Finding the right place to stage a Decentralized Dance Party is more art than science. Which is why Gary Lachance is standing against a railing near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, looking perplexed. It’s nearly midnight and he’s just beginning what will be an all-night search of the city, looking for locations to flood with revelers for tomorrow night’s mobile bash. He might be tired—he just arrived in California today after a brutal 50-hour RV drive from Houston—but that doesn’t change the fact that he has less than 24 hours to find locations and plan a route. The wharf is just one of the possible stops as the party snakes through the city.
The sounds of foghorns and sea lions ripple through the darkness. He stares at the empty wharf, visualizing an ocean of revelers swarming it tomorrow night. His mind brushes past possible logistical snags until it sticks on one in particular. “Too many sea lions,” he says.
As coinventor of what is officially known as Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party, Lachance has to balance the meticulousness of an urban planner with the conviviality of a good host. Since 2009 he’s held more than 50 semi-spontaneous outdoor throw-downs in major cities, insisting on a leave-no-trace ethos, noise complaints and perturbed marine mammals included. It looks like Pier 39 won’t make the cut after all. Lachance gets back on his bike, as do his ridemates—a group of superpowered partyers who help scout locations in each city and keep the events running smoothly. They’re called the Elite Banana Task Force. And, yes, they wear banana suits. “It’s impossible to have a bad time in a banana suit,” Lachance says.
If you flipped on the local news last year, you may have caught snippets of DDP’s latest exploits. Its goal: to free us from our humdrum nightlife. In Austin, a partygoer dressed in a lab coat leans into the YNN news camera: “I could be spending $30 going to a bar and doing the same-old, same-old,” he says in a hoarse voice. “This is something different. This is something new. And it’s free!” In the video, you can see people carrying daisy-chained boom boxes, their tuner knobs duct-taped into place to ensure that all stay locked to a vacant radio frequency. That’s what lets them groove to the crowd-fueled PA system: volumes cranked, the DDP’s pirate radio broadcasts anything from booty bass to Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy.”
“Nightclubs are too forced,” says Kyle Del Bonis, who attended a New Year’s Eve DDP in LA. “Most DJs sit around like lumps, unengaged with their audience.” Decentralized Dance Parties attempt to subvert that formula utterly, burning the velvet rope and bringing the inside out. What makes them sustainable for the organizers, though, is how mobile they are. Once DDP arrives in a city—heralded by Twitter and Facebook and with travel costs underwritten via Kickstarter or Indiegogo crowdfunding—the nerve center of the operation can be carried by a single person. A high-powered FM transmitter hooks into an antenna, which in turn is rigged to a backpack. Inside is a vintage disco mixer (held in place with a rubber band), mic receivers, a 12-volt battery, and a separate Ramsey FM transmitter—and a blue slipper “for good luck.”
And all of it is controlled (symbolically) by a Nintendo Power Glove—an old-school videogame peripheral that is as revered by nostalgic ’80s babies as it was ignored in its day. Over the years, the Power Glove has become a symbol of DDP’s abandon. The glove was at a DDP when people skied down subway escalators and when DDP-goers swarmed ferryboats with pogo sticks and trampolines. It was there in February 2011, coaxing 20,000 Canadians out of taverns onto Vancouver’s streets. And it’ll be here tomorrow night when DDP’s San Francisco party—the theme is “strictly business”—hits the streets.
Right now, though, Ryan Stomberg bikes alongside Lachance on Market Street’s sidewalk. A guy named Tom Kuzma was Lachance’s original partner and cofounder. But after they had a falling-out, a different person took over the role of “Tom”—the 27-year-old Stomberg is the third. (Lachance looks to be in his thirties but will give his age only as “18 till I die.”) Stomberg’s orange flannel fanny pack—the JammyPack—plays music continuously amid the gentle hum of the overnight street sweepers. He points northeast. “I don’t think we’re gonna have any problem parading down that block,” he says. Farther east is the contorted Lego-block sculpture and fountain in Justin Herman Plaza, the party’s intended endpoint. Lachance computes all of this, and the Bananas ride on. Thanks in no small part to this type of extensive preparty legwork, DDP has had no difficulty with law enforcement—indeed, officers often end up escorting the crowd along city streets. “Cops expect to find a Jäger-guzzling frat boy leading this,” says Lachance’s friend Kerry Leonard, another Banana. Instead they find a deep-thinking Canadian whose vision of street-level abandon is part of what he calls a “Libertarian mindset” about how the world should be.
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150 Boom Boxes and the Best Dance Party You've Never Been To
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150 Boom Boxes and the Best Dance Party You've Never Been To
