Love 'em or hate 'em, raves are here to stay

Publication title: Edmonton Sun (CN AB)
Publication date: May 12, 2000
Document type: Editorial 
Article author: Doug Beazley 
Transcribed by: MW




Nothing puts a crimp in a 16-hour techno dance marathon like some drugged-up dummy who gets the music shut off.

It happened some five months ago at one of Edmonton's massive dope-soaked dance raves. A kid showed up drunk, took a tab of the street drug ecstasy and proceeded to dance for five hours - before the combined dehydrating effects of booze, E and exertion knocked him flat.

Before the medics could spirit him away, one of the exasperated DJs trained a videocam on the raver's face.

"There were, like, five ODs by 4 a.m.," says an 18-year-old raver who calls herself Tabitha. "And the DJs got really, really angry. They had this guy's face up on the big screen and they were asking, like, who knows this guy? They were saying, ‘One more OD and that's it, we're leaving.’”

Rave DJs rarely threaten their audiences. Even rarer was what happened after the raver fell: The crew killed the music and turned the house lights on, letting nearly 2,000 pale, sweat-drenched dancers get a good look at each other in relative silence.

"I normally don't approve of turning the house lights on," says the promoter behind that rave, a DJ who goes by the stage handle Crunchee. "It used to be you'd only have one OD per party. You've got to shock them into looking after each other."

Wishful thinking, maybe. Two weeks back, Edmonton's vibrant rave scene operated largely below political radar. There were police busts in a few downtown clubs, a few dehydration falls and legions of ravers who saw or claimed to have seen dozens of dance floor overdoses.

Ascension 2000 changed the climate.

The massive rave event, held at the Sportex hall over the April 1 weekend, was plagued by problems: five-hour lineups and a hall packed past capacity due to crossed wires with the fire marshal's office.

And eight dancers collapsed at the scene. Ascension's promoter blamed a sort of strobe-induced epilepsy, while dubious police said the seizures were definitely drug-related.

Devout ravers love to insist their scene is about music, not drugs. Their hippie parents used to say the same thing about the Woodstock era with the same level of insincerity: Rave culture is ecstasy culture, with a smattering of methamphetamine, mushrooms and acid thrown in for colour.

"The candy flip's probably my favourite," says Tabitha. "That's acid and E together. There's a lot of E, Special K (ketamine hydrochloride, a powerful hallucinogen). Mushrooms, acid. Not a lot of coke. When you're in the rave, you don't really notice how high you're getting until you walk outside."

Over the last few years, drugs have put the business of selling raves in Edmonton on the thin edge of oblivion. According to Crunchee, small promoters like himself are seeing available rave venues dry up and disappear because of the rave scene's increasingly sordid reputation.

“The venues are saying no because a couple of raves did damage they didn't pay for," he says. "And now, with all the stuff in the papers about kids getting high, most big venues don't want anything to do with raves.

"So you're left with the smaller places, where you can only get in about three or four hundred kids. That's not a rave. That's a high school dance."

But what really worries promoters is the talk at City Hall of a "ballroom bylaw" amendment targeting raves. City councillors haven't been specific, but promoters are anticipating a law along the lines of the one in place in Toronto.

"It'll require clearance with the fire marshal, private security, paramedics," says Crunchee. "There'll be zoning limits, so you can't use warehouses. That's 70% of Edmonton's venues gone right there.

"It means the base cost of holding a rave goes up, so they've got to be bigger for you to make a profit. You need 1,700 dancers to even make it worthwhile.”

That cuts the available venues down even further, and opens the prospect of splitting the rave scene between huge profit-driven and city-sanctioned events, and a re-emergence of so-called "underground" raves - smaller gatherings with limited guest lists and zero security.

"A lot of the raves are going underground anyway, to get away from the drug gangs and the cops,” says Tabitha. "Cops hate us."

"A lot of the rave scene could well go underground, away from security and paramedics," says Crunchee. "And that could get ugly.

"But it's not going to go away. The 5,000 kids that went to Ascension aren't going to start clubbing at Cowboys all of a sudden."



Got a story to tell? Tell it to Beazley at dbeazley@edm.sunpub.com.


Photo Caption: Doug Beazley (THE INSIDE STORY)