Rave Rulers of a Mini-Empire

In the late 1980s, Steve and Jon Levy were pioneering rave outlaws. The British siblings were the guys who lugged speakers into downtown Los Angeles warehouses, collected cash from wild-eyed patrons and watched the door, hoping the cops wouldn’t burst in and shut the whole affair down.

“It was exhausting,” Steve Levy says of those halcyon days when the all-night dance parties were a mysterious and illegal new import. “Crazy and exhausting.”

But also too fun to completely abandon, so the Levys sought out a new venture with the same backbeat. The result: Moonshine Music, a mini-empire within the electronic music realm that has sold 4 million albums over seven years, launched the only annual, national techno tour and is now dabbling in Internet projects and the world of fashion.

More than that, observers say the Los Angeles-based label’s unrelenting focus on U.S. artists in genres that have been dominated by European DJs has helped to cultivate a domestic scene that is now producing its own stars.

“They have stuck with home-grown acts,” says Raymond Leon Roker, publisher of Urb Magazine. “The scene is not as polished, but they took America with its lumps and they’ve been a great success . . . 10 years on the scene and they’re still standing.”

In some ways, the story of the West Hollywood-based record label points to the larger tale of electronic music in the U.S.

Starting out as the ragtag enterprise its Prohibition-era name would suggest, the company has carved out success with DJ compilation albums that are more fan-pleasing than star-building, just as the rave culture’s emphasis on the communal dance experience has kept many DJs faceless.

And, while Moonshine releases hit sales of $13 million this year, its stars--John Kelley, Carl Cox, Keoki, Dieselboy, Cirrus--are still strangers to the top of the U.S. album charts and no title in the company’s catalog has cracked 150,000 in total copies sold. Similarly, electronic music may be one of the fastest-growing sections in record stores, but it has yet to create pop superstars.

Earlier this decade, the music industry tabbed the electronic genres as the “next big thing,” and labels scrambled to sign leading acts such as the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers. But the windfall never materialized, and the major labels moved on to “next, next big thing.”

But still the music and fashions of the rave culture have seeped into mainstream sensibilities and are used by filmmakers and Madison Avenue to represent youth culture. As music genres blur, the turntable sounds of hip-hop and electronic music also crop up more and more in pop and rock.

“I don’t know if rave music will become your top 10 music,” says Jon Levy, 31. “I don’t think it’ll be bigger than rap. I don’t think it’ll be bigger than rock. But I do think it’s going to be big enough to stand on its own.”

On the Road With a Mega Moonshine Tour

If the Levy brothers get their wish, the future of Moonshine may include a new chapter in the history of U.S. electronic music with their Moonshine Overamerica tour, already the largest traveling showcase for the genre. “Ultimately, we see a payoff coming,” Steve Levy says, “our goal is to make it the Lollapalooza of raves.”

The tour, while profitable, has a long way to go before it resembles that breakthrough festival of alternative music, which regularly drew crowds of 15,000 a day. In 1997, the first Overamerica tour had 14 dates and the largest audience was perhaps 1,500. This year the 25-show tour’s largest gigs pulled in 5,000. But the growing pains continue. A venue snafu saw the tour end with a canceled date in Seattle, and some shows drew only 600.

“[But] we saw some fans traveling to go to different shows, showing up in Austin and then New Orleans . . . and the way they treated the DJs, these kids were almost star-struck,” says Jon Levy. “There’s a building hunger for this music.”

Indeed, the appetite for raves and their music may remain somewhat underground, but it’s easy to see the tremors it creates. Most weekends, Southern California raves draw thousands of young people to their all-night offering of loud, throbbing music, a hippie-like vibe and intense sensory stimulation.

The music is still criticized by non-fans as anonymous and mechanical, and even its top artists often remain faceless. Perhaps that’s why the major labels have found it hard to mine the areas where Moonshine has found its success.

“I don’t think the majors would be as successful,” says Micro, a young New York DJ whose third album will be released by Moonshine in February. “Electronic music will always be on the back burner for them. They want rock stars.”

The labels that do offer electronic music often present it as “very serious, very sober,” to distance it from the dance-and-drug reputation of raves, Roker says. Not so with Moonshine, he says, which packages its compilation albums with Day-Glo logos and other symbols reminiscent of rave fliers.

“To their detractors they seem a little obvious with the happy-slappy logos and big bubbly graphics and titles like ‘Rave Hits 101,”’ Roker said. “[Other labels] are taken more seriously. But Moonshine sells more records.”

The Levy brothers remain steeped in the rave culture because, to the dismay of many “serious” electronic music fans, it remains the engine and entry level for the genre’s audience. It is also, of course, the siblings’ history.

The Early Days of Rave Life

In the book “Generation Ecstasy,” a history of the global rave culture, author Simon Reynolds describes Steve Levy as a pioneer of the West Coast movement. Reynolds recounts Levy hosting a rave in the basement of a fish warehouse where patrons would be searched for weapons--not to deter troublemakers, but to weed out undercover cops.

The elder Levy, 32, waxes nostalgic about those years now. The journey into that wild world began in the summer of 1988 when Levy (who, like his brother, graduated from Pepperdine University) returned to his homeland and stumbled into the swirling sensation called acid house music.

Steve Levy came back to the U.S. with a stack of records and a taste of the rave scene. Reynolds writes that the result would be the creation of “the house party scene in Los Angeles . . . fashion-conscious fun, rooted in the popular demand for after-hours dancing.”

Moonshine Music is now sizing up corporate sponsors for the next Overamerica tour. What a difference a decade makes. “I think our success is keeping in mind what the fans want,” Steve Levy says. “We’re from same place where these kids are from. We were these kids 12 years ago. They think they invented this music and we did, too.”