Kill the Noise

CHAPTER 1

Let the Good Times Roll

It was the summer of 1993—I was eighteen years old and ready for anything. I pulled my Honda Civic, nicknamed The UFO, up to a 7-Eleven, and my buddy Gerardo jumped out of the front seat. He dropped a quarter into a pay phone, punched in some numbers, and was connected with the underground hotline. The voice on the other end gave him some directions, then disconnected. Gerardo ran back to the car and dropped into the front seat. Turning to me, then toward our three friends who were sardined in the back, he said with a grin, “It’s on.

We’re set.”

I knew that look. I had seen it before. This was going to be epic. During our last trip up to San Francisco, Gerardo had introduced us to techno music. Going to Haight-Ashbury, he bought us a Ron D Core mixtape. We listened to that cassette for eight hours on our way back down to LA, psyched on what we heard. Then, earlier this week, Gerardo had told us that Insomniac was putting on a rave in LA. The rave scene was still young and he had been to a few. He told us they were insane and said we had to get ourselves to one. That’s what was going down tonight.

Okay, Gerardo, it’s on! Let’s do this, G! I punched the pedal to the metal and we were out.

We drove through LA late at night—our windows were up, we were taking bong rips and hot boxing the car, and we were getting warmed up, bumping that same techno mixtape. We had been smoking weed all day, of course, and now we each dropped some hits of LSD. It took an hour for the acid to kick in full effect, so we were trying to time it just right for showing up to the party. As we weaved through the cars, we were hoping for no LA traffic jams. God forbid we end up out on the 101, jammed into The UFO, peaking on LSD.

Soon we were off the freeways and driving the streets, trying to read the signs in the midnight dark. We were in a seriously sketchy area just outside downtown. It was the last place a group of high seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds should have been. But we were young and stupid and absolutely invincible. Finally, we crossed some railroad tracks and spotted the correct warehouse just off of Santa Fe. Parking next to the tracks, we got out and started toward the door.

Well before we reached the building, we could feel the heavy throbbing bass—whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom. Gerardo looked at us and grinned again. We had timed the LSD just right.

The place was a run-down warehouse—old, dirty, industrial. The dude throwing the party took my five bucks and I walked in. Techno was blasting out of a wall of speakers stacked one on top of the other. Dozens of ravers climbed the speakers and were getting their rave on, some wearing Cat in the Hat hats, baggy rave gear, Day-Glo beads, and Mickey Mouse gloves. This mass of partiers was swarming the big black speaker boxes like ants attacking a piece of candy. This wasn’t like any concert I’d ever been to. Everyone wanted to be as close as possible—some with their heads right up against the speakers. They didn’t want to just hear the music; they wanted to feel every beat.

I stood there trying to wrap my mind around what I was watching. It wasn’t easy, because I was peaking on LSD, and I only had a loose grip on reality. I can’t remember a lot about the night, but I know that by the time I left I was hooked. When’s the next one? Count me in!

When we finally walked outside, someone yelled, “Look, all the cars got broken into!” My heart dropped. I looked up and saw that all the car windows up and down the street were shattered. Not only that, but it looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to all the car bodies, too. They were totaled. But when we got closer, we realized that nothing had actually happened to them. We had been hallucinating from the high of the LSD.

We looked at each other and started laughing.

This was my introduction to the LA underground rave scene and it was sick! Sometimes I wonder how I survived it—how can I possibly still be alive? And I’m not talking just that event, but all the years of partying. I have way too many friends who didn’t make it. It wasn’t the raves that took them down. The raves were just a new place to do what we had already been doing up in the hills around the city. What took my friends down were the drugs. The acid, ecstasy, meth, booze, and cocaine—taking them individually or combining them, trying to take the high to the next level. For some the ride just got too wild.

One guy I knew was up three days on meth. Then he took a hit of LSD, bad tripped, and jumped off a cliff. The cops made me identify his body. That was my junior year in high school. Another guy took LSD, beat up his dad, and took a dive out of a second-story window before getting arrested by the cops and put in the hospital. Years down the road, I was almost a casualty like them. But God’s grace saved me from an early grave and gave me hope and peace and purpose.

That rave was the first of many nights spent in grimy warehouses. Once I went the first time, I was all in. I kept going back. It was unique, it was underground, and it was illegal. That was my vibe. It was LA underground, and I couldn’t get enough.

I grew up like a lot of other Southern California kids. My family lived in La Verne, right next to San Dimas, where they filmed the famous Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We had a condo at the beach in San Clemente, where we’d spend a lot of weekends surfing and skateboarding. Home life was great. My parents loved each other and they loved my brothers and me. My dad pastored a Calvary Chapel megachurch. In every family there are challenges—there are no families that are perfect. But mine was about as close as you could get to ideal.

In the late ’80s, the LA underground was hugely creative, as it always is, and thoroughly antiestablishment. The music was in-your-face and raw. Groups like Minor Threat, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, and Social Distortion were playing the clubs. The telephone poles lining Melrose Avenue were covered with concert fliers showing angry cartoonish figures and creative lettering. Album covers were either graphically simple or intricately designed. It was a rad time to be growing up.

I was the youngest of three. My two older brothers, Raul Jr. and Shane, were deep in the skinhead, mod, and punk movements of the time. My brother Shane was in a thrashing power pop band called The Key that played gigs on the LA circuit. I remember one day Shane brought home his new girlfriend. He introduced her: “Hey, this is Gwen Stefani.” Later on, I found out her band, No Doubt, was opening for The Key. It seemed like every day there was something new to see or to experience. I was a skater and a surfer, and I was surrounded by the music scene and the counterculture. Punks, mods, skinheads, and rude boys were always coming in and out of the house. A bully picked on me one day, so I had some skinheads on their Vespas pick me up from middle school. He never bothered me again. I loved the “do what you want” rebel mentality. Break the rules? Yes, please! Middle finger in the air like you just don’t care! Like Eminem says, that attitude is who I became, and it got worse the older I got. I didn’t want to hurt anyone; I just didn’t want people telling me what I could and couldn’t do—and I mean no one.

My brothers weren’t into the drug scene, but drugs and alcohol were a big part of the culture then, just as they are now. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. They were all around me, and it was just a matter of time before I got sucked in. I didn’t want to read about it or hear about it; I wanted to experience it firsthand. So, I dove in headfirst. Then in high school I heard the Beastie Boys, and I realized that finally I had found a band that I could identify with—their music and their lifestyle. They were all about getting drunk, smoking weed, hooking up with chicks, and having a good time.

That’s when I started holding my own parties. We’d go from house to house to do them like you do in high school—if anyone had parents that were down for the cause, me and the AWOL (absent without leave) crew would be there. I’d work with a friend on some artwork, have a flier campaign, then work with some more friends to get some production going for the event—sort of a pre-version of the work that I do now—and people would show up by the carloads. Everyone knew an AWOL party was going to be epic. Backyard ragers with black lights, DJs, and nitrous tanks. Music was blasting and people were having a good ol’ time. We’d be smoking weed, doing mushrooms, and passing out nitrous balloons. That and the LSD were what opened the door to the psychedelic realm that led me into classic rock—Hendrix, the Doors, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead.

Those wild nights were why it was so easy for me to slip into the rave movement—I was already throwing crazy parties. Partying became my life—you know, having a good time. Get high, get drunk, and go nuts with the crew! I got the name Rock ’n’ Roll Ryan when I was out on tour with UK drum and bass DJs Roni Size, DJ Krust, and DJ Die. To my close friends, I was Wild Out Ries or Ice. My brothers called me The Wild Beast.

As far back as I can remember, I always had a craving for the things the world offers. The Bible talks about them as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16 NKJV). The writer of that verse, the disciple John, goes on to make it clear that those are desires that are not of God the Father but of the enemy, the devil. That devil, Satan, is using these body appetites to get into today’s youth and seriously mess them up.

The lust attack started for me back in first grade. I was walking behind my school one day and discovered a duffel full of porn magazines. It was hard-core XXX stuff. I had no real understanding of what was taking place in the pictures I was looking at—how could I at that age? Even as I turned from one page to the next, I knew that I should stop because what I was looking at was wrong. If I close my eyes, I can still see some of those pictures today, more than thirty years later. That’s the effect of pornography—once it’s seared into your mind, there’s no getting rid of it. Your brain is like a computer hard drive. Everything you look at gets saved, and there’s no delete button. It gets filed deep in your memory bank until it pops back up at the worst times. You’ll be sitting in church or driving your car with your kids or on a date night with your spouse and suddenly it’s there, playing on the big screen in your brain. Porn messes with relationships. It messes with marriages. It affects the brain and can even lead to impotency.¹ Research shows that long-term porn use alters the same areas of the brain as heroin addiction.² Seriously, put the book down and google “your brain on porn and heroin.” Wow, right? This is a growing problem in the US and many other areas of the world.

About five years after that first discovery, I walked into my friend’s house and his brother had some XXX hard-core porn showing on the TV. Watching that video finally helped me to understand what had been going on in the magazine pictures. Those images changed the way I thought of women. Later in life, I began viewing females as objects—as something to be used for my own pleasure just like in the porn I watched. What I saw opened my mind up to sexual issues that my preteen self wasn’t equipped to process. It started the fires of lust, sex, and porn that plagued me in years to come.

There were weird sensations growing inside of me as I watched the screen at my friend’s house. Some were physical, but others were spiritual. Looking back now, I believe these other feelings were the grieving of the Holy Spirit. It was His conviction in my heart. The Spirit’s sadness came from my loss of innocence. He felt pain because He knew even back then how that moment was going to affect me in the future. That grieving takes place many times every day as more and more kids are exposed to these kinds of images. It used to be difficult for most kids to get their hands on pornography. But now it’s only a couple of button pushes away on every smartphone that’s in the pocket of kids and adults across America.

And it’s not just here in the US. When I was on recent speaking tours down in Mexico and Colombia, I saw that every kid had a cell phone. The same is true all around the world. A 2017 statistic showed that the average age that kids are first exposed to pornography is thirteen, with some as young as five. Nearly half (43.5 percent) of those first exposures were accidental.³ Whether kids go looking for pornography or they accidentally stumble across it on an internet search, or whether it pops up on YouTube or Instagram, or it’s direct messaged to them, innocence is being stolen each and every day.

I was in high school when I was first introduced to cocaine. I had been smoking weed all day when my buddy Dusty got a page to head over to Sheldon’s house to go blaze. We parked and walked into the garage where my friend’s older brother was rolling cocoa puffs—marijuana joints with cocaine sprinkled in. We sat in a circle and it got passed to me. I hit it hard with a few big rips. After we smoked, I walked out to my car and just sat there thinking, “Dude! I’m so high right now!” That first try opened my eyes to a whole new world. From that point on, cocaine became my friend.

Of course, my parents quickly figured out what was going on. They found my weed stashes and my marijuana plant. Once, they even discovered a hundred hits of liquid LSD in my room. They did all they could to get me help, but I wasn’t having it. I was living my life the way I wanted to live it. It became a big source of conflict in our home, much as it is for every other middle school, high school, and college-age kid who is going through the same thing. I was trying to get everything past my parents, while they were trying to shut it all down.

Every day I would wake and bake. As soon as I got up, I’d hit the bong. For the rest of the day I’d keep smoking weed, maybe pick up a forty ounce, then crash out at night. A lot of our crew began getting kicked out of school, because we were getting into so much trouble. My friend Sean McKeehan got expelled for throwing rocks at the teachers’ cars and doing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. The rest of us were living out our own stupid reasons for getting asked to leave the school for good. I got sent to continuation school. After a few months there, I just said forget it. I sucked at school anyway. If I was going to do something with my life, it certainly wasn’t going to happen for me in an “institutional learning environment.” Time passed. Each day was like the day before—the only variations came with the people, the locations, and just how wasted we got.

The only part of my life that was strong enough to pull me away from the drugs was my passion to create and produce events. Again, my love for this began back when I was putting together those high school parties. Just like back then, my mind was always thinking of ideas and concepts and how I could make the experiences bigger and better. I needed to find outlets for all this passion and creative energy that was pouring through me. I started putting on shows and club events around this time, and I started getting paid. That’s when it all came together. I saw that I could actually make money producing these events. Pulling in cash while I was doing rad events and hanging out with people and having fun? Dude, that’s what’s up!

That’s when I also realized that the drugs were majorly interfering with my ability to build a business off my ideas. My life was out of control because of all the substances I was dumping into my system. So, I stopped the drugs. I decided I didn’t want that life anymore. People ask me how I was able to just stop the drugs cold turkey. Three things—first, I have ADD and I am very passionate about whatever I throw myself into. So, when I decided to pursue this ideas-and-event-producing career, I went full speed, cutting out anything that was going to get in the way. Second, I was still young and living in my parents’ house, which sucked. This was my ticket out. Third, I significantly increased my alcohol consumption. This allowed me to focus hard on my work, then wind down with a six-pack of beer or more at the end of the day. While this is in no way a path to sobriety that I would recommend, it worked for me at the time.

And obviously, it made a huge difference. Rather than wasting time partying and getting nothing out of it, I started producing parties and doing graphic design projects for a record label. Don’t get me wrong—I was still drinking way more than I should. But at least my transition from the rave scene to the bar scene helped to keep me a little more grounded on planet Earth.

That’s when I fell in love with the wrong girl. I met her in a dive bar, and before I knew it, we had this totally sex-based relationship going on. And that’s really all it was about at first. I wasn’t even that into her in the beginning. But once you start having sex all the time, it’s hard to break away. It’s the body appetites I was telling you about—the raging lust of the flesh living itself out.

That’s the big reason for the guidelines and boundaries about sex in the Bible. It isn’t because God wants to be a creeper lurking around our bedrooms. Hebrews 13:4 says, “Give honor to marriage, and remain faithful to one another in marriage. God will surely judge people who are immoral and those who commit adultery.” It’s not that He wants to keep us from having any fun. It’s exactly the opposite. God wants you to have tons of fun in the bedroom, but it’s got to be with your spouse. That’s how He made us. We were created so that sex is more than just a physical act. There’s an emotional and spiritual side to it, too. So, He created guidelines for keeping it inside of marriage because He knew how sleeping around could seriously confuse our emotions and lead to all sorts of bad situations, messed-up relationships, and STDs. It can even lead to abortions and all the screwed-up emotions and aftereffects that come with that. Sadly, abortion is exactly where this girl and I ended up.

One day, she showed up at my work bawling. She told me that she just got back from aborting our baby at the clinic. This was the first time I even knew she was pregnant. Now she’s telling me she aborted our kid? I was in shock. It was like a bomb had been dropped on me. But she was near hysterical, so I wrapped her up in my arms. My own feelings about what had just happened got shoved to the side. Instead, the compassionate side of me came out. People don’t often think about how badly getting an abortion messes girls up. It took her a long time to work through what she had done. It was during this time of my emotional shock and her being a wreck that we ended up falling in love.

Then I got her pregnant again. Here was our chance to do it right this time. We stopped the partying, and she took her prenatal care seriously. At one appointment early on, we got the news that the egg had split into twins. But before we had a chance to celebrate, the doctor told us that the second baby had died. He called it vanishing twin syndrome. That news sucked.

But we still had the one baby. We were living clean—doing the best we could for this new life we were bringing into the world. I was determined to be the father this child needed, not a wastoid or a deadbeat. I started having all these fantasies about what it was going to be like being a dad. A short time later, though, she called me and told me that she was too young to be a mom and she was going to abort the baby. She said she still wanted to be with me, but I told her that if she aborted our baby, I would be gone. She did it anyway.

Emptiness. Then rage.

Two pregnancies—three babies gone. All the hope that I had for life turning around was crushed. Then, as one more knife to the back, I found out she was cheating on me. She had already cheated on me before, in between the abortions, but I had decided then that I was going to stick around and try to make it work. Forget that now. We were done.

Some may say, “Dude, what did you expect?” I don’t know. I expected something different—something better. Maybe some grace and mercy from God and a chance at both of us turning our lives around and becoming a family. People can change, right? Maybe I was naïve. Maybe I had crazy, unrealistic expectations. All I know is that when it all fell apart, I fell apart with it.

Rather than considering the possibility that my own bad choices may have led to my current situation, I decided the blame belonged to God. Even though I didn’t have a relationship with Him, I still accused Him of destroying my life. The insanity of that thinking! I didn’t want anything to do with God. I had totally blocked Him out of my life. Yet, when my life collapsed around me, where did I point the finger of blame? Right at the One I had told to keep out of my life. How schizo is that?

Still, that’s what I did. I straight-out told God that I hated Him for all that He’d done to me. I cussed Him out and flipped my two middle fingers up to Him. I let Him know that He could just stay the hell away from me. I was just going to keep doing my own thing. I’m going to make money. I’m going to put whatever I want into my body. I’m going to use girls just to satisfy my own needs. I’m done looking for love. I’m done trying to find “the right one.” Screw that—I’ve tried it. There’s too much pain in relationships. Besides, you can’t trust women anyway—they’re all the same. As soon as you start loving one, she’ll cheat on you or stab you in the back or kill your unborn kid. If God’s got a problem with that, what do I care? He obviously doesn’t care about me.

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