How a rave on a Bay Area battleship almost crashed and burned

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags During the first night of the Rattleship rave on the USS Hornet in Alameda in July, Noah Bennett has his hands full. The mastermind behind the event, he serves as the promoter, the booker, the logistics lead, internet troll response manager and a headlining DJ. On top of all that, he’s also the pizza delivery guy. Around 11:30 p.m., Bennett, aka DJ Dials, boards the decommissioned WWII aircraft carrier via a clinky Indiana Jones-style rope bridge, two pizza boxes held high above his head and a cellphone and Polaroid camera balanced precariously atop the boxes. Wearing all white, he strides past decommissioned WWII fighter jets wrapped in blue LED lights and somehow wades through a crowd of 4,000 bodies like a nightlife ghost gliding through the function. In less than five minutes, he’s made it behind the festival-sized stage and literally climbs down “the hatch” to an infirmary below deck, walking past a room full of bunk beds and Navy showers to a rave mission control room of staffers hungry for pepperoni.DJ Dials poses in the USS Hornet during the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship event he organized in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, July 1, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special to SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adBennett is in constant problem-solving mode as soon as he sets down those pizzas. Just like a DJ has a ticking timer before they need to play the next song, Bennett has an internal countdown before the talent needs set time details, before the USS Hornet Museum’s managers need an update on the additional 400 feet of barricades purchased for the second show the following night, before a literal fire alarm goes off — and with it the risk of a $10,000 fine.Above mission control in the hull of the ship, alarm strobe lights flash as British drum-and-bass duo Delta Heavy drop a raging remix of their song “Anarchy” for thousands of fans. Bennett frantically excuses himself from conversation. “Sorry, I need to go make sure the fire department doesn’t come,” he says, apparitioning his way back through the crowd to the fire marshal waiting outside.Music sounds better with youAdvertisementArticle continues below this adIf you’ve seen a touring DJ in San Francisco anytime in the past 20 years, odds are that Bennett was involved. The name “DJ Dials Presents” is ubiquitous atop promotional fliers, and a now-dormant Instagram account of Polaroids serves as a scrapbook of acts he’s booked, from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy to Grimes to Kali Uchis to Moodymann. Prince, who he once threw a last-minute afterparty at 1015 Folsom weeks before his death, declined a photo.Scenes from the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship event in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, July 1, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special To SFGATEScenes from the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship event in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, July 1, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special To SFGATEBennett is the head booker for arguably the biggest club in town, 1015 Folsom, but the Rattleship show may be his most complicated logistical feat yet. It has support from not just the USS Hornet Museum crew and his LA partners Brownies and Lemonade, but a staff of over 100. It’s events at unconventional spaces like aircraft carriers and secret warehouses that keep him inspired. It’s also good business, and a way to distinguish his operation from industry giants like Live Nation and Goldenvoice, whose influence has made it almost impossible for newer independent promoters to book any of the acts in Bennett’s Polaroid collection.“It’s really important to me to go back to the purity of it, which is: A good party feels like you shouldn’t be there,” he said a few weeks later, chatting outside The Mill in San Francisco. “You go to a house party when your friend’s parents are out of town, everyone’s experienced that in high school. Your idiot friend decides to throw a rager, it gets out of control, you’re having the time of your life because you feel like you’re breaking the rules.”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adBack at those high school ragers, there’s a good chance Bennett was the one controlling the music. He began DJing as a 12-year-old in Spokane, Washington, inspired by a rave he attended in a wheat field: “My mother dropped me off at 6 p.m., I lied to her and told her it was a ska concert. About 45 minutes later she realized what it was and pulled me out by the ear.”DJ Dials poses in the USS Hornet during the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship event he organized in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, July 1, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special to SFGATEBy the end of high school, he had opened for the Roots and scored a fake ID in order to play in clubs. (The name on the ID? Jose Canseco.) He moved to San Francisco for art school in 2001; it just so happened that the city was the epicenter of West Coast rave culture at the time. Around 2010, Bennett stopped working in the arts and became DJ Dials full-time. At this point he considers himself an “open format” DJ, which means no gig or genre is off-limits. That might mean playing Paul Simon and Toots and the Maytals songs at an afterparty for Dead & Company’s Oracle Park performance, dropping the 1986 Congolese disco tune “Hafi Deo” in an opening set for Fred Again, or pulling off left-field transition selections like sneaking Weezer into an EDM set at Northern Nights Festival. AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“It has been 27 years dedicating my life to this thing. And a lot of times, in its best moments, you’re in service of others. In its worst moments, you’re in the service of your own ego. Which is like — ‘I want to play this gig, I want this slot, I want this moment, I want this thing.’”Attendees board the USS Hornet for the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, July 1, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special to SFGATEOne thing Bennett’s been wanting to do for quite some time: Be the first to throw a rave on the USS Hornet. Another thing he wants? To pull the plug on our interview the moment we sit down.DJ Dials is dead, long live DJ DialsAdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“I was almost thinking about canceling this, because I’m at the point where I’m tired of the criticism. And I’m tired of everything being nitpicked,” he said, citing a 20-minute review of Rattleship from a vlogger who had never been to a rave before. To his chagrin, his public-facing promotional role means he can’t just ignore the trolls — or clap back at them. The only way to defend himself is to work harder, better, faster, stronger.When talking candidly to other nightlife veterans about Bennett, the most common refrain is that he does, indeed, work all the time. The next most common observation is that, well, he’s a complicated individual.It’s easy to see why Bennett has a target on his back — he’s not one to hold back an opinion. Despite his trepidation about an interview, he lays out a litany of complaints about the current state of San Francisco nightlife: He condemns Beyonce vs. Rihanna (or Taylor Swift vs. Olivia Rodrigo) DJ nights, calls out “nonplayer characters” who attend events solely for Instagram photos, and takes to task modern DJ fans who go to “see” their favorite acts instead of to “hear” them. He describes the DJ booking landscape in modern-day San Francisco as a “war zone between three major promoters,” all of which he works closely with in a complicated dance he refers to as “gangster s—t.” He says that being a DJ at his age — 39 — is a “red flag,” he’s ready to retire the Dials moniker and let the next generation take over, but his packed gig calendar tells another story. And when your job is literally to build relationships with DJs like Diplo, it’s impossible not to flaunt a few famous friends — by the end of the 90-minute interview Bennett has dropped so many names that the sidewalk outside The Mill looks like a Coachella flier.Attendees sing and dance on the USS Hornet during the Brownies and Lemonade Rattleship event in Alameda, Calif., on Sunday, July 2, 2023.Samantha Laurey/Special to SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adBut what’s most clear from speaking to him for 90 minutes, and watching him quarterback a rave on an aircraft carrier, is that he’s very much not full of s—t. Bennett is a DJ lifer who talks about DJing…

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