A radically positive influence on rave culture: Meet DJ Kaskade

LAS VEGAS — This city at night is otherworldly — a maze of neon casinos and fountains. Looking down from a helicopter, these lights meld into arcing lines, tracing the network of hotels and stadiums.

Along I-15, I can see a string of red taillights miles long, heading toward the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where the largest electronic dance music festival in North America is taking place.

By the end of the weekend, more than half a million festivalgoers will stand before one of the nine massive stages to be immersed in pulsing 100-decibel sets from their favorite DJs.

Many are going to see the man seated next to me.

Music and dance: ‘Part of celebrating life’

The chopper makes a tight circle around the speedway. Even from this height, the scale of these megastructures is staggering. Ryan Raddon — stage name, Kaskade — looks down and points to a semicircular LED wall. “That’s ours!” he shouts into the mic, referring to the stage. Over the crackling headset, his wife Naomi (a helicopter pilot herself) gives a brief acknowledgement.

We touch down on the blacktop outside the speedway, where a fleet of Eco-Star helicopters is taxiing the DJs and their crews to and from the city. The Kaskade team — over 10 strong — piles into a caravan of black SUVs, heading toward the back gates.

It feels like a scene from a movie, riding in a president’s Secret Service cavalcade.

Raddon, 52, is dressed in a black T, cuffed jeans and orange Nike Air Force 1s. An industry veteran of nearly 30 years, he’s an old pro at this. If there are any pre-performance jitters, they don’t show. We thread through parking lots to a turf-lined campground, where artists can be seen mulling around.

For most in the electronic-music scene, being booked on a main stage at the Electric Daisy Carnival would be the highlight of a career. But for the occupants of these “Star Waggons” — Ti?sto, Alesso, AfroJack, Zedd and Kaskade, among others — this is part of a grueling, yearlong circuit of international venues.

Tonight, Raddon tells me, he’s going to be playing mostly techno. To the uninitiated, electronic music genres are easy to confuse, but for Kaskade’s die-hard fans, a techno set is a serious departure from the house style he is known for. Raddon’s media director, Jodi Nelson, is hopeful the true fans will enjoy the education.

She says they go to Kaskade to be exposed to new music, to have their tastes stretched.

“People have been dancing forever,” Raddon says. “That’s part of celebrating life.”

Electronic music is newer than dancing, but older than many think. While some versions (like dubstep) exploded in popularity in the 2000s, forms of dance music had been simmering for decades in nightclubs and warehouses from Chicago to Berlin. The field of music is diverse enough to rebuff widespread categorization, but the shared love of dance unites them.

Twenty minutes before Kaskade’s 12:30 a.m. set, we jump into golf carts and vans and head toward the stage. The festival takes place in the middle of the night so that the lights and pyrotechnics have maximum impact. Driving along the racetrack feels like orbiting some supernova mid-explosion.

We disembark and gather around a staircase leading to the DJ booth. The opening at the back of the stage gives us a peek at thousands of spectators facing our direction, a stomach-curdling experience for one prone to stage fright.

Australian DJ Dom Dolla is ending his set, and security waves us through the fence. Raddon, his wife and two of his daughters gather in a huddle, a ritual before each set. They break as Dolla’s last flamethrowers spit fire 20 feet above the stage. On cue, Raddon smiles and casually walks up the stairs to the DJ booth, toward the roaring sea of expectant ravers like a gladiator entering the arena.

BYU, missionary service and finding a career

When Raddon was a kid, he remembers jumping on a trampoline in his backyard, looking toward the downtown Chicago skyline. On a clear day, he was able to pick out the Sears Tower.

He was raised in Northbrook, a suburb outside the city. His father ran a small independent finance company with help from Raddon’s mom. For many years, Ryan and his brothers would clean their father’s office building while he worked on Saturday.

But as Ryan got older, going into the city became less common among his school friends. “I think once kids got into high school,” he told me, “the guys I was around just wanted to have keggers and go to football games and beat each other up.”

Raddon didn’t fit into that scene. He didn’t drink or party, he loved music and was in the high school varsity choir. At 15, he didn’t have a driver’s license, so he tagged along with his older brother at night, taking the train into the city.

“My parents, they were never like, freaked out,” he said. “I could go into the city, hang out, go to shows, juice bars, see DJs.”

Raddon found himself in the heart of a developing scene: the birth of “house” music in Chicago, a mix of alternative industrial music, disco, electronic pop from Europe and techno from Detroit.

“Being around people that thought differently, dressed differently and listened to different music — it was cool. That was fun and exciting,” he told me. “I could be who I wanted to be. I’m a devout Mormon, that’s who I am … I never felt judged.”

But he was an outsider in many ways. Growing up in Chicago, he only knew a handful of fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he said. So he looked west, to where his brothers went to college at Brigham Young University.

“The idea of going to Utah and finding my people within this other group of people — that intrigued me,” he said. But his grades weren’t there, and he wasn’t accepted. It took a plane ride out to Provo, Utah, and a sit-down with the admissions counselor to convince the school to let him live in the dorms and take night classes.

Steve Estes, a longtime friend, remembers first meeting Raddon during his freshman year at BYU in 1989. “Even then, he was this larger-than-life guy, just really dynamic.” Music was a large part of the bond between the group of friends.

“His music collection is all over the map,” Estes said. “It’s Metallica, it’s Beastie Boys, it’s Chicago house music, it’s Depeche Mode. It was like a little bit of everything. ... He has this thirst for music, you know, music of every genre.”

“My freshman year was amazing,” Raddon told me. “Maybe a little bit too amazing.” He remembers his parents visiting that spring, and he was the tannest he’d ever been. He laughs at the memory of his dad saying, “There’s no way you look like this and you’re gonna pass school.”

His dad was right. Raddon didn’t have the grades to return the next year. He bounced from Utah Valley University (called Utah Valley State College at the time) to the University of Utah, before serving a Latter-day Saint mission in Tokyo and later working in New York using his language skills as a tour guide.

“I came back from New York, and that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I need to stop screwing around. I gotta get a degree. I gotta figure out what I’m doing.’”

In 1995, he moved to Salt Lake City with his collection of records in tow and started taking classes at the University of Utah. He met his wife, Naomi, through mutual friends at a show in Provo — they bonded over snowboarding. It was in Salt Lake where Raddon got his first paying gig as a DJ at the Club Manhattan, downtown.

“Honestly,” Raddon said, “my story begins there.” Through word of mouth, his friends packed the club on a Monday night. In a basement with legal occupancy of 299, he remembers 400 people showing up. “I made, like, $300 or something,” he told me. “I was like, ‘They pay me to play records? This is insane. This is what I’m supposed to do with my life.’”

A grueling schedule

The afternoon sun filters through wall-to-wall windows in Raddon’s spacious hotel suite. Hundreds of feet below, the Las Vegas strip is bustling with an influx of ravers gathered there for the music festival. Raddon sinks into his couch wearing an old hoodie. He brought a shirt and tie for church in the morning, despite the projected 4 a.m. return to the hotel.

Naomi is in a back room napping. During summer months, she flies Black Hawk helicopters, fighting wildfires. When their three daughters were younger, it was easier for the family to travel together. In 2012, they did a two-month bus tour across North America together. It’s harder these days with the girls in school.

Raddon’s laid-back vibe could be a mirage. It’s been reported that he earns more than $200,000 a gig. He’s a longtime business partner with the owner of the $10 billion hotel we’re sitting in. He talks about the island of Ibiza with as much intimacy as I speak about the Smith’s grocery store down the street.

Raddon undertakes a grueling schedule of concerts, playing more than 200 shows a year, but flies home at every opportunity to be with his family. He estimates that he’s played more than 5,000 shows throughout his career. Estes told me, “He kills himself. That’s what it boils down to. The fact that he’s kind of still up and functioning at this level blows my mind.”

Almost 30 years ago, he was just concerned with paying rent and saving up money to purchase production equipment. “I just sat in my basement for hours and (would) go get $5 pizza, just sitting and trying to learn how to use synthesizers and drum machines. ... That’s what I did for five years,” Raddon said.

Things gradually picked up, a combination of persistence and luck. He moved to San Francisco to work as an assistant to the owner of the music label OM Records. He was inspired by the melodic style of Bay Area electronic music. He released an album. He booked small gigs, he opened for bigger ones — his music snowballed.

“I just wanted to try to figure out how to make a living,” he said. “I was never drawn to this because there was big money. When I was getting into this for the first 10 years, the most successful guys were fine. They were making a living, but barely. … And there was no fame or anything like that.”

‘He is family first’

Raddon went from toiling in a San Francisco studio housed in an old salon that smelled like hair products, to being the first DJ to sell out the Staples Center. He was a major reason why Las Vegas became the electronic music capital of the West, by pioneering a residency program and helping bring in talent.

But the rise of rave culture was accompanied by troubling problems. It’s up for debate whether ravers’ reputation of drug use is fairly earned, or residual stigma from its underground days. Either way, concert promoters and legislatures have been grappling with questions of accountability and harm reduction for decades.

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The Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (known as the RAVE act) of 2003 targeted concert promoters and organizers, holding them liable for illicit activity during events. The danger of these drugs is a very real problem. But Kaskade and others have argued the legislation has unintended consequences, driving concerts underground where they become less regulated and more dangerous. Raddon wrote about this on his website, “To assign responsibility of regulating drug use to concert promoters is ludicrous, in the extreme.”

The Electric Daisy Carnival, for example, used to be held in the Los Angeles Coliseum. After 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez died in 2010 from an overdose, the city of Los Angeles called for a “rave moratorium” and the organizer, Insomniac, left for Las Vegas.

In the past few years, the moratorium was lifted, and rave music returned to Los Angeles in a big way. In 2021, Kaskade was the first concert in the newly constructed SoFi Stadium. In 2022, his L.A. Coliseum concert with Deadmau5 broke the record for the largest single-day electronic music concert in North America.

For Raddon, a practicing Latter-day Saint, working in this culture of drug use and partying provokes the public’s curiosity, although he told me, “It’s always been a very easy thing in my mind to reconcile.”

Raddon said that no one in church has ever given him a hard time for what he does. “I attended the shows as a kid sober, and I feel like music for me was an outlet and a way to be who I am. And I hope there are kids out there that have come to my shows and had that same experience.”

Estes, his college friend, said the contrast between Raddon and other top DJs is stark. “I’ve sat in 500 green rooms with Ryan and interfaced with guys you see out there today. He’s a different guy. He doesn’t party. He’s not into drugs. He doesn’t drink. He is family first. He is wife first. He is friends first.”

Nelson, who has known Raddon since his days in Salt Lake, told me that the famous DJ never publicizes the fan outreach he does, though he’s constantly making videos, visiting sick fans and writing letters. But his audience — and the media covering the industry — has been taking notes. In an article titled “The 25 DJs that rule the Earth,” Rolling Stone wrote, “Kaskade represents an intensely positive side of dance-music culture.”

“I read that, and I tear up,” Raddon told me. “Sometimes you wonder if you’re crazy. … I’m trying to do this thing. And I hope this reflects me. But certainly, there are days that I’m down, and like, maybe I’m part of the problem.”

Doing it all again

One hour and 24 minutes into the show, Kaskade plays “Eyes,” a staple of most sets since it was written in 2011. The track is relatively sparse in construction, lifting a softly sung melody into the night. There have been many versions, official and unofficial. Washing over the crowd, it’s a song about love and connection. It builds in tension and emotion until it overflows and the bottom drops out.

Kaskade stands on top of the DJ booth, arms outstretched. He’s an apparition silhouetted against the LED screen behind. Fireworks erupt, and pillars of flame obscure the deck.

Someone, or many someones, in the crowd will remember this moment for years to come. A vague and powerful feeling, goosebumps or tears. They’ll remember who they were with, and what the night smelled like.

It’s difficult in this moment to imagine Kaskade’s presence here as anything but positive — the fact that it’s Ryan Raddon and not another looking out into the crowd, with his peculiarities, passions and convictions, his family watching from behind, and the crowd staring back at him.

After the set, the hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers will return to their real lives, glassy-eyed. Raddon will go back to his hotel suite with his daughters and wife, ears ringing, neon faces flashing across his mind. He’ll struggle to sleep as the adrenaline drains slowly. And tomorrow night, Kaskade will do it again.

Correction: A previous version of this story referred to Utah Valley College instead of Utah Valley State College. Also, Raddon moved to Salt Lake City in 1995, not 1985.