Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  With all these psychoactive substances circulating in the Full Moon milieu, it’s hardly surprising that there were incidents of mass hallucination. At one party in late 1992, several hundred people ‘saw the same spaceship come down and land,’ claims Wade Hampton. ‘There was this acid floating around called Purple Shield. That party is legendary in San Francisco. After that party, most people walked away as one.’

  Take It to the Limit: the Los Angeles Rave Explosion

  While San Francisco ravers talked about reaching ‘higher awareness’ and celebrated the DJ as a ‘digital shaman’, the house party scene in Los Angeles was more about fashion-conscious hedonism, rooted in the popular demand for after-hours dancing. In 1989 – 90, there were parties that mixed a bit of house in with hip hop and funk, like Solomon Monsieur’s Dirtbox, Steve LeClair’s OAP (One Almighty Party), and a series of clubs and one-offs like Alice’s House, Deep Shag, and Stranger Than Fiction put together by a guy called Randy. After moving down from San Francisco, Doc Martin DJ-ed house at Flammable Liquid. There was also a long established all-night dance culture amongst Latino youth on LA’s East Side.

  Most clubs in Los Angeles had to close by 2 a.m. By 1990, ‘you started seeing flyers for psychedelic after-parties,’ says Todd C. Roberts, editor of Urb, LA’s DJ culture magazine. ‘Normal clubs started kicking people out at about 1.45 a.m., so there was lots of drunk ’n’ horny guys and gals wandering around.’ As in San Francisco, the key promoters who spotted the potential for all-night clubs were mostly English. Steve Levy was DJ-ing at his own Santa Monica club, West Go West. After a trip back home to London in 1989, he returned with a stack of acid house 12 inches. Following the warehouse party blueprint he’d witnessed in London – word-of-mouth, flyers, voice-mail, meet-points – Levy founded the illegal after-hours event Moonshine.

  ‘Our first location was a building this guy had been using for an illegal casino,’ remembers Levy. ‘The guy was a nutcase, dodgy enough that when he kept our security deposit we didn’t argue with him about it!’ After a few weeks, the party moved to the Fish Factory, the basement of a fish warehouse in downtown LA. ‘It stank, but you got used to it after a couple of hours. [Punters] had to go down a freight elevator. Halfway down, we’d turn all the lights out, ask everyone for the money, and search them. In LA, if you search a policeman, they have to give up the gun. Since they aren’t allowed to travel without a weapon, we searched everyone to stop undercover cops from getting in.’ Other locations came through contacts in the real-estate business.

  After a dozen Moonshines, Levy decided to switch to legal venues. By this point – the summer of 1991 – Levy’s parties were pulling thousand-strong crowds. But they weren’t really raves – the party-fuel was still alcohol (hence the prohibition-era name Moonshine) rather than E, and the music was slanted towards hip hop rather than house. Levy’s next venture – Truth, at the Park Plaza Hotel – was closer. Hip hop and house were in separate rooms, but the funk crowd were getting seduced by the house room’s trippy projections and lasers. ‘Next week they’d be rolling up in their overalls ready to have it.’

  Promoters in suburban Orange County were already throwing ravey events; following Moonshine’s lead, they started breaking into warehouses in downtown LA. If the English club organizers like Levy resembled Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling circa 1988, the Orange County impressarios were equivalent to Sunrise and Energy in 1989: entrepreneurs with the guts and ego to take it to the next stage. As with 1989’s orbital rave explosion, the result was an escalating spiral of friendly-but-fierce competition to throw the most spectacular events in the most audaciously outlandish locations.

  ‘For me it was all about the production, the idea of having a vision and then building it up from the ground,’ says Les Borsai. From his beginnings with Steve Kool-Aid throwing parties like Double Hit Mickey and Mr Bubble, Borsai progressed to increasingly grandiose raves in downtown LA warehouses. For King Neptune’s Underwater Wet Dream, ‘We painted the whole warehouse fluorescent, using stencils of seahorses and fish and sharks. We put up blue lighting and bubble machines, made the whole club look fuckin’ spectacular.’ Suddenly helicopters and police arrived to arrest Borsai and his team. Managing to wriggle out of the law’s clutches by claiming they’d only been hired to paint the place, Borsai faced the challenge of finding a replacement site within twenty-four hours. ‘We found a massive underground parking structure, painted it, and brought in a huge water truck and twenty cases of shampoo. We foamed up the whole dancefloor.’ But two hours after the rave kicked off, the police shut it down and arrested Borsai.

  Fed up with the precarious nature of unlicensed events, Borsai hooked up with rock promotions company Avalon Attractions. The result was a series of fully legal raves that grew ever more spectacular. For a 1991 rave in a Pomona cow pasture, Borsai rented an entire carnival. Techno Flight One took place in a Disney facility which housed Howard Hughes wooden aeroplane the Spruce Goose. ‘The plane sat in a moat, and Disney created dry ice effects so it looked like it was floating on clouds. This plane must have stood fifty feet off the ground, but people were so off their heads, the kids were dancing out on the wings. It was madness!’

  When it came to rave extravaganzas, Borsai’s major rival was Daven Michaels, who cultivated a larger-than-life persona – Daven the Mad Hatter – and even hired a personal publicist. Collaborating with early partners Beej and Sparky, Daven threw a rave called LSD (Love Sex Dance) which, he claims, ‘changed the course of LA’. His tale illustrates the flagrant law-bending and logistical cunning required to promote raves in LA during the scene’s outlaw phase. The location was ‘an incredible space called the Bingo Building, which the realty management company would rent out for movie shoots. I pretended I was a location scout and kept asking them to hold it for us, saying “We’re going to have a production meeting, I’ll get back to you.” That way, we kept the space open right up to the last minute.’

  But on the day of the rave, Michaels discovered that a rival promoter was advertising a rave at the very same space. ‘I hopped in my car, threw on a tie, and drove down to the building, where the kids are setting up their event. I say: “Guys, I’m John Stone from this [realty] company, you’ve set off a silent alarm, and you have ten minutes to get out before I call the police.” ’ Having routed the panicked kids, Daven locked the building’s entrance, then noticed that the rival promoters were still hanging around. Thinking on his feet, Michaels decided to disguise the rave as an after-concert party for Madonna, performing in LA that very night. After informing his usual security team of this ruse, Michaels hired another security company and fed them the Madonna after-party line, so they’d sound convincing if challenged by the police.

  Pulling both their own crowd and the people who’d come for the rival rave, LSD was a huge success, spawning a series of sequels. Like Borsai, Michaels became obsessed with dazzling the kids with spectacular, ‘fully themed’ productions involving up to five separate installations per event. ‘We worked with a performance artist on huge performance pieces that involved hydraulics. One was modelled on Ancient Rome, with this 400 pound guy called Fat Freddie wearing a toga and sitting on a throne. All of a sudden Rome crumbles, the columns crash down. Then hydraulics lift everything back together. The kids flipped for it.’

  Going solo, Daven began his Paw Paw Patch series of parties. Paw Paw Ranch – 27 June 1991, in the desert city of Hemet, Riverside County – was LA’s first outdoor rave, ‘the first party where the ravers saw the sun go up’. Because the idea of travelling outside the city limits was then unusual, Michaels says ‘We had to trick people so they didn’t realize how far they were really driving.’ A year later, when desert raves were well established, Paw Paw Ranch II took place at Horse Thief Canyon Stables in Orange County; Michaels hired ‘a ghost town from a company, prefab, which we transported there and erected’.

  Although the British expats got the LA rave scene off the ground with their clubs (‘English weeklies�
�) and medium-scale one-offs, their following was older and relatively sophisticated. Rave ringmasters like Borsai and Daven the Mad Hatter pulled a younger, more suburban crowd who were really there to rave. ‘To an extent we commercialized it,’ admits Daven. ‘The English guys never sold out . . . Whereas we were always outdoing each other. And we really spent a lot of money outdoing each other. In the beginning, events cost between five and fifteen grand, but by the end the costs were running to well over a hundred thousand dollars.’ With tickets selling from $20 to $25, and crowds between four and six thousand, ‘we had to run a pretty tight ship just to keep up with each other and still make a few bucks’.

  The most extravagant and over-the-top South California rave ever was probably Gilligan’s Island, which took place in a Catalina casino-cum-ballroom. 1200 people were ferried over to the island on two ships. ‘The budget was massive,’ says Wade Hampton, ‘there was never even a possibility of recouping what they spent. Eventually they took over the island, ’cos the cops wanted them to stop but they wouldn’t. It was the pinnacle of Los Angeles rave – so outlawish, so brilliant, like Sunrise taking over the M25 highway in 1989. From then on, people were trying to match that vibe.’

  Hampton claims that DJs were flown into the event ‘on Lear Jets paid for by hot cheques’ and that ‘virtual crime’ was rife amongst LA promoters – credit cards scams, cellular phone fraud. ‘A lot of parties were boosted by doing mad things with other people’s money. It was the beginning of the end.’ For the honest promoters, the game was getting too risky: the huge events couldn’t evade the police’s notice, and a busted gig could obliterate the profits from several previous triumphs. Inevitably, LA rave began to move towards fully-licensed legimitacy. Instead of the flyers/voicemail/map-point system, promoters started to sell tickets at stores, then graduated to working through Ticketmaster. By mid-1992, LA rave was losing its outlaw edge, even as the potential profit margins were attracting fly-by-night entrepreneurs and serious criminals. But for about eighteen months, LA had the most full-on rave scene in America. It even had a techno radio station, Mars FM. Starting 24 May 1991, Mars broadcasted ‘the new music invasion’ all day long, interspersed with the station slogan ‘we want our techno’. There was also an explosion of rave fashion on LA’s streets. According to Hampton, many kids adopted the raver look first, then got into the music. ‘Fresh Jive, Clobber, all these rave oriented clothing lines became very influential. If you had flyers designed by Fresh Jive, loads of kids would come to your parties. Through the desktop, computer graphics revolution, the whole culture got very visual.’

  Fashion and ‘balls out hedonism’ (as Hampton puts it) defined Los Angeles rave, then. But there was a utopian aspect to Southern California’s rave scene – the racial mixing that was going on. ‘It was the first time in my lifetime I saw people from every neighbourhood – San Diego, Riverside, San Bernadino, Long Beach – coming together’, says Todd Roberts. ‘Every weekend you’d see a lot of people you’d never even come into contact with. It was especially nice, being African-American myself, to see [black youth] involved and not just a bunch of white kids acting weird. Rave allowed me to talk about and see LA as a better community than most people give it credit for. It is a very divided city. But this was the first time those walls were breaking down . . . Utopian? It was as utopian as LA could get!’

  Crashing the Party: US Rave Descends into the Darkside

  Ecstasy culture pivots around a utopian/dystopian axis. Any given rave scene seems to enjoy a honeymoon period of two years, tops, before problems begin to appear – the shift from Ecstasy use to abuse; MDMA burn-out and the lure of amphetamine as a cheap, dependable surrogate; polydrug experimentation. The resulting paranoia and mental confusion is aggravated by taking place in a context of drug rip-offs and criminality. First ‘in’ and therefore first to burn out, the scene’s prime movers succumb to ‘lifestyle dysfunction’, even mental breakdown.

  The hardcore hedonism caught up with Frankie Bones in August 1993. ‘On the weekend of Labour Day, I had a seventy-two-hour thing where I was eating everything – acid, Ecstasy – and smoking angel dust . . . Towards the end of my mission, my mother caught up with me,’cos I’d wrecked my car. I was doing really weird things – the way my uncle described it to me, I didn’t care if I lived or died . . . My uncle had a neighbour who worked in the hospital. I was only supposed to go there for some tests, but they found so much shit in my system, they locked me up and put me on medication.’

  Seven weeks later, Bones was released and went back to live with his mother for the first time in ten years. ‘All I wanted to do was eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner, and watch TV. I had no interest in music.’ By the end of 1993, Bones was off the medication, but his career was in tatters. It took him a year to get back into regular DJ-ing.

  Bones’s misadventures weren’t abnormal. In Long Island, Caffeine’s ‘just like the sixties’ vibe went from 1967 euphoria to a 1969 death-and-madness trip. ‘If you exceeded your limit five times over, you were probably at Caffeine,’ says Bones with a wry grin. ‘Kids couldn’t afford Ecstasy so they did LSD as an alternative. I remember this girl on acid just flipping out and running amok, we had to hold her down.’

  By late 1993, the East Coast was ‘at the bottom of the US rave scene, we went from totally the best to a bunch of bullshit . . . The “poly” is what fucked everything up,’ Bones says, referring to his doctors’ original diagnosis of “poly-substance abuse”. Finding that E alone wasn’t getting them high enough any more, kids were mixing all manner of drugs into potent, unpredictable cocktails that blew their teenage minds but created an anti-dance vibe. ‘Kids were combining Special K, angel dust, E’s, acid, and they’d just become a ball of jelly, sitting on the floor.’

  NASA was also succumbing to the darkside. ‘People started taking Limelight drugs,’ says DB, referring to the rampant abuse of drugs like ketamine by more cynical Manhattan club kids. ‘People were lying in hallways, it wasn’t so euphoric.’ By 1993, says Scotto, ‘the drug dealers were the heroes of the scene – you were either a promoter, a DJ or a dealer. Then the dealers were getting paranoid, having these fantasies of being a Mafia guy or a gang member.’

  At one NASA night in spring 1993 – a few months before the club closed down – a girl handed me a photocopied pamphlet. Framed with smiley-faces, happy goldfish and handwritten phrases like ‘group hugs’, the leaflet was a heartfelt, heartbreaking plea for a return to lost innocence:WHY ARE YOU AT THIS EVENT? THE RAVE SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNO. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT DRUGS. THIS SCENE IS NOT JUST ABOUT FASHION. IT IS SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT UNITY AND HAPPINESS. IT IS ABOUT BEING YOURSELF AND BEING LOVED FOR IT. IT SHOULD BE A HARBOR FROM OUR SOCIETY. BUT OUR SCENE RIGHT NOW IS DISINTEGRATING! OLD STYLE RAVERS – REMEMBER WHEN EVERYBODY HUGGED ALL THE TIME – NOT JUST TO SAY HELLO AND GOODBYE? REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE JUST SAID HI FOR NO REASON EXCEPT TO BE YOUR FRIEND? REMEMBER HOW GOOD IT FELT? WHY DON’T WE DO IT ANYMORE? NEWCOMERS – YOU ARE WANTED AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THIS SCENE IS ABOUT OPENNESS. WE ALL SHARE A BOND – THE DESIRE TO GROOVE TO A GOOD BEAT ALL NIGHT LONG. AND NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. EVERYONE NEEDS FRIENDS AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS TOUGH ENOUGH. WE DON’T NEED FRONTS AND ATTITUDES IN OUR SCENE. OPEN YOUR HEARTS AND LET THE GOOD FEELINGS FLOW . . . RAVERS UNITE AND KEEP OUR SCENE ALIVE.

  What’s truly poignant about this leaflet is that the golden age being lamented had occurred only nine months earlier – an indication of just how swiftly Ecstasy burn-out and polydrug mind-rot can set in. Over in San Francisco, many of the major players in the Anglo-cyberdelic milieu were succumbing, Bones-style, to drug-induced malaise. ‘There’s specific people who got into serious drug trips, using speed, heroin, ketamine,’ says Jody Radzik. ‘Key people really fucked up.’ Radzik himself began dropping out of the scene in February 1992. ‘Just through getting involved in raving and Ecstasy I uncovered [personal problems] that I had to deal with. I developed a lot of insecurities, socially, and just had to remove
myself.’ Radzik says he ‘went through a little psycho drug period too. . . . Maybe it helped in that it made things a lot worse. The Ecstasy, the speed, exposed all these huge inner flaws that I had to [deal with].’

  In the spring of 1993, a tragedy occurred that cast a pall over the ailing San Francisco scene, but that also, in a weird twist, opened the way for a partial regeneration of idealism. After a Full Moon party, the Wicked crew were driving back in their van. In the back, asleep, was Malachy O’Brien, plus the spare sound-system he’d brought along in case the event was busted. ‘We came off the road up at Candlestick Park, ironically near where some of the early Full Moons had happened, and ended up in the Bay,’ says Malachy. The driver may have nodded off at the wheel after partying too hard (a common cause of post-rave accidents); there might also have been a mechanical failure. Whatever the crash’s cause, a speaker impacted Malachy’s head, bending it so badly his neck was broken. He was left a quadraplegic.

  It’s a testament to Malachy’s character that he’s capable of talking about the accident in terms of good fortune – ‘It was a lucky escape, there was a generator full of gasoline.’ Despite his personal catastrophe, Malachy also stresses that the tragedy reunited the divided San Francisco scene, with promoters coming together to organize a series of benefit raves to pay for his hospitalization and physical therapy. The flyer for the first benefit – called Come-Unity and held in April 1993 at Richmond Civic Center auditorium – beseeched ‘Music Is a Healing Force, Dance Is a Healing Energy, Join Together and Dance For the Healing of A Troubled World and the Healing of Malachy’. During the rave, the DJ-ing was interrupted by a healing ceremony guided by a shaman and a Zen monk, with Malachy appearing on a video screen and addressing the crowd. Today, Malachy has recovered some movement in his biceps, allowing him to operate his joystick-controlled wheelchair and use the track-ball on a computer. After a period of intensive physiotherapy in England, he’s back in San Francisco and still involved in the house scene, helping to run Come-Unity.