Longform Audio Piece (Broadcast Audio Cut) - TRANSCRIPT - Natalie Goyarzu WHEN THE RAVE KIDS GROW UP 00:00:13 Rise of the Phoenix Hey, this is rise of the Phoenix. The right party is a go. 00:00:17 Rise of the Phoenix One and exit 232 and right until you get to the gas station on the right. 00:00:28 Natalie 1989 was a marker year for global shift among huge world events and realignments. New music scene was beginning to Bloom. 00:00:39 Natalie A budding rebellion to the commercial corporate predominance of the decade, leading to the second summer of. 00:00:46 Natalie Love. 00:00:47 Natalie From Chicago to the UK, House music found a home in Canada too. 00:00:52 Natalie Those early rapiers in the 90s Flyers from the record of skate shop music and an undisclosed place. No GPS, no text, no cell phones. The party bus that we take you no booze. 00:01:06 Natalie No social media when the youth culture went against the system of the time and created a movement that will never, ever be duplicated. 00:01:17 Natalie Who said being a raver would be a stigma of the 00:01:19 Natalie Time. 00:01:20 Natalie What did they think would happen? 00:01:22 Natalie When the rave kids grow up. 00:01:31 Mitch In the 90s, Los Angeles, we used to hang out at a rave called time. It was later purchased by Prince and was called the Grand Slam club. But in the 90s it was time and. 00:01:47 Mitch You had time to. 00:01:48 Mitch Kill. 00:01:49 Mitch And time to to spend and we were sleep deprived and hanging out on time and playing with time for a long time. My name is Mitch, and I'm a raver. 00:02:12 Steve Like I remember, like my first rave probably was upstairs on somewhere on Hastings St. 00:02:19 Natalie This is Steve Jiu's stage name. Stunning Steve Jiu. 00:02:24 Natalie A professional touring Elvis impersonator, Steve always had musical instincts from beginning with childhood performances to his parents for happy meals to DJing in the Vancouver rave scene in the mid 90s. 00:02:37 Steve So it's not going out at 93. 00:02:40 Steve Maybe 92, but you know it was like it was. It was a really fresh scene too as well. The the underground house scene was really more pumped in in the late 90s as opposed to the early 90s. 00:02:51 Natalie So how did he even get into these parties? How did it all go down? One place to look to the Flyers, the Flyers detailing the save the dates for the upcoming rave was basically all that they had the name of the rave, maybe the DJ and the. 00:03:06 Natalie A paper version of a cryptic and artistic, say, Instagram post, and of course on your flyer you would have the telephone number to call the day of to one. Make sure the party wasn't already shut down, and two to find out where to meet the person who's going to tell you where to go. 00:03:23 Natalie I myself was just on the cusp of being able to go to these non address parties. 00:03:30 Natalie And only got to hear about this real life scavenger hunt from the outside. Probably what made it that much more alluring. 00:03:38 Steve You would get the. You would get the ticket and you would get this phone number and this phone number. You would call, it would be the answering machine and the answer machine would tell you when you go down the streets there to hang a left and keep on locking. 00:03:50 Steve For 100 yards. And once you get to 100 yards, you'll you'll hear a little bit distance. Then you'll meet someone. Then I'll point out to you where the party is and stuff and just show your ticket and you go from there. So it's really cool that you would get a phone number, not a Google map location. 00:04:07 Natalie I'm not sure. 00:04:10 Natalie The dance until summer. 00:04:18 Jeremy My friends, just like yo, I went to this thing in Toronto and it's like, great, it's called Reef back home in a small town that thinks old Big City ravers are doing drugs and they probably have devious sex and doing all kinds of bad stuff. I realize it wasn't just these people come back glitter. 00:04:36 Jeremy On their face. 00:04:37 Jeremy It was people having a. 00:04:38 Jeremy Great time. It was in essence, of what Ravian 90s was, was just letting. 00:04:44 Jeremy Ohh of pretension. My name is Jeremy. I'm a raver. 00:04:54 Natalie There is this understanding that raves brought about a culture of openness. 00:04:58 Natalie Where people would bump into you and you'd both turn and smile, or just keep dancing and not even notice you'd go back to the town you were from returning covered in glitter and wristbands. 00:05:08 Natalie It wasn't a place you'd aim to pick up someone. The attraction for many was that you could wear whatever you want. 00:05:16 Natalie Be whoever you want. 00:05:18 DJ Takin Was it the love, the love that you found 00:05:20 Natalie This is DJ Takin, owner of Toronto's the wiggle room. He began his early rave days, mid 90s Toronto, now owner of a venue that aims to replicate the vibes of what he felt in those young rave moments, community comfortability. 00:05:36 Natalie A safe space. 00:05:38 DJ Takin It was pretty impressive before that I was into like, not all ages. Nightclubs which were cool, but this was just something else. We're just gonna much larger scale. Everybody was so kind and loved each other and support each other. The music was just. 00:05:59 DJ Takin Something else? 00:06:13 Natalie However, people started to build a stigma. The stigma of assumption. If you like house music and go into raves, you're on acid. What's acid house? Are you a drug user? Drug dealer, when in reality, people went to raves to dance and acid house was a genre of very early. 00:06:30 Natalie Cynthia House music, based out of Chicago. Nothing to do with LSD. The music and the energy was enough to lift you up, but to deny the drugs were taken at raves. 00:06:40 Natalie You would be misleading. You didn't necessarily need them, being that the contact hide the room would radiate for a while, but in the thick of the scene it was a part of it. Perhaps it was a lack of booze. Perhaps it was drugs like ecstasy or people there just for the music. Perhaps it was a combination of everything but the rave community was the outlier. 00:07:01 Natalie Club scenes. 00:07:02 Steve There's a time like, you know, you just like, Just Dance the free movie. You don't you couldn't care less what other people were looking at you or. Or they're gonna pull out the camera, start recording your dance movements and stuff. 00:07:13 Natalie The acceptability of the rave scene disarm. 00:07:15 Natalie You where normally there would be a uniform of the crowd you associated with, whether you're into hip hop or skater or rocker. The only thing uniformed in a rave was everyone's desire to just give in to dance DJ Takin's goal to create a similar resonating space in Toronto STEM from the susceptibility. 00:07:35 Natalie Of rave culture. 00:07:37 DJ Takin I find night clubs or dance places are a little there's a bit of aggression to it. In most places, you know people are. 00:07:47 DJ Takin Not necessarily there for the music or for the art. 00:07:52 DJ Takin They're there to get. 00:07:54 DJ Takin You know, intoxicated. 00:07:56 Natalie Having your priorities be music first produced an atmosphere of togetherness. Everyone in this small, sweaty underground warehouse dancing to this emerging electronic sound house. It just so happens it's said to have originated its name from being played in these early wear house spaces. 00:08:15 Natalie For Steve, the biggest thing about a rave was being able to listen to this music not available anywhere, but in that one moment, knowing that when you went to a rave, you were about to experience something truly unique, that even if. 00:08:28 Natalie All the stars. 00:08:29 Natalie Would never happen the exact same way again. 00:08:32 Steve When you left that building, you would never hear that music anytime soon unless you knew the DJ. 00:08:38 Steve And you were into the music, but the music was you couldn't find the music on the radio. You couldn't find the music on the computer. 00:08:47 Natalie There was a freedom pulsing in these rapes. 00:08:50 Natalie The freedom. 00:08:51 Natalie To escape into the music. 00:08:55 DJ Takin Music resonates with people differently, right? Different people resonate with different types of music. Somebody might like rock. Somebody likes, you know, Symphony. And some people like this. It doesn't matter what you're into. It's as long as you. 00:09:11 DJ Takin Know you it it keeps. 00:09:12 DJ Takin You going and I think it's a. 00:09:15 DJ Takin It's a major. 00:09:17 DJ Takin Breath in everyday life. You know music is needed. 00:09:32 Jimmy It's the mid nineties 96 I think. I read up on the Internet about this camp out in the desert, so I decided to drive there. 00:09:41 Jimmy Burning Man in its early days, there was maybe about 12,000 people there, and that's a lot less than the 80,000. 00:09:51 Jimmy It also felt. 00:09:52 Jimmy Really uncontrolled and even dangerous at the time it had this chaotic Wild West. 00:09:59 Jimmy Vibe. I couldn't believe that something like that could actually keep going. I have no idea how it how it became the thing that it still is. I'm Jimmy. I run an open decks night in Vancouver. 00:10:20 Natalie Experiencing your coming of age as a raver in a time that coexisted with the club kids, the punks, the grunge, the Goths. And in 1989, when it really took off, there were even still the fragments of the yuppies. It left a marker on your tree ring. 00:10:35 Natalie If you had a chance to live through this moment and go to these raves, there is a muscle memory to hearing those early songs that started it all out for you. 00:10:44 Natalie Passing through this experience leaves an impression where you landed today has residual effects from these raves of past. 00:10:52 Natalie Everyone grows up. 00:10:53 Natalie But it doesn't mean the spirit of having lived through this iconic moment in time has to unplug. 00:11:03 Shar Used to go to raves when I was younger. They were super fun and colourful and now I'm taking my son to his first rave. My name is Shaw and he's. 00:11:12 Shar Nine months old. 00:11:20 Natalie Once young kids dancing to music that had them shamed by people that didn't understand or care to understand what these early 90s raves. 00:11:29 Natalie Were all about. 00:11:31 Natalie I guess they assume that music choices going to raves destined someone into a specific type of life. 00:11:38 Natalie And here we are, 30 or so years later, these rave kids have kids here for parents own companies, work for major companies and still are vibrating from the music that took them. 00:11:51 Natalie On that adventure. 00:11:53 Natalie Making them who they are today.