Firestarter

Located deep in the sun-baked heart of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, it looks like the set of Mad Max In Wonderland. To a continuous, cacophonous soundtrack of literally hundreds of different sound systems, all pumping everything from Irish trad to techno at full blast, thousands upon thousands of bizarrely costumed people wander around a post-apocalyptic landscape – a vast sand canvas cluttered with myriad Macnas-style artworks.

Most of those who aren’t attired in outlandish costumes are either naked or else have their bodies painted in bright Braveheart colours. Just about everyone, though, is wearing stoned and vaguely dreamlike expressions on their faces, as though they can’t quite believe what’s before their eyes (understandably enough, given that typical artworks include a thirty-foot tall purple mushroom, a fake field of papier mache sunflowers, a full-sized wooden Oriental temple, and a graveyard with headstones marked ‘Cheerios’ and ‘Duracell’).
In Dust Devils, the highly impressive Irish-made documentary about the annual and ever-growing Burning Man festival in Nevada, there are numerous scenes guaranteed to boggle the minds of even the most alternative thinking and event-hardened of viewers. Drugs? Undoubtedly. But out there, LSD also stands for Lots of Sand and Dust.
It would therefore seem reasonable to assume that the chief architect of this surreal spectacle would be some mad, peyote-munching, long-haired, guru type. But no, Larry Harvey – who founded Burning Man in 1986 – is nothing like that at all. A tanned 56-year-old American, in combats and sleeveless hunting jacket, he looks more like a successful rancher or oil man on vacation than a counter-cultural icon.
Take it from me, though, despite his outwardly straight appearance, in years to come Larry Harvey will be as respected an American counter-cultural figure as Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey. Maybe even more so. Burning Man is much, much more than just your typical alternative festival. Now attracting upwards of 30,000 people annually, for one week only, Black Rock City – the festival site built, and ultimately burnt, by its temporary inhabitants – becomes the fifth largest city in the State of Nevada.

As founder and executive director of Burning Man, over the years he has fought numerous legal and political battles with the Nevada authorities and federal government to keep the festival alive. He’s a realist, not a dreamer. Or rather, he’s a realist and a dreamer. And like another great visionary before him, he also started his career as a carpenter.
Born in 1948, Harvey grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. His family was poor, but decent and hard working, and he and his brother had a happy and idyllic childhood. Having graduated from high school, he attended university for a while, studying literature and history, but soon found himself bored with academia.
“I wasn’t really a drop-out – more of a drift-out,” he laughs. “After a while in college I decided I could do a better job of educating myself. I didn’t like the way the professors would take their subjects out of their pockets like a watch, dangle it, and then put it back into their little pocket again. So I just started reading courses on my own and I’d go to university libraries wherever I was and trawl through the stacks and find my way through bibliographies of whatever subjects excited my passion.”
Although he was drafted into the army in the late sixties, he never made it to Vietnam, instead serving out his time at a military base in Germany. Discharged with an honourable mention, he returned to the US and, having travelled around for a while, eventually settled in San Francisco in his mid-twenties. While he knew a lot of hippies, though, he was never really all that convinced by flower-power. Even today, he’s a much bigger fan of the Velvet Underground than the Grateful Dead.
“I believed in the hippie ethos for about thirty minutes one day in Golden Gate Park, under the influence of LSD,” he chuckles. “But I was raised by very down-to-earth, rural people – peasants really – who were brought up in the dustbowl and forced to the west coast working as migrant labourers, so my background wasn’t very middle-class, whereas the hippies around me were all middle-class.
“And I just didn’t buy it. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t really believe that you could change the world by taking drugs, listening to rock & roll and having a lot of sex. All pleasurable activities, doubtless, but not world changing.”
Always a hard worker, Larry paid the rent by doing carpentry jobs here and there, interspersed with spells of truck driving.
“I was hanging out with what I called the ‘Latte Carpenters’,” he recalls. “They were this group of crazy carpenters who were leading a fairly bohemian life – in between jobs they’d gather at a friend’s house, drink wine, play flamenco guitars, talk about art and philosophise generally. It was an easy life on the sunny west coast.”
One particularly idle August afternoon in 1986, Larry was hanging around shooting the breeze with his carpenter chums when he suddenly had a brainwave. He suggested that they should all pool their talents (and spare lumber), build a big wooden effigy of a man, and then take it down to the beach and burn it.
“It might seem odd, but that wasn’t a particularly remarkable thing for us to do,” he smiles. “There seemed like a good human aesthetic to it – or at least there was in my head. Much of what we did was devoted to immediacy anyway.”
They set to work, eight of them spending the afternoon carving and crafting an eight-foot tall wooden Man. When the task was completed to their satisfaction, they loaded him up into a truck, loaded themselves up with wine and weed, and drove down to a local beach. Initially, it was just the eight of them but when they burnt the Man at sunset, the party grew to about thirty people. Such a good time was had by all, that they made a pact to return and do it again the following year.
Twelve months later they returned to the beach with an even bigger Man (“We wanted to outdo ourselves!”) and held an even bigger party. As it became obvious to all this should really be an annual thing, Harvey decided to christen his event.
“We could’ve named it Lumber Man but that would have lacked finesse, so I named it Burning Man. Which was interesting because it described what it does, and it described what we did. You know, the verbs kinda merge.”
He denies that his inspiration came from Robin Hardy’s cult 1973 movie The Wicker Man. “It’s got nothing to do with The Wicker Man. People keep asking me about that. I assure you we do not burn earnest Methodists, chickens or goats. No, I’d never seen the film.”
Over the next few years, they continued to illegally burn the Man on the beach as a guerrilla event. Inevitably though, with word spreading through the San Francisco alternative media, and both the wooden Man and the party around his cremation growing larger each time, it wasn’t too long before the authorities finally got wind of it.
In 1990, an official representative of the federal government showed up at the beach and told them that they couldn’t burn anything there.
“At this point we were trying to secretly smuggle this giant 40-foot-high wooden Man onto a beach. So we were carrying it down a cliff, with teams assigned to arms, legs, torso and head. It was pretty funny. He was looking at it. And the Man was nice-looking – these were all skilled carpenters and craftsmen so it was quite complex and intricately designed. It ached with craft. It all looked very complex and purposeful.
“And the government official was impressed. And he did a wonderful thing for a bureaucrat. He made a deal with us that we could raise it but not burn it – and then he ran away. In case we burned it! And my colleagues were all saying, ‘Burn it, burn it’. But (a) I’d given my word, and my father had always taught me to keep my word, and (b) through political instinct I thought that maybe I should honour a political deal because it might be useful later. ”
Unfortunately, by now Burning Man’s reputation as a brilliant party event had spread and a lot of people had shown up. Having watched Harvey and his friends erect the four-storey high man, most of the crowd now demanded to see it burn.
“So suddenly, having raised the statue, it was time to lower it again – as per our deal with the authorities. But we’d never really thought in terms of an audience. We had no provision for dealing with an audience. We had no bullhorn. We didn’t have a voice to address them with. And there occurred a mini-riot. They were disappointed that their sensational thrill wasn’t going to happen.
“And the crowd turned ugly. We got it down by diverting them with a fire-breathing performance from a friend of mine who was an old carnival performer. So we created this little side show, which was enough to divert the beast’s attention long enough for us to be able to lower it and put it out of harm’s way.”
How’d you get the Man back up the cliff?
“We carried it out the public way,” he laughs. “I’m not a pharaoh!”

Harvey recalls that he was somewhat shocked by the experience of nearly being responsible for a major riot – not to mention a little pissed off that his party was being gate-crashed by freeloaders who’d had nothing to do with the building of the Man, and who understood none of the philosophy behind it.
“I was shaken because we’d ignored the fact that we’d acquired all these spectators, and it seemed to violate a certain sense of sanctity about it. It had been a unique extension of us, but it was nothing to them. It was just a show – a big fire on the beach.”
His rather unique solution was to relocate, and take Burning Man out to the middle of the desert. It was his party and he’d fry if he wanted to. And if anybody wanted to join him, they’d have to fry too!
“Taking it out to the middle of nowhere really solved that essential audience problem,” he explains. “Because in order to go to the Black Rock Desert, which is in the naked heart of the wild west, the trip itself is an initiation. Survival there is a struggle in the teeth of volatile natural forces. You were a forced participant. There was no margin for spectator-ship. Anyone who was willing to do that and willing to survive under those conditions was in the soup with all of us. We were together.”
That first Burning Man in the desert in 1990 is now as legendary as U2’s brief stint in the Dandelion Markets, with everybody claiming to have been there.
“Of course, I’ve heard so many people claiming to have been there that it must’ve been about 4,000 people,” he chuckles. “But in reality it was really more like 80. And we simply went there to burn the man, as we had on the beach.”
As the Nineties progressed, Burning Man’s reputation continued to spread and, despite the harshness of the desert environment, more and more people began to make the pilgrimage.
By the mid-nineties, Burning Man was attracting upwards of ten thousand people – most of whom were showing up in costume, and contributing by building and burning their own effigies and artistic creations. Harvey realised that he’d created a monster that had to be controlled somehow. His little village had grown to become a small city, and needed some kind of order.
“At first we called it a ‘city’ ironically,” he says. “But then it became apparent that we had responsibility – the responsibility of urban planners. For years in the early 1990’s it was such a small thing, there was no gate and we hadn’t thought of any way to enclose it and create boundaries. The trouble really was being found by those who were coming. You could get lost in space out there. It’s literally like outer space. It’s about 200 square miles of flat, Euclidean plain – not a bird, not a bush. Alkaline. Inimical to life, inimical to machinery, inimical to everything to do with man or what man makes.”
“The fact of the matter is that, within a year or two of going out there, we became responsible for people’s lives. It was so hard to find and so easy to get lost in and around our little city that we began to buy radios and a group formed to go rescue people. Because you could get mired in that desert and die of dehydration within hours. That kind of death is very common there. And anyone who strays from the flock, from the herd, nature might claim. And once we’d organised the safety crews, our civic identity strengthened further.”
Of course, there were other civic responsibilities inherent in building – and burning – an entire city in the middle of nowhere. Real life concerns, like insurance, quickly became issues.
“We had no insurance to begin with,” he admits. “We learned all our lessons the hard way. We now have insurance, we now have attorneys, we now have a city that has pretty much everything that a city has. A daily newspaper, two or three angry alt-weeklies that disrespect the daily – as it should be – and we have about forty or fifty radio stations, because you can self-broadcast.
“We also have some services that cities don’t have – but might consider. We have greeters. When you come to our city you’re personally greeted by someone. And we’ve learned how to instantly acclimatise strangers. It became clearer to me as it grew that there were more strangers than there were people who know one another, so we’d gone beyond a kind of communal village kind of experience where everyone knows everyone – with all of its virtues and all of its vices.”

In 1996, things hit financial crisis point. Up until then, Burning Man had basically been a free event, with no advertising and no tickets sold. The Man itself was paid for by Harvey and his friends, and everyone coming out there had to bring enough food, water and supplies to survive. However, as the event gradually mushroomed and morphed from small town to fledgling city, other costs were being incurred.
“Originally we would just pass the hat,” he laughs, touching the one on his head. “It was a communal sensibility. Usually we’d get a little dough that probably wouldn’t quite cover the cost. But of course passing the hat amongst thousands of people doesn’t work. So then we created a gate.”
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a normal kind of gate…
“It was more of an art installation really because it was a gate without any walls attached to it – it was just a gate in the middle of nothing. And we depended on the fact that we were still so small that we wouldn’t tell people where it was and people would get their secret instructions as to where to go, once they went to the gate.
“The only trouble was that half the people couldn’t find the gate! So it was a non-viable economic model and, of course, at this point, we were trying to build a city and that well outstripped the resources of anybody’s credit card. We eventually solved that problem. Interestingly enough, as we became more of a civilised entity and people respected the place more as a public sphere that everyone belonged to, we were able to put up a fence around our city. Now that fence is still there. It’s about five square miles in the shape of a pentagon, but it’s only three feet tall and made out of plastic – perforated so the wind can blow through it – and yet it works. One, because we are respected by most people. And two, because we use radar. Ha, ha. We use boat radar. We can see them coming from miles away.”
Although they now charge for tickets to Burning Man, it still couldn’t be accurately described as a commercial event. To Harvey’s mind, it’s all about community – and he’s gone to great lengths to preserve that spirit.
“We preserved communal values on a civic scale in two ways. First to come and live there, the communal strategy is rather important – the lone person has a hard time in such high temperatures. There are dust storms that blot out your hand before your face and pluck up your tent and all your belongings and toss them ten miles into oblivion in an instant.
“But we did another thing once we became a city that helped create a kind of communal tie at the scale of a city and that was to ban all commerce. Originally, of course, it was simply inappropriate. If we went to a picnic and you said, ‘Oh, we need some olives’, your friend wouldn’t say ‘Oh, I’ve got some. I’ll give you a deal. How about two bottles for five dollars? I’d charge you less but there aren’t any other olives here, are there? – friend.’ Ha, ha. Well, that would be a savage and inappropriate thing to do – well, it was always so with us.
“So at a certain point, since everyone was coming to plan to survive anyway, we just said there is no market here – nothing can be bought or sold. And in doing that, prohibiting market transactions, we did something that was beyond that negative, that prohibition. We created what we finally discovered was a gift economy. And we began to deepen that philosophy as time went on.
“You could almost say that we’re Disneyland inside-out. In our Disneyland, the participants entertain one another with fantasy and creative works. But it’s far more interesting because every one of those creative works comes with a biography attached to it. It hasn’t been hatched in a lab somewhere.”
Another advantage of banning commerce and running a gift economy is that people tend to be more respectful both of each other and towards their respective creative works.
“People do find it hard to believe that you could have this festival of creative excess and this great Bacchanalian party – because it is that, as well as a ritual – and, at the same time, keep public order. What we discovered is that if everyone is creating the city they’re in, and the medium of that creation is a gift – and that has created a gift economy that soulfully connects everyone – that the margin for anti-social behaviour shrinks down to about that 2% of people who’re trying to get even with their old man.”
Having said that, Burning Man does have some crime – but, according to Harvey, it’s not a serious problem.
“Bikes get stolen but most of that’s due to confusion,” he chuckles. “There are assaults but the percentage is minuscule. In 30,000 people it will occur, but it’s nothing compared to the level in another city of the same size. And it’s nothing compared to a Mardi-Gras where everyone is drunk and pickpockets are everywhere and fights are breaking out in every bar. It just doesn’t happen in our city because everyone is invested in it.”
If trouble does break out, though, they’ve got the means to deal with it. They pay three-quarters of a million dollars a year from the till to the Federal Government for police services (“Personally, I think they’re overpaid!”). However, the police don’t patrol inside the city. Burning Man have their own private rangers for that. “They’re trained in non-confrontational mediation and they’re very good at it. Their motto is, ‘Making reasonable excuses for your behaviour since 1988’.”
Despite the best efforts of Harvey and his civic-minded colleagues, though, a small number of people have died at Burning Man over the years. The most recent fatality was just last year, when a woman died following a fall from a vehicle out on the playa.
“Yeah, a woman died out there last year,” he admits. “And another fella died recklessly driving his motorcycle outside of the event. But there’s death everywhere. It’s safer in Black Rock City than it is outside. But, you know, if somebody dies at the County Fair it doesn’t make the same kind of headlines it does when it happens at our event.”

Of course, being responsible for a (temporarily) thriving city of 30,000 people is a serious job and not one to be taken lightly. While there’s undoubtedly a lot of drug-taking happening in Black Rock City, Harvey himself isn’t really in a position to indulge in recreational substances any more. He learnt that lesson the hard way.
“Years ago, I took a drug that affected me quite strongly and then, of course, an official from the Bureau of Land Management showed up,” he laughs. “I spent the next hour escorting her around and doing an inspired imitation of normality. But since that time I’ve been entirely sober. When you’re responsible for that many people, in a life or death environment, you have to be a serious person.”
Serious indeed. Although Burning Man only turns a small profit (most of the money from ticket sales is reinvested in the artworks), they do have a corporate structure – though everything is decided by consensus. Larry Harvey is currently executive director of the project and also serves as chairman of Burning Man’s senior staff and Black Rock LLC, its executive committee. He also co-chairs the organisation’s Art Department and scripts and co-curates Burning Man’s annual art theme. Also a political planner, he supervises the organisation’s lobbying efforts and frequently attends meetings with state, county and federal agencies. Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty much a full time job for him (though he says he’s far from rich from his efforts). He works 15-hour days for more than eight months of the year.
“Politically, we’ve incessantly fought to exist,” he says. “If we were doing a more normal thing there would have been no problem. It’s not a conspiracy but it is almost an instinct of the established order to try and thwart us at every turn. And we’ve fought immense battles.
“People often ask if we’re tempted to sell-out? That’s an easy one. Who would buy our business model? Our ‘customers’ are actually citizens and community members. We haven’t branded them, we’ve allowed them access to identity that they’ve created themselves. How could we sell that? You couldn’t! I mean, we’re not against commerce – we sell tickets. But what we’ve created is a space and a realm and a ritual around which, and within which, the world is de-commodified.”
Although some critics say that the event isn’t what it used to be, Harvey himself reckons that the Burning Man spirit is truer and stronger than ever.
“We’re not just building a city anymore,” he says. “Now it’s becoming a social movement on a large scale. Just as we master what we have to do, we tend to double the task. Having doubled it recently, we’ll double it again.”

Burning Man 2004 takes place from August 30 to September 4