Is there anything you want to say about this year’s lineup?
“A Night of Carnage on Friday night… That doesn’t happen in Oklahoma, much less Halloween weekend. Friday night is our “Go Hard or Go Home” style party, since it’s All Hallows’ Eve and a Night of Carnage, right? Party Favor, Leah Culver, and Free Pizzv will all be playing that night. On Saturday, it’s more of a house party vibe, with Chingy, Chiddy Bang, Peking Duk, DJ Dirty, and Cazzette. Chingy’s the wildcard, I mean, Saturday’s gonna be a house party dude! It’s not go hard-style all night like Friday. Saturday is going to be all about getting together and singing “nothin chillen at the Holidae In.”
This sounds like one of the most underrated parties out there!
“Right! We don’t ever want to be the next EDC, everybody’s always like, “Oh, don’t you want to grow and get bigger?” No. We want the quality to grow and get bigger, and of course we want a few more people to come, but we want the same intimacy that we have now. I don’t want seven fucking stages. I don’t want to walk two and a half miles. I want to party my ass off, I wanna get a ride home, maybe meet a hottie, drink beer with my boys, and party hard for a couple of nights and then get back to my life. That’s where I stand.
I don’t know if I told you about the warehouse parties I used to throw. I wasn’t classified as a promoter or a warehouse guy or whatever you want to call it. Raves weren’t big in Oklahoma. When I was in high school I managed to snag a set of keys to this warehouse my family owned. The warehouse was a little ways down the road from this midnight rodeo club. It was a hotspot where the locals with fancy cars and chopper kids hung out-it was a big-time club-all the underage kids could go there because there wasn’t an age requirement or anything.
I started inviting everyone back to the warehouse after the club closed for the night. It started with me and a couple buddies, we’d drink and people would just hang around the warehouse, it wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t have a DJ or anything like that, people would just pull their trucks up to the front and blast music.
At that time I was getting into Ministry of Sound, ATB, Tiesto, Kaskade and some others. The first year I came back from college for winter break, I threw a New Year’s Eve party. While I was out grabbing more kegs, like four-thousand people showed up. Apparently, while I was gone, some idiots set fire to some explosive fifty-five gallon drum of something. I don’t even know what it was, but the whole police department showed up, helicopters were flying all over the place, three fire trucks came. They had roadblocks set up and when people went through a checkpoint police stopped them and asked, “Where’s Justin Walmer? Do you know Justin Walmer?” I was riding back with some people and when we got stopped, everyone pointed at me. Luckily for me, the officer knew my family. The cops were just trying to get everyone out safely. He ended up calling my Aunt and she straightened everything out. Obviously she wasn’t too happy with me, but she said she knew what it was like to be young, you know, everyone makes mistakes.
The warehouse parties were always a good time, that one night just happened to get out of control. There’s so much to my story that I don’t get to tell people. I mean, it took me ten years to get to the first Elektrik Prairie.”
And that’s the thing, whether it was conscious or not, everything you did with the US Open, the Warehouse parties, it was all in preparation for this, Elektrik Prairie is the culmination of all those experiences.
“That’s the fucking truth, man. Some of it was a conscious effort, but most of it was just because it’s what made me happy. At the end of the day, I haven’t lived one unhappy day, I can honestly say that. My parents were always like, “Work sucks, that’s why it’s called work, it’s a job.” But if you do what makes you happy, you will never work a day in your life. You hear that all the time, but that’s what my parents taught me. We were a music family, inside and out, that’s all we did. My first concert was KISS, it was all about tits, fireworks, pyrotechnics, lights, and blood… that’s the stuff I was exposed to from the start.”
