How the DMV Raved

Ask anyone who lived it and they will tell you the same thing: the DMV and Baltimore were one bloodstream. The same crews and DJs, the same kids in fat pants and backpacks, moved up and down the corridor every weekend, from a broken-into warehouse in DC to the Cow Palace or the Column Warehouse up in Baltimore, and back. To tell the story of one city you have to tell the story of both. Before the writing, here is the scene in motion: four rooms, on tape.

This is the story by just one person who experienced it: Chris Baggett, who DJs and runs A&R for Bent Rhythm as Sinestro. He came up in it from the late 1980s as a North Stafford skate kid chasing whatever was underground, and he never really left. What follows is mostly his memory, checked against the flyers, the records and the people who were there.

Chris came to electronic music sideways, through skateboarding. Late ’80s, he and his friends would skip school in North Stafford and drive up to DC to skate, and the city handed them everything the suburbs didn’t: punk, hardcore, industrial. The first time he ever heard Ministry, he knew the future was electronic. He’d been an electronic kid since grade school, when the first record he ever bought was The Art of Noise’s “Who’s Afraid Of...?” while everyone else was buying Def Leppard’s “Pyromania”. By 1989 and 1990 the acid was coming in with the Deadheads on tour, and acid house was coming in from England. The two arrived at the same time.

The room that mattered was the Fifth Colvmn, spelled with a V, a “dance club and night gallery” at 915 F Street NW. The building had been a bank, then a club called the Bank, and the actual bank vault next door became its own club, the Vault, where they’d lock the vault door from midnight to two. Along with Tracks, the big gay house club nearby, these were about the only rooms in DC touching techno in 1991 and 1992. Tracks brought it in around the same time, and Scott Henry ran a Monday night there too (more on that room later). But the real techno at the Fifth Colvmn happened on one night: Mondays, when Mike Meacham got on the decks. Every other night was mainstream. Monday was ram-packed. Meacham doesn’t DJ anymore, he designs lighting for major clubs now, but the footage survives.

The first proper rave in DC came out of a simple problem. The people who loved techno and house had Monday at the Fifth Colvmn and nothing on a Friday or Saturday. So a few of them, who had been driving up to Frankie Bones’ Storm raves in New York, decided to just throw their own. They called it Catastrophic, and they booked Scott Henry out of Baltimore to play it. That first one was a one-off, but the name stuck and turned into the crew that threw the rest: a Catastrophic in a warehouse, a Catastrophic under a bridge, three or four of them in all. By 1993 they had run their course, and the center of gravity moved up to the Modern Music and Ultraworld parties in Baltimore, with the occasional DC party when Baltimore was quiet.

In DC, everything ran through one record store. Music Now, on F Street, was the first rave and techno shop in DC, sat right next to a clothing store called Bohemia. Both were Lieven DeGeyndt’s. Music Now was also a label, and Lieven put out BT’s first record before BT was BT. If you wanted into a party, you went to Music Now and bought a ticket. In Baltimore the spot to get tickets and directions was Modern Music, near Fells Point. Chris’s own first came in the summer of 1992, and it was not one of the Catastrophic parties. He never caught the name of it. The ticket sent him and his friends in a 1977 Chevy Nova up to the shop, where it told them to call a number from a payphone, meet on a street, trade that ticket for another, and follow that one to the actual room. The room, he found out years later, had been broken into. They rolled the sound system in and threw the party without renting a thing. Where that room actually was is still an open question. Chris’s best guess is Northeast.

Inside was a different planet. Two rooms: a dark main floor with Adam X banging straight techno, and a side room of breakbeat and happy hardcore, Prodigy and colored light and kids dancing like the floor was on fire. Chris was hooked. It was like being in a haunted house + dance party + freakout, all wrapped up in one place. Halfway through, the cops came and pulled everyone out. He got home the next morning, and that was that. Rave was the whole life now. The tape below is Scott Henry’s actual Catastrophic set from January 1992. A different night than Chris’s first, same rooms, same sound.

Baltimore was already moving. Scott Henry and Onions had a night called Citrus, industrial and techno, and Scott already had a crowd from his industrial days. He started Fever at the Paradox with Charles Feelgood, every other Thursday. Fever ran almost a decade, until 2001. Around the same time the Modern Music crew started the Tripotronic parties and Lonnie Fisher started Ultraworld. Within a year the region had a real calendar.

None of it was separate. DC and Baltimore were forty minutes apart and the crowd was the same crowd. Years later the writer Jeff Bratton would call Fever “ground zero for dance music in Baltimore,” and Chris would not argue. The flyers came down to high schools in Fredericksburg with no internet to spread them, just hand to hand, looking trippier and trippier the deeper into 1992 you got.

By 1994 and 1995 the unit was the week. A night was one stop on it. The parties across Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore and Richmond were coordinated so that, most weekends, there was one party everyone went to. Two and three thousand people. Lady Kier and Deee-Lite would drive down from New York just to be at the Baltimore parties, because no one parties like Baltimore!

That is where the backpacks came from. You left Wednesday and you did not get home until Monday, so you carried what you needed and went from party to after-party to party with people from Charlottesville and North Carolina you’d see every single weekend. The whole backpack thing that later became a look started as pure logistics.

The candy has an origin too, and Chris puts it at one party: Thick, the Tripotronic rave at the Column Warehouse, Deee-Lite’s DJ Dmitry headlining. A woman from Pittsburgh who went by Sarah Smiles worked the floor handing out actual candy, Smarties and lollipops, to anyone near her. It caught on for a practical reason Chris states plainly: everyone was on acid, and a lollipop gives you something to do while you grind your teeth. The literal candy came first. The bracelets came later, along with all the other ways people found to be friendly to strangers in a dark room.

Names worked the same way. Nobody went by their real one. You met someone, they gave you a made-up name, and you needed one to hand back. That is where Sinestro came from.

Rave is only half the story, and the older half is house. Before any warehouse, DC had Tracks, the huge club that was one of the only rooms in the area playing house and industrial, the main gay house club in the city. The man at the center of DC house for four decades was Sam “the Man” Burns. He started spinning in 1978 and never really stopped, a fixture until he died in 2020, booked to headline Flash the night he passed.

Chris tells it simply: Sam saw Chris at the Edge fumbling with a pair of 1200s, stopped what he was doing, walked over and taught him how to set the tonearm and the weight. That was the kind of mentor he was. The same lineage gave DC two of its biggest exports, Deep Dish and Thievery Corporation, who both came up out of the city and stayed tied to it. When Red, Sam’s longtime room, closed in 2005, the flyer in the gallery above said it plainly: the beat goes on.

Spiritual Movement and then Rise (Modern Music’s main party) went hard for two years with DJ Who and cemented breakbeats as the main love of the scene. By the end of 1996 it was gone. What carried the whole thing on was Buzz. It had started Fridays back in 1993 at the old East Side Club, co-founded by Scott Henry and Lieven DeGeyndt. That first Halloween they put Moby, Orbital and Aphex Twin on a DC stage, live. Chris remembers Frankie Bones upstairs on a floor that bounced like a trampoline.

In October 1995 Buzz moved into the Capitol Ballroom on Half Street, later renamed Nation. The first night the place was just a warehouse: Chris remembers Josh Wink playing on turntables sitting on cinder blocks. Buzz did so well every Friday that they built the room out around it. The weekly run survived heroin scares and a hidden-camera news report, and in 2002 a federal and city pressure campaign pushed it out to Baltimore and back before the building finally came down in mid-2006 for the ballpark district. Around it, the smaller rooms: Red on Jefferson Place, Zei in its alley off 14th, the Spy Club down the block, the 18th Street Lounge, the Circle up on Connecticut.

Part One ends here, at the last night of Buzz and the fall of Nation in 2006. What came next is its own story: the switch from underground rave to festival EDM, Echostage and the big rooms, and then the return of techno through the 88 nights and everything that eventually became Bent Rhythm. We are saving all of it for Part Two so we can do it justice.