Apocalypse Again

Last Thursday the smoke from the California fires in Butte county seemed to have settled permanently atop the Bay Area. The AQI was over 300, visibility was so poor that you couldn’t see Sutro Tower from middle of Haight Street, and almost every work place, my own included, had sent everyone home to shelter in place. By 6 pm the thin brown veil of ash that was covering everything in sight had been covered by darkness, leaving only the grey blurry sensation that comes when you forget to put on your contact lenses. Most people who were out had on face masks, like Freddy Krueger, which added to the sense of dystopia. But life has to go on, even in the apocalypse, so I parked my car on Cole Street, left my daughter sleeping in the back seat, and went to Amoeba Records to see the Ace of Cups play their first performance in San Francisco in, oh, something like 40 years.

 The Ace of Cups were an all-female band that played around the Haight in the mid to late 1960s. As my brother puts it in his excellent blog (please click through here), “throughout the 20th Century, the Ace of Cups band was a mystery bordering on myth: an all-female "psychedelic" band playing many of the legendary places with all manner of legendary headliners, but with no released recordings, no known history and hardly even a photograph.” As Corry notes, they weren’t the first all-female band by any means, but they were the first to write their own music, not wearing uniforms or playing covers, at least in that scene. The fact that so little is known about them – that they didn’t get a recording contract and so on – is beyond unsurprising given that even today such a thing is considered weird, inappropriate and noncommercial. 

 Despite their obscurity, I had heard of the Ace of Cups of course – my brother being their unofficial historian – but I had no idea what their music sounded until I saw them at Amoeba, and guess what? They were great. It was a little unsettling to watch them though. There was such a casual, fun grace to them; a vibe and an aura (for lack of a better word) that was wholly unique. We’ve become used to the sight of 70 plus year old men playing guitar and rocking out in ways that look much like younger men doing it, but the sight of women in that age bracket doing the same is…dare I say it? Better. It’s better, because first of all, they both sing better and look better. It’s a gender thing, I think. Men fall apart in their old age, they just do. It’s also better because, not having burned out touring for all those years, they don’t seem jaded or cliché’d. And finally, it’s better because it’s new. If it’s something you’ve never seen before, it’s probably well worth seeing. 

 I hope the Ace of Cups go on tour, so you can see them too. I hope they get to open for a band of their era. How about for the Grateful Dead, or whatever they’re called now? How about The Zombies, or the Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac? How about Patti Smith or Ringo Starr or Roger Waters? People in those audiences would probably really love them, because of their music and their back story and their courage, and because it’s just neat to see women do fun things at that age, it gives one hope for oneself.
 I’ll be honest though. Given the weird night, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see them if it wasn’t that I had my first book launch, at the Bindery on Haight, practically right next door. It was such an apocalyptic night, I’m surprised anyone came at all, and since I knew everyone personally in the audience, I didn’t prepare anything to read. Instead, I asked people to vote on which chapter they’d like to hear from, and the surprising consensus was that they wished to hear my thoughts about raves. So this is what I read:

Chapter 7. A Peculiar Euphoria: Rave Crowds and Freedom*

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. --Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

One evening in 1994, a friend of mine who worked for Rolling Stone called me up in a dither. She had arrived in San Francisco that afternoon on assignment to cover a Full Moon Rave in Santa Cruz, and she couldn’t for the life of her find out where it was to be held.

The rave was of the kind that gave clues, rather than a map, to its location. For example, a typical invitation – perhaps a flyer, given out at a bar – would ask you to call a number that would then direct you to the name of a store in Hunter’s Point, where you then had to buy something – perhaps a carton of eggs, indicated by an image on the original flyer -- and written on a single egg inside the carton would be the longitude and latitude of the location in Golden Gate Park.

Today, such devices seem laughably simplistic. If you were told to find a store in Hunter’s Point called Quikmart, you’d google its address, and if you were then given a location written in longitude and latitude, you’d use an app on your smart phone to find it. In 1994, this was not the case. You could spend hours driving around Hunter’s Point looking for the right shop, and you’d be especially hampered if you were from out of town. This is why my friend was flummoxed. I was, too, but as it turned out, my downstairs neighbor was d-jaying it, so I just asked him where he was going. 

"May Day" by Andreas Gursky

In other words, we found out the old fashioned way, through word of mouth.

As this story indicates, the clues to these dance parties ranged from obvious to obscure, but they were part of a larger project that elevated the experience of attending a rave to one of ideology rather than function. Just as grunge recouped ideas about punk rock and class status and inserted them into a more modern musical landscape, the intention of techno music was to meld the sonic output of electronic technologies with bodily pleasure; intellect with emotion. The ‘search’ was part of this project, and it had other advantages as well, eliminating casual comers and creating imagined communities of like-minded individuals. 

What’s interesting about this is that the concept of search, combined with the concept of the crowd, is integral to what is possibly the 1990s most entrenched-technology and cultural shifter, the search engine. The search engine, which was developed throughout that decade, has changed the way that most people think and even act. If, as Trevor Pinch and other SCOT theorists would have it, technology is socially constructed by users and not the other way around, then searching for raves is the perfect metaphor for its time. To do so, at least in San Francisco, was to participate in the zeitgeist; to experience the cutting edge of post-industrial age and its byproduct, the new media economy.

But to search is different than to seek. Ravers, like hippies, were more likely to describe themselves as seekers after enlightenment and a form of mental freedom. To search for something is a more prosaic activity. A seeker is on a personal journey. A searcher – like John Wayne in the movie of the same title – sets out on a more public quest. A search engine (rather than a seek engine) looks through public information, and this act, like Wayne’s hunt for his kidnapped niece, may have broad consequences. 

My name in lights

 Searching for music festivals, then, is different than seeking enlightenment, and it has a different outcome. As early as 2000, researchers were suggesting that the codes used to rank search results were (or perhaps one should say “are”) inherently political, based on invisible rankings built into the system. As we have seen, music festivals have been used as spaces for political statements and gestures and ideologies, but as with the politics of search, the biases and ideologies at festivals aren’t always entirely apparent: instead, the power hierarchies they inscribe are invisible. On the internet, search crawlers (“spiders”) crawl the web, displaying the ‘best’ – i.e. most popular, useful, or frequently asked for – results to users. This is a good allegory for music festivals. They too are spiders, crawling through culture, displaying results, popular acts, popular technologies, and advertisements, to attendees, who then spread them to culture at large. 

Of the many technologies that are on display at raves (turntables, sound systems, MDMA, portable toilets), the most obvious display is that of the attendants: ravers, scantily clad in glittery costumes with wings, face paint, spangles, backpacks and pacifiers, dancing ecstatically into the night. On the surface, raves seem to be advertisements not for people, or for music, but for a state of mind. Ravers would have it that this state of mind is the same as that of hippies – peace, love, freedom, and oneness; the merging of society with the self. But it may be more complicated than that. The rise of techno, through the medium of the rave, is a giant endorsement for the post-industrial economy and all its affordances. If, as Marx once said, history repeats itself, the second time as farce, then ravers are reproducing the gestures of the counterculture, without a hint of irony – or of lessons learned.

If you’d like to read more from my book Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella, you can order it here.

In addition you can order the Ace of Cups album here:

Also, if you are in the San Jose Area the weekend of December 1^st, I will be doing another reading and discussion with my friend film critic Richard Von Busack, at the Santa Clara Valley Brewing Company at 7 pm. Come on down!