Where do you all keep your whippits?

Sunday morning, Forrest Gump would see a lot in a pair of black leather boots. An unplanned limp shifted the weight and wear away from the ball of the left foot. Untied hours bent the plastic aglets. The toes remained pristine, all but uncreased, while the inside of the ankles had been scuffed from leather to suede.

These shoes belonged to somebody who had been out late, had left their inhibitions behind, and had done a certain amount of careless dancing. Their wearer had shuffled in place dancing behind the beat, so taken by the music that he couldn’t notice his right foot clipping his left, his left clipping his right. Why look down, after all, when there’s a light show like this going on?

The shoes were the cornerstone of my all-black outfit for Saturday night to see a name-brand DJ at a name-brand venue. After the show, walking to the L train, it finally clicked that this would-be wasteland was only a couple blocks from the darkroom where I get my film developed and a park I’ve eaten lunch in occasionally. My black t shirt, a relic of my summer busing tables at a diner after high school—yes, high school and it still fits!—was not the same color black as the black pants, an impulse buy in Europe while on the way to get bounced from Berghain. The trousers went for more of an OLED, while the t shirt had that non-black black of the LCD.

I rounded out the job with a black single-use mask I’d held on for just this occasion. The ticket I bought cost many times as much as my long-amortized $4 t shirt, and I could have worn salmon shorts and a dry fit country club golf shirt, but I was going to a rave in Brooklyn and so I had to dress up for the occasion.

The prior Friday, I had worn a tie dye shirt from a craft brewery, a brown pair of canvas pants, the type you could garden in, and my closed-toe Birkenstocks to see a jam band at Forest Hills. The mules didn’t cover my ankles, but I know a similar thing happened because when I woke up, each ankle had a scab right on that round bone on the inside. The same one that gets the blisters in ski boots.

My Morning Jacket may or may not be a jam band. Every jam band points over their shoulder at somebody else saying “hey I’m not a jam band, they’re the jam band,” just as any stoner can always find somebody with a dirtier van. Behind MMJ stands Phish, and behind them are the Dead. Off to the side are the less renown Widespread Panic, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and dozens of others.

Nonetheless, there comes a time during the middle of the concert when you realize there’s no point trying to ask your buddy what the name of this song is. Is the guitarist soloing, or did he just play a scale up and down four times? There’s not much to do beyond bob.

In the spirit of the tennis court underneath the pit, and due to requirements implemented by the surrounding Tudor Revival community, Forest Hills has a curfew somewhere between 10 and 11. At that point, the opener’s opener’s opener’s opener has started walking toward the green room at the Brooklyn Mirage.

The crowds may not overlap much, but the two affairs share more than their status as four-hour “you had to be there” moments. Most people seem to buy tickets only for concerts featuring songs they know and love. Songs lost their individuality to comparable degrees at both My Morning Jacket and Diplo. In the former case, what’s on Spotify serves as a jumping off point. They may start with a song, but, eleven minutes in, whether they’re exploring the sound or lost in the sauce is a matter of personal interpretation. In the latter case, the man’s top streaming tracks are collaborations with people who wouldn’t be showing up. This is of limited importance, because he’s spinning lab-grown music that, with no beginning or end, just makes you move. Listening to this stuff is like eating breakfast in the future, when you sit down at your chrome kitchen nook and take three pills that fill you up for the day.

At a rock show, there could be 45 minutes between the opener and the main act. At Diplo, there was at most 45 seconds. The last thing they want is for people to stop moving. Only once they stop might they start wondering about whether tickets at this price point are compatible with the underground, deep-Brooklyn aesthetic on sale here or, heaven forfend, whether DJs count as musicians. So long as you keep moving, it’s pretty hard to draw any comparisons to that scary rave in The Matrix: Reloaded or the Bacchanals of an empire in decline.

During my first Bonnaroo, Phish played two three hour sets. Beforehand, my knowledge began and ended with “Farmhouse” and Ben and Jerry’s. As we found a spot for their first set, the long-haired gentleman to my right overheard me talking about how I’d never seen them or any comparable act before. He tapped me on the shoulder and began to spin mile-long yarns about his favorite tracks and shows and trivia. Apparently there’s some bit with the drummer and dresses. A week later, I had an opinion on which of the thirteen Baker’s Dozen shows would have been the most epic. All I had to do was show up and move my feet, and they let me right into the Phandom.

I had known better than to try to get into MMJ before heading to the show. I’d never understood Phish until seeing them live, and only on my fourth salvo did I decide that The Dead aren’t boring per se. Maturity is not what is required here, as the thick cloud of pot smoke negated any such claims. Amazing how well their lasers worked with only human smoke machines. Nevertheless, there is a certain perspective that is required to dig something this un-trendy. I love these shows, and they are awfully fun. Yet, when we went out in Crown Heights after, I would have killed to be wearing less tie dye.

My folks have a friend who is somewhere around 50 and an avid concert goer. He attends some top notch shows with a coterie of hip friends, but he has more than once lamented that most of the family-oriented guys his age “only want to go see jam bands.”

Meanwhile, at age 15, my high school best friend bought his first secondhand neon clothes and decided that his new mantra was PLUR. PLUR for the uninitiated stands for Peace Love Unity and Respect, which we believed were bedrock values of the earlier days of warehouse raves and a time when EDM acts were not individual DJs drinking Dom in private jets but in fact “collectives” often referred to as “sound systems.” My local record store is fresh out of oral histories from this period, but I speculate that “sound system” was originally meant in the literal sense, meaning “speaker.” As in, the coolest people in the scene were those with access to anything that could play music loud enough to make one’s capillaries dance.

We downloaded mashups and remixes off the file sharing websites that dominated the window between LimeWire and streaming. We played them loudly in his parents’ car, parked in dark church parking lots. In our rooms, we downloaded apps that let us use the flash bulb on our iPhone 4 like a strobe light and jumped on our beds with headphones in. Enamel mugs were the cheapest available in the Soviet Union before they became kitsch, and so our silent discos grew out of strict dorm supervisors rather than whatever it is drives people to them now.

Despite this momentary obsession with PLUR and EDM, we had never been to a rave. In fact, it took until Christmas break of our junior year for us to go to Williamsburg at all. We didn’t make it much past Bedford Ave. For a few months, we dreamt of getting lost in a warehouse with no name and not finding our way out until the sun rose.

The people at the Brooklyn Mirage are selling just this. Though not so far into the middle of nowhere as one might expect, the various security steps led us down a winding path through two or three different warehouses and empty lots, places with the polish of the county fair but the choreography of a Disneyland line. Inside, the decorations are either sparse as in the totally black loos, or over-the-top as in the palm-trees, screens, and lasers all around the main venue. They’ve built up nooks and crannies so that people can wander about and find a bar with a shorter line, constructing a sense of adventure in a controlled environment.

They’d built bathrooms big enough to keep wait times so civilized that queue jumping seemed limited, a true show of unity.

The bars, however, were another story. They’ve worked out some sort of RFID scheme, which causes a certain amount of consternation. Walking in, concert goers can link their credit card to their wristband, or else they have to pay cash at the bar. Some 30% of people missed this memo on the way in, so the bartenders had their hands full keeping things peaceful.

My group and I stayed put relatively far from the stage, uninterested in whatever enormous amount of pushing it would have taken to get there. We seemed to be among relatively likeminded people, so everybody tried say excuse me and thank you while respectfully keeping to their personal space.

The love, however, was in short supply. Outside of our group of 20-odd leaders of tomorrow, I interacted with just two other people. Dancing to a remix to Abba’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!—the sole identifiable track of the evening for me, and by an opener— I’d drifted to a slightly different area and looked over at the woman next to me. I had stepped on her foot, she told me, and it really hurt. I lost the beat and stood stock still, smile wiped from my face. I’m so sorry, I said. It really hurt, she said. This went back and forth, and an apology drink was rebuffed. It really hurt, she said. I switched to the other side of our group, where I bumped my arm into somebody’s lit cigarette. That left a burn that I still have, which really hurt. I didn’t bother to engage the smoker, though I caught their attention by yelping right as it happened. Karma perhaps, but not love.

The love, however, was flowing among the neckbeards and their craft beer at My Morning Jacket. Early in the evening, we meandered our way toward an optimized spot in the middle of the pit, but behind the people who really cared. Hardly alone with this line of thought, we met a dude wearing a jean jacket with a Bonnaroo patch and a couple of wooks, also Bonnaroo regulars. Based on an affinity for meandering guitars and hot Tennessee fields, we fell in immediately with this loving group. We bought rounds and shared excitement the rest of the evening.

Outside Forrest Hills, at the civilized hour of 11ish, people stood around with canisters of either whippits or laughing gas. People bought balloons of the stuff and huffed it, and I understood for not the last time the tone people use when they talk about New York in the 70s. The average age at the concert seemed to be high enough that, like, are you guys seriously buying whippits on the street? I was assured that this is normal jam band fare, to the extent that a friend of mine had been confused that the whippits guys weren’t closer to the venue. He joked about saying “I’ve never seen a show here before. Would you be able to please tell me where you all keep your whippits?”

The light show, the robust food options, and even the whippits were routine for this type of concert. The ease with which people welcomed us, too, spoke to how they had themselves been welcomed in previously. I live a block from Irving Plaza. When metal acts like Avatar or Cradle of Filth play, regardless of what day of the week, the faithful start congregating by 2:00pm. The line never gets that long, but the spiked boots, dyed hair, and black band t shirts all indicate that everybody is there on purpose, to be part of something. The night Shawn Mendes played, the line stretched around the corner, breaking for the comedy club’s outdoor space. Many more people, and none of them came by until at least 5.

He may not be Harry Styles, but Shawn Mendes is in the zeitgeist to an extent that Cradle of Filth, with roughly 8% as many Spotify listeners, is not. It’s easy to be kind of into Shawn Mendes enough to be excited to see him at an intimate, easy-to-get to venue centrally located enough that you can get back early in time to finish your algebra homework. All it takes is the ticket cost, a bit of planning, and one or two lukewarm yeses. To get into Cradle of Filth, that is a longer story, one in which a yes was given to a piercing, a tattoo, a t shirt, a hair style, and a host of other things my parents don’t want me to have. The more niche the interest, after all, the more enveloping its aesthetic. Classic hip hop fans may not move much beyond Aaliyah t shirts, but wow Cradle of Filth is a whole schtick.

The expected attire for the MMJ concert is more balloon friendly than that for Cradle of Filth. MMJ can’t genuinely be deemed counter cultural after having been a centerpiece of an episode of American Dad! back in the aughts, but one similarly has said yes to several unusual things, not least of which is a guy with two first names who rose to fame recording in a silo.

The Brooklyn Mirage is an easier, less loaded conversation topic at a work happy hour these days. Nobody wants to hear about the weird band you got into, regardless of whether you spent the concert swaying back and forth, wondering about whether Jim James looks like Jesus because he sings like that or whether he sings like that because he looks like Jesus, or whether you stomped and thrashed and did whatever they do at the Cradle of Filth show. Telling my colleagues I went to see Diplo at The Brooklyn Mirage is no different than telling them I went to the expensive bar they recommended.

Because that’s what it is. Rave culture, dance music, and the whole PLUR bit came of age far outside the 39th floor of my office building or the $75 face value tickets. Disco, Dance, EDM, and all of their respective cousins were made for those on the outskirts of the mainstream, those shunned or ignored or rejected by those in power. The better venues that you can read about in the New Yorker and think “wow, that sounds cutting edge” still espouse this. If I’m at House of Yes, it may well be over, but when I went in 2019, they served us tea in line, we saw some of the most acrobatic dancing we’d ever seen, and the people were even kinder than the Jacket Wearers, or whatever MMJ fandom calls itself.

In the wee hours, we left for the L. The music faded as we moved away from the venue, but newer, edgier music grew louder to replace it. A couple blocks from the subway, we saw some fifteen or twenty people losing their minds. A short school bus had been retrofitted as a DJ booth, and DJ bus driver had set up strobes strong enough to make use of the warehouse walls on either side of the street.

So far as I could tell, there were no wristbands. Even if we still had enough energy to join, we weren’t exactly invited and certainly didn’t feel legit enough. This was the club I thought I’d find at the Mirage. Out here we were seeing home-made rave fresh from the still, and we’d just paid through the nose for a weakened brew of moonshine, packaged in affected mason jars.

At the bus, at the Mirage, at Forest Hills, everybody’s looking for the same thing. It’s Saturday night, and the feeling’s right, but authenticity and clout vary across shows and venues. The dream rave from high school might be a far-off ideal, a club only to be joined in the wee hours of the morning at an inconvenient location.

At My Morning Jacket, my friend’s Bonnaroo hat was enough to get us into the club. He even met up with one of our new friends to see the exact same show at the exact same venue the subsequent night. It may not be a club worth bragging about, but it was its own self. The Irving Plaza metalheads and the My Morning Jacket hippies may look like they’re wearing uniforms, but if you ask them why they dress the same, they won’t understand. They’re just wearing their favorite shirts.

At the Mirage, however, fairy wings mingled freely with golf shirts, and I looked around in my all-black costume, confused about the dress code. I knew we were bobbing along at an expensive distillate of the raves I imagined back in high school, but I nonetheless danced the leather off my boots. I still would’ve worn my costume even if I’d known there wasn’t really a club to join, but it might have been nice to know that one black outfit doth not a raver make.