that. But I think I know what ecstasy feels like anyway. I’m guessing it feels “really good” and “like a kind of ecstasy.” I was able to use this kind of marketing language to take my biscuit slangin’ to the next level. Each pill was twenty a pop, and I got to keep ten. Craig got the other ten. I could make a couple hundred bucks in a night and then go dance once all the partygoers were satisfied.
But those first couple of hours contained chances for very strange interactions. AA people went to raves. How strange it was to stand there, hawking my MDMA, whispering to strangers “E? E? Need any E? E…GADS! It’s you! From the Tuesday night meeting! How are you, my recovery brother?! Never mind me!”
This kind of split lifestyle wasn’t gonna work. I knew that I would soon be faced with a dilemma: AA or raves. But I also knew at that time that my choice would be pretty clear and pretty easy. I wanted to be a normal kid. I was almost eighteen and I’d finally found a scene where people liked me, where I was confident, and where I could meet girls and they liked me, which is really pretty important to an eighteen-year-old. A place where I had social currency and power. Where fun and earning a living happened at the same time. It was no contest. A few months later, I stopped going to meetings and threw myself further into the scene and further into Craig’s empire.
The parties we threw together were slowly creeping toward massives. In those days there were really two kinds of parties: undergrounds and massives. Undergrounds were smaller affairs, a few hundred people, a lesser-known DJ lineup, and a general desire to stay connected to the PLUR roots of the rave scene. They were small, vibey affairs where you’d manage to hug or dance with most everyone at the party. They vibrated with peace and community. They were not thrown for the money but for some kind of allegiance to the scene. Originally these were the kind of parties I threw and the kind I liked to attend.
Massives, on the other hand, were…massive. They were thrown with the explicit mission of making money and putting on an awe-inspiring (if not love-inspiring) good time. They were permitted by the city and often had off-duty cops working security. Massives were thrown in gigantic warehouses or convention centers, fairgrounds or airplane hangars. They were what you think when you think rave. Lasers zapping, sound system throbbing, thousands and thousands and thousands of people gyrating. They had their place. The first party I went to, Cyberfest, was a massive.
Then there were the hybrid parties, which were essentially small massives trying to be two things at once. Intimate and authentic affairs that were still moneymaking enterprises with thousands of attendees. The ultimate example of this was the Gathering, a massive party by any estimation, but one that had been around San Francisco for so long that it got a pass in pretending to be underground. These hybrid raves were what Craig had been trying to do with his parties. I respected the vision of what Craig was trying to do. I found his ideas exciting and, if I’m being honest, I was excited by the idea of becoming more powerful in the scene. My little underground parties had been amazing. They kept me buzzing for weeks, but there were only a few hundred people there. And they kept getting shut down by the police. Here was an opportunity to take the thing I loved and bring it to scale. Here was my chance to really become a full-time DJ. Here was my chance to make my rave dreams come true.
Craig had bigger dreams yet.
The next party we put on would be a legit massive, in partnership with another production company, but together we worked on a brand-new idea: a massive that spanned genres. Not allowing the lineup to be limited by electronic music, we’d book hip hop acts for what I think was one of the first of its kind. This party was called Planet Rock, and rather than the typical rave acts the headliners were hip hop legends Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.
In hindsight, it was a watershed event. Until that time, even with raves as massive as they were, the idea of nonelectronic musical acts was sort of taboo. I mean, sure, there was the night that Yanni played his weird pan flute in the chill room, but I might have imagined that. Prior to this party, if you wanted a “really big act,” you’d book one of the underground superstars of rave legend, like Frankie Bones or the Detroit innovators of techno Derrick May and Juan Atkins. Or perhaps you’d book one of the European mega DJs like Sasha, John Digweed, or Sven Väth. Are you recognizing any of these names? No? Good, that’s how we liked it!
Planet Rock ripped down that invisible fence between genres and, I would posit, signaled the beginning of the end of the era of the “true rave.” Once the seal was broken, all bets were off, and the scene slowly began to morph into the era of electronic music festivals. Afrika Bambaataa wasn’t exactly a household name—he’s more firmly in the “legend” category—but after this party came parties with KRS-One and the Black Eyed Peas. This isn’t that odd; hip hop and dance music have a lot more in common than most people from either scene used to want to admit. In the early days, there was even a subgenre of both music forms called “hip house,” where rappers rhymed over banging disco beats. The most famous track from this mostly cringey subgenre was “I’ll House You” by the Jungle Brothers. There was “ghetto house,” a house subgenre championed mostly by a guy called DJ Funk who played slammin’ house with absolutely filthy rap samples laid over them. There was “Jungle/Drum and Bass,” which is essentially double-time hip hop break beats that often had MC’s rapping over it. Hip hop and electronic dance music had very similar musical roots both culturally and technically. Both used drum machines and turntables, both relied on DJs to get the party started, both were pioneered by bored Black teenagers in the inner city. But mostly, they’d gone their separate ways and were now coming back to meet one another. It wasn’t out of nowhere, but it was unexpected.
Eventually someone thought, hey, why stop at hip hop? Why not rock? Why not pop? Why not leave the warehouse altogether? Why not be Coachella? This kind of evolution was inevitable. It is a mark of maturity and age. Promoters grow up and move beyond their dreams of being kings of a tiny scene. Eventually they want to make real-world money and do real-world things. Promoters want to send their kids to college, too. And I hate to admit it but eventually you need more than house and techno.
But anyway, back to the party.
Planet Rock was huge, but it was also a disaster. There was a point in the night when the line grew so long and the rate at which people were being let in was so slow that it reached critical mass. I was standing there, staring at the fence as the crowd grew and with it their impatience. Here’s the closest I get to mysticism in life: I believed then and I believe now that the intention of the promoter of one party or another has a direct effect on the demographics and the vibe of the crowd that shows up to that party. If the intentions are pure, the party, even if it’s a massive, will feel pure. The crowd ingests the energy of the party itself and manifests that.
Planet Rock was thrown for money and size. It was a mic drop, a dick-measuring contest. As such, the crowd was greedy, impatient, and unwilling to pitch in with good intentions when logistics broke down. I don’t blame Craig. But I understand why the next thing happened.
The crowd started undulating forward, pushing on the fence, shaking it, and yelling “Let us in!”
They pushed farther. I stood there in shock. I’d helped put this party on—and it was quickly becoming a riot. I tsk-tsked the crowd yelling, “This isn’t who we are! PLUR everybody! Remember? PLUR!” A moment later, the twenty-foot chain-link gate buckled and fell to the ground and thousands of ravers charged at me like a scene from (b)Raveheart.
Okay, so they didn’t remember PLUR.
“Fuck this,” I shouted and ran in toward the production office. Craig was in there with a look I’d never seen him exude: fear. I lit a cigarette, trying to calm down and catch my breath, when another producer of the party came in. “Some teenage girl just OD’d. I think she’s dead.”
I was stunned. What the hell was this party? Had I contributed hundreds of man-hours toward something that had ended a life? And why? For what? Didn’t I do all this rave stuff because it was my community? Didn’t I do it from a place of love? Could I really look around at this party, bloated with commercialism, turned violent and dangerous, and say I was here for anything resembling a good reason? Could I really claim I was the good guy and Craig the bad?
The girl survived. The crowd was eventually calmed down, and order was restored. But something had changed in me.
Planet Rock was a financial nightmare. The promised return for Craig’s investors didn’t come through, and he suddenly went from being the rave king to persona non grata. This is the unfortunate reality of doing business in the legal gray area of “underground” scenes. People are often living hand to mouth, event to event, and their fates pivot quite quickly. It took only one party to end him.
The rave king was deposed.
He needed his number two as his public face. This was my moment to finally take center stage. He explained the terms to me: The next party would be my party. I would be the face of it. I had to be. And it was also going to be a fundraiser for Craig. Specifically him. He was the cause. Getting his Planet Rock investors paid off was the mission of this party that I would be assuming the risk for. He would get the money, and once again I would be paid in enthusiasm. The next next party, the one after this one, that’s when the access codes to his rave kingdom would really, really get turned over to me. That’s the party where I would get paid, would get my accolades, would get all the direct contact with the investors and the people who made all the decisions. I wasn’t getting conned; I was getting pimped.
But I was already in this far. I said okay.
The party was called Pangea, and it was the first of Craig’s parties to be thrown by my production company Bay Area Underground. The people (just me) who brought you Meridian! My long-lost credo “Dedicated to Taking Our Scene Back” would be included on the flyer for this party but with a slight edit. It read “Dedicated to Paying Back What’s Owed, to Those Who Make Our Scene Happen.” It might as well have read, “Dedicated to Paying Craig’s Investors Back.” Why did I like getting ripped off so much?! My only defense was that I was really young (this defense worked better when I was fifteen), in over my head, and a middle-school dropout.
Pangea was a great success. Big but not overwrought, intimate but still raking in the cold hard cash for good (?) ol’ Craig. After that party, right when my time to truly take over had arrived, Craig did the opposite of arriving.
He just disappeared. Poof.
With him gone, my DJ career began to slowly dry up. I hadn’t realized how many of the gigs I got were just from being connected to him. My underground cred was shot by association, so I couldn’t play those parties anymore, and my massive party cred was shot by the same association, so I couldn’t play those parties anymore.
I still got in free to any party I wanted, I was still on that side of the line, but I would mostly go, stand on a wall, and roll my eyes at the changing demographics of the scene. It was getting so young and so…I hate to use incendiary language but…mainstream.
When I’d begun to go to parties I was sixteen. I was the youngest person I’d meet at most raves. By the point I was grumbling on a warehouse wall, sixteen was the median age. Or at least it felt like it was. Did I want to make a living throwing parties for high school kids? Was I Spicoli?
My connection to it all entered a rapid decline. I would get a gig a month, then a gig every few months, and then it had been a long while since I’d been asked to play anywhere. I would walk into record stores in a good mood, look at all the rave flyers for upcoming parties, realize what I already knew—that my name was not on those flyers and that I didn’t really know these people—my blood would begin to boil and I would leave in a terrible mood.
By the summer of 1999, I was a soaky mess. I took baths. Like, a lot. I guess you might call it a depression, but I just thought I was suddenly enamored of getting really, really, like, super clean. I’d wake up at around three p.m., “the crack of evening.” I’d lift my little head up and look around. “Nothing much to do today,” I’d reason and go back to sleep until my body screamed at me to get up. Then I’d draw a bath and get in it.
There are three reasons to take a daily bath: 1) You are a menopausal woman getting back in touch with your body; 2) you live in the year 1813 and your only possibility of getting clean is for the local saloon to heat up a wooden barrel of water and give you a scrub brush to wash the trail dust off of your back; or 3) you are a depressed twenty-year-old clean and sober ecstasy dealer who hasn’t been to a meeting in a year.
Ding-ding, that’s me, number three!
I’d draw the bath and get in and immediately fall back asleep. You know that thing where you stay in the bath so long that your fingers prune up like a real cutie patootie? Well, if you stay in long enough that process continues until the pruning cracks and rips your skin and when you climb out, your hands and feet feel like you’ve run them over a cheese grater. That process would serve as my pain alarm clock to get back up and out of the bath and face the day. Except the day was over. I’d face the night! I’d clean up and put on some clothes and get myself to a rave or a club and I’d stand in the entryway, with a pocket full of ecstasy pills. I was that guy. I’d become that guy.
I’d thought I’d left this life behind, but somehow this thing that had been like a portal to a new life, this scene, this olive branch from the social universe, had swallowed me up and had curdled around me. It wasn’t fun anymore. In a lot of ways, I felt like I was right back where I was before I had even gotten sober. Cynical, jaded, distrustful, angry. Apart. The fact that I was right back there while still sober was alarming.
The last straw was when I saw a flyer for a party featuring a DJ with a rather familiar sounding name, “E-Moshe.” I kept reading the name over and over again. It did not compute. E-Moshe? What the fuck? I’d been playing and promoting parties for years at that point. How could this guy not know that he was naming himself after an established DJ, added an E, and decided to make his debut? I couldn’t go down to Altamont, call myself E-Mick Jagger, and play “Start Me Up.” What the fuck was wrong with this guy?
I decided to find out.
I went to the party this charlatan was performing at (got in free, felt nothing), waited for his set to end, and walked right up to him. “Hey are you”—I had a hard time even saying it—“E…Moshe?”
He smiled, “Yeah, that’s me!”
I cleared my throat “Okay. Well, uh…my name is Moshe. I’m a DJ here in the SF scene. Have been for a while.”
“Yeah!” he said. “I’ve heard of you!”
You don’t say, I thought.
I started pulling out reams of flyers of raves I’d performed at. “Here I am at Mega Buzz, here at Open, here I am at Acid Breaks, Second Chakra, it goes on and on. I’ve been performing at raves for years.”
He smiled again. “That’s so fucking cool, bro!”
Was he fucking with me? He really didn’t seem to be. I continued, “I, uh…I’m saying I don’t think it’s cool of you to have a DJ name so similar to mine.”
He frowned now. “Oh. Shit. Okay.”
I stared at him. “So…you’ll change it?”
“Sorry,” he said. “No.”
I felt like pulling my fucking hair out. “Dude, this is the first party you’ve ever played at. Like, what are you even walking away from? Is Moshe your Hebrew name or something?”
He shook his head, “Oh no. I’m not Jewish.”
My eyes went wide. “Well, then, why did you choose this name?”
He thought about it for a second. “I just thought it sounded cool.”
My eyes went wider still. “It does sound fucking cool! It’s my fucking name!” I was losing it. “Look,” I said, getting desperate now, “I will battle you for it.”
He was confused. “What?”
I dug in. “I’ll battle you for it. We will throw a party. Both do a set. Let the crowd decide. Whoever wins gets to keep the name.” I was going old-school now, Electric Boogaloo style. I’d take this dispute to the rave streets.
“Oh,” he said. “Nah. I’m good. I’m just gonna keep the name.”
I now had two choices. Accept this fucking weirdo having my e-name, or beat him to death. I didn’t have my Escape sock anymore. I’d left it at Cyberfest. I gathered up my rave flyers and walked away. And for the first time, I had the conscious, previously unthinkable thought, one I would one day come to recognize as familiar, “Maybe I don’t belong here anymore.”[*9]
At the same time, another unthinkable shift was happening. Electronic music acts were becoming mainstream stars.
In 1990, house music had its first real hit with Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart,” but the truth is it could only nominally be called house music. It was a fantastic song, playful and dense, layered and absolutely (de)groovy, but really it was a pop song with some house elements. Prior to that, C+C Music Factory and a couple of others had had some songs approaching hits on the dance charts, but really no artist in America could crack anything like mainstream success. In Europe dance tracks charted regularly, but Europeans also loved Speedos and spandex shirts, so who could trust them? Largely, record companies had given up on electronic music and in some cases were even openly antagonistic toward it because of its association with the moral-panicked view of raves as drug dens. If artists did get signed, it was to indie dance labels or deep-sub labels of the big conglomerates. Occasionally house music legends would remix some famous mainstream musician’s single into a “club mix,” but it would be little noticed and mostly heard only at the actual club.
Then something shifted.
People started to notice electronic music. Underworld, Fatboy Slim, the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, and more all had albums that if not chart topping were at least chart bottoming. And then it happened: Daft Punk released an album called Homework that was absolutely massive. The second single, “Around the World,” dropped and you literally couldn’t step into a dance club or mall without hearing it. All of this was unimaginable and exciting.
Moby had been a rave legend, DJing at warehouse parties through the 1990s. His “big hit” before the shift was a track called “Go,” which was a hauntingly beautiful and simple rave anthem. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard it; it wasn’t his time. Then came “Feeling So Real,” a hands-in-the-air hardcore track that seemed made for the Berlin Love Parade. Again, don’t worry if you haven’t heard it; it still wasn’t his time. My point is Moby was huge in the rave scene, all of the aforementioned artists were, and no one outside of our little culture had heard of them. Then came Moby’s album Play, a record that, if you watched a commercial in the year 2000, you for sure heard. It exploded. It was his time.
These artists were all “real ravers,” pioneers who’d been grinding their heads into the buzzsaw of the music industry for years. They’d been kept financially afloat by the scene, by the raves and clubs. They were underground kings finally getting their due. These were our superstars. I don’t mean to suggest these acts were obscure. They weren’t. They’d headline raves in the United States and music festivals in Europe, they were wealthy and successful, but compared to any real chart-topping act, these groups were all still a part of our little secret.
Huge DJs like Carl Cox and Sasha could sell out large venues and a group of them could sell out a massive warehouse. But an arena? No one could do that. We only had one “superstar” DJ and that was a colorful character named Superstar DJ Keoki who was a superstar only because he kept telling everyone that’s what he was. Then Paul Oakenfold, a legendary British DJ who’d been around dance music since the earliest raves, since before that, remixed a track for U2 that got more play than the original. He went on tour with the band and brought some version of the rave to Wembley Stadium. Then DJ Tiësto, a Dutch trance DJ with a massive following, embarked on an experiment: He’d try an arena tour. And it worked.
Now we had actual superstars.
With the true commercial success of these rave legends, these people who we felt “deserved it,” something started to change. It was slow at first, imperceptible, the artists ascending to rock-star status, but it didn’t affect us. They floated into rarefied air and the underground tipped its cap to them and kept on raving. But as they garnered more and more acclaim, the music they made started to sink into the ears of America and the world. They too had their “ ‘100% Pure Love’ at the Danville AA Dance” moment. They, too, were metamorphosed.
Within ten years, the rave scene would essentially be gone, replaced in full by music festivals so massive we never could have seen it coming. Never in a million years could I have imagined two hundred thousand kids at a festival and they were all there to see the DJs. Back then three thousand attendees was a massive. Never could I have imagined the 2013 Outside Lands festival, where I watched as tens of thousands of kids streamed from the stage where Nine Inch Nails began their set—the audience confused by what they were listening to—toward the real reason they came to the festival: to see a German pop techno DJ named Zedd who’d done tracks with Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande. Never could I have imagined driving down Sunset Boulevard and seeing billboard after billboard advertising the DJs playing at the biggest casinos in Las Vegas, their draw becoming as profitable for the city of sin as the gambling tables. Never could I have imagined looking at the top twenty DJs in the world and not only barely knowing who any of them were, but that they’d be worth a hundred million apiece. Martin Garrix, one of the biggest and highest paid DJs in the world right now, was born a year after I attended my first rave. The way he fell in love with this music was not at a dingy warehouse, its padlock cut open by an angle grinder and a pirate sound system set up in a hurry for hungry ravers. He was watching the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympics and saw Tiësto, the world’s first rave DJ stadium act, spinning records to the assembled Jamaican javelin team. Martin Garrix doesn’t care about the underground. How could he? His entire vision of what the “scene” is launches from literally the biggest stage in the world. He isn’t “dedicated to taking our scene back” like little Moshe throwing his first rave in 1996. To him, there is no back. Back to where? The Sydney Olympics? When he thinks of dance music he doesn’t have to envision a future where the world finally “gets it.” He was born into that future. His context is different. This is not negative. This is not a lamentation of “what has become.” This is what must be and what always happens. The moment something is created, it is also given away, willingly or not.
The rave scene and dance music does not belong to old-school ravers, and, justly or not, it doesn’t belong to the people who started it all; it doesn’t belong to Derrick May or Jesse Saunders or Kevin Saunderson or Larry Levan or Frankie Knuckles or Frankie Bones or Paul Oakenfold or Tiësto or the Chainsmokers or Martin Garrix.
It belongs to whoever wants it. It belongs to whoever is there. To whoever finds it. To whoever chooses it. To whoever dances.
For a time, it belonged to me.
*1 House and techno provided the first two dishes in what would eventually become a buffet of EDM. From there came acid, ambient, breakbeat, bass, drum and bass, downtempo, dubstep, electro, garage, glitch, grime, hardstyle, hardcore, happy hardcore, juke, trance, trap, and on and on forever (I’m trying to include every subgenre I can think of to ward off attacks by unseen EDM nerds).
*2 In 2013, Pauly D, the man best known as “the guy with that hair” from the hit MTV prestige drama Jersey Shore, was ranked number fourteen on Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen highest paid DJs in the world, pulling in around $16 million that year. He rated above Diplo, the guy behind M.I.A.’s sound. This is somewhere akin to a pile of burlap earning more for playing guitar than Eddie Van Halen.
*3 The pacifier was a common accessory at early raves. Its purpose was twofold: It was a part of the infantilized aesthetic that was typical of the rave scene back then, but more important it was a tool designed to give your mouth something to do other than grind your teeth into rave nubs when the ecstasy made your jaw vibrate with agitation. Now, as for me? I had a pacifier. A Tweety bird one, in fact. But of course I was sober. I didn’t do ecstasy. I sucked on a pacifier simply because I thought it looked cool.
*4 After doing extensive research for this book I found the actual answer to be about even.
*5 The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Look into them. These people are heroes of decriminalization and healing.
*6 There is very little data available to support this, but trust me, it works. Try it and if anyone stops you, tell ’em Moshe sent ya.
*7 Earlier I described DJs as smooth sound shamans, mixing together two separate songs to alchemize a new, seamless creation. But, of course, that describes a good DJ; for beginner DJs the more common sound is exactly what you’d imagine two songs playing simultaneously would sound like: a clashing, jangling, nightmare referred to as a “trainwreck.”
*8 A similar business principle can be found in most mid-tier cities’ kosher restaurants. In big Jewish populations, there are enough Jews for businesses to have to try to actually be delicious or people will go to another place to eat. But in Portland? In Oakland? In Cincinnati? There’s usually only one kosher place to eat. Simply being kosher was as hard as they had to try, and as a result, you get a gruff Israeli tossing a plate of baloney shawarma on your table with an expression that suggests you ought to be grateful to be eating at all. Raves tended to be a “one party per weekend” affair. The party that week was the only game in town, and as a result promoters didn’t have to try that hard.
*9 By the way, I never saw a flyer or heard of a party where the infamous DJ E-Moshe was playing again. He simply showed up, pissed me off, and disappeared. To this day, I cannot be sure he was a real person or just a guardian angel—sent to help me with my transition from the underground to the world beyond.