Despite being portrayed in the Gen X-sploitation movie Kids as a den of debauchery (chemical and sexual), NASA’s atmosphere was initially rather fresh-faced and idealistic, thanks to the collective MDMA honeymoon. ‘You could hear it in the conversations,’ grins DB. ‘We were going to print a T-shirt with “I really love you” on the front, and then on the back, “It’s not the drugs talking”.’ The same was equally true of the Storm milieu. Heather Hart, then only eighteen, was putting out the fanzine Under One Sky, which rapidly progressed from purely musical coverage to ‘a very spiritual angle’, incorporating poetry, art and letter pages where kids would testify to life-changing experiences on the scene. Four years after England’s 1988 rave-olution, New York was experiencing its own Second Summer of Love. The Storm-NASA axis was bolstered by the arrival of Caffeine, a rave-club in Deer Park, Long Island, where party-hard kids from NASA and Storm would end up on Sundays. Here – according to a condescending report in The New York Times – the universal refrain on every other teenager’s lips was: ‘It’s just like the Sixties.’
For Dennis The Menace, the pinnacle came at a Storm rave in a trucking depot. ‘At the end of the party, we were winding down, the sun was out, everyone was feeling pure and alive, in that communal unity feeling. Then someone in the middle of the floor started holding hands and putting their hands up in a circle. Kids were jumping from the back to put their hands up to touch the centre point where all the hands interlocked. People had tears in their eyes. We were just looking at each other, so happy, so open to everything. At the peak of all of it, with everyone trying to let go as much as they could, the belt drive on the turntable bust. Everyone stopped and looked at Frankie, and he kept trying to keep the record spinning with his finger at the right beats-per-minute – just to continue what everyone was feeling.’ Although MDMA catalysed that communion, Dennis insists that ‘The reason these kids were going out wasn’t the ecstasy in the pill, but the feeling you got when everyone was together. Group energy, where one person triggers the next person who triggers the next person . . . You could feel it vibrating between everyone. You can’t put that in a pill. There’s kids I know that were totally straight, who never did drugs, and who were there dancing as hard as anyone ’cos they could feed off that energy.’
Live Fast, Dream Hard; San Francisco’s Cyberdelic Visions
If New York’s rave scene can be traced back to Frankie Bones’s experiences in England during the summer of 1989, the West Coast’s scene was directly catalysed, in large part, by British expatriates. In San Francisco, a remarkable number of the prime movers were from the UK: Mark Heley, the guru behind the Toon Town raves; most of the Wicked collective; Irish promoters Malachy O’Brien and Martin O’Brien (no relation); Jonah Sharp, founder of the Reflective label and music-maker as Space Time Continuum (named after his pioneering London ambient parties, Space Time); clothes designer Nick Philip.
A particular techno-pagan strand of English rave ideology was also disproportionately influential on what happened in San Francisco. The principal font of this cyberdelic philosophy was Fraser Clark, the original hippy-turned-zippy (zen-inspired pagan professional) behind Evolution magazine, the Shamanarchy In The UK compilation and London’s New Agey trance club Megatripolis. Another influential figure was Psychic TV’s Genesis P. Orridge, who actually ended up in SF after exiling himself from England when the authorities threatened to take his children into care. One SF party organization called Mr Floppy’s was affiliated with Orridge’s cult The Temple Ov Psychick Youth.
P. Orridge was actually a peripheral figure in the UK’s acid house scene. But his widely disseminated ideas – psychedelia/sampladelia = the creative abuse of technology; house’s 125 b.p.m. = the primordial trance-inducing, alpha-wave triggering tempo that connects Arab, Indian and aboriginal music; the manipulation of sonic frequencies to achieve ‘metabolic engineering’, à la Aleister Crowley’s dictum ‘our method is science, our aim is religion’ – pretty much defined the San Francisco scene. In the more hyperbolic West Coast versions of rave’s history, P. Orridge is credited with actually introducing acid house to the UK in the first place – a total myth-take.
At the same time, there were plenty of local sources for San Francisco’s neo-hippy version of rave: the neuroconsciousness movement’s covert research into designer drugs and archaic plant psychedelics, the Internet/Virtual Reality/posthuman/‘extropian’/Mondo 2000 scene on the fringes of Silicon Valley; New Age culture; Haight-Ashbury’s history of acid rock and psychedelic happenings (‘Be Ins’, ‘Love Ins’). It didn’t hurt that much of America’s drug supply comes from West Coast labs, making for especially strong Ecstasy in the Bay Area.
Finally, San Francisco was a fertile area for house music because of its indigenous disco scene, a by-product of the city’s allure as a liberal, laidback Mecca for gays from all over America. The first clubs to play house were mixed gay/straight clubs like DV8, Doc Martin and Pete Avila’s club Recess, and its successor Osmosis. According to Jody Radzik, a key cyberdelic ideologue who helped out at Osmosis, the latter was ‘one of the main conduits for rave ideas into San Francisco. Then the British rave mafia took over.’
Beginning in the early summer of 1991, Mark Heley hooked up with Diana Jacobs (who’d been involved in the gay club scene) and her partners Preston Lytton and Craig Valentine to promote a series of parties called Toon Town. ‘The first, a collaboration with Mondo 2000, didn’t work out, the second one got busted,’ says Radzik, ‘But when they moved it to this strange little club in South of Market – the office/ industrial area where most of the clubs are – Toon Town really took off.’ A Toon Town rave on New Year’s Eve 1991 pulled a then astonishing 8000 punters.
If Diana and Preston provided the organizational skills, Mark Heley was the guru who articulated the vision. A Cambridge graduate who’d written about cyberdelic culture for iD and Mondo, and had run a ‘brain gym’ in London, Heley is mythologized in Douglas Rushkoff’s Cyberia as a modern shaman wont to warn his acolytes that ‘bliss is a rigorous master’. ‘Heley pioneered the whole cyber-rave trip, he brought VR and brain machines into it,’ says Radzik. Heley also forged contacts with the Bay Area neuro-consciousness wizards like Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Bruce Eisner and Allen Cohen, and brought in a character called Earth Girl to set up a Smart Drinks stall. These psychoactive cocktails – briefly popular throughout the US rave scene – were more hype than anything else, although those containing ephedra gave you a sort of sub-MDMA rush.
Like Heley, Radzik was a bit of a seeker. Enrolled in a Consciousness Studies degree at John F. Kennedy University and an adept of Bhakti yoga, Radzik had cobbled together a syncretic religion out of ‘psychedelic, shamanic, and Hindu Bhakti practices’. Weirdly blending prophet and profit motives, Radzik marketed his knowledge of youth fashions to the sports wear company Gotcha. But this canny business sense was all part of the techno-shamanic role, fashion being a crucial medium for the dissemination of cultural viruses (or in cyber-speak, ‘memes’). ‘I felt I was an evolutionary agent, these ideas were channelling through me,’ says Radzik. ‘We thought we were setting up the morphogenetic field for rave – the idea of rave was alive, it wanted to express itself, and it was using the culture as a medium.’
Strip away the posthuman discourse, though, and the nature of the enlightenment offered by rave was actually quite straightforward. ‘You go to a rave for the first time, take Ecstasy, and you’re in this context of bright flashing lights, different sorts of images projected on the walls, crazily dressed people, normally dressed people,’ says Radzik. ‘People you don’t know are smiling big at you. Everyone else is on E so there’s this huge bath of acceptance. That’s a tremendous experience – it changes people, turns them into ravers.’
In the UK, people had these life-changing experiences, but they didn’t necessarily dress them up in cosmic significance; most people enjoyed them as relatively local transformations in their modes of self-expression and the way they rel
ated to friends and strangers. But in San Francisco, the Fraser Clarke/Genesis P. Orridge derived anarcho-mysticism went into cosmological overdrive, thanks to booster-doses of Terence McKenna’s eschatological, drug-determined theory of human evolution. McKenna argues that human consciousness may have been spawned by primordial man’s consumption of magic mushrooms. In this lost Edenic phase of prehistory, psylocibin’s effects of ‘boundary dissolution’ worked to sustain an anarcho-utopian tribal society, organized around orgiastic mushroom-eating ceremonies enacted every full-moon. Plant-based hallucinogens (psylocybin, DMT, peyote) act as an innoculation against the ‘tumour’ that is the ego, a ‘cyst’ which ‘keeps wanting to form in the human psyche’. Climatic changes led to to the disappearance of the mushroom cults, and thus to humanity’s Fall from paradise: the ego formed in tandem with the dominator psychology of territoriality, property, sexism, class, ecocide and war. But wait, there’s hope: ‘. . . the ego is the pathological portion of the human personality. Like any other pathology, it can be treated with pharmaceutical substances. It can be treated with plant psychedelics and it can be cured.’ Rave, as a trance-dance drug-cult, is part of the ‘archaic revival’, helping to end our alienation from the ‘Gaian matrix’, the womb of Mother Nature.
This sounds reasonable enough, but McKenna has more outlandish beliefs, like the Mayan notion of End Time. Technological progress is accelerating History towards a ‘bifurcation point’ circa 2012, at which point human consciousness will abandon its bodily prison and merge into the Overmind. This is basically a cybertronic rewrite of the biblical notion of The Rapture. If Rushkoff’s Cyberia can be trusted, Mark Heley seemed to believe that rave was part of this escalating evolutionary thrust towards End Time.
San Francisco rave’s cyber-mystic shtick manifested itself most blatantly through fashion and flyers. Nick Philip’s clothing company Anarchic Adjustment went from purveying skatepunk wear to being ‘a mouthpiece for loved-up ecstasy consciousness’. T-shirts bore slogans like ‘open your mind’ and ‘empathize’. ‘We were the first to put aliens and UFO’s on shirts,’ claims Philip. ‘One of the most popular featured a Buddha with a circuit board and the slogan “Spirituality Through Technology” . . . In San Francisco, a lot of interesting things collided together because [graphics] technology had developed a lot further than when rave started in England.’ When Photoshop design software arrived in 1989, ‘half the rave designers didn’t know anything about design, but they had all these new tools and they were really experimenting, rather than just using old design paradigms. With the people who did rave flyers in early nineties California, the attitude was just get on the computer and make it as mental as you can.’ Of course, the results were often cyber-kitsch, riddled with ‘far out, man!’ clichés. ‘No one understood that we were almost spoofing ourselves for being so high,’ says Wade Hampton, by this point flitting between LA and San Francisco. ‘We’d put little tag lines at the bottom of flyers like “Live Fast, Dream Hard” – things the inner core of people would giggle over.’
This blend of tongue-in-cheek, retro-hippy references and genuine Ecstatic idealism also informed the first stirrings of San Francisco house music. At the fore were the Hardkiss Brothers. Their brotherhood was spiritual rather than genetic. Gavin Bieber and Scott Friedel had met at college in Philadelphia, become friends through a shared passion for Prince, then swerved from a suit-and-tie future to music, inspired by a series of revelatory experiences in Tenerife, at England’s Glastonbury Festival, and at a Frankie Bones party in Long Island. The pair followed Scott’s old friend Robbie Cameron to San Francisco in 1991, where they threw weekly parties like Sunny Side Up and started the Hardkiss label to put out tracks (Gavin recording as Hawke, Scott as God Within, and Robbie as Little Wing).
Their music’s vibe wasn’t cyberdelic techno so much as ‘psychedelic funk’, says Scott, ‘influenced by live, traditional music as much as electronic, futuristic music. A lot of people in this scene are obsessed with the hottest and latest, but personally I have yet to hear a dance record that rivals the Beatles’ singles!’ One contemporary record that did deeply influence the Hardkiss aesthetic was The Future Sound Of London’s sublime 1992 rave anthem ‘Papua New Guinea’, with its softcore breakbeats, ecstatic wordless vocals (sampled from Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard) and blissed serenity.
Hardkiss’s own tracks resemble Prince’s psychedelic phase circa ‘Raspberry Beret’ filtered through Balearic house: just dig titles like The Ultraviolet Catastrophe’s ‘The Trip (The Remixes)’ God Within’s ‘Raincry (Spiritual Thirst)’, Hawke’s ‘3 Nudes (Having Sax on Acid)’, the latter being Hardkiss’s all-time shimmerfunk classic. The halcyon imagery reflected the honeymoon period that all ravers, and rave scenes, experience with MDMA. ‘It was a magical time in San Francisco,’ says Robbie. ‘We were going to these outdoor parties, stepping out and creating our own lives after college. We truly believed we were creating our own family – not just us three, but extending to girlfriends, wives, close friends. It was a magic burst, and you can’t repeat it . . . It’s like the first time you take Ecstasy, or the first time you fall in love – it never feels like that again.’
Moonstruck
For all the retro-kitsch knowingness, there was a genuine spiritual yearning behind San Francisco’s positivity, expressed through imagery of Gaia and Goddess worship. Take the following pamphlet entitled ‘HOUSE MUSIC & PLANETARY HEALING’: When used with positive intention, Group energy has the potential to help restore the plan of Love on Earth . . . When you open your heart, and trust the whole group you dance with; when you feel love with everyone, and they return it, a higher vibration can be reached. This happens when a crowd is deep into the vibe of House . . . In the true sense of rhythmic movement, the affect is to align the physical, mental and emotional bodies with the Oneness of All that Is . . . Help push the consciousness another level into Enlightenment . . . Don’t put out negative energy and feelings. Leave the old ways behind. Throw yourself into the winds of transformation and sow the seeds for a new world – one where the human family is together again. When people respect and care for each other as a community-organism. It’s up to us to spread the vibe. Spread the Peace!
This leaflet was circulated by Malachy O’Brien, a British expat from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland who was involved in the weekly club Come-Unity and later worked with Martin O’Brien on the irregular rave The Gathering. Strongly redolent of the Spiral Tribe’s terra-technic philosphy, the leaflet’s idea of house music as biorhythmic synchronization with Gaia was crystallized in Come-Unity’s logo: a child-like drawing of a house superimposed over Planet Earth.
The legendary Full Moon outdoor parties were where San Francisco’s back-to-Mother-Nature spirit found its fullest expression. Full Moon was the brainchild of party collective Wicked, which largely consisted of English expatriates – Alan McQueen and his girlfriend Trisha, DJs Jeno, Garth and Marky Mark – and had links with UK free party sound-system Tonka. McQueen had been friends with Heley in London and was on the same ‘Terence McKenna techno-shamanism trip’, says Nick Philip. But when the increasingly spectacular and successful Toon Town started to inspire ‘copycat raves with VR and all this shit,’ people felt the scene was getting too commercial. So the Wicked crew said ‘fuck it, we’re just gonna have a sound-system and maybe a strobe.’
As in Brooklyn, most of the underground parties were warehouse break-ins or jams thrown under bridges, beside train tracks, and (in a nice San Francisco-specific touch) in disused tram yards. But the Full Moon parties were held outside the city limits and under the sky. Typical locations included disused military bunkers overlooking the Bay and secluded sea-shore spots like Baker’s Beach. ‘With the high cliffs, and if the cars were parked well away, you could escape notice and party till noon,’ says Malachy. ‘At one Full Moon, I was directing people across the sand dunes, and as I got near I was thinking: “What the fuck’s up with the sound-system?” I reached the crest of a dune and all I c
ould see was a sea of people, bonfires, dogs running wild, someone juggling with firesticks. Then the sound kicked in and all the people rose to their feet at the same moment. With the moon out there low over the water, it was a pretty awesome sight!’
Like Spiral Tribe’s rural raves, the Full Moons were free parties. Nobody was benefiting financially, but there was still a competitive spirit of oneupmanship between San Francisco promoters, albeit on a more spiritual level. ‘It was about how you could take care of people and impress them with something very psychedelic,’ says Wade Hampton. ‘In San Francisco, it tended to be much more natural and human-driven – hang-gliders, unicyles, anything you could possibly imagine was hauled off to the parties.’ Ravers competed too – to intensify the vibe by wearing wacky clothes or by freaky dancing. ‘It might be something like bringing an antique bicycle with a really big front wheel and riding it around on the beach til noon. It was a Dali scene.’
It was also a drug scene. ‘Being San Francisco, there was a lot of psychedelics,’ says Malachy. Not just Ecstasy and LSD, but ‘San Pedro cactus, ayahuasca, Syrian Rue’. The latter is a plant-derived substance rich in a chemical called harmine, whose MAO inhibitor effect intensifies the visions caused by psychedelics. Amazonian shamans combine harmine-rich plants with the hallucinogenic tree-bark DMT to create ayahuasca, a potent brew that triggers ‘extremely rich tapestries of visual hallucination that are particularly susceptible to being “driven” and directed by sound’ (Terence McKenna).
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 39
