NYT: A Year After Drug Deaths, the Electric Zoo Music Festival Tries Again
With three weeks left until thousands of raver babies dressed in neon spandex descend on Electric Zoo, New York’s largest dance music festival, Mike Bindra and Laura de Palma were running through their checklists in a state of high anxiety. The load-in for their giant show was about to begin. In a few days’ time, six performance stages — the biggest serving 30,000 fans — would spring up in a field on Randalls Island. Crates of pyrotechnics, trucks of LED screens and a stadium’s worth of subwoofers would soon be coming in.
But the excitement on this August afternoon had been undercut by the bad news coming out of Canada, where two young people had overdosed a week before, possibly on Ecstasy, at a similar outdoor concert in Toronto. There was more bad news coming out of Maryland, where that same weekend two more fans had died at a dance show in Columbia. There even was unnerving news coming out of Brooklyn: A few days earlier, concerned about the recent spate of deaths, a local promoter had banned from his show in Coney Island a strikingly restrictive list of items — including, but not limited to, pacifiers, laser pointers, miniature massagers, eyedroppers, stuffed animals, unsealed tampons.
For Mr. Bindra and Ms. de Palma, a married couple who have run Electric Zoo since 2009, it was a nauseating form of déjà vu, returning them to memories of their show last year, which they abruptly canceled on its third and final day after two attendees, both in their 20s, died in separate drug-related episodes. “Six in a couple of weeks,” Ms. de Palma said, sounding openly disturbed. “It’s horrifying — it’s scary.”
“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Bindra added with a sigh. “I hope at some point the people at these shows” — presumably his included — “realize that what they’re putting in their mouths can actually kill them.”
It’s been a rough summer for electronic dance music — or E.D.M., as aficionados call it — which, in the last quarter-century, has been known mostly for its remarkable transformation from an underground demimonde of voguers, drag queens and urban fashionistas to a Balearic island bacchanal to a largely middle-class, $6 billion cultural phenomenon. Last year, Tiesto, a dance-music D.J., earned a staggering $32 million. That same year, E.D.M. was the fastest-growing music genre in the country in terms of digital sales, according to an industry publication. And these days, festivals like Electric Zoo attract hordes of suburban fans as well as huge investments from media entrepreneurs and corporate sponsors.
But even as it goes mainstream, E.D.M. is haunted by its druggy past: In addition to the deaths in Toronto and Maryland, there were two in July at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. And just three weeks ago, a man from Buffalo was charged with selling Molly — a supposedly pure but easily adulterated form of Ecstasy — to one of the fans who died last year at Electric Zoo.
Given these unfortunate events, a quiet conversation has begun within the world of E.D.M. about how to finally stem the tide of drugs and, perhaps more broadly, about whether the scene’s philosophy of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity and Respect) has given way to YOLO — You Only Live Once.
WHETHER OR NOT they like it, and they seem to go back and forth, Mr. Bindra, 45 and of Danish extraction, and Ms. de Palma, a former model who declined to give her age, are squarely in the middle of this developing discussion. They are, after all, founding members of the E.D.M. community, having been around since the late 1980s when the music first emerged in the warehouse clubs of New York, Chicago and Detroit.
Because of their experience last summer, the couple, who left New York shortly after last year’s festival for a Zen-chic farmhouse in the Berkshires (with a disco ball hanging in the living room), have a personal perspective on the future of the music, on the role of the promoter in handling security and on the two young fans who died: Olivia Rotondo, 20, and Jeffrey Russ, 23.
“We were devastated,” Mr. Bindra said last month.
“It was — and I mean it — my and Laura’s worst fear come to life.”
It was the first time that he and Ms. de Palma spoke publicly about events last year, and Mr. Bindra recalled that he got word of Ms. Rotondo’s death from his medical director on the opening day of the show. “When the first fatality happened,” he said, “it was obviously awful, but since it didn’t seem to be a public-health issue, the festival went on.”
It was only after Mr. Russ died, on the festival’s second day, that he and Ms. de Palma confronted the possibility that a toxic batch of drugs was going around or, even worse, that someone was deliberately distributing them.
“We just didn’t know if it was tragic or nefarious,” Mr. Bindra said. “So we felt we had no choice. We had to shut it down.”
This was not an easy decision. The couple had, after all, spent nearly a year — not to mention almost $20 million — planning Electric Zoo’s extensive list of acts, its vast array of food purveyors, its complex transportation systems and, of course, its safety measures, which last year included 70 emergency technicians, 15 paramedics, five trauma nurses, two physicians and a team of guards on pneumatic lifts with binoculars and night-vision goggles.
“We’ve been working with this promoter for the past five years and they have a stellar record,” Michael R. Bloomberg, then the mayor, said in the aftermath of the deaths. “I have nothing but good things to say about them.”
Nonetheless, within days of the festival’s closing down, articles appeared linking Mr. Bindra to the Manhattan nightclub Twilo, which the city shuttered in 2001 because of rampant drug use. Mr. Bindra had indeed worked at Twilo as a manager, though he had been in charge of booking talent, not security. The distinction was lost on the gaggle of reporters who camped outside the couple’s home in Long Island City, Queens.
The clamor lasted a week, but it had the lingering effect of producing a sort of cautious introspection in the E.D.M. scene, which seemed to detect in the uproar something like the outrage that an earlier generation had attached to Elvis’s hips.
It was pointed out, by D.J.s and promoters, that fans had died at other famous festivals, like Bonaroo and Woodstock, as well as at wholesome events like the New York Marathon. It was reasonably argued that intoxicants have always gone with music, whether that meant reggae’s taste for pot or country’s love of bourbon. And it was gently suggested that when it came to the safety of 20-somethings looking for a party, there was only so much that a festival manager could do.
But where some of their colleagues saw a witch hunt, Mr. Bindra and Ms. de Palma saw, with time, a teachable moment, for those inside and outside of E.D.M. “I would never downplay drug use,” Mr. Bindra said one day in late July, as he and Ms. de Palma were walking through their Randalls Island site, “but whenever something new comes up and the establishment doesn’t get it, there’s always a bit of hysteria.”
IN TRUE DANCE music fashion, the couple known as “Mike-and-Laura” wooed each other underneath the strobing lights of the old Sound Factory, a nightclub that was on West 21st Street. The hysteria — albeit an enjoyable sort — was already there when Mr. Bindra, fresh from discovering what was then called house music in Costa Brava, Spain, first showed up in 1990, followed by Ms. de Palma, who says she arrived at the club within a week of relocating from modeling in Paris.
“It was an underground place,” she said. “You would get on the dance floor and everybody was celebrating. You kind of just forgot about anything else. It was almost like our religion every Saturday night.”
This was at a time when New York’s nightclubs, especially its after-hours clubs, were filled with every variety of self-expressive freak. “It was just so liberating,” Mr. Bindra said. “You could go there and be free of judgment, of all the stuff you had to deal with in your life. There were Chelsea boys and hip-hop guys and crazy artists. Jean-Paul Gaultier would be there with Madonna, but everyone was really there for the music.”
That music — pulsing and propulsive — had been thrust into the dark of 3 a.m. largely because of its roots in the gay scene of the ’70s. It survived in hiding on the turntables of D.J.s like Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez. Mr. Bindra, then an actor-waiter (“Much more on the waiter side,” he said), was so enamored of the stuff that he arranged a job at the Sound Factory bar, an offshoot of the club, and then another booking acts at Twilo, which took the Sound Factory’s space when it went out of business.
Ms. de Palma, meanwhile, had become a muse and model for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and in 1996 she and Mr. Bindra promoted their first show: an after-party for the launch of one of Mr. McQueen’s lines of clothing. They found they liked promoting shows — lining up the talent, finding the proper venue, making easy money. When Twilo closed, after a long campaign against it by the city, and Ms. de Palma quit her modeling career, the couple started Made Event, which began arranging shows at the Roxy, the Roseland Ballroom and at Arc, in TriBeCa, which Mr. Bindra, Ms. de Palma and a partner owned for a couple of years.
Then, in 2003, Made Event organized a show with the German D.J. Paul van Dyk at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park. It drew a crowd of 3,000 and its success led to other outdoor events — at McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, on a Hudson River pier. These were the early avatars of Electric Zoo.
“We had a clear vision all along to take the music out of the darkness and into the light of day,” Ms. de Palma said. “We’d been to Ibiza” — the Spanish ravers’ island — “and knew that it didn’t have to be played in blacked-out clubs at 2 in the morning.”
A few years earlier, a fellow promoter, Matt E. Silver, staged a rave called the Sixth Element on Randalls Island — an overnight event with decent sound but inferior talent, Mr. Bindra said. He reasoned that the Wild West rave scene could profit from better logistics, and that if he and Ms. de Palma did their own show on the island, they would book the right acts. There was a false start in 2004, when they were scared away by the estimated $1 million production costs. But by 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, they got permission from the city to mount a Randalls Island show, and set about hiring the finest headliners Europe had to offer.
“We could feel the groundswell,” Mr. Bindra said. “We knew that E.D.M. was getting bigger. But we had no idea that it would turn into Niagara Falls.”
There has in fact been a cataract of mergers and acquisitions in the E.D.M. world in recent years. In 2012, the entertainment conglomerate Live Nation bought a stake in Insomniac Events, which runs the Electric Daisy Carnival, the country’s largest dance festival, for an estimated $50 million. And last year, Robert F. X. Sillerman, the media mogul who owns SFX Entertainment, purchased a 50 percent stake in Made Event for $45 million, according to a lawsuit filed against Mr. Bindra and Ms. de Palma by a former partner who claims they shortchanged him.
“Electronic music is the soundtrack for this generation,” Mr. Sillerman said not long ago. “In my day, music was a series of short stories, with a beginning, middle and end. But what’s fascinating about Electric Zoo is that what you see are 10,000 kids dancing in unison, without a narrative, and not all hearing the same thing. The paradigm has changed. The Internet has created a collective mind-set of individuals. The audience is now in charge.”
NO MATTER who’s in charge — audience, investor, promoter — it is a testament to Mr. Sillerman’s faith in Made Event, and in the larger happening of E.D.M., that he closed the deal only weeks after Mr. Russ and Ms. Rotondo died. He referred to this year’s Electric Zoo, which starts Aug. 29, as “a homecoming,” hoping, albeit as a man with skin in the game, that the festival would move beyond tragedy and get back to its roots as “a major celebration.”
To that end, Mr. Bindra and Ms. de Palma, flush with his money, have tweaked the celebratory aspect of the festival, bringing in organic-food vendors and an ’80s-era “vinyl-only” tent.
They also expanded their security procedures. They have hired, for instance, what they are calling “the zookeepers,” a group of med-school students who they hope will be more approachable than uniformed guards for college-age guests who find themselves in need. They have also rigged the concert’s digital entry bracelets so that they will not work unless fans first watch a brief online public-service video on the dangers of taking Molly.
To some, however, even strengthened security measures are simply a superficial treatment for the illness of drugs. While E.D.M.’s shift from the darkness into the light has greatly benefited ticket sales, it has also led to more drug-related episodes.
“When underground rave culture broke into the mainstream, its population obviously grew,” said Missi Wooldridge, executive director of DanceSafe, a group that campaigns for health and safety in the E.D.M. community. “And what we’re seeing here, in part, is an issue of more people, more problems.”
According to Ms. Wooldridge, the real solution is political. Drug policy in the United States tends to favor prohibition and criminalization over education and the release of information. DanceSafe encourages promoters to acknowledge that their fans are going to roll on Molly, no matter how stringent safety measures are, and to set up testing stations to screen the available drug supply for adulterants. But openly admitting that drugs are being used does not endear promoters to stadium owners or parks officials, let alone to insurance companies.
Mr. Bindra and Ms. de Palma are, as Sound Factory and Twilo veterans, aware that drugs and dance music go hand-in-hand. But they are older now, and they are clearly unsettled by a new generation’s attraction to a drug that is threatening to obscure the natural elations inherent in the music they love.
Sitting on their patio in the Massachusetts countryside, with hay rolls resting on a nearby hill, Mr. Bindra tried to bring perspective to the current scene. “We had life-changing moments on the dance floor,” he said, “and I kind of feel like a pied piper at times, like it’s our job to recreate those moments for the next generation.”
He paused to drink some tea.
“I feel like nobody knows better how to do that than we do,” he continued. “It might sound corny, but when we see tens of thousands of people having the best three days of their lives, it’s just an amazing feeling.”
___________________
"In a world of illusion you only see what you feel"
