Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  On Sunday evening, it’s stopped raining at last, the mud has dried, and the slightly reduced crowd consists of the hardcore of party people who just don’t wanna go home. The Drop Bass Network crew pose for a photo like end-of-year college students. I chat to their leader, Kurt Eckes, who tells me over 3000 people turned up. ‘We’ve seen licence plates from California, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New York, Washington DC.’

  Thinking of the teenage acid-casualty the previous night, I suggest to Kurt that some of the kids here look kinda young. Do their parents know what they’re up to? ‘I suspect they don’t,’ he says, adding blithely that ‘A couple of parents called here threatening to call the police for having fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old kids here without parental permission.’ Eckes’s nonchalance stems from Drop Bass Network’s militantly underground attitude. ‘There are no rules here at all,’ he grins.

  DBN is all about representing the rave scene’s dark side. ‘Within the rave scene, there’s definitely some things going on which to most people seem wrong,’ Eckes told Urb magazine. ‘They seem right to us. We’re just pushing those things to the limit.’ DBN’s version of rave might be called called psycho-delic rather than psychedelic.

  Distancing himself from the Summer of Love idyllicism of 1988, Eckes once declared: ‘I don’t see myself going to a party, taking E, hugging people, and screaming peace and love. I’m more . . . a person who’d rather go to a party, take a lot of acid, and hug speakers.’ As Eckes and I chat, the nearest sound-system is pumping out Test’s ‘Overdub’, a classic Roland 303-meets-gabba blitzkrieg unleashed in 1992 by Dance Ecstasy 2001, sister-label of Frankfurt’s ultra-dark PCP. As well as a party promoter, DBN is a record label specializing in PCP-STYLE industrial-strength hardcore and mindfucker acid; the label’s third release was titled ‘Bad Acid – No Such Thing’. But DBN’s most punishing output is released via a sub-label called SixSixtySix. The Satanic allusion is a clue to Eckes’s subcultural strategy – turning heavy metal kids on to techno (Milwaukee is a big town for thrash and ‘black’ metal).

  As well as the Furthur events, DBN throw regular ‘techno-pagan ritual parties’, often timed for the solstices. One such party – Grave Rave, on Halloween Night 1992 – was treated like a modern day witches’ masses by the authorities. Armed police stormed the building and arrested not just the organizers but the entire audience. After being detained in handcuffs for five hours, 973 people were issued $325 citations for ‘aiding and abetting the unlicensed serving of alcohol’ (in fact only a few cans of beer were found). Those under seventeen were also given tickets for violating the ‘teen curfews’ that Milwaukee, like many American cities, instituted to ‘protect the young’. But 400 of those prosecuted pleaded not guilty, ultimately forcing the city to drop the charges because of bad publicity concerning the police’s overreaction. Undaunted, DBN threw a sequel ‘Helloween 93’ party called Grave Reverence, trailed with the promise: ‘Demons of the darkside taking control of your soul.’

  Even Furthur is a microcosm of American rave culture. On the positive side, Furthur wouldn’t exist without the zeal of the promoters (who definitely aren’t in it for the meagre profits) and the dedication of the kids, who are prepared to drive five to fifteen hours to a rave, and who sustain the geographically dispersed scene via the Internet and fanzines like Tripp E Tymes. On the less positive side, there’s the debauched extremity of the drug use, the tender age of the participants, and the precarious relationship with the law (which is why Even Furthur took place at such a remote, non-urban location).

  Despite regular outcries in regional newspapers, despite police harassment and legislative repression on the state, county and city level, rave in America has never really escalated to a national news phenomenon. Every year since 1991, current affairs TV programmes have ‘discovered’ rave and solemnly informed parents it’s ‘the latest craze’, despite the fact that rave started in America as early as 1990. 20/20’s 1997 exposé of the Florida rave scene is typical, whipping up parental fears with its references to ‘blatant, brazen drug-taking’ and parties situated ‘anywhere that’s far from adult supervision’. At these ‘drug supermarkets’, non-users are an ‘endangered species’ because ‘peer pressure is profoundly strong’. Mothers of kids who’ve died from overdoses appear to beseech – ‘We need to stop the raves!’

  Yet for all its folk-devil/media-panic potential, American rave culture never hit that critical mass of public concern and outrage that really pushed British rave over the top in 1988 – 9. Partly that’s because the subculture infiltrated the country in slow-and-steady, piecemeal fashion; partly it’s because the music didn’t explode into the Billboard charts like in the UK. But this still begs the question – why? It’s even more puzzling when you consider that not only did the music originate in America (in Detroit, Chicago, New York), but that the Ecstasy/ trance-dance connection was first discovered in Dallas and Austin in the early eighties.

  ‘This was Reagan years, remember, so it was pure hedonism,’ says Wade Hampton, then an upper-class Dallas teenager, later a prime mover in the California rave scene. Devoid of counter-cultural trappings, the Texas Ecstasy scene was about innocent fun – literally innocent, because MDMA was legal until the summer of 1985, and you could buy it over the counter in gay clubs like Stark in downtown Dallas. ‘We were charging it on our parents’ credit cards,’ says Hampton. Despite the absence of hippy-dippy ideology, Stark and similar clubs anticipated the Balearic anything-goes ethos coined in Ibiza’s Amnesia and codified by Shoom in London. The soundtrack mixed proto-techno electronic dance (Section 25’s ‘Looking From A Hilltop’, Chris and Cosey) with Wax Trax-style industrial and indiepop like The Smiths’ ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’. And as XTC spread from the gay crowd to straights, a Texan equivalent to the loved-up football hooligan emerged: fratboys and jocks whose machismo melted under the influence of MDMA. ‘You’d go into a bathroom and see Southern Methodist University football players wiping the mascara from their eyes. It was the first time [Dallas] men had their testosterone broken down.’

  But it was these rich college kids who ‘fucked it up’, says Hampton. ‘If you look back at the cases that were the basis for making Ecstasy illegal, it wasn’t the gay crowd, it was SMU students who had enough money to buy twenty hits of Ecstasy. And they’d take all of it. The weird thing was that people were going blind – temporarily – from taking too much. Those kids’ parents had enough money to raise hell – I’m talking the cover of the Dallas Morning News every other week, for a year.’

  Outside the gay discotheques, there was also a yuppy scene of ‘XTC parties’ that precociously featured one of the defining aspects of rave – the eschewing of alcohol in favour of juice and mineral water. For these respectable professionals, Ecstasy didn’t seem like a drug; it was cheap, there was no scuzzy paraphernalia like syringes or bongs, it wasn’t addictive and there was no hangover. Above all, it was legal. ‘It wasn’t unusual to come home with a date and her parents would be higher than you guys,’ Hampton laughs.

  When MDMA was placed on Schedule 1, the worst category of illegal drugs, the yuppies stopped partying and the dance scene went underground. ‘From the minute it was illegal, there were warehouse events, with DJs involved as organizers.’ With MDMA outlawed, the drug’s price soared even as its quality deteriorated; the cheaper, more dependable methamphetamine infiltrated the clubs, prefiguring the calamity that would strike rave scenes throughout America in the nineties.

  Hardcore, Only 4 the Headstrong: New York Rave

  In the pre-prohibition early eighties, MDMA was available in club scenes throughout America. Generally, it was used more for bonding sessions amongst friends than as a trance/dance drug. The first fully fledged rave scene was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was directly modelled on what was happening in Britain in 1989. Already a veteran DJ – producer on New York’s freestyle scene, 23-year-old Frankie Bones was flown to England for an Energy rave. After the awesome buzz of playing to 25,00
0 people at dawn, Bones enjoyed his own personal ‘Ecstasy revelation’ a week later at Heaven in Charing Cross. ‘I’m on my first hit of E . . . and all this shit is going through my head – “you’ve got to bring this back to America”.’

  At his first parties in Brooklyn, Bones and his crew actually played videos of English raves on screens, as a sort of training film. These first events were word-of-mouth micro-raves: ‘Fifteen people in someone’s room with a sound-system and a strobe.’ Gradually escalating into the hundreds, the indoor jams turned into ‘outlaw parties’ at warehouses or beaches, advertised with handwritten flyers. After a dozen or so ‘break-in’ parties, Bones and Co – brother Adam X and his girlfriend Heather Heart, DJ Jimmy Crash and promoter-whizzkid Dennis The Menace – started calling the events Storm Rave.

  ‘At first, they were just a place to hang out,’ says Dennis. ‘No one could get into clubs, we weren’t dressed right. When I got involved, there was an outlaw party in the woods in Queens, in July 1991. You had to go to this famous Carvel [an ice cream shop] in Brooklyn, where you’d get given the map, which led you to the site in Queens. You followed this path with candles along it into the woods . . . The early parties were free, but we’d ask for donations to pay for gas for the generator. The less we asked for, the more they gave. That was back when it was pure.’

  One of the most successful early parties took place in a brickyard, with the Storm crew building a DJ booth out of cinder blocks. ‘Back then, we’d spent the whole week just scouting for buildings like that,’ says Bones. ‘In the fence at the back of the brickyard, we cut a hole adjacent to these freight tracks that no trains had been on in years. People parked six blocks away, walked down the tracks and climbed through the hole.’ During 1992, there was a Storm Rave Allnighter every month or so, plus smaller outlaw parties with names like Tina Tripp’s Magical Mystery Tour (after Frankie’s girlfriend Tina). By the summer, events like Brainstorm were pulling crowds in the thousands to hear top DJs like Doc Martin, Caspar Pound, Sven Väth and Richie Hawtin.

  The Brooklyn soundtrack was ‘hardcore-only 4 the headstrong’ (as Bones put it), music for the first flush of Ecstasy euphoria – Belgian bombast, Underground Resistance, early English breakbeat ’ardkore like The Prodigy. In typical hardcore rave fashion, Storm was part of a subcultural matrix that combined party promotion, DJ-ing, retail and making tracks. Bones, Adam X and Heather Heart ran their own Brooklyn record store Groove. This became the focus for a closeknit alliance of mostly Italian-American DJ – producers – Lennie Dee, Mundo Muzique, Tommy Musto, Ralphie Dee, Joey Beltram, Damon Wild – who traded ideas, collaborated, and engineered each others’ tracks. Frankie was at the centre of it all: sharing an apartment with Beltram, making music with Lenny Dee as Looney Tunes for England’s XL label, and with Tommy Musto for Deconstruction/RCA. Then there was his solo stuff as Flowmasters and his famous ‘Bonesbreaks’ series of hip-house EPs, minimal breakbeat tracks designed as mixing material for DJs.

  The deals with XL and RCA proved useful in an unexpected way – when the cops came to bust the parties, Bones brandished official-looking documentation with record company letterheads and claimed ‘We’re shooting my video inside.’ Eventually, Bones got into serious trouble with the police and the fire marshals, who were cracking down on unlicensed events after a hundred people died in a fire at an overcrowded Latin Social club called Happy Land. ‘They set up a police team called the Social Club Task Force to check clubs had fire exits,’ says Bones. ‘When they found out about the rave scene they became the Rave Task Force.’

  There was also undercover intelligence work to worry about. ‘On three separate occasions I had people coming to Groove Records asking me for Ecstasy. And I’m, like, “What’s Ecstasy? Is it a record?” There was a track out called “Ecstasy, Don’t Play Me Raw”, so I’d grab a copy and say “Is that what you’re looking for?” and then they’d leave. I knew people who had Ecstasy, but if you’re the DJ and you’re the one throwing parties, you don’t want to [get involved in] selling pills.’

  Yet, as Frankie admits, ‘without Ecstasy, [the scene] would never have happened the way it did . . . That shit breaks down people’s inhibitions.’ Ecstasy also got rid of the troublemaker element – most of the time. ‘The one time we did a party where it felt like some kids were going to start robbing people, I set an abandoned car on fire just to get everybody out of there quickly!’

  As in Britain, the early ‘pure’ phase of rave was succeeded by a period in which entrepreneurs, legal and illegal, cottoned on to the money-making potential of the scene. In London, this involved bringing the music into West End clubs, and the MDMA-initiation of working-class non-hipsters. The key figure behind this process in New York was Michael Caruso, aka Lord Michael. ‘I was friends with Michael,’ says Frankie Bones. ‘But he was, like, “Bones can’t do these parties for ever, I’m gonna bring it into Manhattan.” ’

  Surrounded by a thirty-strong ruffneck entourage, Lord Michael started throwing warehouse jams in the outer boroughs, then made the transition to Manhattan in 1991. His working-class following mostly consisted of Italian-American youth from the ‘bridge and tunnel’ boroughs (Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Staten Island) that surround Manhattan; a self-described ‘new breed’ who had seized on techno’s futurism in a violent reaction against their parents and elder brothers’ retrograde taste. By early 1992, Michael was working for Manhattan clubland mogul Peter Gatien, owner of the Limelight and the Palladium. The ‘new breed’ would gather at Caruso’s two hardcore nights Adrenalin and Future Shock, Thursdays at the Palladium and Fridays at the Limelight respectively.

  ‘Fifty per cent of the kids here are just into the music,’ Lord Michael told me at the time. ‘They get off on the aggression, ’cos New York’s a very aggressive city. The other 50 per cent are taking Ecstasy or acid. Some of them smoke PCP. It’s wild.’ The soundtrack was full-on Belgian-British-Brooklyn brutalism, escalating from the voodoo throb of ‘House Of God’ by local outfit D.H.S., through djpc’s speedfreak anthem ‘Inssomniak’ to the ungodly tintinnabulation of Incubus’s awesome ‘The Spirit’. With tempos peaking at a then outrageous 150 b.p.m., it seemed the only appropriate response was to headbang or pogo. Clinching the hardcore-as-thrash-or-punk analogy, the brawny boys didn’t dance rave-style, they slamdanced. Young bucks with slicked-back hair barged into the fray, stripped to the waist with T-shirts hanging out of the back jean pockets like Springsteen. Others lurked at the Limelight bar and brazenly snorted cocaine through soda straws. Moby – then DJ-ing at Future Shock and making waves with tracks like ‘Go’ – later likened the experience of spinning for this crowd to ‘playing in a penitentiary’.

  As Gatien’s right-hand man, Lord Michael became a major clubland power broker. ‘When he met Timothy Leary in the Limelight, he really just flipped the script, he really wanted to be, like, kingpin,’ says Bones. In a 1997 Village Voice exposé of Lord Michael headlined ‘The King of Ecstasy’, Frankie described his erstwhile buddy as ‘the Al Capone of raves’. Bones also alleges that The Limelight tipped off fire marshals about a Storm Rave on 18 July 1992, because ‘we were hurting the business in [Gatien’s] club . . . The marshal came with six fire trucks . . . Conveniently, as everybody’s leaving the party, there’s people handing out flyers and saying “now come down the Limelight!” ’

  By the end of July 1992, Storm Rave had an ally in the struggle against the Limelight’s commercialized version of hardcore: NASA. Located at Shelter, a club in deepest downtown Manhattan, NASA – short for Nocturnal Audio And Sensory Awakening – was the brainchild of Scotto and DB. Scotto was an in-demand lighting-director who had toured with Deee-Lite. London-born DB had moved to New York in 1989, where he DJ-ed and ran a peripatetic outlaw party called Deep with a proto-rave vibe, plus smaller events like Orange which catered to English expats with a mix of house and Madchester style indie-dance.

  Kicking off at the end of July 1992, NASA was full-blown rave. The music was a different ve
rsion of hardcore than either Storm or Future Shock offered – NASA’s DJs favoured the breakbeat-and-piano driven tunes that were peaking in England that summer. ‘The first six weeks, we lost money every week,’ says DB. ‘But I knew in my guts that if we stuck with it, the thing was going to pop. After six weeks, there was a line around the block, and these kids were not jaded, they didn’t want to get in for free like typical Manhattan clubbers. To this day, I’ve never seen dance energy like it in New York.’

  DB and his fellow DJs like Soulslinger and Jason Jinx were pushing the proto-jungle tunes from UK labels like Reinforced, Formation and Moving Shadow. The first time I went to NASA, I was thrilled to hear tunes I recognized from the London pirate stations. But by this point, the winter of 1992, the crowd’s vibe was lagging behind the music’s madness. The peak ‘only lasted three or four months,’ admits DB, ‘it quickly became way too young, way too druggy, way too cliquey-fashion-bullshit.’ Unlike the dressed-down, jeans-and-trainers Storm crowd, the NASA kids were inventing the look that became the dominant US rave style. ‘It was the fusion of hip-hop culture into rave,’ says DB. ‘Super baggy trousers halfway down their arses, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo – preppy gear that became hip-hop clothing and then entered rave. But back in 1992, it wasn’t so label oriented – lots of backpacks, lollipops, flowers in the hair, smiley faces. Very kiddy-innocent-looking – nineteen-year-olds trying to look like they were five-year-olds.’

  ‘NASA was where that whole style of East Coast rave dancing was invented,’ says Scotto. ‘That dance where there’s a little snakey thing going, and little bunny hop steps – that was created at NASA by this guy Philly Dave. He was an Ecstasy dealer, he wore these big white gloves, and he would come up from Philadelphia every week. One night he was fucked up and mesmerized by his own gloves, he started these moves, and that’s how it started. The kids worshipped him, he was an icon. Unfortunately, he OD-ed.’