The Annual Summer Party Turns into a Cult Classic
Larry Harvey, a hippie and occasional vagrant who lived among artists in the Haight-Ashbury district, constructed a human effigy eight feet tall out of scrap lumber and burned it on Baker Beach in 1986. At the nudist beach near the Presidio military base, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, a crowd of around a hundred individuals gathered around the ball of fire. People started scattering in all directions as Harvey doused “The Man” in gasoline and struck a match. A group of Harvey’s pals gathered around a bonfire one Summer Solstice, and the event quickly became an annual tradition. As word spread about the annual meeting of weirdos, Harvey became accustomed to answering questions about whether Burners are a cult. In 1996, he gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle in which he referred to Burning Man as “Disneyland in reverse.”. Turning on his head, Woodstock became upside down. Attendance has increased annually since it doubled in the 1990s because of how open the theme is to interpretation. Participants at the week-long event increased from the hundreds to the thousands. Additionally, the Burning Man statue was expanded. The height in 1987 was reported to be 15 feet. And by 1990, it had grown to a height of 40 feet, making it five times as tall as the first Man. Since its relocation to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, the annual event has drawn tens of thousands of visitors from all over the country.
A Bigger, Better Site for Burning Man
As the fifth annual Burning Man festival approached, the Golden Gate Police finally figured out what they were doing and began to enforce stricter regulations. Wildfire safety worries caused them to cancel the festivities in 1990. However, a bonfire was not permitted besides the gathering. Friends of Harvey’s who assisted with the construction of the Man—Michael Mikel, Kevin Evans, and John Law—aided in relocating the structure the same year Bay Area authorities told Harvey the event was forbidden. Everyone who attended Burning Man was forced to leave their homes and start over in the desert. Former Cacophony Society members and hippies Micke, Evans, and Law had wandered out to federally owned Black Rock Desert. They quickly recognised the huge, level dirt area as the ideal spot to burn the Man and save the ritual. Mickel a Texan who served in Vietnam and now lives in San Francisco. He believed in the Cacophony Society’s mantra of “mental freedom” so much that he adopted it as his own. The founding ideas of Burning Man emerged from his description of the community as a “randomly formed network of free spirits joined in search of experiences beyond the boundaries of normal society.”