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Rave New World Vancouver's scene gets down to business by Guy Babineau
Sunday morning, 2 a.m., may not seem like the ideal time to head out for a night on the town, especially when it’s a night in the country. Yet, far from the city, down a narrow sideroad, a posse of red tail-lights snakes through farmland toward a pulsing glow that emanates from behind a bank of coniferous trees at the end of a distant field and diffuses into a Steven Spielberg sky profuse with stars. A full moon floats luminously beneath a filament of scattered clouds. The fresh air is sweet with the hint of autumn - and cannabis. One by one, cars are ushered into a makeshift parking lot by security guards with bright red traffic batons. The synthesized tom-tom of electrojungle reverberates, drawing people one by one from their vehicles and toward the ethereal glow.
But first, everyone passes through a processing centre. Beyond the side door in a community hall, another battalion of security guards awaits. They take the tickets - plastic cards with magnetic stripes - and swipe them. After a computer database has confirmed the tickets are paid for, pockets are emptied and a cursory frisk ensues. Next, the new arrivals traverse a gymnasium where a half dozen teens and twentysomethings dance in a swirl of acid-flashback lighting. Finally, they walk past a vendor selling bottled water and candy, and end up back outside.
A five-minute walk along a packed dirt road leads to the ultimate destination. En route, two guys make an unmistakable sound reminiscent of the washroom stalls of an ’80s nightclub. Sniffing, they offer a line to passersby, which is politely declined. The road bends, the trees break and suddenly 1,500 dancers appear, bouncing, gesticulating, many carrying or wearing shimmering phosphorescent doodads. On a DAY-GLO stage, a celebrity DJ energetically mixes vinyl, accompanied by impromptu go-go dancers and a man in a welder’s mask doing something inscrutable with a blow torch. Three large movie screens flicker with montages of unrelated yet mesmerizing images. A rapid sequence of purple and blue laser beams scatterguns the sky. What sounds at first like the rattle of tiny tractors turns out to be generators kerplunked in the dried mud. On the sidelines are concession stands that sell massages, pizza, watermelon, more bottled water and candy. This place, in rave-speak, is a TAZ: a Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Around the dance area, clusters of people are seated on the ground, engaged in quiet conversation. Amid the dancing throng, people bump into each other then pause to say “excuse me.” There is no evidence of alcohol, either in bottles or behaviour. It's a cuddly, cleancut crowd, outfitted in uniform counterculture clothes from Le Château and the Gap.
Every ethnic group and nonconformist sexual preference is represented and everyone is having a good time, but sexual behaviour is almost non-existent. The dancers are a unified clump, caught up in a euphoria of simultaneous self-expression that has an almost transcendental quality. Smurfy voodoo. Or, given that many of these seemingly privileged kids are blissed out on an illicit substance, the disinhibiting empathogen ecstasy, maybe this is just Leave It to Beaver on drugs. Welcome to a Vancouver rave, circa 1998. Only it’s not called a rave, but a dance party. And it’s not in Vancouver. It’s in Chilliwack. While Toronto and Seattle, cities Vancouver is often compared to, boast rave and dance-party scenes that thrive thanks to relaxed municipal legislation, Vancouver’s would-be ravers are crippled by the city's arthritic dance-hall bylaws, which seem to have been quill-written by someone’s vinegary Aunt Prue. Inside city limits, nobody 19 or over may dance publicly with someone under 19, and after 2 a.m. no one at all is allowed to dance, except at high school graduation dances where - if a school authority has obtained the proper permit - dancing is tolerated until 4:30 a.m. The nearby jurisdictions of Richmond and UBC have recently introduced rulings that prohibit raves. Hence the banishment of raves to smaller communities in the Fraser Valley, on Vancouver Island and in the Okanagan.
This is due to occasional rave-related incidents and frequent rave- related public misunderstandings. Just last May, media outlets reported a drug death and several non-fatal ecstasy overdoses associated with a UBC rave called Never Neverland. The death, it turned out, was an unrelated suicide that occurred several kilometres from the rave site. The overdoses did take place at the party, but now the police admit they were likely due to GHB, a drug potentially much more dangerous than ecstasy. This summer a proposed rave near Penticton was regulated out of business after a nearby campsite operator complained the music was too loud. Meanwhile, the archives at BCTV reveal the bizarre extent to which reports on the evils of raves will go. In August of 1997, an outbreak of the mumps prompted the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board to announce that infected teens were 17 times more likely to have attended a rave than those uninfected - mumps bacteria apparently practising discretion about where they go for a good time.
“I'm not down on raves in particular; I just have to ensure that anybody who gets a licence for a special event is going to uphold the law,” says constable Bob Young, of the VPD’s Special Events department. He’s the one responsible for deciding who gets permits for dance parties. “Most of the organizers want permission for events that last all night long. That contravenes city bylaws.”
“We have a real concern about people’s safety,” adds Paul Teichroeb, Chief Licence Inspector for the City of Vancouver, and Young’s city hall rave-control counterpart. “Let’s just say that we seem to share a different philosophy about what safety means. And to be honest, we do receive pressure from legitimate club and bar owners who feel that these events offer unfair competition.”
NO DOUBT BAR OWNERS HAD SIMILAR concerns about the first rock concerts. Raves are basically ’60s love-ins reconstituted for the ’90s, with a high-tech edge and better dance music. Rave culture was born in the late ’80s in England and Germany when people in their teens and 20s started congregating as spontaneous all-night parties in abandoned buildings to dance to funky, computer-generated music featuring samples of songs technically manipulated by DJs. Rave’s proponents pulled psychedelia out of Haight-Ashbury’s photo album and retouched it with a technological twist. Ecstasy, a drug briefly used by psychotherapists to lower clients’ ego barriers and get them in touch with their feelings, made everyone non-sexually lovey-dovey. An update on the hippies’ search for new spiritual vistas via LSD, peyote and mescaline, but without a hallucinogenic component, E heightened a communal sense of what adherents cal PLUR: Peace, Love, Understanding and Respect.
New-age philosopher and rave kingpin Hakim Bey has an influence on hardcore ravers much as anti-establishment toastmaster Timothy Leary did on the flower children. Bey endows the scene with mystical qualities and celebrates the nomadic, ephemeral and pagan nature of these events. It was he who coined the term Temporary Autonomous Zone. Bey-watchers believe that ravers have a utopian goal: to achieve, briefly, higher spiritual consciousness and complete harmony with everyone else. Bey espouses the benefits of underground commerce, what he calls a “pirate economy”, and embraces the Internet as a tool for building community.
Yes, it sounds naïve, if not a little scary. But consider Woodstock, the poster festival for the era the ravers emulate. While operating under the guise of peace, love and understanding, the festival was in fact a money-making venture, and ended up being free only because ticket booths didn’t arrive on time and the crowds crashed the fences. All the acts were paid, many received double their usual fee, and some refused to perform until they got the money upfront.
Twenty years later in places like New York, having a good time didn’t need a higher purpose. At trend supernovas like Area, Tunnel, and The Palladium, the so-called Club Kids wore gender-bending ensembles and baby-doll outfits, and took ecstasy as well as nastier drugs such as keratine, GHB and crystal meth.
By the early ’90s all of the above had coalesced in Vancouver at secretive, illegal warehouse raves, one-nighters you’d find out about the night they happened by word of mouth or a hush-hush telephone number. They often comprised several rooms with varied music and atmospheres. For most people it was an occasional, recreational pastime. If they did any drug, it was E. Some scenesters recall where ecstasy was included in the ticket price.
In June, Toronto’s Addiction and Mental Health Services Corporation released what it claims is one of the first studies of the rave scene in Canada, with some surprising insights. According to the study, the main reason ravers say they attend parties is “the music, dancing and being with friends”, not drugs. The community code of conduct frowns upon violence and “unwanted advances on women.” Many ravers disapprove of alcohol because it causes inappropriate behaviour.
The early Vancouver parties were gentle, friendly and, most of the time, safe. Yet overdoses did occur, especially when ecstasy was mixed or laced with other stimulants. Lately, some say, the scene has soured, and new research suggests that regular use can lead to health problems such as memory loss. Seasoned ravers have shelved their PLUR, and roll their eyes with zeitgeist angst. They complain about organized crime’s growing involvement as the city’s traffic in heroin, crack and designer drugs increases in velocity, and they bitch about people trying to commercialize raves.
“Raves used to be so…light,” says one scene veteran, 19. “Now, with crystal meth, the vibe is tense. And the big raves, you can go into Le Château and pick up a flyer. How underground is that? Plus they’re expensive. Tickets are, like, 25 to 50 bucks. Then you’ve got to pay three bucks for a chocolate bar or a bottle of water.” As with movie theatres, people are not permitted to bring their own refreshments; the frisking ritual is perhaps more about enforcing this rule than it is to intercept contraband drugs.
Futuristic Flavour, a store on Granville Street, caters to the alternative dance scene with records, CDs and paraphernalia. “Pirate-economy” pants run $100 to $130; trendy tanktops sell for around $50. Over at Hush, a record store on Abbott Street, the vibe is solely about music. Owner Deana Prod’homme, 24, finds that lately she is eschewing raves in favour of private dance parties, where the focus is neither drugs nor establishment-bashing nor being fashionable. The focus, for Deana and her pals, is the music. It’s become pretty sophisticated over the past 10 years, with an electrified finger in jazz’s pie and a digitized foot in the doorway to rhythm & blues. “The big raves now are just a bunch of teenagers who don’t care what they’re dancing too,” says Prud’homme.
BUT OF COURSE, THAT’S AT LEAST PARTLY because as the original early-’90s ravers grew up, they gravitated away from barn- parties and toward bars and nightclubs, quietly inheriting the urban scene. In fact, lost a little amid the buzz over the revival of swing and the sudden death of guitar rock is the emergence of electronic music and acid jazz—rave music—as the dominant forms in Vancouver clubs. In a word, the ravers won. A smart, ambitious group of young entrepreneurs is currently attempting to cement a place in Vancouver’s after-dark scene despite the eye-crossing prospect of untying the knot in city hall’s red tape. Lately, Vancouver has begun to emerge as an international destination for DJs and live electronic events at clubs and special parties. Companies such as undernet.* Services and Swing Kids employ bonded security guards, ensuring that safety standards are met and drug dealers are kept out.
As rave mutates into a variety of new formats, from club nights to charity balls to American bandstand-style pasture parties, the average Vancouverite will absorb fragments of the scene through fashion and merchandising, not ecstasy. Like the ’70s, when one minute Grace Slick was singing that “one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,” and the next minute when television’s “rock mom” Shirley Jones was driving the Partridge Family bus, what we call rave will be experienced by people as a version smoothed out by marketing surveys. Some clever manufacturers are already cashing in on the subculture’s utopian social ideals of harmonic interaction. Last year, Haworth, one of the world’s largest office furniture companies, unveiled an ergonomic workplace chair with new-age design elements. It allows you to interact in perfect harmony with all the tools and technology at your workstation.
It’s called TAZ.*
*Soon after this article was published, Haworth had to change the name of its chair due to copyright infringement of the Warner Brothers cartoon character, Taz.
Originally published in Vancouver magazine © Guy Babineau 2003
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