The Long Lost Recording of Organic '96
Now mythic as a pop culture milestone, it surfaces right when we need it
It was like a portal to the future was opening in the sky. On Saturday, June 22, 1996, at 7 pm, people who tuned into 106.7 FM KROQ on their radios at home or in their cars, heard two Los Angeles DJs live from the mountains of Big Bear above the San Bernardino Valley, introducing a music event called “Organic.” The cascade of sounds was unlike anything they had heard before.
“Broadcasting live from Snow Valley….an all-night rave in the forest,” featuring some of the biggest bands in global electronic music: Underworld, The Orb, The Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Meat Beat Manifesto, along with Loop Guru, Electric Skychurch and a host of local rave DJs. On came Jed the Fish, one of KROQ’s biggest boosters of dance music, telling listeners, “Whoa! I hate to disappoint the cynics, but things so far have gone remarkably smoothly for a rave-style concert here.”
Acknowledging the prejudices and doubts of the music industry at the time, Jed was pushing up against decades of cultural resistance. It was as if he was taking in a tidal wave that seemed eminent to those closer to it, that it would dominate the world any minute. But like a Doppler effect, it was hard to gauge. The ravers and music fans at the Snow Valley Resort were also pushing up against that same friction, including the incline of the dance floor which was a ski slope during winter, and the cold: as Jed noted, “It was 80 degrees today. It’s going to be about 37 degrees tonight.”
Just a few minutes later, with the broadcast slightly time-shifted, Jed with co-host Jason Bentley would introduce live on stage, on air, the first headliner of the night.
“My favorite band in the whole world!” Jed effused.
“Welcome to the underground family!” said Bentley, who came up through L.A.’s rave scene and had relentlessly championed electronica on his show Metropolis on KCRW 89.9 FM. “You don’t know how long!” he said, unable to contain his excitement. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting, alright? You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to introduce this one band. OK, it’s live at Organic ‘96! Ready? Welcome to Underworld!”
And so it begins … but the music would be just a memory if it weren’t for one man, Daniel Barassi, who had the foresight to record the whole simulcast from his home, pushing his Mac computer to the edge — all while he was simultaneously at the show. No one has heard a pristine recording of Organic ‘96 in over a quarter century — a legendary watershed event that would prefigure Coachella and Daft Punk’s pyramid 10 years later. Long lost, on December 24th, 2020, amid the slow motion agony of COVID and a world fallen into cynicism, as a Christmas present to the globe, he finally posted what he captured with his pro gear.* It’s synchronicity. With Daft Punk’s split — it’s a rebirth of sorts for the electronic generation and a reminder that before the pyramid, there was a mountain.
We talked to Daniel about how and why he did what he did. As Depeche Mode’s archivist, a former station remixer for KROQ, the legendary MARS FM, and Groove Radio, he has seen his fair share of magic on stage, false dawns, and supernovas. Here is our edited conversation, with some Ghost Deep insights in between:
What are some of your memories of the show and why did you go?
Daniel Barassi: One of the main memories was trying to get to the event with my buddy, Ken Spector. We got in his big Cadillac, and it broke down on the way from Beverly Hills to Big Bear. We then had to get to a car rental place to rent a car to get to the show.
And then getting there, and being handed the face mask — relevant in today's terms — but back then I didn't quite understand the reasoning. But as the night progressed, I was starting to understand more and more why you needed to wear a mask, because Big Bear, when it's not snowing, is very dusty. Even wearing the mask, I was still blowing my nose for like three days afterwards.
The part that blew my mind of the entire show was basically being on the rail for Chemical Brothers, and looking up and seeing the "Yellow Submarine" black and white John Lennon, when they were doing that ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ mix, thinking “This is the best thing ever!”
Organic was just surreal. That would be the best word to put it — “surreal.” It was, for me, a completely different kind of concert experience than I had before.
You've been in the Southern California music scene for a long time, especially electronic music. You did a lot of stuff for KROQ, contributing dance edits. But before you went to Organic, what did you know about it and what did you think it would be before you went?
I wasn't a huge concert goer, I mean, thanks to KROQ, I got a lot of free tickets to concerts, so I would go to shows here and there. Organic, though, seemed different. I saw the flyers at the dance record shops on Melrose — places like Street Sounds and Prime Cuts. I saw the Organic line up, and thought “This sounds like a good show!” It's like these, these are all the bands I like.
I went with my buddy Ken, who at the time I believe was still Jason Bentley's producer on like Wednesday nights at KCRW. The two of us went, and I just, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I've worked at dance stations, I did dance music, but I didn't go to raves. Because me at 3:00 am with glow sticks? That's not my thing.
So how did you have the foresight to record Organic ‘96, which was going to be broadcast live on KROQ that night? Doing that kind of thing was much harder than it is now, in terms of disk space and so on.
Well, I had like one of those huge Radio Shack antennas. You know, the ones you see on a roof that look like you can use to talk to aliens? I could pick up 91x in San Diego, in stereo, from Burbank! That's an achievement, so I was like, “I'm gonna record this! It's going to sound great.” I always archived this stuff. For Organic, it was tricky because you have to think, “You're leaving early in the afternoon, and this thing is going all night.”
I had the tuner going through the DAT deck, which fed Pro Tools. So when I got back, it was a really large file. When you play the file I have on the site, it's a hair over five hours. That is with all the commercials cut out. The original file was much more. That's a lot of hard drive space. I was maxed out.
The only problem I had was that I recorded it off the air. I wanted a clean board feed. I begged my friends at KROQ after the show, I'm like, “Please, please, please, you must have taped this, and put the DATs aside, let me have that. I want the non-aired copy, the pre-air.” No, they threw them away!
In the 1990s, it was rock vs. rave. They were like two alien civilizations on separate planets, one representing the well-known roots of American blues and country music, and the other a post-1960s blast from the cybernetic frontier — a misfit sound. And then Organic ‘96 came, and the world of music would never be the same.
A two hour drive from his home in Burbank, remote on a mountain, Daniel was catching the cosmic waves cracking open at that moment. Like a magic trick, he was in two places at the same time, experiencing and recording. A rare alliance between the rock and rave camps, KROQ’s presence and broadcast at Organic ‘96 wasn’t welcomed by all — there were some hardcore ravers who booed and chafed.** And surely, there were rockers listening across L.A., scratching their heads, cursing the radio, and turning the dial.
But this long migration into the electronic frontier had begun years before. Depeche Mode’s performance at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in 1988 was a seminal event, and another key KROQ bet, DJ Richard Blade heavily promoting the dark electro pop act, laying the groundwork in many ways for the L.A. rave scene. Acid house would hit California the very next year, with its first underground club, Alice’s House. KROQ’s Swedish Egil was instrumental in tuning SoCal ears to the emerging sound. DJ Spinn, who would become DJ Simply Jeff, along with many other KROQ stalwarts, would follow Egil to MARS FM at 103.1 on May 24th, 1991, to help herald the future.
“I remember getting promos from Warners of the band Underworld. These records were nothing like the Underworld that came later,” explains Daniel, pointing out that there were connections to the pre-rave scene. Underworld’s unsuccessful run as a new wave band in the ‘80s led to a mid-career crash before they rebounded as one of the leading lights in electronic music. Fun fact: you can see a cassette tape promo of their Underneath the Radar album in the Depeche Mode 101 documentary, which captures DM’s historic 1988 tour and Pasadena Rose Bowl finale.
“I remember listening to them, like, ‘Yeah, okay, they're okay,’” he recalls. “That was not their best incarnation. I remember friends turning me onto some of their later stuff. I started hearing all this, like, ‘What the hell am I listening to? This is? Wow!’”
The past becoming the future and vice versa, was in the vortical waves of radio and vinyl. Rock and rave were coming together, as the bitter taste of the disco demolitions of the 1980s were slowly left behind. There was New Order in Manchester — Egil literally got the first white label of “Blue Monday” in L.A. from an air hangar in LAX when it arrived — the whole “Mad-chester” scene, which also hatched the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays.
And yet in 1991, a key decision was before KROQ management and many other tastemakers in the U.S. Was there a market for this more wild and electronic sound? Yes, Depeche Mode had shown big success. But this “Acid House” thing? It was full on. Yet right on the edge. Organic ‘96 was trying to break through, but could it?
As an underground culture, in many ways the rave revolution was poorly documented. And as those who lived it, pass on, you might ask, “Did Organic ever even happen?” That’s why Daniel’s audio resurrection in 2021 is so incredibly important.
Reading about your recording on your site, with COVID, we've all had more time in a sense and have been more isolated. So you were thinking about what you had stowed away all these years, amongst many other things. But why the Organic recording now? When did the light bulb go off that now is the time?
So I had a rough idea where the DATs were. I was hopeful they would still play, because, you know, DAT tapes are tricky. There's only one DAT standard, but tapes recorded on, say, a Sony machine, might play differently on a Panasonic machine. So I was really nervous.
But luckily, there were no problems with the Organic tapes at all. I mean, they had barely been played since I originally made them back in 1996. I was a little nervous and crossing my fingers, but the recording came out great. I was really surprised how well it came out, honestly. When I recorded things off the air, I never really thought about “legacy.” I just thought “I might want to hear this again,” and would hit record. I was never thinking, “In 30 years, this will be great.”
I didn't have that presence of mind. I never had the time to think back right away. As a professional archivist now, It's funny looking back. I never associated the word “archivist” with what I was doing, but it was what I was doing.
As for “now is the time”? With all my current workload, I just never had the time to sit for nearly six hours to transfer tapes, along with the editing and prepping for online distribution, until COVID.
Given you were following alternative music closely from 1981 onwards, involved with KROQ, an archivist for Depeche Mode, at Daft Punk’s performance at Coachella in 2006, where does Organic fit in, or not fit, in the spectrum?
KROQ in ‘96, was Soundgarden, Nirvana, it was mostly grunge. In ‘91, they could have gone Manchester with dance music, or they could have gone Seattle. They went Seattle. “Rock” was in their name, “K-Rock,” was what their program director or somebody like that said. That was their policy.
Organic '96 on KROQ seemed a bit out of place. KROQ didn't do much to promote it, and it was broadcast live late at night into the morning. Not exactly prime time placement. It was an experiment, if anything.
If the show had been broadcast nationally, like a Westwood One broadcast or something, who knows how big this kind of music could have been. Instead, it was just on KROQ, once, and the tapes were thrown away after.
I think it's really more in retrospect that it is recognized as a big thing. It didn't feel like a normal thing, and especially again with the way music culture was at that time. We're in L.A.; we're spoiled. I don't think a lot of the country had a lot of rave music going on. If it was, in most places, it was probably a very small scene. I’m exaggerating, but like three dudes in the back of a Circle K.
It’s simple. No Organic. No Coachella. A decent amount has been written about the importance of Organic ‘96, but more could be said. And certainly it has not gotten the recognition it deserves. Daniel reminded me several times that it was “fringe” at the time, pointing out how much rock still dominated, and how people didn’t understand then that those worlds could be crossed and even cross-pollinated. As a result, years before social media and smartphones, Organic ‘96 remains relatively unknown.
The brainchild of Philip Blaine, a crucial L.A. event producer in the rise of EDM and electronic music in America, Organic ‘96 showed the way for Goldenvoice to take a chance on Coachella just a few years later: Paul Tollett has explained in the past how Organic inspired him and his team to bring the festival culture of Europe to California, by creating a place for the mass convergence of popular musical styles, that rave culture and Organic ‘96 had helped incubate.***
Bands like Underworld, Orbital and the Chemical Brothers were instrumental in setting the tone for Daft Punk and Fat Boy Slim, or creating the atmosphere for electronics that Radiohead, Coldplay, Kanye West, Skrillex and Billie Eilish have emulated in their own unique ways. Nowadays it’s no big deal. It’s natural. It’s even expected. Someone may still adhere to a purely acoustic record or sound. But it all goes electronic somewhere along the line. That’s inevitable now.
We live in the digital age. And while new wave before rave, and Kraftwerk before Daft Punk, pioneered the use of synthesizers and drum machines, the most critical period in the evolution of electronic music did not happen on MTV or YouTube. It was in these random signals and one-off miracles, like Organic ‘96.
Over five hours of raw history, Daniel’s miraculous recording of KROQ’s broadcast of Organic ‘96 is a thrill to hear. I was actually at Organic, so I had never heard what it was like to hear it from afar. It calls back vivid memories and captures the sonic magic of the night well. From Underworld’s blistering set — as Daniel says, “Karl Hyde, the singer, you’ve got him screaming the lyrics. It's really live!” — to the hard-charging breaks of the Chemical Brothers to the the melodic trips of Orbital to the strange esoteric dub sea of The Orb, it’s a fascinating and immersive ride.
You even have the clash of perceptions, as KROQ’s morning DJ Scott Mason takes over from The Orb. He’s flabbergasted by what he is hearing. That the last thing we hear is him switching to news about a KKK rally, in its own way foreshadowing the bizarre times we live in today, speaks to all the twists and turns we’ve since taken.
Yet here, for a moment, is pure bliss. If Organic ‘96 had happened in 2016, people would have streamed it live from across the planet. But now, at long last, they can hear what was so momentous 25 years ago. It’s a window into the mythic, an energy flash, back to a future that is as exciting as ever, that is still unfolding before us…
We talked about you finding the tapes and the recording process, but what was it like to listen to Organic again and the broadcast? After you know it had been stored away for so long?
Very fun. When I archive a DAT tape, I don't just put the tape on and walk away. You can't do that when you're archiving something, because there could be some little glitch, some little something. Luckily, all three Organic DATs played beautifully. So I'm sitting here. I was playing the DATs with my headphones on, blasting the thing. I'm like, “I remember this! Oh my god, people are gonna enjoy this. This is gonna be fucking cool.” It was an amazing reliving of the moment. To be able to sit through the entire process again and hear the show, more or less in order, was surreal.
If you play the very final bit of the MP3 file, I left the piece of the late Scott Mason, KROQ engineer and DJ. He used to do a public service show on KROQ. His show came right after the Organic broadcast, and you hear him doing his transition over The Orb, and he's like, “Well, that was weird!” I left it in because it’s an absolutely perfect example of where people's mindset was at that time.
Like you said, you had this powerful Radio Shack antenna. You had your setup. It was one of the longer shows you recorded because you were at the show. Do you remember when you got home?
I remember coming back, and immediately seeing it was still recording, like, “That's good!” And then, I'm like, “Oh God, it's been recording all day.” If I hit stop, is it going to save it? Is it going to crash Pro Tools? This was early Pro Tools, not exactly the most stable audio recording software. I was so paranoid about even touching the computer. But if it kept recording, I was gonna run out of space in minutes. I hit stop. I hit save. It saved, and like, “Oh, this is okay. This is promising.” And yeah, opening up the saved file, it actually started playing back and I was like, “This is fucking great!”
I've found lots of stuff recently in my DAT collection, but the Organic tape was definitely like a level. It has always surprised me how not recognized it is. I mean, it was a pretty big event, but it's still kind of underground. It didn't get a lot of love. Nobody really invokes Organic that much, and when they do it's just certain people. So the fact that I was able to have something, you know, again, I had the presence of mind to record it. My computer worked with me that day and it lasted all these years for me to be able to digitize it and put it out.
I'm sure everybody's brain is just fried from living through this pandemic. So I thought, with the Organic recording, for the ones who did know about it, but also for the people who didn't, it could be something to get your mind off the pandemic hell.
In a way, Organic ‘96, even if people don’t know it by name, has entered the zeitgeist through things like Coachella. They call it out big time and feature some video of it, that Philip Blaine loaned, in the history of Coachella doc that they premiered last year online. Now that this is out, what does it mean to you?
Organic was in its own way, you could say, a blip. But it’s mythic. In the sense that it was part of that change that was happening. There isn’t a lot of documentation about it. So I'm really happy to be able to share the show with the world. The bands that played there are well known nowadays, but back in 1996 they were a bit “fringe” to many in America. Not to me, though. I might have just hung on the rail all night and soaked in the music, instead of dancing, but the show was special for me. Getting the chance now to share such a rare show is a privilege.
Before I put up the full Organic '96 file, I put up a teaser of the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ mix. Having Tom Rowlands [of the Chemical Brothers] actually tweet me back, going “I've never heard this!” — it's mind-blowing. Even the artists involved didn't seem to have a copy!
Go to Daniel’s Brat Productions site to listen to the Organic ‘96 recording in full. Read more about Organic, and Underworld in particular, at our Medium site for a deep dive from 2015. Or get the lowdown from a retrospective story in Billboard from 2019.
*Recordings of Organic ‘96 have existed, very limited, on file-sharing services and as bootlegs, in most cases as only portions and at low bitrates, but Daniel Barassi’s new version appears to be the first to be shared widely on a public site and in high quality.
**My own memory is that when Jed the Fish came on stage to introduce Underworld and say the show was live on KROQ, that many of the ravers further back in the field booed. That’s how strongly many people felt about the “underground,” and about wearing a badge of hostility toward the mainstream. Also, a lot of the people in the crowd were indeed the L.A. rave scene’s most committed participants.
For example, Blaine co-produced the event with Insomniac, hiring Pasquale Rotella to help get the word out for Organic ‘96. Together, they also booked many of the DJs for the festival, handpicking some of the most respected and credible tastemakers in the Los Angeles area, including the Moontribe crew (DJ Daniel Chavez, John Kelley, Brian Seed), URB Magazine founder Raymond Roker, DJ Trance, Ron D. Core, Fester, R.A.W., Eli Star, Thee-O, Alien Tom, and Mojo, including London’s Michael Dog.
***Glastonbury Festival in the UK, started in 1970, was the main inspiration for Organic ‘96 and Coachella. 1996 was a “fallow year” — when the Glastonbury organizers give the land and local township a breather from the 200,000 person, 5-day gathering. Because Glastonbury didn’t happen in 1996, the top British electronic bands — who were leading in the sphere of live techno before Daft Punk or the French — could be booked for Organic ‘96 at a more affordable cost, enabling Blaine to take a risk.
Hell yea, this is still one of my favorite evenings ever. Very interested to see if my memories line up...