Branden Powers EDM Festival Pioneer
From Bakersfield to NARNIA
For me it all started in 1984, when I was a 14-year-old skater punk in a city already baptized in outlaw blood—Bakersfield, California. Home of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and the Bakersfield Sound. A place where Telecasters twanged rebellion, where country stars turned hard living into gospel, and where authority was always something to dodge, bribe, or fight.
Most kids my age were at football games or cruising Chester Avenue. I was dragging friends into cotton fields and abandoned lots, skate shoes caked in dirt, hauling stolen generators and busted speakers to blast the music nobody in Bakersfield wanted to hear—Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Gary Numan. Machine rhythms echoing across farmland built on honky-tonk twang.
Those first outlaw parties were stitched together with duct tape, extension cords, and the sheer nerve of kids who didn’t know they couldn’t pull it off. A keg hidden in a ditch, a strobe light strung from a tree, eyeliner and denim glowing in the dust. Bakersfield wasn’t ready for us. But that was the point. We weren’t asking for a place in their world. We were building our own.
That outlaw instinct followed me south to San Diego. The Pacific felt like an edge of possibility, and the Indian reservations were sovereign territory where the cops and bureaucrats couldn’t touch us. Around that time I met Nik Luckinbill, sharp and restless like me, and Joe Villa, a true believer with a vision for how big this thing could get. Together with the Circle of Friends—our tribe of seekers, freaks, DJs, dreamers—we formed the core of what became Global Underworld.
And then, late ’80s, I heard the Jungle Brothers’ I’ll House You. A chant disguised as prophecy. That was the moment everything snapped into focus. Global Underworld wasn’t just an idea anymore—it was a movement. We were a network of dispossessed and wide-eyed kids who believed music wasn’t just entertainment. It was weapon, ritual, medicine.
At the same time, whispers came across the Atlantic. The UK was doing what we were doing, but on a scale that made our fields and warehouses look like warm-ups. Acid House. Ecstasy. Warehouses packed like anthills, kids dancing until the sun made them holy. We recognized the signal instantly: this was the future.
We carried the flame across borders with Baby X, the first rave ever thrown in Mexico. Chaotic, yes—but chaos is birth. That night proved we weren’t building something local. We were building something global.
Then came the Seven Journeys of OPIUM. Long before slick LA promoters stole the name, OPIUM was ours—seven initiations, each one deeper into the mystery. Psychedelics weren’t accessories; they were architecture. Music wasn’t layered on top of reality—it rewrote it. By the seventh journey, we knew: we weren’t just throwing parties. We were preparing for something colossal.
That something was NARNIA.
The first NARNIA happened on an Indian reservation. About 3,000 people showed up. No social media, no apps, no email blasts—just word of mouth, flyers, mixtapes, and guerrilla marketing hand-to-hand in parking lots. We combined scenes to hit those numbers: live music kids, hip-hop heads, punks, surfers, ravers, seekers. Everyone poured into the wardrobe we’d built.
And it grew. From that first 3,000 to over 60,000 people storming the San Bernardino mountains. Tens of thousands stepping into a myth. At sunrise, while most festivals would be breaking down, Fantuzzi from the Rainbow Gathering pulled us into a circle, hands locked, voices raised, consecrating the dawn. We weren’t just dancing anymore. We were planting the seeds of a future that didn’t yet have a name.
Burning Man? Back then, they hated electronic music. Thought it was machine noise. It took the Wicked Crew from San Francisco to drag house into the desert and change the DNA of the burn. But before that, NARNIA had already fused music, drugs, and spirit into a single cosmic engine.
San Diego was the perfect crucible. The weather. The psychedelics. Spiritual leaders drifting in from yoga retreats and Rainbow tribes. And the reservations—our sovereign ground, where sheriffs and bureaucrats couldn’t touch us. Out there, Global Underworld wasn’t just an idea. It was a kingdom.
But none of this came from nowhere. To know the future, you must know your past. Our scene was a continuation of a lineage that began with the Acid Tests of the 1960s, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters spiked the Kool-Aid and the Grateful Dead turned feedback into sacrament. Their mind-expanding productions cracked open the walls of reality, and we picked up that torch. Different tools, different chemicals, different generations—but the same fire.
Those souls who came before us were with us still—in every circle, every sunrise, every bassline. Nik, Joe, the Circle of Friends, and me, the 14-year-old skater punk from Bakersfield—we weren’t just throwing raves. We were portals. We were underworld guides. We were the next link in a chain of outlaws stretching from acid tests to cotton fields to San Diego mountains, from Merle Haggard to NARNIA.
Because to know where we’re going, you have to know where we’ve been.
