A Nocturnal Wonderland in a Ghost City
Thoughts on my 'Dancing in the Dark' story about America's rave origins
About ten years ago, my life as a storyteller was at a crossroads. I had just become a father and had shifted my day job career into digital product design for a major media company. The six years prior I had worked as a news editor and producer at Yahoo! News, covering my main beat in national politics. For a couple years, I had written on the side for Magnetic Magazine after an old friend encouraged me to write about rave culture again. (I had once been a senior writer and the music editor for Lotus Magazine — a Cali techno-spiritual rave zine in the ‘90s that went national in the ‘00s, before it nosedived along with much of rave culture around 2004.)
Around 2007, “EDM” of course rebranded the techno and rave movement in a new incarnation that was bigger, louder and brighter than ever. Based in Los Angeles, I had long followed and engrossed myself in the electronic music underground in the West Coast, including the larger global movement. The rave scene had “died” a few times, burning itself out as quickly as it rebounded, a microcosm of a future that confounds as much as it exhilarates.
But in 2008, there was a major shift. There was the election of the first Black U.S. president in history — something I covered closely — during a major financial crisis. The city was strained for money, so it renewed its deal with Insomniac Events — the biggest rave promotion group in L.A. — to host its music festival Electric Daisy Carnival at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
L.A. had first hosted EDC there in 2007 on June 30th, just a few weeks before Daft Punk played just a short walk away at the Los Angeles Sports Arena: links in a chain reaction that included the Frenchmen’s historic performance at Coachella the year before, and the rise of tech utopianism in general, perhaps best symbolized by Burning Man’s huge impact on Silicon Valley and California’s counterculture.
So in 2012, as I left journalism as a day job and relaunched my first two blogs, The Museum of Lost Tales and Electrohound with a new vision as Ghost Deep, I started to freelance again for more publications, including LA Weekly and Insomniac.com, where a few of my old colleagues from Lotus and Magnetic asked me to take assignments, especially ones that explored Insomniac’s history.
Which brings us to Dancing in the Dark, one of the first big features I did for them. It ended up as the lead story for their 2015 issue of The Insomniac. I had actually flown out to EDC in Las Vegas in 2013, where I got a firsthand look at its phenomenal boom and production values. I wrote a few articles based on that reporting tour and came back to L.A. fired up about how the West Coast rave scene had evolved into one of the greatest juggernauts of experiential entertainment in history.
I have some basis for this assessment. I joined Southern California’s rave scene in 1993 and made monthly pilgrimages to the desert for Moontribe’s full moon parties. I was at the historic Organic ‘96 techno festival in Big Bear. I was at the first EDC in 1997 at the Shrine Auditorium, another venue adjacent to Downtown L.A., like the Coliseum and Sports Arena. I went to Burning Man in 1999, a year when it was expanding beyond its humbler origins but before it became a Tech vacation. I witnessed Daft Punk’s Coachella performance. And today I work in themed entertainment. EDC 2013 was a peak moment.
So when I was asked to write a feature on the first Nocturnal Wonderland in 1995 — Insomniac’s original “big” rave festival in California as it would become just a couple years later — I had a good sense of how all these streams were converging. That is, I could look back and excavate the right details with the right feel. What I liked about writing Dancing in the Dark was the subject had a purity and innocence about it.*
That is not to say that it was not dark, because the rave scene was almost as dark as it was bright, especially as more time passes and more insight is abraded into my mind by life; the more I perceive the cynicisms, addictions, jealousies, and insecurities that have helped drive its rise. In fact, perhaps the big secret of rave history — fluffed up with intoxicated memories and seize-the-day youthfulness — is that a lot of the people I know at the core of its genesis hate each other or distrust one another.
I suppose that’s just humanity for you. And as much as the rave scene imagined it was the first wave of a future filled with love and techno-enlightenment, the same dramas and betrayals that have defined human history and mythology were writ large with fantastic electric scrawls of sound and vision in warehouses, nightclubs, deserts, beaches, arenas, coliseums, and so on. Perhaps that was its super power: techno music compressed all that alienation and communion into sounds that went far beyond words, often without words, so that it spoke to something deep down, a consciousness that was in search of a new voice that still eludes us.
Yet that does not change my opinion of its positive value to human affairs. The world is filled with tragedy and madness. “Rave” stands as a noble idea — one that aimed to bring the world together by bringing kids from all walks of life together, to dance to a beat with a fierce commitment to artistic integrity. There’s much more to the origins of the American rave scene and its global connections, so much more, but here is a taste as I re-chart my own journey, just a chapter of many to come…
………………………‘Dancing in the Dark’………………………
This home of dreams is ghostly tonight, like downtown Los Angeles seemed for so many years — a hollow city. On a late March evening this past winter, the birthplace of Insomniac’s Nocturnal Wonderland at 2708 East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue looks like an empty two-story mansion with boarded up windows, red brick walls and Spanish arches that hide deep rooms and long staircases within. The streets around it feel eerie, not a soul walking about. It’s dead quiet.
It was here just east of the Los Angeles River in Boyle Heights, more than 20 years ago on Saturday, February 11th, 1995, that a line of ravers stretched around the block as bass thumped from the inside.
They were part of a new era, not just for Insomniac’s hometown, but for a movement reaching far outside its dusty fractured concerns. You can almost see their afterimage.
“A concrete warehouse vibrates with each dropping beat,” a Net.Werk zine profile of Insomniac began, published a few months before the first Nocturnal. “The hard walls covered with visions of psychedelic dreams, an array of colors splashes against the wave of dancers in unison with the rumbling bass. Oversize, red and white hats, bob up and down in this sea of sweat-soaked speaker stompers, whistles screech and voices scream in ecstasy of the heavy beat.”
The year prior, Pasquale Rotella had thrown a Friday night weekly called “Insomniac.” It was often touch and go: the map point for his first one was run off the front table of a coffeeshop unaware of his underground operation. Locations were hard to secure and sometimes in rough neighborhoods.
From the start, his parties called back to the good vibes of L.A.’s initial 1990-1992 rave boom. For Rotella, the sound of those good vibes was “techno,” which at the time had come to mean a swaggering hybrid of every electronic dance style that came before it. It was synonymous with the West Coast’s biggest raves.
“A lot of people at the time said it was a very bad idea to do a techno party, but that was the music I liked,” Rotella told Net.Werk editor Lisa Pisa in that same October 1994 article, pointing to the more opiate flavors of EDM that were splintering off into the L.A. afterhours scene. “The whole year when I would go out, there was nothing I would enjoy going to. I was sick of going out and not having as good a time as I used to in the scene...I wanted to feel like a kid again.”
Nostalgic and futuristic at once, Nocturnal Wonderland was designed to open the door to a bright origin myth by looping back to rave’s genesis. For inspiration, he chose Lewis Carroll’s timeless books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.
“It was something that I just naturally gravitated to because there was a famous Lewis Carroll story that was about Alice going on an adventure, and I wanted people to go on an adventure when they came to my shows,” he says now. “It was perfectly fitting — going to find venues and warehouses and going into these worlds.”
Part fairy tale exuberance, part adult contemplation, Nocturnal Wonderland’s mission was to remind the rave scene of its prime directive: to bring people together on one dance floor.
DJ Joel “Mojo” Semchuck, who played at the first Nocturnal, remembers techno as a highly eclectic music filled with a sharp attitude and heavy vibes in the low end. Some of its biggest signatures ranged from R&S’s rolling elastic classic ‘Dominator’ by Human Resource, to the black R&B soul of ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S., house rhythms bouncing through the octaves and her voice burning from the inside.
“Techno was a little bit higher energy,” says Mojo. “It had more breakbeats, more sirens and the ‘Dominator’-style, the really powerful synth stabs. When people think of techno, they think of Detroit, or they think breakbeat, or proto-jungle, because all that stuff was mixed in together: Belgian techno and Dutch techno and Detroit techno and UK breakbeat techno. It was just a mishmash of styles, and even some house and acid house and trance-y stuff all mixed in together. That’s what made what we called ‘techno’ techno.”
Net.werk’s Pisa describes it today in more native terms: “L.A. had a very distinct sound from, let’s say, Detroit or Chicago or Miami or even New York type of techno. L.A. had a very urban almost heavy bass, hip-hop feel to it, with a little bit of G-funk in there and it just had a different feeling than the other cities that were putting out techno at the time.”
By the mid ‘90s, EDM was breaking up into segregated universes. Insomniac wanted to hold them together while keeping the door open to newcomers. And the first Nocturnal Wonderland was Rotella’s biggest shot at pushing that frontier.
“It was kind of funny,” says Jason Blakemore, aka DJ Trance, who was an up-and-coming DJ from suburban Orange County south of L.A. “Insomniac wanted to do an ‘old school’ thing in 1995, go back to 1991, 1992, but it had only been a couple years since the rave explosion. It was like that movie Interstellar, another speed. It was going so fast back then.”
It may seem obvious now, but kids throwing underground parties in “forgotten” parts of L.A. using pagers and first generation mobile phones to do it, all so they could freak out to futuristic black music by way of England’s magic mirror, was like landing on Mars in 1991 or 1995.
“Nowadays we take for granted all our technology resources,” says Jason Bentley, KCRW’s music director and a regular DJ at early Nocturnals. “Back then it didn’t stop anybody. It was more of a challenge: voicemail lines, map points, criss-crossing Southern California. It was unbelievable. It’s like water. Water just finds its way. It will keep going around and carving its way to its ultimate destination. That was always part of the rave scene. It really needed to be an adventure, and it was, it definitely was.”
“I was 19, going on 15,” laughs Rotella. “I was very young. I didn’t know who was going to show up or how many people. My passion for it was just, I could see nothing else but this party. Like, kill me if nobody shows up to this party tonight. It was everything. If that event didn’t go on tonight, if it wasn’t good, my life was over. That’s how I felt.”
A review of the party in Net.werk puts about 1,500 ravers in Boyle Heights that night: “Following the voicemails, we parked at a Ralph’s and waited among about 500 people to board buses that took us to the location about two blocks away. Let off the bus, there was an even bigger line to get in. At around 3 a.m., capacity of about 1000 was reached easily with over 500 kids trying to get in. Inside the place was packed.”
Blakemore was on the bill for the main room both to DJ and play live with local acid breaks producer Mike Knapp, aka Xpando. “I remember it being dark with red walls, going up the stairs, being sweaty, carrying my records, all the DJs being there waiting, stressed and being sweaty too,” Blakemore says. “I just jumped on. I don’t remember if I was even quite supposed to play right then, but I was like, I’m going.”
Like any rave, the music was loud, a mix of chaos and rhythmic order.
“It was the Wild West out there,” recalls Mike Gutierrez, who owned the infamous Shredder sound company that worked Nocturnal that night. “The thing about the music, that bass line, I never felt like I had to get high. When I stood in front of the speakers and that sound moved me, I could sit in front of the speakers and it felt like you were swimming in an ocean and the water was pushing you one way or the other. I could just close my eyes.”
Everyone’s retinas received waves of energy too. Upstairs and downstairs, the Insomniac team bathed every surface with black lights, loops and lasers. “I used to have these lights called oil wheels,” says Rotella. “They were these glass circles, with very thin, thin glass....When you turned it on, the wheel would spin, the oils would melt and the colors — kind of like a lava lamp but lava lamps are usually one or two colors — these were like 10 colors...I had to hit the wall at the right angle and just make that wall melt.”
Aldo Bender, a surfer DJ known then for his progressive techno, was on the second floor with Blakemore. “I think that was the first event Pasquale had hired me,” he says. “It was hot. It was on one of the floors, once you were up there, big light productions, technicolor parade, projections everywhere, it was a good crowd with great energy.”
The energy that night was pulsing like the binary on/off switch of a city computer. While Blakemore and Xpando performed live as Rebirth, the power to their Digital Audio Tape machine kept going out. Panicked, Blakemore looked back many times and thought he saw Bender bobbing his chair back bumping the power cord.
“Aldo Bender being back there bumping the plug and it shutting off, we were playing a lot from a DAT and I think maybe he was messing with us for relying on it,” Blakemore says with a laugh. “Or maybe it was just a mistake. You know how these things go. It probably wasn’t even him, but some other DJ.”
Despite the hiccups, one live track in particular captured the night: Rebirth’s ‘Pure.’ As Blakemore recounts, the song was inspired by Scott Hardkiss’ ‘Raincry’ as God Within. But Xpando and Blakemore’s take on that spiritualist sound was unique. It wobbles along to a rubbery bass line and high hats syncopating like flamenco castanets, a long magic carpet ride for the dance floor. But it’s the male vocals gasping in a kind of morning prayer that sets ‘Pure’ apart, rising for several bars without beats, giving dancers a dawn within.
“Xpando and Trance, they had just put out their Rebirth record, which was getting lots of play,” remembers Pisa. “We were very proud of them because they were local boys who had made this hit. And then seeing them live in the underground environment was pretty awesome.”
Just as L.A. as Xpando’s sunny psychedelia was the harder adrenaline found on its speeding highways and deeper inland at warehouse parties along the 710 interstate. DJ R.A.W. (Raoul Gonzalez), who records today as dubstep artist 6Blocc and came up through the city’s various DJ battles, would go on to spearhead L.A.’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. He was tearing it up that night.
“R.A.W. was such a skilled DJ,” says Jeff Adachi, aka DJ Simply Jeff, one of L.A.’s breakbeat pioneers who also played at the first Nocturnal. “He was able to take that same influence, scratching and cut and paste, and go nuts. When Raoul came on, he was just incredibly technically good.”
“I don’t remember who was playing, probably R.A.W.,” says Arturo Cazares, a longtime raver who remembers one thing clearest about that night. “But everyone speaker humping made the second floor feel like we were gonna end up on the first floor!”
In its purest form, the rave scene was about freedom of thought. Not just in the music, but in the way people moved and dressed. “It was all about how much imagination you could bring to the event,” says Bentley.
“There were a handful of people that were there that still to this day I have their faces etched into my brain,” says Rotella. “Till the day I die. There were these characters and they made these events fun. I didn’t know their names, but they were something else. There was this black guy; he wore a Dominoes pizza shirt. I think he would literally get off work delivering pizza and rock his shirt and that was his trademark. I don’t know if he really worked there, but that’s what I imagined — he had a Dominoes hat and a Dominoes delivery shirt and he would go to every Insomniac event.”
“There were these other two guys that would wear giant overalls,” he says, recalling ravers like a DJ recalls records. “They would wear Cat in the Hat hats, one red and white and one green and purple. They would always roll together; you could never see their eyes. They’d always have their hats pulled really low and they’d always be hanging out next to the speakers.”
“And you had these two girls that were like the girl versions of them. They had the best style. They’d change it up and kind of match a little bit with furry overalls and their hats pulled down. They had really white faces, like they were powdered, with bright red lipstick and you couldn’t see their eyes. They were really mysterious looking.”
“There was a dude that always had a cane,” he continues, never out of depth. “He’d be in the dance circles. There was a guy that had the hugest hat ever. You could see him in the room no matter where you were standing from.”
“You’d get people from all over,” says Pisa. “All the San Fernando Valley kids ended up knowing each other. You’d meet up in Los Angeles and then you’d get the East L.A. kids. You’d get the South L.A. kids. We all came together from different parts of Los Angeles to party at these events and I loved that it had that diversity. I would have never gone to East L.A. if it weren’t for undergrounds. I would not really know much about it, or go to South Central.”
“There were people coming from upper and middle class neighborhoods connecting with breakdancing music and freestyle,” says Adachi of the era. “There were people from lower incomes, connecting ... You’re not there because you thought it was the cool thing. Because it was beyond cool then. You really had to like the music. There were people there who were into computers, like programmers. There were lots of musicians, sound engineering students, fashion people, a lot of people interested in the next level of technology, music and art.”
Coincidentally, even Frank Acevedo, who has co-owned the space at 2708 East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue for more than a decade, was heavily involved with the ‘90s rave scene. As a teen, he worked for old school promoters like Daven “The Madhatter” Michaels and Tef Foo’s CPU101. In particular, Foo’s mentor and partner, the artist Richard Duardo, who was once called the “Andy Warhol of the West,” had a huge influence on Acevedo, dubbing him “Frankie the Kid.”
“Growing up in Rampart and MacArthur Park, what was happening all around me was the beginning of these violent street gangs,” says Acevedo. “I didn’t want to have any part of it and the easiest thing for me to do was to participate in this alternative movement which may have saved my life.”
In a twist of fate and a link to in an unbroken chain back to those ravers lined around the block back in 1995, an afterimage that still glows in so many minds, sticking with the Eastside community, Acevedo’s team is currently reinventing 2708, reopening this year as the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory for kids. It will include classes on electronic music, Ableton Live, and DJ-ing.
“I would love to have some kind of reunion, an anniversary kind of thing at the venue,” he says. “We’re trying to get the next generation involved with electronic music to take it forward.” Back west across the river, the city’s heart is already pulsing with money and a cultural renaissance that is turning heads around the country. Last year, GQ dubbed downtown L.A. as “America’s Next Great City.”
But raves like Nocturnal Wonderland were decades ahead, making noise and attracting spirits to its nocturnal wonders long before it was cool. It still is. Many fractures remain. Only a lack of imagination stands in the way.
*This version of Dancing in the Dark is my original edit. The print version in The Insomniac made some changes that moved the ending away from my larger observation about the continued disconnect between the richer and poorer communities of Los Angeles, and by extension, the world.