From Punk To Polygamy, Part 2: The Rave Years

Me at the Domes, 1988

The summer after high school graduation, in 1988, I went on a school-sponsored summer exchange program to Belgium.  Previously, I had taken four years of high school French.  When I got to Belgium, I realized that I really didn't speak French.  After a summer over there, I came back almost fluent, speaking French almost better than my high school teacher.  My time in Belgium changed my life.

First of all, it gave me a world view, breaking out of my colloquial bubble, experiencing culture, language, and food from an entirely new perspective.  I found that everyone knew I was Mormon because of my unique name, and everyone would offer me wine.  For the first half of the trip, I set a good example, being a good Mormon boy, and politely declined any offer of alcohol.  By the end of my stay, I was doing as in Rome and trying to see how many mugs of Jupiler it took before my ability to speak French was impaired.  Many raised their eyebrows when they found out that I came from a large family.  I was depressed my first week there.  Everyone was condescending and mildly sarcastic towards me.  After a week, I started throwing the sarcasm back at them, and people warmed up.  Some were impressed by my familiarity with Marx.  One guy had blown smoke in my face when I first got there and said, "You know, I really hate your country."  A week later, he was telling me, "You are the first nice American I have ever met!"

Me in Belgium, wearing a Meat Puppets shirt, 1988

Pierre, the father of the host family I stayed with took me aside one evening.  He told me in mixed French and broken English to be more proud of who I was when people asked me.  He pointed at himself, "I, Freemason."  He pointed at me, "You, Mormon."  Then the finger darted between us.  "Freemason respect Mormon."  Of course, I was 18 and dumb.  I had no clue what the significance was in that.  But to this day, I deeply respect Freemasons, thanks to Pierre.

While there, I would attend dance clubs.  The music at these clubs was dominated by pounding electronic beats as the acid house craze was sweeping through Europe.  The Belgians had their own version of this music called New Beat.  I fell in love with this music from Belgium, much as my dad had fallen in love with Mexican music and took some home with me - Front 242, Euroshima, Lords of Acid, Jade 4U, 101, S-Express, Bomb the Bass.  Once home, I bought a lot of this music, although, in the days before internet, it was tough, involving heavy catalogs at the record stores, special orders, and a lot of patience.  And everything was on vinyl!  I ordered a lot of Chicago house, Detroit techno, and everything in between with a hard beat.  I made everyone mix tapes and got pretty good at dubbing with the equipment I had.  I deejayed parties, much to the chagrin of my friends who didn't care for house music.  I remember going to an old cotton warehouse with some of my deejay friends, setting up equipment in the empty building, and spinning music as loud as we could, although I was sad that we left the recording levels down.  No one really listened to this music or knew what it was.

Me & James in Yuma, 1989 - making the duck face before it was "cool"

By 1989, all of the clubs were playing acid house - all of them.  If you went to an alternative club, "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult or "Blue Monday" by New Order were no longer the longtime fixtures they once were - it was all house music, which I always described as tripped-out disco.  The clubs were mostly playing Belgian New Beat - which was a shock to all of my friends who came to visit Belgium in the summer of '89.  There were about six of them.  Imagine their surprise walking into Six Feet Under in Tempe -  which made the summer edition of Rolling Stone magazine that year - and the deejay was playing nothing but Belgian music that year.  Not only did we attend clubs, but we attended raves, or what we called back then simply "warehouse parties" - illegal deejay parties that sprung up in empty warehouses or buildings in downtown Phoenix, infamous for serving alcohol to minors and being busted by cops.

At the end of 1989, me and my good friend, The Baron, made a trip to Austin, Texas to see my friend Matt.  The first mishap - we were running late getting to the airport.  After checking our luggage, we were literally running through the airport to get to our plane.  Now, this is in the days before TSA, but we still had to go through the metal detector.  I had so many metal bracelets on both wrists that they kept setting the detectors off.  I was trying to take them off one by one to be able to get through the detectors, but it wasn't happening.  The plane was going to take off.  I pulled off all the bracelets off all together in one tug.  Skin came with the bracelets, and there was blood.  But we made the plane on time.  On the plane, I spent my entire ride staring at these business people - a man and a woman - engaged in conversation.  I really remember staring at them, realizing that I would never be like them.

Me in 1988

Once in Austin, we went to the famed 6th Street by the university with its bars and clubs.  We found this dance club.  The interior was pretty cool - three stories with a movie projector playing "The Blob" on the top story.  The club played acid house and Belgian New Beat, but the club's patrons were not sure what to do with it.  They were snobby, trendy kids with blond hair, expensive black clothes, and shiny,black shoes.  They stood on the dance floor and shuffled aimlessly to the music, not really into dancing, but there for some sort of fashion show.  Then there was the Baron and me - right out of the Phoenix rave scene, and we looked the part.  Smiley face t-shirts and buttons, leather biker jackets, the numerous bracelets were back on my wrist, hair hanging in our faces, getting into the music and really dancing.  The patrons stared at us in bewilderment, not knowing what to make of us.  It was, back then, one of the proudest moments of my life.  The evening finished out when a punk I knew by the name of John took me to party in the back of the club in an alleyway with some other punks, and I wound up on the hood of an Austin Police cruiser.  Frisked and let off with a warning.

Ghost Division, a punk band I sang for briefly

I guess I should say that, for a short time, I started experimenting with drugs.  It was part of rave culture.  I'm not really proud of it, but neither am I ashamed of it.  It was just something that happened and a learning experience.  I'm going to neither discuss it further nor glorify it.  But at this point, I was kind of in trouble spiritually.  At this time, my dad's long career in the LDS Church was coming to an end.  He was facing excommunication for belief in plural marriage.  I was the age to to go off on my mission, and I think my dad knew that I was struggling.  He started to push me in a direction to embrace my religion.  I already had had a few spiritual experiences, but nothing that I felt really defined me spiritually.  Not until one night when I was watching Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ", which was being boycotted by religious groups at the time because it depicted scenes where Jesus (Willem Dafoe) was married.  I had no problem with that.  As a Mormon, I already believed that Jesus was married - probably polygamously.  During the movie, the devil in the guise of an angel, portrayed by a child, tempts Jesus to come off of the cross and live his life the way he wants.  So he does and marries Mary Magdalene.  Decades later, on his death bed, his apostles come and scold him.  They gave their lives for him, and, in return, he was supposed to die for them.  He regrets his choice and wishes that he was back on the cross, and he wakes up, still nailed to the cross.  It was all a fantasy, a temptation.

Me after a rave, 1990

I drove home and thought about this movie.  Some at church had suggested that Jesus had no agency to act for himself, that he had to fulfill his calling.  God had declared the beginning to the end and had prophesied that Jesus would succeed.  So it was impossible for Jesus to fail.  He had no choice.  He had no free agency.  This made no sense to me.  How could he not have a choice?  The fact that he made a decision to go to his death made his sacrifice all that more meaningful.  So,after midnight, sitting in my car, I prayed for the first time ever, asking God to now if the sacrifice of Jesus was real, and the Spirit poured on me like sweet honey, tears flooding my eyes.  The punk, the raver knew for the first time that there was a God in heaven, and that his son was Jesus Christ.  From that moment on, I started studying every book on Mormonism that I could find.  Specifically, books on Mormon fundamentalism since that was the direction that my family was moving.

Around this time, the Baron called me up and drove me to downtown Casa Grande to look at an abandoned warehouse.  It was an old car parts warehouse, long out of use.  The Baron wanted to show it to me as an idea for opening a club in Casa Grande, which had none, yet was possibly big enough to have one.  There were catwalks all over the facility, including a cage that would be perfect for a deejay booth.  We started talking logistics about opening the club.  We were very excited over the prospect.

Me, a friend, and The Baron, Cornville, 1989

The the same time, I was approached by my parents who were very concerned about my spirituality.  They offered to pay for my schooling if I moved to Utah with my polygamist uncle and lived among the polygamists.  So, I had a choice - open a dance club, or move to Utah and become a Mormon fundamentalist.  Of course, I picked the latter.

The week before I was supposed to leave, I was mowing the lawn.  Fall was approaching in Arizona, but it was still hot.  With my younger brother, we drove to the LDS chapel for an appointment.  The building was empty except for the bishop.  He let us in and took us to his office for a very brief interview.  The first question he asked was, "Do you believe that plural marriage should be practiced in this day and age?"

My answer was, "Yes."

Next question:  "Do you believe that Ezra Taft Benson is a prophet, seer, and revelator, and the only man on the earth that holds the keys?"

My answer:  "No."

That was it, I was dismissed.

A few days later, we were loading up the car to go to Utah.  In the back of the car was a crate with all of my vinyl and cassettes.  In the hallway, as we prepared to leave, my dad stopped me.  He put both his hands on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and smiled.

"I don't think Utah is ready for you, son," he said.

A couple of weeks later, in Utah, I got two letters from the LDS Church.  One was an invitation to my priesthood court, saying that I had been excommunicated for apostasy.  The second was the result of my trial - excommunication.  So, it was official.  I was cut off from the LDS Church for BELIEF in plural marriage.  I was officially a Mormon fundamentalist.

In the next part, I will discuss being a Mormon fundamentalist, how music affected me, and what it is like being a former punk in this culture.