EDITOR’S NOTE:
This article has been corrected from its original printed form. For more info on the correction, please see the note at the end of the story.
It’s a home for artists, dreamers, and drop-outs disaffected with society, but also an open market for drug dealers. It’s underground, independent and hedonistic. Eugene’s rave scene is a brilliant light, dangerously close to burning itself out.
Raves are undergoing a renaissance in Eugene. After enjoying a brief time in the national spotlight during the late 1990s, Americans largely forgot they existed. But they still thrive in London and some major American cities. Here, they are festivals that can attract crowds of more than 500 with dazzling light shows, cutting-edge music, and access to an array of hallucinogenic drugs. Their Eugene resurgence is fueled by a core of veterans, international attention and a new generation of partyers.
Simply known as ‘parties’ by attendees, they are huge undertakings, often featuring a dozen DJs from all over the world performing on up to three stages, and they are financed by scenesters who, even when charging $10-20 a head for entrance, often struggle to break even. Because money is so tight, security guards are not part of the equation. They take place in secluded parts of the forests surrounding the city, far enough from roads and homes that prying ears can’t hear the cacophony of techno music that blasts from sundown until hours past sunup.
Jonas
Jonas lived on my neighbor’s couch for a few months. A Santa-bellied, lifelong Eugenean, Jonas has an easy smile and a charm that means whenever you hang out with him you leave a few dollars lighter. He owns a skateboard, a laptop, a cell-phone and a few pairs of clothes. He lives off the kindness of his friends and the quickness of his wits. He is a man who spent his 30th birthday driving down a highway tripping on acid while a friend lost his virginity in the back seat.
Last May, walking up the stairs to my apartment, I saw him standing on the landing smoking a cigarette, and I asked him, as I always did, “hey man, what’s the story?”
He smiled, exhaled and said “raves man, raves.”
He had been in the scene since 1999, seen it peak in 2001, trough in 2003 and rise again over this past year.
Jonas would go to all the raves and work for hours, without pay, setting up stages and crafting displays. He loves the raves, everything about them; hawks them like a car salesman.
When I mentioned the prevalence of drugs at rave parties to him, he said “Go into any bar in Eugene. If you’re looking you’ll come out with whatever you want. Go to Saturday Market, whatever you want is on the steps of the courthouse, every Saturday. Yeah, there’s a bit of drugs but no more than anywhere else.”
For Jonas, the square community sees him as an outcast, but in the scene he’s an elder statesman. He is respected. Jonas didn’t have a house, but the scene gave him a home.
Ella
On a Friday afternoon, soon after I Jonas mentioned raves to me he gave me a phone number. I called it and an answering machine picked up and gave me a maze of directions that said something like “drive 6.2 miles down Mud Crick Lane. Turn right on the dirt road and reset your odometer. Drive 3.8 miles, bearing left at the fork, and turn right at the Forest Service access road marked 52-16B. It’s kind of hard to see. Drive uphill until you hear the party.”
I followed them and found myself in an abandoned rock quarry at the top of a mountain west of the city. A buddy of mine dropped me off there after dark the night before the party, and I stumbled down a path between the mined-out cliff faces toward the spurts of music where they were testing the sound system. The music, I was later told, was a subset of rave called Psychedelic Trance, or Psytrance.
A ring of people encircled a campfire and I sat down next to a woman who started talking to me immediately. She said that her name was Ella and that she was 30. She raced between topics, glancing off parties she’d been to, her two teenage sons and drugs. She asked if
I’d ever tried ecstasy, I told her I hadn’t and she pulled a handful of pills from her pocket and offered me one for twenty bucks.
“People come here to combine the lights and the music with psychedelic drugs. Not everybody, but most,” Ella said.
She said she likes to take ecstasy once every couple months. The next night, the night of the party, before she took a dose of recently-developed synthetic hallucinogen 2C-I, she told me she’d spent two years addicted to meth.
Raves give Ella a place to get high.
Bedouin
But it was sitting around that fire the first night that I first saw Bedouin. He wore a hand-sewn leather body suit, nappy dreadlocks and tattoos covering his sharp face. He was telling someone across the fire what it felt like to be an alien sent to Earth from another dimension.
In the noon heat of the next day I sat down near him while he drank water from an ox-horn he pulled from a leather utility-belt around his waist and told the gathered crowd around his fires.
But soon, before I could talk to him, he stood and walked off into the woods. I chased after him, and offered to help him
gather and chop wood, and after a couple hours he told me that since 1995, he has lived traveling from party to party building
giant fires called accelerators for raves and other underground parties.
“The fire, love, the accelerator, gets the Earth in line with the Templaric Plates,” he said to me, wide-eyed. “Channels the earth’s core. The earth has a metaphysical field surrounding it, like the tectonic plates. The accelerator is a portal for them.”
That night, as the hundreds of people swarmed in to dance to the hypnotic beats, Bedouin sipped mushroom tea from his ox horn and raised the flames of the accelerator high into the starry sky.
Raves give Bedouin a place to be a space alien.
Raymond
Later in the summer, Jonas set me up to get a ride to a party with a DJ friend of his named Raymond. When I walked into his cramped apartment, Raymond was practicing for his set that night on a turntable setup that engulfed much of a wall, the volume turned up to 11. Across the room his mother sat watching ballet on public access with the TV volume turned off.
On the ride to a farm north of the city, Raymond, McDonald’s heavy and smoking too many Camels, told me he started DJing clubs in the late 1990s in Santa Barbara, Calif. and that he “went underground” in 2001. He said Eugene attracted him because the scene is so accepting and open to newcomers, and has a momentum that he’d not seen anywhere else.
“It’s less a scene than a family,” he said.
On the drive back the next morning he said, when not DJing, he works as a telemarketer for an insurance company, watches TV and hangs out with his girlfriend.
Raves give Raymond a place to be a somebody and not just another nobody.
May
I met so many people at these raves, saw the bizarre sights, the excess is too much to tell really, but I remember one girl in
particular. She was at the first rave in the quarry, and as the night deepened and the crowd swelled into the hundreds I saw her looking over the fire at me. She had chipmunk-cheeks, black curls and wore a fairy costume. I walked over to her and she asked me my name and offered me her hand. I told her my name was Ed and asked for hers.
“May,” she said, “like the month.”
But as I took her hand she started squeezing and massaging mine.
I looked into her eyes. They were puppy-brown and dilated like marbles. She stood for a couple moments watching the lights and squeezing my hand before quickly running off. It was as she disappeared in the crowd that I realized she couldn’t have been older than 16.
I spent the summer of 2006, my 20th year, studying the scene, going to parties and meeting partiers. During that time I met a menagerie of people who allowed me to und
erstand the scene as a place where outsiders can feel accepted, for people to
have fun and for artists to express themselves. I also came to understand that the scene is in conflict with itself. For all the good it offers to some, its unregulated, anarchic nature provides drug dealers with a fat market to exploit a market that includes young kids. And while Eugene is a city notorious
for the ease with which those who want to can find drugs, it seems that one day some kid is gonna wind up dead, and the hammer’s gonna fall cold and hard.
Contact the news reporter at [email protected]
CORRECTION:
An article in the Emerald’s Back to the Books edition (“The Underground Party”) misstated a name in a photograph cutline. The man pictured is actually DJ Quickster, not DJ Whistler as he was labeled.
The Emerald regrets the error.