The following is an Article on Rave from the Sacramento Bee on Friday April 10, 1992. Apologies for typos that I didn't catch before submitting. By J.D. Lasica / Bee Staff Wrlter From the street, the warehouse's windows pulse with angry bursts of energy, like a lightning storm trapped inside a box. It is 3 a.m., and people are still arriving. The party won't be over for another five hours. Inside, a few hundred young people wander around the chillout room. Strangers hug. They hand each other Tootsie Pops, sour balls. Some are sipping on smart drinks, some are tripping on something more potent. But things are about to get stranger. Up a ramp, through a large door, the rave room is going full blast. Some 600 bodies are writhing to the rude, mind-melting rhythm of techno. It is insanely loud. The music is a wild animal with its eyes gouged out. Dancers, decked out in retro outfits and Mad Hatter garb, add to the mayhem by blowing on whistles. Toon characters - the Cat in the Hat; porky pig, a glitter creature - prance through the crowd. A computer splashes out streams of green laser lights, like a giant water sprinkler gone amok. This, friends, is not the sock hop. It's a rave. It's where 1,500 young people, mostly 17 to twentysomething, danced till dawn at an underground, possibly illegal, party on a recent night in midtown Sacramento that the authorities never found out about. And maybe, just maybe, this could be the Next Big Thing - one of those cultural snapshots that defines a generation. Kids in the '60s had sit-ins, love-ins and die-ins. '70s kids had disco and punk. '80s kids had progressive and rap. '9Os kids have rave. It's an entire subculture, complete with its own music, fashion, lingo, philosophy - and drug of choice, Ecstasy (the so-called "love drug," also called 'X" or "E"). And if you're over 25, you probably don't have a clue about it. But that's not your fault. Rave has caught fire just recently. "This is the quickest, fastest-hitting trend in dance music I've ever seen," says Mark Fahey, 33, of Sacramento, a modern-music club DJ for 16 years. "It's really taken off in San Francisco the last few weeks, and now it's hitting Sacramento. You're looking at the speakeasies of the '90s." "Rave is going beyond the parameters of dance music. It's becoming a cultural and societal phenomenon," Says Mark Gartenberg of Epic Records in New York, the record label of the rave group the Shamen. "This isn't a fly-bynight trend." "It's really taken off on the West Coast," says Andyboy, club editor of DMR, a dance music magazine in New York. "It's like it was back in the '60s - people getting together with no violence. Rave isn't as big back here. People just don't mix as well on the East Coast." Raves are so new here that law enforcement authorities are often in the dark. (A woman who answers the phone in the Sacramento police narcotics unit does a quick poll of the officers and says, "We hadn't heard about it. All these officers are looking at me like I'm nuts.") Raves, for those not in the know, originated in England in 1988. The dance party would last past dawn, and kids dosed on Ecstasy and LSD would proclaim the eternal grooviness of it all. The scene sputtered out in Britain, but it has resurfaced recently in Japan, Greece, Spain, India and elsewhere. But it has expleded in Los Angeles and San Francisco in recent months. The first rave hereabouts took place last summer under the Yolo Causeway in Davis, where 300 kids turned out. There have been a half-dozen other raves since then, but the pace is picking up. Four more underground raves are scheduled this month. Where will they be held? Beats us. That's part of the allure. They're clandestine. They move from place to place. You've got to call a secret hotline on the day of the event - no, not to find out where the rave is, but to find out where to get a map to find out where the rave is. And you can only do that from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. So what are the rules of a rave? First, dress down, not up. Forget the trendy basic-black look. Casual is OK, but hard-core ravers go for the weird, the wacky, the wild and whimsical. Colors are in - the bolder and brighter the better - and so are funky hats. Call it the Mad Hatter look: goofy, oversized, hats, ski caps and sports caps (ditch that Kings cap, though). Baggy shirts, overalls, necklaces, whistles, '60s tie-die and psychedelic T- shirts are also popular. Just remember, it's not a fashion show; the whole point is to cut through the pretensions. "There's not a lot of role playing and social status," says Steve Lefebre, 29, who's just rolled in at 3 a.m. "It's not hip to be cool anymore. It's hip to be fun." Next, you gotta dance dance dance like a banshee. Says DJ Fahey: "The great thing about a rave is everyone dances. You get an immediate feeling of camaraderie on the dance floor." And third, most important, you gotta get in the right groove. Fahey again: "It's not like the industrial music scene of the la~e '80s, all anarchy and anti-establishment. Here it's love, peace, look at the pretty lights and have fun." Miguel Vasquez, the man who put on this particular rave (he and a partner run an outfit called Horizontal Workshop), echoes those sentiments. "We're just getting out of an era of negativism. The '80s were all dark and grim," Vasquez says. "We're trying to relay the message that people need to come together and love the world and each other. We want to make this a generation of acceptance. There's so much factional strife in our society. But here, everyone comes together in peace and unity and embraces each other. The energy is just incredible." If that sounds like an outtake from the cutting-room floor of "Woodstock," guess again. Vasquez is 20 years old. What we have here, then, is a convergence of '60s love-and-peace mojo, a '70s disco dance aesthetic, '80s irony (the name of this night's affair is "Inside Van Gogh's Ear"), '9Os technology and a never-out- of-style dose of heavy-duty partying. All that, plus lots of pretty lights, for $10 a pop. Back in the rave room, Warren Zera pokes at the keyboard of his laser-spitting computer, the Bytemare. Zera shouts above the music: 'It's She killerest thing this town has ever seen. There's no right or wrong way to dance or to act, just be kind to each other. The energy peaks four or five times a night - the whole room's in sync, A thousand people partying at the top of their minds.'' On the dance floor, a kid in a We Never Sleep T-shirt - why do we believe him?.- puts on some goofy-looking 3-D glasses and stares at the lasers and the strobe flashes, only the guy who's handing them out says they're not really 3-D glasses, see, they're holographic glasses. Well, OK. All we know is that when you look at the white light, all sorts of blues, purples and reds dance and jump like crazy (it's called diffraction grading, for you science majors). That's about as high-tech as Van Gogh's Ear gets. "Raw" is how several rave veterans described this event. Some raves in the Bay Area boast things like computerized slide shows, brain machines (goggles that shoot waves of lights onto your eyelids, creating brilliant visual patterns), art installations and '60s- style liquid wall projections (yeah, it's cool again). As the party slouches toward sunrise, a half-dozen DJs, including Jeno, Garth and Thomas - three Britons who were part of the underground rave scene there - mix sets of cold, electronic techno music, deep house and hip-hop, ranging from a moderate 115 to a hypercharged 140 beats per minute. For someone who stays four hours, let's see, that adds up to about 30,000 beats. that's a lot of beats. The music takes some getting used to. It's as if someone recorded car's, engine problems, sampled it ar~d wrote a song around it. So it's no wonder a good.part of the crowd hits the smart bar in the chillout room. There's no liquor at this bar. But for $3 you can get a smart drink- a chalky tasting blend of juices, vitamins, amino acids and caffeine. All very legal, if very bland. (So-called "smart drugs," by the way, aren't a part of this scene. Smart drug~ are legal pharmaceuticals used to treat ailments associated with the aging process.) But there are pharmaceuticals, and there are pharmaceuticals. "What are you on?" says a 19-year-old from Rocklin we'll call Gordon. "We're doing acid, man." Gordon and his 20-year-old friend from Elk Grove - let's call him Brad - are chilling out in the chillout room after being timewarped in from Deadhead Central, we figure. "I'm totally into the music," Gordon says, doing his best "Wayne's World" impression, only it's no impression. "It's pretty dope, this rave scene," Brad adds. "Everyone's so open and free." "We're here to meet girls," Gordon says, cutting to the chase. "They come up and rub my head." Gordon, see, has this purplish Mohawk. "It's pretty cool. They rub my head, it feels like velvet." Sometimes you just have to take a guy at his word. A cigarette girl passes, just like in those old movies. She's selling Tootsie Pops, chocolate bars, Cracker jacks, sour balls--even cigarettes. People buy a handful of candy and pass it out. Nearby, standing almost directly beneath a floating "e" sign, two 17-year-old friends are scoping it out. (The event is for 18 and over,~ but no one checks IDs.) The one who gives her name as Elke (not!) chirps, 'X (Ecstasy) is like an aphrodisiac. This is a love drug party." "You kiss a lot of people you don't know too well," Amity says. "At some raves I've stayed sober the whole night, but you still get off on the music and the whole energy. It's really nice because there, are no cliques, everybody mingles. Elke says: "During a normal week of a 17-year-old's life, coming to a rave can be the answer to everything. I don't use drugs outside of this. This is such a peaceful, loving environment. This is the highest energy form of . . ." she reaches for a word on the ceiling 30 feet above - "anxiety relief that I can find." Amity, who has been to eight raves, also talks in italics, the way 17-year-olds sometimes do. "The raves get really frenzied. I mean~ as the night goes on, they become like rituals. They're huge. The nice thing is, there are so many people and they never turn violent. I've never been in a bad situation at a rave. It's very mellow." Amity and Elke disappear into the black lights. Are they representative ravers? It's hard to tell. At the other end of the chillout room, Alexxa Pappas, 20, of Sacramento, says: "There's a lot of it (Ecstasy) here, but I don't care for the drug scene myself. I just come here to hang out with my girlfriend. It's so mysterious. It's just the thing to do, go to a rave."