Nocturnal Wonderland Fights Its Site

In the restaurant business, it’s said there are three key ingredients to success: location, location and location. The organizers of Nocturnal Wonderland, Southern California’s biggest rave, learned the hard way Saturday that that adage also applies to their trade.

Held this year at Havasu Landing Resort, nearly five hours outside L.A., the eighth annual Nocturnal Wonderland had to fight hard to overcome the unfortunate locale.

It started with the atmosphere. At raves, the right vibe is just as important, if not more so, than the talent lineup. Imagine the disappointment, then, of the estimated 22,000 fans from L.A., Las Vegas, Arizona and other points in the West who converged on Havasu expecting a picturesque lakeside spot, only to be greeted by a never-ending dirt road that led to a concrete jungle where stages were lined up like booths at a street fair.

The layout, with a third of the nine stages set up within a few yards of each other just on the other side of the entrance, created a backup of foot traffic that made dancing extremely difficult and caused the artists to bounce up against each other musically.

It was a little better beyond the food court, with the Labyrinth stage, the biggest and best attended, having enough space to take on the air of a club for at least a portion of the 14 hours.

Because headliners had difficulty getting into the venue from the one-lane road, the stages were off schedule all night, often making it impossible to tell who was spinning, since there were no introductions or names listed on the accompanying visual screens. As if to summarize the night, a generator blew out on the hip-hop stage during a set from L.A. favorites Dilated Peoples.

As frustrating as Wonderland was at points, there were some highlights. As the crowd began to dwindle around 2 a.m., most of those left were dancing and celebrating to the soaring trance mix coming from the Labyrinth stage. Familiar tunes such as Reflex’s ‘80s hit “Send Me an Angel” intertwined with trance instrumentals, prompting whistles, hollers and arms waving in approval.

There was a surprisingly small number of individual musical highlights, given the talent of the more than 80 artists who were scheduled. Nookie, who spun futuristic, spacey beats while accompanied by an emcee, and the Bassbin Twins, who had the joint jumping with their unique spins on such recognizable tunes as James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” were two of the standouts.

The reality at Wonderland, though, was that maybe half of the crowd, at most, really appeared to care who was performing. The others treated it like a street carnival, coming out of curiosity, because it was something to do, or so they could say they were there.

As the pressure on dance festivals from various communities and political leaders grows, some think that raves will be forced to return to their original, underground form.

That could be the best thing for this event, which needs to go back to basics and rediscover its purpose of celebrating electronic music and its culture.