Although Malachy accentuates the positive, other scenesters responded to the tragedy as an ill omen. ‘When that happened, it was the beginning of the end for me,’ says Nick Philip. ‘I don’t think everybody believed anymore that we were going to save the world. It was just so weird that it happened to Malachy – the nicest guy, and the person who really lived it. A lot of people spouted the philosophy about saving the planet and global consciousess, but Malachy really lived it, he gave his [proceeds] away to fuckin’ charities [like Greenpeace] . . . It happened to him, and that freaked people out . . . A number of things happened – drug related incidents, busts, someone shot at a rave in Santa Cruz – that turned the optimism into something different.’
Tweaked Out
Meanwhile, down the coast in Southern California, the LA rave scene was being killed by its own success. The syndrome was similar to England in 1989: media outcry, police crackdown, rivalry between promoters, gangsterism, bad drugs. The LA riots provided the coup de grace, destroying the precarious trans-racial alliances.
There was a symbolic death-knell in July 1992, when Mars FM dropped its techno playlist in favour of alternative rock. Protests and petitions by a group calling themselves Friends of Techno and Rave Music led to a brief restoration, but by September techno was dropped again, for good. It was probably a sound business decision, based on the realization that the record industry was backing grunge as the new youth-cultural cash-cow, not rave. The major labels had signed up a bunch of British and European rave acts; American’s supremo Rick Rubin seemed briefly enthused by the idea that techno was the new punk. But grunge was a better bet. Guitar riffs, gruff vocals, a little bit of old-fashioned rebellion – this was something the record industry understood, and bands were something that could be marketed, unlike DJs and ‘faceless techno bollocks’.
Mars FM’s turnaround was probably also influenced by the tarnishing of rave’s image in LA. The local media had discovered that the dance parties, far from being innocent extravaganzas, were bacchanals fuelled by Ecstasy. There was also a scuzzy substance seemingly unique to the West Coast scene: nitrous oxide, sold in balloons at raves for around $5. The harmless associations of ‘laughing gas’ were shattered in March 1992, when three young men were found dead in a pickup truck on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The cabin’s windows were rolled up; the kids, high as kites, had left the valve open on their nitrous canister and asphyxiated. As drug researcher Dr Ronald Siegel put it, ‘they basically crawled inside a balloon’.
Nitrous has a surprisingly distinguished history as a psychoactive inhalant. In the nineteenth century, there was a whole discourse dedicated to ‘The Anaesthetic Revelation’ offered by nitrous, ether and chloroform, involving clerics, physicans and scholars like J. A. Symonds and William James. ‘Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; [intoxication] expands, unites, and says yes,’ enthused James in his 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. ‘It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man . . . It makes him for the moment one with truth.’ James claimed that nitrous intoxication was a thousandfold stronger than alcohol, stimulating ‘the mystical consciousness to an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over . . . they prove to be the veriest nonsense.’
The descriptions of ‘nitrous oxide trance’ offered by James and other nineteenth-century inhalers sound remarkably like MDMA. Benjamin Paul Blood wrote of recovering ‘the primordial Adamic surprise of Life’, a gnostic realization that ‘the Kingdom is within’. James described it as a sensation of ‘reconciliation’, in which ‘the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, [melt] into unity.’ This sense of access to an ineffable enlightenment explains the addictive nature of nitrous – as Dr Siegel put it: ‘just a little bit more and I’m going to get the secret of the universe’.
It’s fairly safe to say, though, that for most ravers, nitrous’s minute-long high was just a wicked buzz. ‘You get warm and fuzzy all over and you feel like you can float – like an astronaut. Everything feels thick and soft,’ is how one user put it. A slang term for nitrous is ‘hippy crack’: ‘hippy’ being a nod to its popularity with Deadheads, ‘crack’ evoking the way ‘people keep going back for more, it becomes that futile attempt to transcend the experience,’ says Todd Roberts. Taken on its own, nitrous offers a non-dancey ‘head trip’, he claims. ‘It plays well with the strange effects and echo in the music.’ Inhaled after taking Ecstasy or LSD, nitrous enhances the synaesthetic effects of those drugs, synchronizing visual hallucinations to the music.
Whether stolen from dentists or legally obtained from gas stations (it’s used as a fuel additive to soup-up race-car engines), nitrous oxide became rife on the West Coast rave scene, and eventually spread throughout America. Because a $100 tank could fill 200 balloons at $5 each, the nitrous pedlar could make a 900 per cent profit. Dealers started to offer the promoters big money for the exclusive rights to sell nitrous at raves. Newspapers noted in horror the popularity of ‘Just Say NO’ T-shirts, which meant ‘just say yes to nitrous oxide’.
Despite the freak tragedy in Chatsworth, nitrous is not harmful in itself, if used with the right mix of oxygen. Because the gas makes you pass out for a few seconds, there’s a risk of injury or concussion if inhaled when standing up or in motion; morons have been known to get frostbite of the lips, tongue and throat by sucking directly from the sub-zero cylinder of liquid gas. In the rave scene, the worst side-effect of nitrous was to dampen the dance energy. ‘You sit on your ass and you don’t dance,’ says Wade Hampton. ‘People get very pale and their lips turn blue, ’cos you’re depleting your oxygen supply. If you see people who’ve been doing it all night, it makes you want to throw up.’
Focusing on nitrous and Ecstasy, most LA newspapers missed the scoop on the real killer drug, amphetamine – lethal, if not to people’s lives, then to their souls, and to the rave scene’s good vibe. In the West Coast, speed and its more potent relative crystal methamphetamine (aka ‘chrissie’ or ‘crystal meth’) took over because it was both more reliable than Ecstasy and more competitively priced: $20 for a sixteenth of a gram, compared with around $28 for a pill of E. This was a false economy, however, because tolerance to the drug quickly destroys its edge over E. Users start taking huge amounts; some progress from snorting it to smoking or injecting. Because the comedown is vicious compared with Ecstasy’s afterglow, the temptation is to go on ‘runs’ that last several days.
By the end of 1992, the burgeoning speedfreak culture in Los Angeles had coined two new slang terms, tweaking and sketching. Both mean buzzing on crystal, but ‘sketching’ has more of a wired-and-tired, crashing-after-a-long-run connotation. ‘We called them raver-zombies,’ says Todd Roberts of the tweakers. ‘You’d see them stumbling across the floor, not knowing if it was Tuesday or Sunday, and not really caring. Originally, Ecstasy was the catalyst for people reaching out to you. One of the things I noticed when I first started raving was that strangers would actually say “hello” and smile.’ But amphetamine closed down the open-hearted extroversion, replacing eye contact with vacant stares.
The Sketch Pad, a dark and dingy loft-space in Venice, was the raver-zombies’ crash-pad. Originally running from 6 a.m. Sunday to the early evening, then later right through the small hours of Monday morning, the Sketch Pad’s vibe was ‘like a crack den,’ says Roberts. ‘It started as a rent party for the girl who ran it, then it became an excuse for people to buy more drugs or just be together if they were out of their minds.’
Crystal’s effect on the rave community was to ‘break down the ties of reality’, as Roberts puts it. As in San Francisco, prime movers and well-known scenesters were experiencing ‘lifestyle breakdowns’, partying so hard they forgot about paying the bills or going to work. The crystal-fuelled runs could last for weeks. ‘They weren’t awake for week
s, but it could be a rocky road without enough sleep. Maybe work would get done one week – they’d start some projects, make some money, but then spend it on drugs. It’s the addict lifestyle. Over a period of a month, if you’ve only spent four days working, you’ve got a problem.’
The shift to methamphetamine affected the sound of rave music. Roberts attributes the rise of high-tempo trance on the West Coast in 1993 to crystal. ‘I think it lost its soul, the funk was gone. It had the beat and all the markings of techno, but it lost the irony, and the fun.’ Elsewhere in America, tweakers and Ecstasy abusers followed the European trajectory of hardcore into gabba. Lenny Dee started his Industrial Strength label in Brooklyn, Drop Bass Network established their ‘Midwest Hardcorps’ milieu, and Southern California had its own headstrong scene led by DJ Ron D. Core and based around the record store Dr Freecloud’s. The audience was younger, with little knowledge of house’s roots or interest in neo-psychedelic utopianism. They hadn’t grown out of the club scene; all they knew was raves, massive sound-systems, and going mental.
In reaction, the older Los Angeles DJs began a familiar retreat to house. ‘One of the things that killed it here,’ argues Steve Levy, ‘was when several local DJs suddenly became huge fans of garage DJ Tony Humphries. They went to the Sound Factory in New York and decided to impart their new found “knowledge” to the LA crowd. The whole energy of the music, which in 1991 had been Italian piano house and Belgian techno, disappeared. It regressed from a rave thing to a club thing, and the clubs weren’t fun anymore ’cos the music was fuckin’ boring. It went really small, then small and dark.’
The mega-raves were dying because kids were fed up with driving long distances to desert parties that got busted. Media outcry stoked the police crackdown – not just TV news exposés, but fictionalized warnings about peer pressure and raves as ‘drug supermarkets’. In an infamous episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, clean-cut Brandon is spiked with a drug called Euphoria by his girlfriend, and makes a right fool of himself. Next day, he’s rueful about all the pseudo-profound feelings he’d thought he was experiencing, which have evaporated leaving just a ghastly hangover.
Alongside teenage drug abuse, complaints about noise and nuisance, and the danger of events without proper fire and safety measures, the police were also concerned about the arrival of gangsters and gunplay on the rave scene. At 1993’s Grape Ape 3, at the Wild Rivers Water Park in Orange County, a series of incidents – fights, guns being pointed at security guards, a van set on fire – led to the rave being shut down at 3 a.m. The next summer, two fifteen-year-old boys were shot dead at a rave alongside the railroad track in San Diego’s Old Town. Criminals were also applying pressure to the promoters. Daven Michaels had nitrous gangs trying to monopolize the supply at his parties, and ‘mobsters from NY coming into town trying to squeeze me’cos I had a cash business’. When he refused their offer of ‘partnership’, Michaels received ‘death threats in the middle of the night . . . I had to call the police’.
Other Los Angeles promoters were also calling the cops – in order to snitch on their rivals. ‘Originally the promoters all knew each other and made sure we weren’t stepping on each others’ toes,’ says Steve Levy. ‘What started killing it in the summer of ’92 was that there’d be three different gigs on the same night. Everyone would be calling the cops. Eventually the punters got pissed off with paying $20 at the map point and rolling up to a gig that immediately got busted.’ Even without the busts, several raves going off on the same night guaranteed low attendance all round, dissipating the vibe. Many original LA rave promoters dropped out of the business; Levy started his record label Moonshine, Borsai shifted to alternative rock promotion, Daven Michaels started making music. Others persisted: Ron D. Core with his Orange County hardcore scene, Kingfish Entertainment’s Philip Blaine with his desert raves. Despite the downturn, Blaine’s ally Gary Richards, aka DJ Destructo, pulled off America’s biggest rave to date – the 17,000 strong New Year’s Eve rave at Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park at the end of 1992.
Trend of an Era
Knott’s Berry Farm may be isolated in its immensity, but raves on the West and East coasts of America regularly draw between four and ten thousand. Herein lies the mysterious paradox of US rave culture: it’s a massive subculture, but its momentum seems stalled. Since the end of 1992, it’s been stuck in a peculiar holding pattern.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the situation is quite different. Despite its fragmentation into sub-scenes, European rave is essentially bigger than ever. The culture continued to escalate because new recruits arrive with each generation. In Britain, indie-rockers turned on to the new music thanks to rave ’n’ roll intermediaries like Happy Mondays and Primal Scream. This never happened in America because rave is regarded as the epitome of fashion-plate Europhile trendiness; the outlandish way American ravers dress, and the goofy way they dance, tweaks the prejudices of indie-rockers and hip hoppers alike.
The fashion element really took hold in 1993, says Dennis The Menace. ‘If you look at videos of the early outlaw parties, everyone’s wearing jeans and T-shirts . . . Then it became whoever could wear the biggest hat, and people going out to be seen rather than to dance.’ Especially on the East Coast, the dancing that was going on didn’t resemble raving in the original English sense. Instead of trancing-out for hours, US teen-ravers tend to dance in spasmodic bursts – often surrounded, hip-hop style, by circles of spectators. The dancing is more stylized and ostentatious than in Europe: complex involutions of the limbs, shimmying torsions and geometric undulations that make the body ripple like computer fractals, kick-boxer skips and spinning-top twirls – all of which hark back to the breakdancing and bodypopping battles of old skool rap, but filtered through a post-E polymorphous fluidity. ‘The pretzel dance’, as Dennis calls it.
From NASA to his work as A & R director of Profile’s techno sub-label Sm:)e, DB has been a long time crusader for rave in the USA. But even he bluntly admits that ‘it’s much more of a fad thing in America . . . more social and less about music. It’s a place kids can meet their friends, get fucked up and stay out all night away from their parents. That may sound jaded, but most weekends I DJ around the country, and that’s what I see . . . People grow into it and grow out of it very quickly. People in England burn out on the drugs too, but that doesn’t mean they stop liking the music. That seems to be the way in America – once they’ve fucked themselves on whatever drugs they’re doing, they stop liking the music and get into something else.’
In US rave, the ‘whatever drugs they’re doing’ nowadays is a pharmacopoeia of illegal and semi-legal substances. On the West Coast, the vogue is for gamma y-hydroxybutyrate or GHB: a salty, clear liquid swigged from sports bottles and sometimes fallaciously sold as ‘liquid ecstasy’. Originally favoured by bodybuilders because of its steroid-like effects, GHB developed a reputation as an aphrodisiac and a legal alternative to E (although it was actually banned by the FDA in 1990). The problem with GHB is that it affects breathing. In overdose or combined with alcohol, GHB’s respiratory depression effect can lead to coma and death. Because its impact is relative to body-weight, ‘a lot of women pass out,’ says Todd Roberts. ‘They gulp GHB like water, and you’re only supposed to have a small spoonful.’
On the East Coast, another depressant drug is more popular: ketamine, a relative of PCP widely used as a veterinary anaesthetic. At raves, kids take regular ‘bumps’ of ‘Vitamin K’ to sustain a plateau state of boneless stupor. They’ve even started bringing blankets to parties, so they can loll around on the floor. K’s popularity with ravers is mysterious: unlike E or acid, it doesn’t make music sound fantastic, it’s anti-social verging on autistic, and it certainly doesn’t make you wanna dance. Then there’s the risk of going beyond the dissociative effect of mild doses and falling into a ‘K-hole’, an experience that’s been likened to catatonic schizophrenia. A really big dose might transport you onto truly other realms of consciousness wherein dwe
ll the ‘ketamine entities’ aka ‘machine-elves’, who supervise the universe and who may tell you some interesting secrets.
When you’ve got sixteen-year-old kids dosing themselves with an array of substances of unknown potency and unpredictable interactions, adolescents who often aren’t emotionally mature enough to surf the psychedelic maelstrom, then you have the recipe for a freak scene. ‘I played at LSD in Philadelphia at New Year’s Eve, and twenty-five people overdosed at that party,’ says Heather Heart. ‘There were ambulances outside all night long. The party was finally shut down’cos some girl was unconscious and they went to wake her and she was defecating herself. These were kids overdoing it, and doing a mixture of drugs – Ecstasy, ketamine, crystal, acid. None of them were just on one thing.’ Dennis The Menace argues that the polydrug culture has destroyed the synergy effect that occurs in rave scenes during the honeymoon phase of Ecstasy use: the ‘rave-gasm’ feedback loop of ravers, all relatively fresh to the drug, buzzing on the same pure E. Polydrug abuse shatters that synchronized rush; everyone’s on different trips. ‘The scene got ruined when the pills got replaced by powders,’ he claims, referring to K, crystal, PCP and cocaine. ‘The raves just splintered into different vibes.’
Because it was a transplant – literally imported by English expats, in many cases – rave has had trouble establishing roots in America. It never became a mass working-class movement, and it lacks certain key elements of the UK’s self-sustaining subcultural matrix, like pirate radio. America is also a more hostile soil for rave. For rockers who still think ‘disco sucks’ and who hate English ‘haircut’ synth bands, rave is self-evidently inauthentic, a phoney fad. This prejudice is not entirely without foundation. Exempt from the picture the black house traditions in Chicago, Detroit and New York (all of which pre-date rave), and it’s striking that the white rave scene in the USA has so far failed to generate a uniquely American mutation of the music. There are isolated cells of brilliance, for sure: Josh Wink and his Ovum label in Philadelphia, the Hardkiss crew, the Brooklyn milieu in the early nineties, plus a scattering of individual DJ – producers. But America has yet to spawn a creative mis-recognition of the music to rival jungle, gabba or trance. The nearest contender is the ‘funky breaks’ or ‘breakbeat’ style of house that’s emerged in Southern California and Florida – a hybrid of hip hop, electro and acid house that, while great fun, is historically stuck at the level of UK rave in 1991.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 41
