While Rotella certainly seemed to have fostered a culture of positivity while carving out a niche for himself, early raves were nonetheless a messy affair. The Nocturnal Wonderland that took place that same year would prove particularly controversial after being broken up and forced to relocate to the Morongo Indian Reservation in Banning, California – where it saw even more resistance.
As detailed in the Insomniac-commissioned mini documentary Dancing In The Dark: 20 Years of Nocturnal Wonderland, the members of the tribe whom Rotella paid did not distribute the money equally throughout the community – and a disgruntled faction among them attempted to sabotage the event.
“The entrance to the reservation was being blocked by people on the reservation,” Funke recalls. “My understanding was that you had to go through their property to get to the area where the event was gonna be, so you could see the event from above but you couldn’t get down there.”
In the aforementioned mini-documentary, David Christophere of Rabbit In The Moon alleges that Rotella “ended up slamming on the gate and telling [them] to bust the gate open,” leading a charge of 20,000 ravers into the event grounds – which speaks to today’s trigger-sensitive social climate, considering that ravers are ostracized just for wearing Native American war bonnets nowadays.
Insomniac would continue to experiment with different settings, creating a legacy for itself as a live music innovator while it gradually came into its own as a legitimate enterprise. The 1998 edition of Nocturnal Wonderland would take place in the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California – a year before the first edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took place at the same location.
“Also if you look at the first Coachella’s lineup…you’ll see that it was heavy on electronic,” points out Bentley. “I think there’s an argument to be made that Nocturnal Wonderland helped make Coachella possible in terms of imagining it as a reality.”
As the electronic music scene saw unprecedented exposure in the U.S. around the turn of the millennium, the entertainment side of the events saw significant changes as well. Where most events had one room for all forms of electronic music and a “funk room” for open format DJing, 1999 would be the last edition of Nocturnal Wonderland with the latter room – and therefore, Funke himself would be removed from the equation. “I hadn’t played a Nocturnal since 1999,” he points out.
Incidentally, shortly after the turn of the millennium was also when a convergence of social and political issues attached an unsavory stigma to the rave scene. “Every few years there would be an incident that would result in, essentially, this witch hunt,” explains Bentley. “Kind of a knee-jerk reaction from the media and local governments where they would panic about kids on drugs…and there would be this call to shut everything down.”
As a result of the crackdown on rave culture, in 2001 events like Nocturnal Wonderland and EDC went from drawing in 40,000 attendees to scarcely breaking 7,000. The impact on Insomniac’s bottom line was grave, and Rotella was forced to cancel the 2002 edition of Nocturnal Wonderland.
Bentley elaborates:
“2002 was kind of a low point for the scene. It just sort of bottomed out. I think it sort of hit a creative stall, and also drugs were taking a heavy toll. You would go out to a party and kids would just be sitting everywhere in groups on everything beyond E – or molly, as you call it now – and just sort of massaging each other. There was no excitement. I think we had to hit the reset button at that point so it was probably wise to take a break.”