Larry Harvey, "Hay Bail Speech", Burning Man 1997
Burning Man, Saturday, August 30, 1997
Facing a dire financial situation, Larry Harvey makes an impassioned pleas for donations near the end of the 1997 gathering. Over $60,000 was ultimately raised.
Patrick Duffy: We’re here to introduce the founder and organizer of the Burning Man festival, Larry Harvey. The Burning Man festival, as you know… or as you may or may not know, started in San Francisco on the beach, 12 years ago, with an eight-foot structure that was burned in an impromptu fashion, and has… turned into what you see now. It’s moved three times, this is the third move… first time on private land, and with the changes have come all kinds of complications and interesting developments.
We think we have a beautiful city here, a city of art. And… I’m very happy here. This is my second home, it feels like. I live in the Bay Area, like many of the people that come here do, and… as does Larry… and without further ado, I’ll just bring him on, and let him tell the story as he knows it, and he knows it best.
[ applause ]
Larry Harvey: Hi folks. I ‘m going to hydrate while I speak, just as an example to everyone.
[ crowd member yells: “and smoke!” ]
LH: and smoke.
[ laughter ]
LH: So I’m going to start with the first question I always get, and that’s about how this began. The story is that one day in June… of course you’ve all heard the story about my girlfriend, and that’s gonna be written on my tombstone, no doubt… and it’s true, actually, I did, I had a heartbreak, I had a mid-life crisis, lasted unconscionably two years… I got tired of it. And… in fact I’ll enlarge on that story.
If you’ve ever had a heartbreak you know it’s the anniversaries that’ll kill you, you know, the sentimental anniversaries and the height of this relationship… you know, I’ve forgotten her last name… [ laughs ].
[ laughter ]
LH: But at the height of this relationship we’d gone down to Baker Beach, and an old friend of mine had a little solstice celebration she did. It was nominally pagan, although with a certain San Francisco twist. I remember she had a little boom box, that was a… electronic shamanic drum, it was the most soulless instrument I’ve ever heard. And it was making these mechanical thuds around the fire, and they dressed a couple mannequins in polyester, piled them on a couch and threw it into the fire.
[ cheers, applause ]
LH: And I thought “This is my kind of solstice celebration.” And I’d taken my girlfriend down there, and her son was doing something only a fourteen year-old would invent. He was saturating the sand with gasoline, and then taking a burning stick and writing in fire. So I knelt with my lover and we wrote in… yeah, you get the picture…
[ awww! ]
LH: … and it was supremely romantic. And so two years later, having thought of this morning and night for a couple of years I woke up and it was the solstice, and I thought “I’m tired of this.” So I called up a friend and I said “Let’s… let’s burn a man, Jerry.” And he asked me to repeat that statement.
So we went over and we made this man out of scrap lumber in a basement in Noe Valley, and it looked big to us, it was two feet taller than we were.
And then we hauled it, we called a couple of friends, and there was about twelve of us, and we hauled it down to the beach and we soaked it with gasoline, because we didn’t know any better at that time. And… because gasoline as you know… we use diesel now, gasoline’s very volatile, and when it flamed up, it was like a second sun brought down to this earth, it was just… it transfixed us, but… that’s where the story begins, in fact.
Because at the moment it was lit, everybody on that beach, north and south, came running. That beach was a little like the form of our city now, with its two embracing arms around the void of the playa here. And suddenly, our numbers tripled. And I looked out at this arc of firelit faces, and before I knew it I looked over and there was a hippie with his pants on his head and a guitar standing there, materialized out of the murk. And he started singing a song about fire. Now I’m not exactly a hootenanny kind of guy, but it seemed like the thing to do, and we started singing.
The next thing we knew, a woman, impetuously, ran at the figure, and we had the urge to stop her, but it was too late. The wind was shunting all the flames to one side, and so she ran up to him and she took him by the hand, and stood there. And I think Jerry still has a souvenir photo, and you see the little hand down in the corner of it, holding his hand.
That was the first spontaneous performance, that was the first… that was the first geometric increase of Burning Man. What we had instantly created was a community. And… you know if we had done it as an art event, people would have come, and come to the gallery or something, and said “It’s very interesting, perhaps a little derivative, what are you going to do next?” And…
[ PD enters frame, offering LH an empty aluminum can ]
LH: What are you doing?
PGD: Cigarettes.
LH: Oh thanks. Yeah, that’d be great, if I tipped the ash and burned up!
[ laughter ]
LH: I’d never be forgotten! So anyway, what was I saying? So we’d… I’d done it as a private act, you know. I’d gone off to nurse my broken heart alone, but what happened is, four months later Jerry and I fell into casual conversation, and we both realized that… nearly at that same instant… when everyone materialized around it, we both almost unconsciously made the same decision in time. We’d do it again. We wouldn’t have done it again if it hadn’t created that community. And of course we’ve been doing it ever since. 1990, after burning the man on Baker Beach, we were, of course trying to smuggle a four-story… finally, in the… that fifth year, trying to smuggle a four-story giant onto a beach under the nose of the authorities. And… legs, three feet long, down a cliff, you know? Shhhhh, they won’t notice! It was pretty funny.
And finally, in that year, we… well I’ll tell you a little more of that story. We went down to the beach… now, we never assigned a burning… a meaning to Burning Man. That is, we never stopped to say “This is what it means, it represents this.” I remember we were constructing it one year, and a guy came over… we did it on a sidewalk, we didn’t even have shop space. This project has come out of poverty from its beginnings. But poverty is a great breeder of cooperation and culture. And he came up and looked at it and looked at it, wouldn’t say a word to us, kept looking at it, looked at the leg, and he says “Is that a gazebo?”
“No.” I explained, “It’s a giant man, we carry it, we take it out and we burn it, and…”
Then he looked at it for another five minutes and he said “You sure that’s not a gazebo?” You know, finally he walked away and he hit the other side of the street and I had pity on him and I ran after him and I said, “you’re right, it’s a gazebo.” I wanted to put his mind at ease.
We’d never assigned a meaning to Burning Man. And that’s for a simple reason. We started out as a little band of carpenters; my background is in landscape design. Jerry is, was, still is a… carpenter. And we, literally… you wouldn’t believe what we went through to make this thing. We had a garage so small… that…
[ How small was it? ]
LH: I’ll tell you how small it was! We used it as our shop and our storage, right, this was our warehouse, and so every night, always after dark, when we’d finish working on it, we’d hoist it up on ropes so it was right up on this low ceiling, and then we’d… and then it would take us an hour and a half to fit it together again like a Chinese box so we could close the garage door. And then we’d do the same thing in the morning, you’d repeat the same operation. We’d spend, you know, a quarter of the work day just unpacking and repacking it.
And we poured… the group that finally… evolved around it was a group of people who’d spend their entire lives constructing things. Carpenters, mainly, who had made houses, so they had no problem identifying with a man that looked like a house. All you had to do was add sheetrock, but then of course it wouldn’t burn, but… and so by the time we got through we were so invested in this thing it didn’t need to represent anything. It was us. We’d merged with it. We’d sweated over it. I know we… somebody cut their hand one time, bled all over it, you know. “A miracle! The Man bleeds!” It was that immediate a relationship because Burning Man has always been about immediacy.
The last year at Baker Beach, we came down there, and we had attracted larger and larger crowds, as we always have, through word of mouth. A certain kind of elementary excitement. And that year the authorities were there. We have a history, we have a history with the authorities, this year ain’t new… and they met us and said… “You just can’t burn that.” The guy looked at this thing lying on the ground and… well, first he said, “Stop everything!” So we stopped everything. We had radios… and so we said, you know… “Hold the leg!” Well, the leg was halfway down a cliff so they just stopped. And then we had to explain the situation to him, and we told him “Well, we have a… giant leg, on a cliff”… and I told him “I’m not Pharaoh, I can’t get it up there.” And then though he wants to do it, but we could bring it down, you know, that would be reasonable, and then perhaps we could go out to the parking lot.
And so he allowed that this would be a reasonable solution to this problem, and so we brought it down, and then he looked at it. And he goes up, and he looks at it, and he’s just amazed, he thought this was some kind of vandal… some piece of vandalism, is what he thought, I’m sure. And the thing just aches with craft. Clearly, this is the result of painstaking effort. And he’s looking all around and he’s “My God, how long did you”… and carpenters are gathered around, and… saying “Oh yeah, we”… and pretty soon a crowd is gathering around us, and they’re murmuring “Shame, shame… we’ve waited all year….” And he was… fortunately he was a man of conscience. And so he did a… he took a risk as an official. He said… we agreed that we could erect it, but not burn it. And then he promptly ran away. Because he didn’t want to see what we were going to do if we did burn it, right?
And so we erected it, but we weren’t used to crowds. You have to remember that this was a band that had grown up in a completely informal way, just the way all of you are organizing, in this informal but incredibly potent way, around a shared, creative act. And so we got the Man up, and then we turned around and we were surrounded by this big crowd, it was the first big crowd that we’d ever encountered. And it dawned on us that we didn’t have a P.A. system. We’ve come a long way. And we had no way of addressing them, or communicating with them, and then we were appalled to find out that… a great part of the party that had come down… it must have been something between six and eight hundred people, it looked like a real nation to us, and they were all up the bluffs, flashcubes everywhere… and suddenly we realized that… a lot of those people had nothing invested in what we’d done. They’d come for a spectacle. They’d just heard in town that there was this big man, they’re gonna burn it. They hadn’t worked with us. We hadn’t been conscious of ourselves as a community, we were just doing it. Then suddenly we were confronted with something that was the opposite of a community: we had a mob.
Larry Harvey, Burning Man 1997
Now, mobs form when people feel anonymous and people feel isolated from one another. And then when strong passionate emotions surge through a group like that you’ll see a monster. And you’ll see the… worst actors among us suddenly thrust up as leaders. It’s their moment. And so people began to chant “Burn the fucker… burn it, burn it. Fuck you, burn it.”
And there was a crisis among us. There was a party that wanted to burn it. “Well, the cops ran away, we can do it.” I gave my word. I… I wavered. Then I heard someone say “Burn the fucker!” and my heels just sank in the ground. “No.”
So then we tried to tell them we weren’t gonna burn it. And it became a mob. It became a mob of disassociated individuals. And people ran forward trying to light it. We tried to wrestle them away. A fellow came up with a Bic lighter, three times, I made a mistake, on the third time, I touched him. I led him away twice before. He put his… he tried to strangle me… it took four people to peel him off.
But the scariest thing about that experience is I looked around and I saw people that I knew who were supposed to… who… men and women of good will, of character, who in any normal social situation would be leaders, who were walking around unmanned… and powerless to do anything in this disconnected social situation. I went home, I had nightmares. I dreamed about… I dreamed about natural disasters all night long. I kept waking up. I dreamt about the Titanic, I dreamt about the Dukakis campaign.
[ laughter ]
LH: You know, it was horrible. You know, where had we gone wrong? What had been a communion for us was just a cheap spectacle for them. And you know, our society anymore is largely organized around cheap, and expensive, spectacles. You know, television is cheap, Vegas is expensive… spectacles, in which you are anonymous, you’re passive, you consume a product, you share nothing with anybody, you go away, come back and get some more later when you feel empty again.
Well. We decided that we had to move the man. And when we did, we almost inadvertently found the solution to that problem. We had to find a place where we could burn it, safely. Where better than the Black Rock Desert, 400 square miles of nothing? And so we formed a party, the San Francisco Cacophony Society got involved, and here’s a group of individuals who, well, they are about the only group of individuals who would have been willing to do that. So the carpenters and the Cacophony got together and we managed to muster about, oh, 60 people, maybe 80 people, and we came out to Black Rock, which is this neighbor here, and we set it up and suddenly we made an interesting discovery.
It turns out that in this vast desert space… that there are peculiar properties, peculiar magic that takes hold. Suddenly we encountered something, it was like the ocean that had backed the Man before, this… great sweep of nature, that’s, that was always part of it. But this was an ocean you could walk on. This was a great piece of nothing in which anything that was, was more intensely so. Okay, in which with a few paper props and some 2 X 4s, like people do here now, you could invent a whole world around yourself, and there’s nothing to contradict it. You know, you could just be what you are and make that into a magic world. So we added something new in that.
First, we’d started out with the work ethic. You work together, you know if you help somebody… you know how it goes, you help somebody move out of their apartment and everybody sorts themselves into roles spontaneously, you do the job, and at the end of it you have the beer and you really feel good about that with everybody else, and well, we had that going for us. And then we came out here and we learned how to play together. And so we had that going for us and then we had one other element and that was the fact that to get here you had to make a commitment. So this was different from that riot on the beach. Now you had to come here and you had to survive in nature.
Now our story as planners, we plan and plan and plan so this spontaneous thing that you just do will happen. And our experience has been pretty… has been tough this year. Because as planners… as planners we’ve had to look at our economic realities. There’s boundless wealth out here, look at… everybody’s giving everything to anybody else, I’ve never seen anything like it. Boundless wealth. But in order to do the planning, of course we need money. Of course we need money.
Now, when we came in to the county, we talked to the service… we talked to the agencies, the police, and the fire folks and so forth, and I have no complaints of them. None. They… they’re in the same business as us. If you organize something this wild you’d better be responsible. You’d better think about people every minute of the day. They’re people who’ve worked in the field and they know what they’re talking about and we learned a lot from them.
The only problem is something interrupted that process. You know, our first conversations with them, we were on the same wavelength. And then the politicians got involved. Now a politician is someone who spends all of their time… trying to avoid being blamed for anything and trying to take credit for everything else. That’s what they do for a living.
[ cheers, applause ]
LH: So there was what we call a caucus. And after that caucus things started to change. Suddenly… suddenly the reasonable arrangements we had made, out of mutual concern for public welfare… oh, those discussions… weren’t possible now.
Now we’re talking by the book and literal. Now we’re talking about… suddenly as we went on in this process we were talking about, we were talking about mandated services that we couldn’t bid out. That we got lower… way lower bids for. We couldn’t bid out. And then we were talking about… well, it goes on and on. I won’t burden you with it. Have you ever dealt with a bureaucracy, you know… it reminds me, kind of, what happens, you know, when you go to a house in the night and the dog comes out, there’s this moment… between whether… he can’t decide whether he’s going to lick your hand or bite it? And I’ve found generally that if you feed a dog with your hand, he won’t bite you. But we felt at times as if we were in the curious position of feeding the dog and getting bit at the same time.
Well. There is all this that… we have a… well, the sheriff’s out there, and the sheriff’s not our enemy. He’s doing what he’s told. He’s enforcing the law. For your information, the deputies, and sheriffs, and fire people they’re having the time of their lives, and the only thing we’re worried about is, they have such a good time, they want to come back.
[ laughter, clapping ]
LH: And you know, he’s been flying around, and we started to resent it, and then we realized he was starting to take up reporters, you know, I think, he’s playing with his toy and trying to help us at the same time. And… and… so… they’re not our enemies.
But they’re taking a bite out of us that’s a third of a million dollars. Now in a reasonable world, and in a just world, that sum would have been considerably lower. And everybody in this county knows it.
[ applause, cheers, cries of “Right on!” ]
LH: People working for county services will take me aside, and one gal, and I won’t tell you her name, or even give you her description, and she said “You know, I’m not supposed to say this, but… you made one mistake when you came here.”
And I said “What’s that?”
And she said “Well… bringing it to Washoe County.”
[ laughter, cries of “Amen!” ]
LH: We’ve got… we love Washoe County. We love the people of Washoe County. Listen, we go to barbecues in Gerlach.
[ applause ]
LH: Out here, the ice concession, we don’t vend, but you may have noticed there’s a Frontier Store, do you know where that money goes? That money goes to Gerlach and Empire, that’s for the school kids there.
[ applause, cheers ]
LH: Only way we could have made the money that they were asking is if we filled this place with cotton candy and rides and people reaching for their wallets. And then we would have had the same trouble that they had at “Hot August Days and Nights,” that was subsidized by the county. 482 arrests. A stabbing. No arrests here. You seen a stabbing?
[ applause, cheers ]
LH: So when the dust settles on this, an anybody asks you if we’re locusts… no, you tell them we’re human beings.
[ applause, cheers ]
LH: So I’m gonna make a pitch… I’m speaking as a planner now. This is an economy… this here is a potlatch world, an economy of superabundance. People just giving everything… you know, most… most of the people here… the ticket price is the merest fraction of what they’ve spent already. You know, you see a semi come in, and we didn’t pay for that.
[ laughter ]
LH: So… but thinking as… as planners, then… we have to crouch down, and think about… we been crouching in our trailer, had a little conference, “What are we gonna do?” We haven’t made our nut yet, they are still out there at that gate. They collect all our money. They put our receipts in a box, they lock it up. Until their commission get paid, and they haven’t been paid yet, we don’t know if they’re gonna get paid. If they’re not paid they’ll call us locusts again. They’ll say they were right. Having posed excessive costs…
Listen. I’d love to come back here. This is the… in 1991 they had a… they drafted the recreation permit, and it’s never been applied for, so we’re the shakedown cruise, unfortunately. And we worked well with the agencies. And… and they’ve educated us, and now we can turn around and educate them about what makes sense and what doesn’t. You know?
[ applause ]
LH: They had a plan, but if you want to make God laugh, make a plan. You’re gonna pay attention to things and we’ve all learned a lot here. We would like to come back but the only way we can come back to Washoe County, and to all the friends we’ve made out here, is if we get a little more help.
The Ammonite Project
by Henrik Haeckl
Now I know you all spent a lot to come out here. Henrik Haeckl, who did the giant shell out there, the ammonite, he came from Germany. He arrived here, he had forty dollars left in his pocket and a giant shell.
[ laughter ]
LH: You all ought to go out and see it.
So we’re making a plea, because… no one else is going to help us right now. I don’t think there’s an angel in the wings, really. I think… if there are any angels present… if there are any angels present they are among us.
So having paid your… if you were early, it was fifty… we had to double our prices this year… well, you have some inkling as to why we had to do it… so having paid that, if you can come up with an extra five, an extra ten… you know, we’re gonna make a… structured offer, I feel like a pitch man… if you give us… if you give us… a hundred dollars you get a ticket to next year, you just have to believe it’ll happen next year, and that’s an act of faith…
[ cheers, applause ]
LH: If anybody wants to give us five, five hundred dollars, they are lifetime Burning Man. They can come forever.
[ more cheers, applause ]
LH: It’s about all we can think of, to do… if we get the help… I think… you know, in a way, in this corner of my mind, I’m glad this happened. Because, you know, we were getting bigger, and you know how it goes. People would start saying “Oh, they’re big, they’re bloated, they don’t care, they’re just exploiting us”… you know, that kind of thing. People are so afraid when things get big… and… this year, this has been one big survival drama from the beginning. If you’re all trying to survive out there in your tents, we’re surviving too.
So if you can help us, I’d really appreciate it. We’ve got a box over here, where’s the box? There’s the box. We’ve got a ranger volunteer… I don’t believe that these funds can be seized.
[ laughter, applause ]
LH: If you can help us out, help pay off people… maybe pay a few of the people who work for us, were the last… is Joegh Bullock here? Where is he? Where’s Cowboy Joegh? Joegh’s gonna step up and give you a pep talk about it, and… were asking you to save Burning Man, and if you want to see it… continue to live… only you can help us. You’re the only ones we know who to go to. Thanks a lot.
[ lots of cheers and applause ]
[the end]