By BLAZE –

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, the Mother of all Festivals. It is a perfect time to take a look back, to go deep, to say „ohm” into the whirling mist of the past.

The Ozorian Prophet is proud to serialize a part of Ray Castle’s newly published book „Moon Juice Stomper”, set in the heydays of Goa and the birth of the Goa trance scene. We talked to Ray to coincide with the launch of the book, and it was mind-opening on several levels: we can hear good, constructive criticism of today’s developed Goa scene. What gets lost, what remains as the Goa scene develops? One way to find out is to learn how it all started. Today, DJs are all up on a stage, high, above the crowd, isolated and separated, playing 2 hour-sets, whereas back then, they were in the middle of the dancefloor, one with the crowd, letting loose for hours on end – notes Ray in our interview.

You can purchase Ray’s book in paperback or as an E-book here:

You can read the first part of the Ray Castle series in The Prophet here.

Moon Juice Stomper by Ray Castle

Chapter 1 – Paradise Precipice

Excerpt No. 2.

FEBRUARY FULL MOON 1990

In the early Eighties, Doc Silver had led the charge of the reformation that saw a New Wave synth-electronica demimonde break away from the old school Anjuna Acid Rock jam band scene that had been the de rigueur of the seventies. Doc put on parties DJ-ing Electro, Disco and Industrial music. Indomitably, he and a posse of renegade DJs, with the assistance of locals, set up lights and speakers in the wildest of locations. Doc knew every motorbike track, and the one he was now blatting his Bullet motorbike down was over grown with jungle and sending pigs squealing in all directions. Once down on the flat at Vagator Beach, he deftly steered his chromed steed toward Spaghetti Beach, where the party was full kicking with obscene amounts of pleasure being had.

On seeing Doc and Harry arrive on the braying motorbike, Zane got up from a chai shop mumma’s mat to greet them. They made their way to the side of a speaker stack to check out the heaving dance floor. Pent up frustration was being discharged from the tension that had built up from a crackdown and music curfew. Doc kicked off his cowboy boots and sashayed to yogi Ananta. Playfully they wove through the movements of the dance floor like it was a palpitating, synchronous, multi-headed creature. Soon, Doc and Zane found themselves in the sweet spot centre, odoriferous with body heat from a happiness explosion.  

Zane spotted blotter baba Shazam, a purveyor of mind-altering goodness. He was holding court next to large rocks by a barely-trickling stream disappearing into Jungle Palace, a labyrinth of tropical flora to the right of Nirvana chai shack. Shazam was wearing a loud fractal-patterned jump suit that appeared to Zane like a chaos attractor in his field of vision, as he loped eagerly towards him. 

“Crikey!” he blurted. “Shazam you’ve got me spinning and I ain’t necked nout yet.” Shazam looked up from dispensing tickets to a couple of English gals in fluoro spandex leggings, their arms wound with silver Rajasthani bangles, gold rings in their noses and silver anklets on their feet. “Superfrajalistaexpialidoceous,” he said in a rhyming musical voice like it was a hocus pocus incantation. “See how happy the palms are today. Are you up for a Gorby? Are you a cosmonaut of the revolution?” 

“Is that your top shelf?” quizzed Zane, pulling a sly grin.

“Aye,” said the wizard with a sparkle in his eye as he placed a ticket of blotter in Zane’s hand. Squinting at its graphic details, Zane saw it had a partial portrait of a vaguely familiar famous man in a suite and tie with bald head, which had a strange looking birth mark.

“This one brought the Berlin wall down. It’s a double-dip Mikail Gorbachov,” Shazam said proudly through a peep-hole mouth from which hung a long white beard. Zane looked the blotta baba wizard in the eye, smiled, and swigged down the perestroika paper with a gulp of bottled Bisleri mineral water, followed by a loud holler of, “Boom shankar!.. here’s to the psychonaut revolution.” Instantly his body reflexed with a nerve spasm, as the mind emulsifying elixir slid down his gullet. 

The sweet sun-kissed melodies of the Goa morning techno on Danilo’s tapes infectiously fired up tanned lithe bodies to perspire micro-deltas of sweat. Doc Silver’s bottles of sugar cane juice arrived and were being devoured by the quenched dance floor. A local boy plied dancers with ice popsicle sticks from out of a polystyrene box he carried under his arm. The brother of the PA owner set up a bar where mineral water was the most popular drink with no one drinking alcohol.  

From up on top of the cliff, Jules saw another bar arrive which immediately set off a high-pitched quarrel in Konkani that sounded like seagulls squabbling. Then another bar showed up. Jules didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. A Goa dance floor was a place of serious action that was inhospitable to drunks. Bars made most rupees from selling bottled drinking water. Alcohol—not being part of Hindu tradition and a libidinal accelerant in a tight-laced culture—was strictly controlled in India, but not in post Portuguese colony, Goa, where it was liberally available and a sacrament for the weeping Christ. But hippies preferred Shiva’s Himalayan sacrament of ganja and hash (charas). Chai tea served by Hindu village mummas was the favoured compliment to Shiva’s sacred pipe. 

There were no spectators nursing bar drinks. It was a smokers’ club with a clan creed of—safi… stone…string…matches…chillum…boom!  The ritual use of soma dating back 3,500 years ago in India’s history of sacred plants (doctrine to sadhu ascetic religious culture) had been made illegal in Nepal and India after American political pressure in the seventies. And how poignant, Jules pondered, that it was the hundred dollar US greenback that the black market money exchangers loved the most, to the extent that no one went to banks to change foreign cash anymore. And how fantastic it was what black market dollars could buy you in a corrupt third world country steeped in mysticism. And how fantastic freak-friendly Goa had been up until the crackdown. 

But not anymore. Party politics had become so dire, and the scene’s need to dance so desperate, that it was now over a barrel being held to ransom to get something which, in the past, was a given, no permission necessary. This season dancers were grounded. No parties in Goa felt like riding a motorbike with flat tyres. 

Jules and Zsu threw themselves into today’s daytime party like their lives depended upon it. Like an irresistible techno itch of infected collective fleshthat yearned to be scratched on a dance floor crying out to be rebooted, the days leading up to it had been tetchy and inflamed with acrid discontent that had hung heavy in the sticky tropical heat.  

From up on the cliff looking down on the drama of the party, Jules lifted his gaze out to sea. A cineplex projection appeared on the horizon in the form of Greek pagan gods followed by androgynous Indian gods, then Portuguese galleon ships appeared with red crosses on their sails, followed by writhing bodies of Hindu witches being burnt at the stake in Panjim when Goa had been the Rome of the East. And suddenly, through all this, burst an Indian warship which fired upon the mainland. Then, the vision he was experiencing dissolved to hippies sitting in a circle on the beach with fishermen in outrigger boats putting out nets. Oh, the glorious seas of faith. The anchors that have been dropped here. He looked up to the clear blue sky firmament, like he was having discourse with invisible spiritual agencies, heavenly bodies, and alien intelligences; as if he might get an answer as to where the scene was at in the history of the universe and what was being played out today. The most troubling planetary deity was the ringed one—austere Saturn, which spun with gravitas like an old Devil, and which he regarded as the shadow of the scene’s carefree fun in the sun. Saturn, the party pooper planet, intent on boxing in dreamy, nebulous, Neptune, the symbol of Shiva’s trident, which ruled music, mysticism, eternity, soma and space cases. 

Looking down at the party he asked himself. Was this the lost tribe of the future? His head spooled with fast rewind replays of how he came to be here making this party against all odds of exigency, which was testimony to his burning attachment to it. So much so, his whole life centred around being here every season. Today’s highly compromised baksheesh-brokered deal was like grasping transactional lube to appease an obsession. To getafix. To have a hit of proper amped-up paradise. Today saw him prostrating himself in acquiescence to the ‘C’ word, which seemed to trump everything in India, including (he cynically hated to admit) godly concerns and rabid addictions. The ‘C’ word was fine, as long as it worked in your favour. The ‘C’ word was testimony to black market forces, and if he believed the papers, the black arts of the Devil’s playground, which the scene was accused of being worshippers of. Thus, besides corruption and compulsiveness, post-colonial Catholicism was very much in the mix.

In the past, you could pretty much butter any tight situation with rupees. But now it seemed to entail increasing degrees of valiance and defiance. The wheeling and dealings of the last twenty-four hours had brought Jules to this paradise precipice. His hippocampus clouded momentarily, he felt himself descending into a cellar of doubt. More moments stalled, cornering him in a state of vacillation which threatened to destabilise him in a tail spin with an undertow of worry worms. Nervous sweat seeped through the pores of his clammy skin. Was this really the last gasp? Did this nomadic, marginalised, lost tribe of the future really have any air of entitlement here? Oh, to dance in the palm grove of golden apples on winged feet one more time, which up until the music had just been turned on, seemed a bridge too far this season.

Niggling pinches of perturbation gripped his stomach. He wiped perspiration from his brow with his arm and considered the shifty lie of the land, the state of play, the politics of ecstasy, the love of the locals, the scene’s fraternal aphorisms: peace—unity—respect—openness—love and light.