one of the last hippie holdouts. We drove through broad rice patties and thick palm
groves, and then into Anjuna, where the taxi dumped me onto one of the village’s
countless sandy paths.
After scoring a room in a local villager’s house for two bucks a day, I was ready to
ring in the New Year. Though I didn’t know the location of the party, the auto-
rickshaw driver did, and I hopped into his sputtering three-wheeled machine. The
waning moon filtered through the cracked window, only a few days past the full.
Soon we arrived at the party site: a tree-lined hill about a mile inland from Vagator
beach.
The dance area was still quiet when I wandered in, nothing but a clearing lined with
black lights. A few yards away, scores of chai ladies from nearby villages had laid out
rows of straw mats and piled them high with fruit and cookies and bubbling pots of
syrupy brew. People flopped out on the mats by the light of kerosene, smoking,
sipping chai from scalding hot glasses, awaiting the dance. The international crowd
was pretty evenly divided between furry freak brothers and hip clubbers strutting
their cyberdelic stuff: incandescent sneakers, flared fractal jeans, floppy Dr. Seuss
hats stitched with the bright mirrored cloth of Rajasthan.
Then an ambient raga began: the bubbling tablas and droning sitar of an Orb
remix. A crowd of young Indian men in dress shirts and slacks set off fireworks.
Then the beats bubbled into an insistent digital pulse soon punctuated with kicking
bass thumps. Computer bleeps, digital winds, and melancholic arpeggios gradually
layered the incessant beat, which approached the 150 bpm mark, where dancing
breaks down into jitters and tics. The freaky dancers rode that edge, keeping the
flow in their hips as they chased the looping liquid melodies with their hands.
Occasionally a disembodied voice floated through the mix, triggering mindfucks left
and right: “Music from the brain;” “There are doors;” “Everybody online?”
I made my way to the DJ booth, squeezing between dancers spinning in exotic
rags and local children begging in filthy ones. Behind the mixing table stood an old-
school hippie: long dreads, black jacket, and leathery, sunburned face. The man was
slapping tapes into two DAT players run through a pint-size mixer. Alongside his
stacks of black-matte cassettes stood a candle, a few sticks of Nag Champa incense,
and a small devotional portrait of Shiva Shankar, sitting in ardha-padmasana on a
tiger skin.
“That’s Gil, one of the best,” one of the Indians mobbing the booth tells me. What
luck. Genesis had told me about Gil: an old psychedelic warrior from the Haight
Ashbury, an intense being, a heavy-set bear of a DJ. “You have to find him,”
Genesis had said. “He’s one of the links.” But Gil was too lost in his craft to talk.
By 3 a.m. or so, the music grew heavier and the so-called “power dancers” took
the floor: utterly absorbed, ceaselessly flowing, totally dedicated to the beat. Their
bodies sought to express every oscillating pulse, every twisting melody and waveform,
like Deadheads bonedancing in overdrive. Many shut their eyes, plunging through
some private and glittering darkness while unsettling voices shot through the mix:
“The last generation...” These people were surfing the psychedelic bardo, that
liminal zone that variously evokes dreamtime and death, primal rites and apocalypse.
ERIK DAVIS 257