Al Weisel
Ravestock
By Al Weisel
Rolling Stone, September 22, 1994, p. 64
It's just past dawn when the earsplitting sound of a revving motorcycle—followed by staccato bleeps that might be a UFO backfiring—cut through the misty morning air. The Orb are in the middle of their two-hour set of electronic music on the south stage of Woodstock '94, at an event dubbed Ravestock, the last performers in a Friday-night lineup stretching from midnight to 6:30 a.m.
A hard-core group of a few hundred kids have stuck it out through the night to see the Orb; earlier that evening many thousands more had gathered, an eclectic crowd of ravers—teenagers with spiked-platform sneakers, someone wearing a Dr. Seuss T-shirt, a guy with a black bodysuit cut out so that it resembled a Kiss of the Spider Woman costume—mixed with curious hippies and shirtless college jocks drawn by the music, which ranged from Dee-Lite's soul-inflected pop techno to Orbital's mega-bpm rave-ups to the Orb's ambient washes, which mix sound effects, beats and noise.
Aside from the mosh pit, Ravestock, which was hastily put together and announced just two weeks in advance, was probably the least nostalgic aspect of Woodstock '94. While there might not have been any ecstasy or smart drinks at the first Woodstock, Ravestock - with dancers waving arms as if tracing fractal patterns, others staring at the kaleidoscopic patterns on the screens with we-live-as-we-dream-alone looks of anomie - did evoke echoes of the past.
"Doses? Anybody got doses?" asked one person circulating through the crowd who already had the brands sussed. "The white blotter is bad," he said. "The Beavis and Butt-heads are good. Stay away from the brown acid." Whoa! Déjà vu all over again.
But not everyone was, well, ecstatic about Ravestock. In the days before the event there were rumblings on the Internet that the organizers were out to commercialize and exploit techno, charges that were reminiscent of those thrown at Woodstock '94 as a whole. And Richard James, a k a Aphex Twin, claims that when promoters discovered he had affixed a fake name to the contract he had signed five before going on, which reportedly gave PolyGram all rights to his performance, they pulled the plug after only a half-hour. "That was the last live show I'm ever gonna do," James said. But Paul Hartnoll of Orbital said, "It was just a really friendly, positive sort of atmosphere. I wasn't sure that was going to happen, because it's a lot of people that hadn't seen that sort of thing."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.