the loose freak collective that helped spawn the San Francisco concert scene’s heady
sound and light shows before Bill Graham moved in. In 1969, fed up with “rip-offs
and junkies and speed freaks,” Gil made his way to India, where he encountered the
sadhus, Hinduism’s wandering holy men.
Hymns in the ancient Vedas describe these “long-haired sages,” living in the
forest, covered in ash and drinking soma, the ancient holy brew that some scholars
believe was psychedelic. Today, millions of sadhus still drift about the land,
gathering at huge holy festivals, or holing up in the Himalayas to practice yoga. Some
are strict ascetics, some are simply beggars, while a select group, the followers of
Shiva, resemble nothing so much as Hindu Rastafarians. These Shaivite sadhus wear
their hair in long dreads and find spiritual sustenance in charas, India’s yummy
mountain hash. Before they inhale, the Shaivites cry out “Bomm Shiva!” the way
Rastas bark “Jah!” They identify the force of the herb with shakti, the immanent
power of creation the sadhu seeks to transmute back into essence.
Not surprisingly, the freaks took to the sadhus. Gil went whole-hog, living in
caves, wearing orange robes, and coaxing the Kundalini up his spine. But he still
found his way to Goa every winter, where he banged on acoustic guitars at the firelit
drum circles. When Alan Zion smuggled a Fender PA in overland, live electric jams
and pre-recorded rock became their yearly soundtrack.
According to Gil, these parties were the direct ancestors of raves. The crucial
transition—from guitars to electronic dance music—occurred at the impressively
early date of 1983, when two French DJs named Fred and Laurent got sick of rock
music and reggae. About the same time that Derrick May and Juan Atkins created
the futuristic disco-funk first called “techno,” Fred and Laurent used far more
primitive tech—two cassette decks—to cut-and-paste a nightlong aural journey out
of industrial music, electronic rock, Euro-disco and experimental bands like Cabaret
Voltaire and the Residents. Stripping out all the vocals, they designed their mixes to
amplify the bacchanalia of hard-traveling psychedelic partiers, and it worked. Soon
hipsters started slipping them underground tapes from the West. When the German
trance maestro Sven Väth first showed up in Goa, he was amazed to discover that
Laurent admired his earliest and most obscure 16-bit recordings.
Gil and his friend Swiss Ruedi quickly followed the Frenchmen, but the techno
transition was not smooth. The freaks were attached to their Bob Marley, their
Santana, their Stones. Once Ruedi had to enlist a bodyguard to ward off some
rocker’s blows. But eventually Goa’s DJs managed to plug the functional needs of
heavy psychedelic trance dancers into the emerging electronic landscape of machine
beats and trippy instrumental remixes. Within a few years, a distinct sound emerged.
When I interviewed Gil, he was adamant about the spiritual core of the Goan
parties. “When I was fifteen, I’d burn certain colored candles and certain incense
and invoke spirits. Now I’m basically just using this whole party situation as a
medium to do magic, to remake the tribal pagan ritual for the twenty-first century.
It’s not just a disco under the coconut trees.” He paused to light up a Dunhill. “It’s
an initiation.”
262 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION