LOVE TAKES OVER THE HEART OF S.F.
2ND AMERICAN LOVEPARADE BOASTS
CROWDS OF 89,000

words DAVID DOWNS shutter AMY YVONNE YU

One hour into America’s definitive electronic music festival of 2005, and mayhem and confusion seem destined to break out.

Some 60,000 club kids, aging hippies and confused tourists bounce through the heart of downtown San Francisco, oblivious to the fact that they are on a collision course with 40,000 peace marchers who are part of a nationwide metaphorical middle finger to the president.

Peace stomps north toward Civic Center Square. Love dances West on Market Street. And word spreads through the organizers’ walkie-talkies that the two could accidentally collide right on the steps of City Hall. Leading the six blocks of dancers and floats, a blue-haired Loveparade organizer with a bullhorn and a British accent shrugs his shoulders and hopes the police can co-ordinate the swirling masses. “I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but our causes are essentially the same,” he says.

But are they? Initial evidence appears otherwise. Up Market Street, the break beats and thumping bass disappear under the chants march, and stragglers from both factions have begun mingling. Serious young men and women in “Fuck Bush” T-shirts carrying “Not My President” pickets stare at the neon-bikinied, boa-wearing drag queen dancers with looks of half-disdain, half-confusion. “How can you dance while your country protests?” their looks appear to say. “Two thousand troops are dead and you’re dressed like a man-squirrel?”

Yet the throngs of giant Jackie O. sunglasses, wizard hats and SPF 15-slathered skin have their own peaceful logic, best expressed by Loveparade organizer Joshua Smith.

“The first Loveparades in the late ’80s sprung up during the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany,” Smith says. The gatherings of then-experimental musicians started out with a few thousand people but bloomed over two decades into a party topping one million. By 2004, Berliners were suffering from Love overload and balked at another year of parade-related public health and safety hassles, so the Parade found a new home in America’s most liberal of towns.

“The torch we carry is using the power of music to bring people together across all boundaries, whether it be class, politics or race, and demonstrating music’s amazing ability to do that,” says Smith. “I think city leaders received the message that we were sending which really harkened back to the counter culture revolution days of the ’60s. They saw what we were doing and said it makes complete sense to do something like this in San Francisco; that San Francisco should be the first city in the U.S. to kick off an event of this nature.”

Brightly coloured parade floats blast house music, breaks, jungle, trance and every type of electronica. “Our #1 thing is diversity, diversity, diversity,” Smith says. “We didn’t want anyone labeling this a trance parade or a house parade to this or that parade. It celebrates all the types of music.”

Up ahead of the dancing throngs, veteran squads of traffic cops block and reroute traffic, catching some motorists between the parade and the barricades. The unlucky sit in their cars for 45 minutes–chins on palms, smiling and shocked–as the party sweeps by in gaudy colours toward the Civic Center Plaza. By the time the floats arrive in the Plaza (which is big enough to land a zeppelin) the San Francisco Police have just moved the last of the peace marchers north and set the stage for an afternoon explosion of electronic music.

The floats circle the square with their six-foot speakers pointed inward, then unleash sets by over 200 DJs for the next five hours, including the likes of Crystal Method, DJ Carl Cox, DJ Dan and Mark Farina. Styles and BPMs change so fast and without guidance that it becomes impossible to keep up. The centre of the square becomes a merge zone where the bass of 100 speakers blends into a throbbing blob of electronica, forcing people to collapse on the grass and bask in the rare S.F. sun.

Inside the palatial City Hall, the thick stone walls mute the exterior bass beats and allow tribal techno fire show The Mutaytor to go buck wild at the bottom of the hall’s Grand Staircase.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Porter looking up at the high ceilings and detailed moulding. “It feels like we’ve invaded. It’s good to see what an open mind the city has.”

San Francisco remains the pre-eminent American city for electronic music, says local DJ Mark Farina, especially for house and break beats. Montréal-based producer Fred Everything, Bobby Valentine and DJ T are among the members of Farina’s must-see list over the next 12 hours.

Meanwhile Crystal Method explains a simple ethos to finding their way through the all sea of DJs performing throughout the night. “Follow the breaks,” says Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland simultaneously, as they are wont to do after playing together for over a decade. Their search includes stop-offs at the official Loveparade after-party, where UK duo Evil9–along with such acts as DJ Ferry Corsten, Bad Boy Bill and Markus Shulz–entertain 9,000 people until late in the night.

“We knew we had succeeded when we started getting reports of all these “Love” events. The whole city adopted us to the point where people were having the “official Unofficial Loveparade After Party” which I thought was awesome,” said Smith.

“Playing during the parade down Market street was something that’s going to stick with me for a long time,” said Lee Burridge. “Young, old, black, white, green–quite a few green people actually–gay, straight, confused. Everybody was there losing it to all the floats. The fact the sun chose to make the event even better with blue skies and warm temperature was awesome. There were so many interesting and hilarious costumes and outfits and crazy vehicles and loads of other stuff to look at that I couldn't really take it all in.”

In the final analysis, Smith said public safety officials were old hat at controlling a lifestyle event of this nature, arrests and injuries were confined to a small number consistent with the size of the crowd, which in a final count was pegged at 89,000. Smith said $5 donations at the gates helped recoup the approximate $200,000 price tag on the event, with sponsors ensuring enough profitability for a bigger better parade next year. “We’re 100 percent focused on building Loveparade and having it come back again, and we welcome global community input on making it a bigger, better event. After all, Loveparade doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to the late-night scene and the dance music-electronica scene.”