This is the part where I tell you that things from the way back when part of your mind that occurred almost twenty years ago are not the easiest to remember, especially when being in drunken blackouts. It’s kind of like sorting through a haze of a million different memories as your brain is purging unwanted things, but the memories are there. Every once in a while there will be a trigger or something that reminds you of the past: a flashing strobe, a loud bass line, or driving on a country road through miles of cornfields. About this time in one of the greatest musical revolutions of my lifetime, electronic music began to eat itself; you had every subgenre of electronic dance you could think of from acid, house, techno, hardcore, drum ‘n bass, and on and on, each one beginning to form its scene, culture, even the way people dressed to those things became different, like putting on a pair of dress clothes for a nice dinner and another set of completely different clothes for another.
It was still pretty early on, around 2006 or so a little bit before big promoters crammed everything into the “festivals” we see today. You see, my friends, the music scene was still underground and there was something wonderful about that. But, it had its share of enemies. I think that you had a pretty good crossover between dudes and chicks that listened to electronic who also listened to metal or punk because it was that subculture, counterculture or what have you that drew the misfits of society to it.
Early 00’s you were still not seeing things become mainstream, and so you had the soccer moms, the PTA, Mothers against Drunk Driving, and every overzealous parent up in arms about it and demanding the State to do something about it. After all, we can’t just have a bunch of hooligan kids gathering together, listening to satanic filth, getting high, and having a good time. And so there was this need to continue being secretive about underground parties. You still had to find out about these events by way of close friends and they’d give you a clue about where to go to get directions to where the DJs would be for that night. If you weren’t careful and didn’t go to enough of them, your trail of where to find the next one would go cold and you’d be out of the scene and that was it.
This was right around the time when people started to use Facebook and so it was slightly easier to keep in touch with people you had fallen out of touch with over the years. Somehow I ended up becoming pretty good friends with this kid Kyle, who was a buddy of one of my ex-girlfriend’s brothers (I don’t know). We shared an interest in metal and also electronic music so it was a Friday night and we had planned on finding this rave. I picked him up in my beater Jetta which had plastic chrome rims I got from Wal-Mart and the bass system and stereo were more expensive than the car, that part you kind of had to live through it to understand how that was pretty common at the time.
Kyle and I swung by Rhiannon’s house, who lived next door to him in a three-story country house on a few acres of land off of a long road that connected several smaller towns in the area. I was somewhat scared of her dad, who I’m pretty sure had served a lengthy sentence in prison, due to his agitation/temper, and several Aryan nation tattoos I spotted on his arms. He probably joined just because that’s something you probably had to do in prison to avoid being harassed I guess, but who knows? We shared some awkward bond where I was in the Marine Corps and he went to prison and you bet that there were more commonalities than you’d think about those two things, except he didn’t take too kindly to people seeing his daughter so there was that. The whole family including their grandma all lived in that big house together and were one big happy family together. On that night we only stopped because we saw her outside on the porch and that was something that we did just sit out on the porch, smoke, and watch cars go by. So we told her we were going to this rave and asked if she wanted to go with us, which she said no because her dad was there, and on account of his over-protection, he wasn’t about to just let his daughter go to some all night party in the middle of God knows where. Rhiannon just said to be safe, which was just a girl’s way of saying don’t get blasted and drive back or do anything stupid wherever you’re going, which we didn’t know where that was at the time.
Kyle and I both smiled at waved at Rhiannon as she took another drag of what was probably the tenth Marlboro Light of the night and we got something good on that expensive stereo of mine and headed west. We had a MapQuest directions printout and that was about it, so it was another kind of thing where the journey is half the fun as getting there. It was still toward the tail end of that era when we all carried around giant ass folios of CDs that we could easily change in and out of from the passenger’s seat of the car. If you were lucky you had a 6 or 12-disc CD changer, but most of us just had one and would change CDs probably at least ten to twenty times during a lengthy car ride, depending on the company and the mood we were in and where we were headed. On this particular occasion, I’d say it probably would have been a mix of early Tiesto (pre-EDM) and Oakenfold tracks, but I had some burnt CDs of stuff I got off Pirate Bay and Limewire which was super underground and that’s kind of what we stuck with for the trip. I was still finishing college but it was summer time so I had a few months off and Kyle was a senior in high school so he had a few months off too. Little did we know we’d never really get that much free time ever again once we both started our “lives” or just working to support ourselves, chasing some Merikan dream that never really arrived.
So we drove on and on into the darkness, Kyle holding that Mapquest printout and turning on the Jetta’s dome light to see what the next step of the journey was. We were not even 100% sure that anyone would even be there when we got there, we found out about this thing from my friend Brian Fife who was still very much into the underground rave scene and had done many events, promoting and such. This was still before Facebook had more than a like button, but if there were a heart and a confused emoji that would have been pretty appropriate for Brian’s directions. We had been driving for about an hour and it didn’t feel like we were anywhere closer to where we needed to be. We had stopped at a rest area to piss and use some loose change to get a few snacks from the vending machines. I told Kyle about this story my buddy Nick told me about how he said he and his crew killed someone and left his chopped-up remains in a hefty bag at a rest stop. It didn’t exactly sit well with Kyle, but if you knew Nick very well at all, you knew that probably 90% of what he told you was either bullshit or so over-embellished it barely bordered on the truth at all.
This was one of the first outdoor raves that I could remember. We drove for what seemed like an eternity and made a few wrong turns. Just when we were both about to agree to give up on this whole thing, I think it was when we had to pull over and piss in a ditch and noticed that the time it took us to do our business, we saw absolutely no one go by. We both still wore pretty baggy ass jeans at the time, so it was hard not to get the bottoms of them damp tromping through tall grass to get far enough on the side of the road. As I was slowly walking back to the car in front of Kyle, I looked over my shoulder and saw some lights in the distance and the all too familiar sound of hard bass that carried over the nighttime into our ears. We were close.
About a mile or so down a dirt road, the kind of road you had to flick on your high beams for, Kyle read off step 20 of the printout, in a quarter of a mile turn right on UNNAMED ROAD. Well, this is either it or Brian sent us on a wild goose chase into no man’s land. At that point, I started to wonder what the hell I ever did to Brian to piss him off so bad. If I looked at his girl wrong or said something to someone on the crew that got back to him. He was always a chill dude, so try as I might, I couldn’t think of a reason why he’d want to royally screw us like that. Plus I only had a few hundred bucks in my bank account to my name if that, and gas getting out here probably burnt up $10-20 of that. Maybe Kyle would spare some cash or we’d be walking home and I didn’t exactly see any gas stations over the last half hour at least into God’s country.
As Kyle and I maneuvered the Jetta onto the UNNAMED pothole-filled bumpy ass road, the sounds of the beats got louder and we could see some larger canvas awnings set up, in what appeared to be the middle of a cornfield. We looked for a place to park and tried to avoid hitting stoned people who were just randomly sitting on the ground, congregating near two or three different tents, each with a different DJ. In a way, we should have been thanking those PTA soccer moms for pushing us out into the middle of nowhere, because as we found a spot to park, I began to feel freer, like a burden, troubles of the outside world, had been lifted from me, and my cares began to burn off, like one of Kyle’s Marlboro Reds.
We parked near some other cars and a van got out and immediately headed towards the larger tent that sounded like it was spinning some kind of drum ‘n bass. The first thing that went through my mind was how the hell they could supply power for all of this, but it looked like someone had a couple of generators, and several decks were run-off running cars. It was quite remarkable actually. I walked alongside Kyle as I tried not to trip over my baggy pants while tromping through the field, and I looked up at the night sky. It was slightly overcast but I could still make out the stars. I couldn’t remember whether or not I felt like that would have been one of the greatest nights of my life or not, but at the time, I was probably more concerned with getting inebriated and keeping Kyle somewhat sober so one of us could get us back out of here. Kyle’s parents weren’t that overprotective. His mom had this weird thing where she trusted me and thought we were going to bible camp or something. I’m not quite sure what he told his mom to get out of the house, but it was clear that we weren’t going to make it out of there at least until the next day. I could tell Kyle didn’t give a shit about all that. I looked over and he was smoking something. He smiled at me and we went to look for Brian Fife, who told us about this whole thing to begin with.
Just then I spotted some tall guy wearing a dress shirt and baggy JNCOs gathered around in a weed-smoking circle off to the side.
Fife was there laughing it up. We came up behind him and almost startled him, but I got his attention, having to yell over the loud thumping beats and samples to say, “Hey, thanks for inviting me, man.”
He said, “I’m glad you could make it out, when did you get here?”
“Just now, me and my buddy Kyle, man, this is out in the middle of nowhere!”
“Yeah, we have to keep things hushed nowadays on account of the police, overconcerned parents, and people that think we are Satanists or something. So we have these outdoors now. I hope the weather holds up, but it looks like it’s gonna rain, so just be prepared for that.”
“Well cool, man. Have you talked to Nick and Jessie, or Dale at all?”
“I haven’t seen them in forever. Nick’s kinda gone off the deep end if you know what I mean. Hahahahah....”
“Yeah, I know what you’re sayin’ man.”
“I’ll catch up with you pretty soon, enjoy everything man.”
Kyle and I walked around for a while. It did start raining after a few hours, which didn’t bode well for electronic equipment, but they managed to keep everything under the tents to continue the music. And we tromped around outside in the mud, making occasional trips to the car to try and dry off. We stayed and listened to those forbidden beats and spent some time in one of the freest environments of our lifetimes, but we didn’t know it at the time.
Something in the night air, in the clouds, in that rain that came down and cooled us off, in those stars that displayed themselves brightly, gave our lives a new flavor for rebelliousness all those years ago that we’d continue searching for, but never quite found anything quite like it.