BURNING MAN.
A little over a year ago I took a red-eye from Los Angeles to New York. As I waited for the A-train in the purpling, pre-dawn night, I noticed three strange looking kids. They seemed identical to the young, homeless kids that infiltrate the east village every summer. You know, the ones with the dogs, tattoos and unfunny (but hoping to be—for the sake of getting beer) cardboard signs? These three on the subway platform looked the same. Two guys and a girl, each wearing baggy, unfathomably dirty army-type trousers, each sporting dusty dreadlocks. Maybe they had tattoos… I don’t remember. The guy was wearing an oversized, green, fuzzy top hat. Regardless, what surprised me was that they were leaving JFK, which meant they had flown here. Stinky, east village meth heads don’t fly into New York. Where did these people come from, I wondered? At that moment, still waiting for the train, in the first touches of daylight, one of them spoke.
“You want to hit this?” The guy asked with a huge grin on his face. I turned around. He was holding out an unlit joint.
“I’m alright,” I said. He nodded and said if I changed my mind not to be shy.
Ok, so, yeah, the A-Train platform at Howard Beach is outside but that still took me by surprise. I’d never smoked pot waiting for the subway and definitely not at six in the morning. Once the joint began moving between them, I tuned into their conversation. They were talking fast, so fast I could hardly follow. Their voices rose and fell like roller coasters, launching into each sentence at 100mph.
What the fuck were they talking about so excitedly? Time, clocks, black rocks, and a smoldering temple in the dust? It all sounded so strange to me I became convinced they’d just flown in from Mars and were recounting their trip in the language they picked up there.
I glanced over just as the guy looked up at me.
“Dude. Burning Man,” he said, as if reading my mind. “Have you been?”
“No,” I said. Up until this point I’d only heard of Burning Man vaguely. As far as I knew, it was some sort of festival, like Coachella or Outside Lands, I assumed, but for art and with more drugs. Man did I assume wrong… except for the last part.
With the same enthusiasm you might find in some Mormons at your front door, the three of them jumped at the chance to explain why I was missing out.
Burning Man, they told me, as we boarded the train, is an entire city. In fact, it’s called Black Rock City and for the first week in September, it’s the third largest city in Nevada. Tens of thousands of people arrive, some of them a few weeks early, to set up camps, art pieces, hair salons, bars and so on. Everything that exists in Black Rock City exists because people decide to build it. If, in other words, one year, nobody decided to contribute anything, there’d be nothing to do but buy ice from the ice truck.
Of course, that would never happen, because Burning Man IS contribution. Almost everyone that goes is involved with an art project or activity and, if they’re not, they’re not having as good a time.
Black Rock City sits on a dried lakebed called the Playa, in the middle of nowhere about two hours north of Reno. The ground is super, fine dust, that’s hardened and cracked. It takes the slightest breeze to coat you in white. The city’s designed as the largest clock in the world. The main avenues, which are spread out like immobile hands, are 9 o’clock, 6 o’clock (at center camp) and 3 o’clock, respectively. And the streets, spiraling out concentric circle-style, take alphabetical names: Anniversary, Birthday, Celebration etc.
The suburbs (not official Burning Man vernacular), where everybody camps, fill the outer reaches of the clock while the center is reserved for the large-scale art pieces and art cars.
In the middle of it all stands the Burning Man, a gigantic wooden statue of a man, which burns to the ground on Saturday night.
When Burning Man first began, it was just an opportunity for a few friends to build this sculpture and take it to the beach in San Francisco to watch it burn. Our fascination with fire, it seems, strikes such a deep chord that, this modest, pyromanaical act could give way to everything that Burning Man is today.
Now, I suppose I’m digressing. This is definitely not what those three kids told me. The truth is, after that encounter, I began hearing about Burning Man all the time. You know how that goes… one day you’re introduced to something for the first time and then suddenly it’s everywhere in your life? It was like that.
I started to meet and work with people who had gone and wanted, with that same enthusiasm, to tell me about it.
Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksson, the couple that founded 5Gyres, the organization, which took me on my sailing adventure in the South Pacific, had practically met and fallen in love at Burning Man.
When we were at sea, I was telling Anna how the experience, living on this boat, trawling for plastic, surrounded by nothing but blue, the days lapping by with the waves, was a life changing experience for me. She said, “Yes, and so will be Burning Man.”
Sometime in June, Anna contacted me and asked if I’d like to perform at Burning Man. She and her husband were planning to bring JUNK raft, a boat they’d built out of plastic bottles and sailed from California to Hawaii some years before, to the Playa as an art piece and they wanted me to do my show on top of it.
At that point, I was already planning to go to Burning Man and this offer seemed ideal. I signed on, obviously.
I arrived in Black Rock City on Wednesday, August 30th, two days after I was supposed to (Hurricane Irene).
In my car, I had a rental tent, sleeping bag, few changes of clothes, PA system, an old acoustic guitar and a crappy bike I’d bought the day before. My gimmick, I’d decided, was to wear my Lillian costume, a dive-skin that looks like a wetsuit, and my neoprene hat. And then, in classic Black Rock style, string LED lights all over my body, bike and guitar, so that when I performed on the raft, which would also be lit up, people could see me as a ball of lights from hundreds of feet away.
What I didn’t count on was how insane my costume (including my lit up bike) would appear to people tripping on MDMA in the middle of the night. When I started cruising around, literally everybody I passed made a comment about my lights. Many people voted me “best lights on the playa.” Obviously, as a newcomer on his first night, this gave me a pretty big head.
At first I didn’t understand why everyone made such a fuss over my lights. Then I remembered. The lights I used are almost impossible to find in the US. They’re the same lights I built the Lillian sculptures with, these bizarre LEDs from China that took me ages to find. What separates them from most lights is that they randomly change colors and patterns, moving from slow fades to quick flashes in seconds. This motion looks pretty wild at night.
Anyway, over time my costume began to break and people gave less of a shit.
The performances, on the other hand, got better and better. When I was setting up my PA system before my first show, I was pretty nervous. Burning Man is a very free form environment. People bike around aimlessly, coming and going, taking it all in. There’re very few scheduled performances. Also, I noticed immediately once I arrived, that raging is the exclusive agenda for most Burners. Every bar and art car on the Playa blasted dub step. Heavy, relentless techno. This obviously intimidated me as I got ready to play my quiet, acoustic set right, smack-dab in the middle of everything.
Underneath it all, however, I took comfort in the truth that Burning Man is what you make it and that there is room for absolutely everything, including my sad songs.
Anna and Marcus were allowed to place JUNK raft in a miraculously central location. It faced the esplanade, which is one of the main roads around the center of the festival. So, my performing on that raft was almost the equivalent of the naked cowboy performing in Times Square. It was all a matter of stopping traffic.
The first show I played coincided with the first dust storm of the year. And the winds were bringing it in my direction. After the first song, everything on the raft, my speakers, guitar, and body, was white. Regardless, as I began to play, I noticed people, who’d been biking along the road, stop in front of me.
At times, there were twenty or thirty people listening as the sun set behind them. The view I had, overlooking this commuter path, watching people in transit respond to my music, stop moving, and come to listen, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career so far. In the spirit of Burning Man, I gave away CDs and people grabbed them with enthusiasm. If I made somebody’s four-hour wait (in traffic) to leave Burning Man a little more enjoyable by providing my record, then I did my job.
Many people would come thank me after the set and tell me how refreshing it was to hear real songs. It became clear that I wasn’t the only person not into dub step blasting from all directions. Yeah, it seems the majority of Burners like to rave out but there’s definitely a small, and apparently growing, movement in support of live music. Without my knowledge, I’d become a part of this anti-techno sub-culture. That felt pretty cool.
Anyway, Burning Man was absolutely the experience everyone had been raving about. The site of the city’s skyline alone, unlike anything you’ll ever see elsewhere, is reason enough to go.
Burning Man, really, is an enormous testament to all that we can achieve for the sake of art and community. I mean, people work year round, spending thousands of dollars to build these fascinating art pieces that literally burn to the ground before the weekend is over. What?? Where else on the planet does anything like that occur?
While I definitely recommend this experience to just about anyone, I wouldn’t say, like so many have said to me, that Burning Man will change your life. It may or it may not. But the point is, it shouldn’t have to. Go to Burning Man to have a great time, to party, to support art, to participate in art or in the erection of a city (something you can’t do anywhere else without a very serious degree), but don’t necessarily go to find something, anything. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t engage in anything for that purpose. What you’re looking for is most likely with you all along and if it’s absolutely not, it’s probably not worth finding.
That’s it for the philosophizing. I really just wanted to tell my littler Burning Man story.
