Spin City
June 10, 2000 — Welcome to the rave new world. No, not Brave New World — that’s the title of the most recent album by classic-rock dinosaur Styx, whose members pounded out their air-guitar-friendly hits to the delight of a middle-age crowd at Sandstone earlier in the evening. Just a few blocks away, outside the Agricultural Hall of Fame, a colorful and diverse crowd is into an all-night party, with teenagers and a fair number of twenty-/thirty-something scene veterans performing everything from jerky robotic motions to fluid dance steps to borderline contortionism, while a stadium-quality light show provides an aesthetically pleasing backdrop. Unfueled by alcohol, these sweat-drenched perpetual-motion machines chug bottled water to keep them hydrated while shaking to beats that might seem monotonous to the untrained ear. These people are friendly — disarmingly so at first. Their constant smiles and genuine greetings are not only a far cry from the typical nightclub environment, but they’re also an almost utopian departure from everyday social interaction.
Upon entrance to this rave, dubbed One Summer Night, dancers are searched thoroughly. Off-duty police officers can be seen patrolling the premises, looking both bored and somewhat surprised at what they’re encountering. Unsurprisingly, given the legal presence, drugs are not being offered and drug-use is not evident. The tell-tale backrub circles that tip off Ecstasy use are absent. Instead, nearly everyone is moving to either deep, pulsing house beats, the more aggressive and sporadic rapid-fire attack of drum-and-bass, or the relatively melodic synthetic thump of deep trance. To witness this peaceful, blissful scene is to wonder why such events carry such a stigma and why what is perhaps the most revolutionary musical movement since the advent of rock and roll has been maligned instead of celebrated. Of course, not everybody has witnessed such a scene, and thus the spread of misinformation continues.
Up from the underground
“Raves have nothing to do with music; it’s all about the drugs,” L.A. deputy district attorney Karla Kerlin told the San Francisco Bay Guardian. “The music is a facilitated sort of mind control. Under the influence of drugs, the music will affect you.” Kerlin also admitted to the reporter that she had never attended a rave.
Although most avoid such science-fiction-based theories, plenty of local authorities agree to some extent with Kerlin’s conclusion. Dave Duckworth, a member of Deep Connections, which put on One Summer Night, says he had a difficult time convincing some skeptical souls at the Leavenworth County courthouse to give him a permit, resulting in his scramble to find a new venue.
“We did everything they asked us to do,” Duckworth says. “We had to make a map of the site, fill out an application, write a narrative about everything that would be going on, and explain the purpose of the event, and they wouldn’t even put us on the agenda to be voted on. We weren’t given the chance to speak to the board about it, and we were out the $25 for the application fee without them even considering it.”
Duckworth encountered one of the biggest challenges facing rave promoters. “There has to be a place to put it,” says DJ Nitro, a respected local DJ who performed at One Summer Night. “The word around the campfire is that police call the venue owners and say, ‘These are a bunch of drug-crazed people; you don’t want them. Don’t let them do this show; we’ll shut them down; we’ll hassle you.’ Most promoters would be more than happy to work with the city if it were actually possible to do so. (City officials will) tell you it’s easy, you have to get this permit, this permit, and this permit. I challenge anybody to go down and get that permit, that permit, and that permit.”
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Yet such promoters as Duckworth are persistent enough to eventually succeed. If Kerlin is correct and raves have nothing to do with music, the attendance at One Summer Night is inexplicable. Deep Connections sees bringing such events above ground as the only way to keep them from going extinct. Drug-addled would-be dancers might have been shocked to discover the on-site security Deep Connections provided, which included hired police representatives, thorough pat-downs, and prohibition of such items as Vick’s VapoRub and candy, which seem innocuous to outsiders but seasoned ravers recognize as hints of impending Ecstasy use. As an example of what he’s striving for, Duckworth points to California, where 10,000-plus-people raves, known as “massives,” are run with corporate efficiency.
“We’ve realized that being ultralegal is the only way to go when you’re making a significant investment,” he says. “One Summer Night was budgeted at $25,000, and that’s a large sum of money to be putting on the line. Everybody gets searched, and they might not like us for that, but that’s the way they do it in larger cities. If it’s going to be like the kids want it here, you’ve got to play by the rules, be responsible, and make sure that everybody’s safe.”
Such descriptions contradict the pop-culture definition of a rave as an illegal activity held at an abandoned warehouse that has been forcibly entered. Groove, writer/director Greg Harrison’s recent indie film, offers a fictional yet realistic account of one such break-in. Yet with rave scenesters attempting to battle negative perceptions, such outlaw events have become rare.
“In the truest definition of the word, raves simply don’t happen anymore,” says Mike Bradshaw, co-founder of EchoBass, which has organized such successful local events as Stomp and Good Times 2000. EchoBass maintains such underground touches as printing only a phone number instead of a concrete address on its visually stimulating fliers. But this is merely for tradition’s sake, not an attempt to thwart the law. Like Deep Connections, EchoBass employs off-duty police officers for security.
“There are two camps of people,” says B Positive, who published a Midwest-focused rave ‘zine titled High-R Frequencies from 1997 to ’98 and remains an active member of the scene. “There are those who can’t recognize that the rave scene is no longer underground, it’s never going to be underground again, and that the only way we’re going to survive is if we work with the system the way it is and ensure people’s safety and do things legally. The majority of people who do these events recognize that we are not trying to provide all-night sex-and-drug orgies. We still use the term ‘rave’ to speak for the culture of underground dance music and to represent something that wasn’t initially part of the scene but has come to be a big part of it: PLUR, which is peace, love, unity, and respect.”
Cynics might snicker at this gooey acronym, at least until they witness the initially eerie upbeat aura that dominates such events and check out the rave reviews.
“This was one of the PHATTEST parties I’ve been to in KC,” gushed one poster to the KC-raves site (on www.egroups.com) about One Summer Night. “This party was off the hook! As I looked around, I could see all the party kids having the time of their lives,” agreed another. “This party will be a milestone marker in the memory of The Summer of the Year 2000,” concluded a third. Deep Connections received “major props” from dozens of attendees who immediately posted their nearly unanimously positive reviews to the Web site, as well as from the featured attractions, with headliner Jonene (a house DJ from San Francisco) telling one of the organization’s members that One Summer Night was, from top to bottom, one of his most pleasant experiences ever with a rave. For such promoters as Duckworth and Bradshaw, positive feedback from ravers justifies the hours of work and astronomic expense that goes into their events, but it’s praise from venue owners and the police that keeps them hopeful of one day eliminating many of the hassles they currently encounter.
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“Every police officer I have ever worked with — about 50, over seven parties — has always said, ‘My police chief warned me about these things, but I can’t see anything going wrong here,'” Bradshaw says. “At Stomp, the officer said, ‘You guys are more well-behaved than a church group we had in here once.’ It sounds as if I’m exaggerating, but this is the dead truth. They say, ‘I thought this was going to be craziness. We were wearing bulletproof vests and brought extra cans of Mace, but we couldn’t find anything wrong and we just ended up sitting there.'”
Duckworth says, “Both of the venues at which we’ve held our events have enthusiastically welcomed us back. And all those ‘I had the time of my life’ statements make it easier to deal with the fact that we didn’t come to the financial status we needed. The payment’s in the fun that people had. We impressed everybody, and although we want to be able to pay our bills, we’d much rather have made a quality impression and come up a little short than have made a lot of money and left people dissatisfied.”
It’s difficult to imagine the promoter of a rock show that featured esteemed out-of-state performers expressing similar sentiments, which provides another welcome break from the profit-driven world of mainstream rock. However, this customer-driven attitude is not a nationwide phenomenon, says the well-traveled B Positive.
“A lot of promoters in bigger cities are just in it for the money, or they’re using their events to promote their own interests,” she says. “They don’t care about the general public. They don’t bother to get their permits, and people will spend $25 or $30 to go to an event that gets shut down immediately. It’s amazing how much the promoters here care about providing a good time for their patrons. Most of them don’t make a penny, but they really live for entertaining people.” Or, as Bradshaw puts it, “the Midwest cares.”
Perhaps Bradshaw was too succinct. True, those who provide the pulse for the city’s rave scene do have true compassion for their DJ/dancer peers, but according to the scene’s ever-active conspiracy buffs, some high-ranked powers care only about holding their beloved brand of dance music down.
E is for Ecstasy, C is for conspiracy
“Parental units, the media, and the authorities can’t believe that a bunch of kids are actually going to go to a party to watch a guy play other people’s music in a warehouse where there’s no alcohol,” says Nitro. “All these kids are getting together and there’s no fights and they’re just listening to music? There’s gotta be drugs involved. That’s their mindset.”
Like many in the scene, Nitro holds the media partially accountable for any drug presence that has infiltrated the scene. He’s referring not to KMBC Channel 9’s infamous grainy undercover footage of the now-defunct club Space, which uncovered less than Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s vault, but to sensationalist pieces on Ecstasy that ran on Dateline and 60 Minutes. Although the latter feature was criticized for its inaccurate use of narcotics statistics, hysteria broke loose and lawmakers took immediate action. On May 10, just over a week after the Dateline piece aired, Toronto placed a temporary ban on legally permitted dance events on city-owned property, while Chicago introduced fines of up to $10,000 for those responsible for unlicensed parties.
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“Up until about 1995, I never really saw any bad press about it,” Nitro says. “I also never saw any overdoses, any fights, any anything. Then news shows that were trying to get something juicy for sweeps week found the five most drug-addled kids that they could possibly find and said, ‘Hey, we’ll put you on TV if you talk about drugs,’ and the kids get on TV and talk about drugs. As a result, the people who just want to dance stay at home, because they don’t want anything to do with some big wild drug party. Then the people at home, who were doing drugs anyway, come to the parties because they think that’s what it’s about. I think any increase we have seen in drug use has been due to people reporting that it’s there, and it’s still nowhere near the level that any news show has ever reported.”
Another heated topic in the scene is the validity of studies that suggest Ecstasy causes damage to brain cells. The study that sparked this debate, conducted by Johns Hopkins neurotoxicologist George Ricaurte, has drawn criticism because of the possibility that the use of other drugs affected the test subjects. In a June 5 cover story on the drug in Time magazine, Ricaurte said, “The vast majority of people who have experimented with MDMA (the compound Ecstasy pills contain) appear normal.” While Ricaurte and others warn that long-term test results are necessary before dismissing the drug as benign, others tout it as a useful therapeutic tool. In 1995, UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Charles Grob used MDMA as a pain reliever for cancer patients and concluded that the drug is safe when used in controlled situations under careful monitoring.
Of course, raves hardly constitute controlled conditions, and the constant motion at such events puts users at dire risk of dehydration, as use of MDMA can elevate the body’s temperature. Also, many of the pills passed off as Ecstasy contain more dangerous additives — it’s these hybrid pills that result in many of the hospitalization statistics spouted out on news programs. The effects of pure Ecstasy include heightening of the senses (hence the use of glow sticks and Vicks VapoRub) and what is often described as a warm sense of empathy, a somewhat intangible characteristic to chart, making “E” users much more difficult to spot than, say, obnoxious drunks. Also, the drug is not physically addictive, although many, inspired by positive experiences, return to the rolls again and again.
Understandably, organizers and fans of legal raves seek to establish the fact that, as Time writer Christopher John Farley points out in the somewhat patronizing article that followed the Ecstasy story, “Rave culture is more than just Ecstasy.”
“When you’re bringing in 1,500 to 2,000 kids and you’re creating experiences, you’ve got a lot of forces at play,” Bradshaw says. “It’s different, people fear it, and they highlight the negative aspects to keep things from changing. They say, ‘Well, there’s drugs.’ Go to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, or any entertainment event where there’s music, and count the amount of drugs. It’s going to be the exact same, if not more.”
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“We don’t want bad elements coming in and listening to our music,” B Positive adds. “Those were the people we were trying to avoid by seeking out other places to go dancing. I got so sick of watching people snort coke in the bathroom at nightclubs that I didn’t want to go to them anymore.”
Recently, however, rave fans such as B Positive have been drawn back into nightclubs that have hired local DJs to spin underground vinyl. Pauly’s on Broadway features My Friend Mike on Thursdays, a drum-and-bass veteran who performed at One Summer Night; accomplished hip-hop scratcher DJ Just on Wednesdays; and an explosive mix of obscure funk, soul, and reggae 45s on Friday nights, courtesy of Super Wolf and Memphis Black. As these DJs dance behind the turntables, the members of the cross-generational hipster crowd move regardless of their surroundings: Pool players wiggle between shots; seated drinkers sway and nod their heads.
Trago, a fledgling downtown club, features DJs Tuesdays through Saturdays, luring such big names as The House Coalition (Wednesdays) and Deep Connection members Duckworth (who goes by David D) and Joey C (Saturdays). Bathed in almost absolute darkness, the DJ spins deep in the corner, with occasional bursts of light illuminating the artistry taking place on the packed dance floor. The massive beats, which echo from every wall, render attempts at conversation futile, but dancers knowingly smile at strangers, then break into the kind of impromptu choreography that was previously thought to exist only in teen-film proms.
In terms of employing big-name underground talent, The Hurricane blazed the trail by hiring DJ Roland almost two years ago. After starting slowly, Roland’s Thursday night showcase became one of the area’s most consistent draws, with dancers packing the patio to hear his deep house grooves. His success followed him to Space, the 18-and-over after-hours club at which he spun until early Sunday mornings. Space is now on hiatus, as the result of an infamous raid in February, and the conspiracy theories about its closing make the Ecstasy-related speculation look like a lukewarm X-Files episode.
The Space saga
On Feb. 20, police made 12 drug-related arrests at Space, which was located inside the El Torreon ballroom, at 31st and Gillham Plaza. They confiscated $7,500 in Ecstasy and seized from Roland, as a drug forfeiture, $6,000 in cash from cover charges. On a night when he was paying DJs flown in from Florida and New York to perform, this loss of revenue hit Roland hard, and after scraping up money to pay his expenses, he hired an attorney to recoup his money. Eventually, the city cut him a check, accompanied by a ticket for operating a dance hall without a dance hall permit. That’s where the simple part of the story ends — and the intrigue begins.
“We didn’t think we had to have a dance hall permit, because it wasn’t really a club,” Roland explains. “El Torreon was already licensed to be a venue, with all the applicable permits, and this was just one night when I would spin or we would bring in touring DJs. We talked to police on a weekly basis. They would see 400 people parked in front of the building at 4 a.m., wonder what the hell was going on, and come in and see a bunch of yuppies drinking bottled water. We got shut down once, and they kicked everybody out, and we showed them all our permits, and they said, ‘Oh, sorry.’ They went through the trash and found one beer can, and they all thought it was the coolest thing ever that that many people were hanging out there with no booze.”
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With no alcohol available to them, Space’s patrons, local drug dealers theorized, might be interested in alternate substances, so dealers began adding the establishment to their nightlife rounds. According to Roland, a federal witness was sent into the club to track down one such suspect, and a group of people who knew his identity assaulted the witness.
“The next Monday, two KC detectives came to my house, asked me questions, showing me pictures of all these guys, and I fully cooperated,” he continues. “Then they started asking around about who owns the place, and people start throwing my name out, ‘Oh, that’s Roland’s place.’ Well, one of these alleged drug dealers that they were after was named Roland, and nobody knew my last name, and they thought he owned the club, so that’s when all the federal agents got involved and thought that he was behind the whole thing. They thought it was just a drug ring — people could go there, buy drugs, and be on drugs.”
When the officers stormed the place and found nothing but 800 avid dancers, Roland says, they became frustrated and began searching patrons. “They did not arrest anyone for drugs who had any connection with the business,” he clarifies. “It was a big zero. Can you imagine what would happen if they went to any concert, any pub, or even the mall and started shaking people down?”
As a ludicrous aftermath, El Torreon, which still lacks a dance hall permit, was forced to discourage those who attended its rock shows from dancing. Owner Abe Haddad posted “No dancing” signs that cited the city ordinance. “What about wedding receptions?” Roland asks. “Does Arrowhead Stadium have a dance hall permit for the Chiefs cheerleaders or for fans who dance to the jock jams?” Further investigation of the ordinances revealed that it’s technically illegal to dance at all after 1:30 a.m., except in establishment that has acquired permits to remain open until 3 a.m. These anachronistic laws have reduced Kansas City’s degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon by inspiring countless Footloose references.
“The government’s trying to say that these parties are an all-drug thing, and they play weird music with no words that contributes to people’s high,” Roland says. “People who are older than me say this is like the same shit that was going on with rock and roll in the ’50s. Europe already went through all this shit. They tried to ban it there, and the rave promoters responded by throwing these huge parties out in the country. Eventually, they moved it back into licensed clubs and venues where they could regulate it and keep things under control, and that’s what’s going to happen here. If Space doesn’t exist, are there any less people dancing on the weekends? Are less people doing drugs? Of course not. They’re going somewhere else. I think it was a good thing for the city, a way to bring a little cosmopolitan culture to our little cowtown. There were way more pros than cons.”
Although the circumstances involved in the shutdown of Space were bizarre, many within the scene doubted that such a club would last. Established club owners, also often cited as comprising the mysterious entity that holds back KC all-ages clubs, again have been cast in the villain’s role.
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“Club owners start getting really worried when independent dance events or a club that has a really good underground DJ starts stealing their customers away, and they start exerting pressure with the police department and city hall,” says B Positive. “They look for any loopholes in the law that they might be able to exert to keep their clientele coming back to the same mediocre entertainment week after week. People are unfortunately used to being fed the same kind of entertainment week after week, and they pay for it, but when they find out there’s an alternative, be it punk music or raves, they’re all about it. I don’t believe the impact is very great on the clubs before they start pulling the dirty tricks. If any dollars leave their pockets, they’re feeling the pain and they take quick action, and there are plenty of legal and aboveground ways to control the makeup of the nightlife.”
“Anywhere that there is youth coming together to have a good time, the city and the police department feel like it’s not good for the community, and so they do what they can to shut it down, and they’ve been really successful at it, whether it be raves, Space, or the Daily Grind,” says Bill Pile, who brings hip-hop and house DJs to the area through Avalanche Productions and spins occasionally himself as DJ Bill Pile at the vegetarian restaurant Lotus. “It’s very rare that a dance party in KC lasts the whole evening, which really hurts the community because the people who want to go see it become afraid they’re going to lose money by going to a party that’s going to be busted. It’s a whole culture, a whole scene of music, that’s being suppressed. Kids are stuck listening to it in their homes, and DJs are playing in their bedrooms, wishing they had a place to play.”
Don’t sweat the Technics
While rave DJs battle negative perceptions and legal intervention, DJs of a different breed battle one another. On the same night that Deep Connections held its event, Avalanche Productions brought the Technics/DMC Turntablist competition to Liberty Hall in Lawrence, offering local hip-hop DJs an opportunity to prove themselves against tough national competition. Springfield’s DJ P, last year’s winner of the regional competition and this year’s clear crowd favorite, dazzled fans with his breakdancing prowess during a break in the action and his exact mixing of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” with Metallica’s “One.” P later paired Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” with a break beat. But such impressive tricks weren’t enough to knock off Atlantic City’s The Gambit, who performed a technically flawless six-minute set.
Of the nearly 50 DJs who provided a brief glimpse of their arsenal in the closed-to-the-public preliminary round, 25 earned the opportunity to showcase their skills for two minutes in front of the judges and fans. Of the locals, DJ Rice was the flashiest, cutting with flair and pizzazz and leaving the crowd buzzing. His failure to advance to the final round of six was one of the night’s few unpleasant surprises. Still, he says, his showing was a marked improvement over his appearance in the 1997 regionals, during which he “threw craps” because of inadequate preparation time. Also, finals or not, he’s got a lot to look forward to in the year to come.
Rice is CEO/president of DropDown Entertainment, a fledgling record company and an established mobile DJ service. This summer, DropDown will release its first album, DropDown Records Presents The DJ Rice Compilation, which will feature the five artists signed to the label as well as other local talent. Albums by the individual artists, such as The Wicked One and Lace, will follow this fall. “We want to be one of the premier companies to break a platinum artist out of Kansas City, to make some noise nationwide,” Rice says.
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Rice has been making noise regionally since 1982, when he started spinning in Columbia, Missouri. He rocked his first party in 1983 and went on to spin his mix of rap, hip-hop, and R&B at everything from raves to weddings. “When I started, the scene was extremely strong because it was new,” he explains. “It was the ‘in’ thing. If you were not breakdancing, you were DJing, and MCs were always showing up at the parties. It died down in the early ’90s, but the true-blues who stuck to it brought it back to the peak again in the later ’90s, and it’s strong again now. Younger cats are looking at the OGs like ‘Damn, I wanna do that.'”
Meanwhile, hip-hop DJs have slipped somewhat in terms of billing over the years, from receiving equal space on the marquee during the golden years in such duos as Eric B & Rakim and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince to fading into the background. “They’ve gotten away from the turntables,” Rice says. “You’ve got the DAT tape and the CD burner, and people feel like they don’t need a DJ any longer. On the other hand, a lot of DJs have moved to the producing side of things, so they’re not available to DJ anymore.”
Rice is also in the process of making the transition into producer, but he’s maintaining a steady gig at the YMCA on Linwood and Cleveland on Friday nights from 7 to 11 as part of the program formerly known as Hot Summer Nights. “It’s a way to give the youth something positive to do,” Rice says of Summer Nights, which is targeted at 14- to 18-year-olds. “It’s a drug-free, weapon-free, alcohol-free safe environment in which they can enjoy themselves and mingle with friends.”
Since moving to Kansas City from Columbia in 1995, Rice has established a bond with DJ Fresh. “Fresh is the big name in KC, I was the big name in Columbia, and we would meet up in Jefferson City for the homecoming,” Rice recalls. “When I moved here, we recorded a CD together, Fresh and Rice Part One, that has done fairly well. Fresh gave me a lot of pointers on the business side and was kind of a mentor in helping me get the mobile DJ service started here. I give him mad props for that, and I respect him highly as a DJ and a friend.”
At the competition, Fresh, the only other KC DJ to spin, juggled Grandmaster Flash records, jumping from 45 rpm to 33 as the rapper said the words “from 45 to 33.” Fresh entered the hip-hop game back in Flash’s heyday, rapping, DJing, and becoming one of the finest breakdancers in the city. Taking cues from such local pioneers as LS Flash and the late DJ K-Rock, Fresh went on to DJ an estimated 1,600 parties or functions. He’s also made a successful splash as a producer, both on the 50 MCs compilation and on the Veteran Click’s 1999 effort, The Day We Worldwide. Like Rice, the 33-year-old Fresh hopes to make that album’s title, and its lyrics (the East had their turn/the West had their turn/the South had their turn/respect we shall earn), a reality. His plans include a quarterly DJ convention and a local video show. And like Rice, he has watched the DJ scene change over the years, not necessarily for the better.
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“DJs are less apt to break new songs now, because they’re scared to lose a little floor response,” he says. “Before, people were more apt to party off of music that they hadn’t heard before. Nowadays, it’s like, ‘I haven’t seen it on video before; my friends aren’t talking about it. What the hell is this?’ But a good DJ has a better chance of keeping the flow going. If it falls off, it falls off and you spin another one. If it stays on, that’s one more record you know you can bang at the parties.”
Although he names several contemporary local DJs he respects, such as Just, Mike Scott, Rice, DJ Hank, and DJ Def, Fresh is somewhat bitter about seeing competition from the coasts cropping up at the Lawrence regionals as a result of the lack of KC representation. “This year was the worst,” he says. “People from New Jersey and Washington think they can go down to country Kansas City where there’s not a lot of DJs, or the DJs that can contend, who don’t have responsibilities and businesses and have time to jerk off in the basement doing technical things for all these hours, are not coming and competing. It’s terrible that people are coming from out of town to here and we don’t have anybody but me and Rice. If I were to get in it next year, I’d like to send them back with nothing for thinking we’re so country. It’s not that we’re country. There’s just less DJs here spinning vinyl, practicing with each other, and networking about new moves and scratches.”
The Lawrence contingent was somewhat larger, with DJ Proof offering the most impressive set. A self-proclaimed “strictly tricks” battle DJ, Proof filled his set with incessant high-speed scratching, never letting the beat breathe before cutting it apart. Another Lawrence DJ, Epidemic, brought a rock vibe by cutting up Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” and the Helmet/House of Pain track “Just Another Victim.” “That might not be what people listen to all the time, but when it’s worked into a mix it gets people open, and people can appreciate that,” Proof says.
But while the DJ crowd might be open to playing rock tunes, rock musicians don’t necessarily appreciate the increasing influence DJs have in the music scene. For every Limp Bizkit or Deftones that employs a DJ, there’s a hardened group that resents the fact that DJ nights at clubs cut into their available booking time. At the same time, there are plenty of impatient DJs who are eagerly awaiting the chance to put what they see as a played-out form of musical expression out to pasture.
Rock versus rave
Some consider electronic music to be the logical, inevitable, and preferable successor to rock. They tout the vibe at raves as being infinitely more friendly than the concert atmosphere, and it’s difficult to argue with them. Compare the communal glow of One Summer Night with, say, Korn’s April appearance at Kemper Arena. At the rave, the dancers respect one another’s space and apologize for bumping into one another, a far cry from the unforgiving mosh pit anyone who wants to get close to the stage at a rock concert must brave. Also, it’s extremely unlikely that women will be asked in crude terms to bare their breasts at raves, while such brain-dead behavior lamentably has been resurrected at concert halls by Limp Bizkit et al.
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“What really scared me was watching news coverage of Woodstock last year,” says B Positive. “They were talking about all the women that got raped and the riots, and meanwhile the rave stage was peaceably going on over in its little area. The people over there were just dancing — no rioting, no rapes. I attend some kind of dance event every weekend with never a thought to my personal safety.”
Actually, the thousands of Woodstock ravers apparently decided to make love, not fire. In its October 1999 issue, Spin noticed the dance fans “ingesting a staggering amount of drugs and engaging in a staggering amount of public and/or group sex” during sets by such superstars as Moby, the Chemical Brothers, and Fatboy Slim. However, a consensual lovefest remains preferable to the harrowing alternative.
The number of DJs snatching up coveted late-night slots at clubs around the country offers additional proof that the tide might be turning. There’s been plenty of backlash from musicians who resent the intrusion of record-spinners on their turf, and Roland, one of the first and most prominent DJs to stake out a weekly spot at a noted rock club, has fielded plenty of it.
“These traveling bands would come in and play in front of nobody early in the night,” Roland says. “One of them gave me shit, saying stuff into the mic like, ‘We’ve got to get off the stage. Some guy’s going to come up and play some disco records for you next.’ At first, the staff at The Hurricane wasn’t really into the music either, but now a lot of them are more excited on certain DJ nights, because they know it’s going to be packed and they like the crazy atmosphere. It’s like when Tenderloin used to play at the Granada, and the people were totally vibing on those guys. It’s intense like that — that vibe, that energy.”
For the most part, DJs don’t feel much sympathy for the rockers they see as an endangered breed. “It’s not our fault they’re not getting booked,” Bradshaw says dismissively. “It’s kind of like people who make catalogs for a living bitching about people buying on the Internet. Sorry, guys, this is new; you guys have been around for too long. Things change.”
Promoters such as Bradshaw are looking to change things in a big way, including a new definition of performance expectations. Shows by well-respected DJs have been panned by legions of rock critics, and Bradshaw says that’s because the audience isn’t yet prepared to become the focus of the show.
“We’re revolutionizing everything,” he says. “We’re putting you in a concert hall, ripping out the seats, and telling you to run around all night and do what you want while a DJ, not a musician …” — at this Nitro groans — “well, not someone playing a typical musical instrument, is performing, and we’re going to shut off all the lights, turn on big lights, and basically change everything about your typical music experience. Rock and roll relates an experience: ‘My baby left me/boo hoo hoo.’ Dance music gives you a beat, so your baby can leave you while you’re listening to the music. It’s not relating; it’s creating. People don’t understand that these DJs are actually doing something amazing, not just providing music. What they need to do is close their eyes and listen to what they’re actually doing. Music was not meant to be a visual thing. It’s an audible thing. It’s all about change, and it’s so different in every possible aspect that it’s hard for most people to grasp and accept.”
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Although Moby and Fatboy Slim have achieved some success, no one DJ can break the scene, as the Sex Pistols did for punk or Nirvana for grunge. As DJ Booth, a house DJ who has recorded with Nitro, points out, “Someone in the basement is mixing the same records that Fatboy Slim is doing, making it sound just as good.” Although DJs were once purely incidental — often exiled to spin in back rooms — they can now display some showmanship (as DJ P, Booth, and Nitro are known for), but, as My Friend Mike says, “A lot of the real stars are on the dance floor.” No matter how engaging the presence of the DJ, eventually eyes will be drawn to the acrobats moving to their music.
Because of the diversity between the musical experiences, there’s little mutual respect between DJs and rock musicians. “We’re performers just like they are,” Nitro says. “They might not be able to see it exactly — see the value of playing two turntables versus playing an electric guitar — but it’s there. They say, ‘All you’re doing is playing someone else’s music.’ I can’t tell you how many cover bands I’ve heard — what’s the difference?”
Roland, who has heard more than the average amount of anti-DJ arguments, takes a more aggressive stance. “With bands, you’ve got four instruments that are commonly used, and it’s just gotten to the point where it’s all been done, unless you’ve got a band that’s got a really good songwriter or a message. Soundwise, the band stuff seems a little stagnant, so then you take all these different sounds from dance records, incorporate guitar bass lines and drum samples, live drum breaks, and electronic drum sounds. There’s so many more variables.
“Mixing records how I do it is like a playing an instrument. If I put as much time into the guitar as I’ve put into mixing records, I’d be a great guitar player. There’s bands that go from town to town playing the same eight songs, and a lot of these guys aren’t even good musicians. How hard is that? They want to give me shit like, ‘How hard is it to play records?’ Well, fuck, there’s a little bit more to it than you think.”
Local DJs are starting to get opportunities to spread the hard-to-pin-down Kansas City sound to new territories. The House Coalition’s DJ True got booked in Portland, Oregon, and Roland is being added to the bill of a massive event in Connecticut. Up-and-coming DJs also have a resource center in 180 Degrees, a two-month-old record store just off 39th and Broadway that’s owned by True and offers vinyl, CDs, mix tapes, turntables, needles, and mixers.
Some naysayers expect such vinyl shops as 180 Degrees, such clubs as Trago, and the rave scene in general to disappear by the end of the decade. However, dance music has defied previous death sentences.
“They said the exact same thing about disco,” Nitro says. “The whole ‘disco sucks’ thing was actually brought on because people in musician’s unions were afraid of losing their jobs to DJs. Disco ‘died’ in 1981, and it went back to the clubs and became house music.
“This isn’t something that’s just going to blow over. It’s been going since the early ’80s, and it’s still going strong. We are right now at about 1960 in the rock phase. We’ve still got another good 10, 20 years to go. Even if the parties get shut down, even if you do ‘eliminate raves,’ it’s going to keep going. There’s too many people involved in it that want it to succeed, and they’re going to find a place to dance.”
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At this point, Nitro says, the city’s powers that be can follow one of two paths: They can work with promoters to ensure that such events as One Summer Night continue to take place, or they can crack down on raves and risk a mass exodus of some of Kansas City’s most vibrant creative forces.
“Right now, we’re a bunch of crazy kids, playing this really weird music and ‘doing a bunch of drugs,'” Nitro says. “Kansas City is really proud of being the birthplace of jazz, but I’m curious to find out what people here thought of jazz when it first came out. Most of them probably moved. There’s a lot of really, really good talent in this city, but because it’s so shunned and looked down upon, Kansas City’s not going to be able to look back 100 years ago and say, ‘We were part of this.'”
