THE DEMF
A REVIEW BY BILL CARNEY

I made it to the Second Detroit Electonic Music Festival (DEMF) Memorial Day weekend. The first DEMF was organized last year by Detroit techno pioneer Carl Cox and surprised everyone with its success.

There were all sorts of Europeans driving around Detroit looking for old warehouses that were the sites of legendary rave parties. Detroiters might have been embarrassed by the city's burnt and never-ending patchwork landscape, but the Euros thought it was cool and theorized that the stark surroundings accounted for the empty spaces in the Detroit techno sound. Whatever.

I was there to play jug band music so I was keeping it "real". Afternoons among washboards, kazoos, and civil war re-enactors, evenings among blissed-out lightwand-waving electronic music fiends.

I'd get a coney island hot dog and ride the People Mover monorail. It was like a dream. Thousands of white people dancing and dancing really well. Black folks digging it. Was Motown moving back from L.A.?

Anything could happen it seemed. Anyway, since last year's festival was so great, it was inevitable that all parties would try real hard to fuck up this year's. No one could adequately explain the big argument but it resulted in Carl Cox being fired a month or so before the festival. I heard he was fired for not fulfilling his contracts, whatever that means. Lots of people wore stickers that read "I support Carl Cox" but again no one could tell me what he did or didn't do to be fired.

Ford was a sponsor and had a special "techno edition" Neon or Focus or whatever their small car meant for impressionable, drug-addled youth is called. Escort? Pinto?

The music was great but greatly aided by mind-altering drugs. There were three outdoor stages and one downstairs inside the Noguchi fountain-toting Hart Plaza. Lotsa big name foreign DJ's and tons of Detroit acts. The aforementioned euro-babes. De La Soul was there this year for some reason.

The festival seemed to have lost some of the magic of the first year's, sort of like woodstock 94 compared to woodstock 69. Not that I was ay Woodstock 69. Lots of suburban detroit yutes all dolled up like Kid Rock or Eminem. The vibe was determined by the amount of ecstasy versus the amount of beer. Beer bad. Ecstasy good.

The big finale, featuring local DJ heros Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, was pre-empted due to a ferocious hailstorm. But I was ready. Some medical tech dude came up and shone his flashlight in my eyes because he assumed I had to be really fucked-up to be standing outside in a hailstorm. He was relieved to see I was drinking a tall boy. Just a drunken idiot. Beer bad. Not tripping or rolling. Said something about putting it in a can but I decided to ignore him since it was in a can. Already classified as an idiot I was free to do whatever I wanted.

-- Bill Carney
Sept 1, 2001