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Before he ever heard of Kirkland, before he became a nationally known promoter and way before an attorney showed him photos of the prison he might call home if he loses his case, Estopinal was a frat boy at Louisiana State University. In the early '90s, according to friends--the defendants wouldn't talk on the record--Estopinal, now 31, was waiting tables, trying to decide whether he really wanted to be an accountant. Co-workers started taking him dancing. Dance music was enjoying a revival, having shaken off disco excesses and borrowed harder beats from underground. Estopinal fell in love with the dance renaissance and began having parties at a stinky fish-processing warehouse. By 1995, cops were closing him down for illicit booze sales and noise, but he knew he could draw thousands of fans of the new music. He turned to the State Palace to help legitimize his work.
The State Palace is a musty old gem on Canal Street, a crowded esplanade bordering the French Quarter. The Palace started life in 1950 as a cinema, but after the Brunets leased the space in 1992, it was turned into a concert venue. Robert and Brian Brunet managed it day to day; their dad Rene helped run the family's 88-year-old New Orleans entertainment company. Robert, 36, and Brian, 33, booked mostly mainstream acts such as the Dave Matthews Band and the Beastie Boys. When Estopinal told them in 1995 that he could pack their club with dancers, the family was skeptical.
The first dance drew just 900, but by 1999, up to 4,300 were paying as much as $35 each to attend raves lasting from 10 p.m. till dawn and beyond. Even so, Rene says, the parties never generated a majority of club revenues, in part because Estopinal spent so much on artsy flyers and DJs like Britain's Paul Oakenfold (who can charge $25,000). On most nights conventional rock, not electronic music, blasted from the club's stage. Regis and Kathie Lee taped their show there each January. In 1998 their taping came days before Estopinal's "Attack of the 50-Ft. Raver Zombies" party. If the State Palace was a crack house, it was an awfully nimble and elaborate one.
As a manager, Rob saw little downside. The dancers didn't fight or break limbs like alt-rock's moshers. Instead, they created a warm atmosphere, welcoming overweight teens, 30-year-olds toting Powerpuff Girls backpacks, nerds who hated their college Greek scene. Some would drive for hours from Alabama or Arkansas. They would tell Rob that the events had changed their lives. No Dave Matthews fan said that.
But wasn't some of the love and unity at the raves chemically generated? Sure. Raves sprang from underground, and drugs were always part of them. For a decade now, electronic-music fans have been protesting that they are creating a culture as valid and vital as the scenes that appeared around jazz in the 1930s or folk rock in the 1960s. And drugs were surely an integral part of those worlds. "It is no secret," TIME noted in a 1943 article, "The Weed," "that some of the finest flights of American syncopation owe much of their expressiveness to the use of a drug."