This year’s Outside Lands festival converted San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park into a gargantuan outdoor dance party, bringing some of the biggest names in electronica, house, and EDM to the Bay (Illenium, Polo & Pan, and Disclosure, to name a few). In addition to those headliners, the SOMA Tent returned to the festival this year, affording house and rave enthusiasts a more intimate space in which to shuffle, slide, jump, and 2-step to thrumming, bass-heavy electronic stylings amidst psychedelic surrounds.
There was a time, however, during which losing one’s sense of self while dancing alongside likeminded individuals didn’t require that one attend a major (and quite expensive) music festival. There was a time, in fact, when formal venues of any kind - be them clubs or concerts - were merely optional. We’re talking, of course, about the Bay Area of the 1990s.
The Bay Area - namely Oakland and San Francisco - were, in the mid 1990s through the early 2000s, one of the meccas of underground rave culture, or - more specifically - of the music (jungle, drum and bass, trance, etcetera) and substances (ecstasy, shrooms, etcetera) that constituted the foundation of rave culture, that enabled rave culture to thrive. What made the Bay such fertile ground for psychedelic shenanigans?
See also: 6 Of The Most Influential EDM Artists From The Bay Area
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We can point to two major reasons, both of which revolve around SF’s forward-thinking zeitgeist. Firstly, and as we all well know, the Bay has been and continues to be at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation - but not just in regards to iPhones, microchips, and AI. By the 1990s, most of the world’s most popular rave drugs were being concocted in and shipped out of California laboratories, the consequence being that Bay Area ravers were afforded easy and relatively safe access to substances like ecstasy.
Secondly, the Bay - like the technological sector - has been and continues to be at the forefront of socio-political innovation and progressive thought. From San Francisco’s counterculture movement of the 60s - one of its major blossomings being Haight-Ashbury’s 1967 Summer of Love to the Berkeley student protests at People’s Park in 1969, the Bay’s populace has repudiated the status quo and practiced radical open-mindedness with remarkable consistency. It makes sense, then, that dance and rave culture - itself a bastion for queer demographics and left-of-center thinking - flourished in such an environment.
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How, then, were you and your crew supposed to go about finding a rave in 1996 in the absence of Instagram and Twitter? If you were lucky enough to get your hands on a flyer, which could be found on sidewalks or plastered to brick walls in an off-the-beaten-path alley, multiple thresholds stood in between you and raving. Firstly, you needed to call the number on the flyer and obtain the address. Not the address of the actual rave, mind you, but the address of some random location at which some random person will - upon hearing the right code word - slip you a piece of paper with the address of the rave. This random location might be a donut shop, playground, or gas station.
After you’ve obtained the code word and address from the anonymous voice on the other end of the line and made it to the mystery location and found the mystery person and told them the code word and have received the piece of paper from them, then you can finally proceed to the rave, which itself could be any number of arbitrary locales, be it a beach, empty parking lot, or warehouse.
If you were an Oakland raver, though, you were likely to find yourself at Home Base, a sprawling warehouse space that, from 1995 to 2000, was the pulsing epicenter of the East Bay underground scene. Vlad Cood was one of the master producers and event coordinators behind Home Base, organizing many of its biggest parties during its 5-year lifespan and even serving as the voice you’d hear if you called the mystery phone line on an East Bay rave flyer.
Occupying over 100,000 square feet, Home Base boasted multiple separate dance rooms/areas, each with its own distinct vibe, DJ, and lighting set-up. Despite how clandestine and well-concealed its operations, Home Base drew tens of thousands of young people over the course of its tenure and is now a Bay Area legend.
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Fast foward over 2 decades, and Vlad Cood now owns the bar and club Butter in SF’s SoMa district, and the Bay’s rave scene has undergone profound transformation. Joe Biden’s woefully short-sighted RAVE Act - proposed in the early 2000s - thankfully never became legislation, but portions of the act were codified as law in 2003’s Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, which allowed law enforcement to punish venues and organizers for encouraging drug use. How precisely did the state understand “encouraging drug use”? The law’s parameters were laughably arbitrary, according to which selling glow sticks and water bottles might suggest “illicit drug activity” and were thus cause for fines or jail time. With the Act and as EDM catapulted into the mainstream, Home Base and the undergound rave scene took their dying breaths.
Nowadays, venues like The Make-Out Room, the Rickshaw Stop, Butter, 1015 Folsom, and the DNA Lounge offer approximations of what rave culture used to be, as do festivals like Outside Lands, and have in some sense democratized raves at the same time as they’ve opened it up to being cannibalized by big business. Traces of the Bay’s former glory persist, though. The underground still thrums, thrives, and dances. Home Bases are still out there, albeit on a much smaller scale.
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Here’s a list of upcoming events at formal venues. Hit one of them up and make friends. Ask around. Someone you befriend might know someone who knows someone who can take you underground.
See also: Crash-Course On The SF Bay's Hip Hop Scene, Preeminent Artists, And Signature Hyphy Sound
Photography by: Zachary Smith/Unsplash
