About an hour and a half into the event, streams of people, moving singly and in small groups (often dressed with a unified aesthetic), continued to make their way through the complicated parking lot, rocking some interesting 'fits.
Attire for the evening ran the gamut from erotic (lingerie or bikini top, thong bottom, and fishnets being a common choice for many young women) to the elaborately costumed (young men with light bulb earrings, conical Asian hats with colored lights around the brim, shirts patterned with colorful flora, giant LED medallions blinking marijuana leaves in shades of green) to the casual (purple and gold Lakers 34 jerseys abounded) to the novelty (shirts proclaiming “I’m fat, let’s party,” “I ♥ small titties,” “I ♥ submissive men,” or “Peace Love Mosh Pits,” or with psilocybin or the red-and-white Amanita muscaria Mario mushrooms stylized in pixelated or tripped out ways) to the merely partially dressed (guys who had opted for cargo shorts and t-shirt, with t-shirt held in hand or stuffed down the backside of said shorts).
At the dropoff point, hundreds of feet from the first entrance checkpoint, itself hundreds of feet from the partially open bay doors of the Rawhide building, dull, indistinct computer-generated thunder thrummed the air. A disposable water bottle full of red fluid of a Crystal Light hue leaned against a spindly tree, abandoned before reaching security and confiscation. A small, gritty puddle of vomit, the color and consistency of curried chickpeas in light sauce, lay nearby.
The night was indeed already underway.
Shaq's Bass All-Stars at Rawhide in Chandler on August 16, 2025.
Hannah Smith
Just after 9:30, Jkyl & Hyde was on the square stage, where general attendees stood around three sides, with VIP sections behind, looking at the DJ from the back. Screens on each side of the stage showed Jkyl & Hyde moving to what sounded like a machine breaking down as he worked the digital audio console, while behind him, a short video of a green-tinted journey through a cavern played on repeat, followed by a similarly short video of bare, angular, skeletal trees. Once at the threshold of the hall, the sound was immense enough to buzz the sternum and tingle the dangling earlobes. Most DJ names on the bill, except Diesel, seemed to adhere to conventions of spelling and length prevailing for vanity license plates, perhaps intended more to enter in a search bar than to be pronounced aloud in a conversation. To stage left and right, behind the partition keeping the audience back, basketball hoops, rising perhaps twenty feet, stood back-to-back in pairs, their nets so tight and narrow no ball could ever have passed through.
In moments of fuller lighting, one could make out Jkyl & Hyde’s fulsome but unruly reddish beard, glasses, backwards blue ball cap, and loose t-shirt waving in the wind of fans unseen. “Phoenix, how the fuck are we doing?” he shouted into the microphone. An excerpt from Ludacris’ “Move, Bitch” began, and soon the voice had been sampled and skipped and deconstructed to unrecognizable lengths. There was also the opening to “Money for Nothing,” a song now forty years old (ancient by rave standards) that was, in its youth, a satirical protest against the cultural abuse of music and the ascendance of image over craft.
Phoenix-area native Ghengar performed in his customary orange visibility vest and lighted monster mask that, from the back of the hall, first looked like an oddly shaped bike helmet. His taste in sound and sight was decidedly darker than the preceding act. The likeness of his masked monster alter ego — its eyes and mouth like menacing, unhealed gashes — recurred as the adversary in pixelated video game face-offs, as a lone figure tumbling endlessly through a multicolored void. In other videos, a crown of skulls slowly rotated, an animated head split open to emit silver spheroids; the animated Necronomicon sequence from one of the “Evil Dead” movies showed the face of that fictitious tome (itself a bit like Ghengar’s mask) chomping and devouring in a swirling chaos of demonic entities; and low-resolution, MSDOS-type letters spelled out, “Killing me will not be so simple.” There were moments of levity and nostalgia as well, with a brief interlude on the “Tetris” theme, originally an Eastern European folk song. Outside the set of half-raised garage doors facing the stage, before the huge cul-de-sac of portable toilets, stand the medical and ranger tents. Several EMTs stood or sat near a folding table. Next door, in front of the ranger station, about a dozen people sat in folding canvas camp chairs. One man hunched over a white bucket, in pained repose with his hand nearly back into his throat, as the woman beside him rubbed his back and gazed on consolingly.
The rangers wore fluorescent green t-shirts and roved through the venue’s grounds, keeping an eye on things. Many set a good example with serious ear-muff-type hearing protection. Bowls on the table at the front of the booth held earplugs, alcohol wipes (to sanitize minor scrapes and cuts), small adhesive bandages, and tampons, and there was a big black tub in the back of the booth filled with ice and bottles of water. Michael, one of three leaders on duty to manage eight rangers, explains in a high, kind voice that the rangers are there as the first level of response for minor physical and mental health issues: overwhelm, tired, excessive alcohol intake, needing to sit down, and so on. Like most rangers, Michael was first an attendee of music events like this one. About five years ago, he needed some help at an event. “Someone was there for me to hold my hand, hold the puke bucket, say all the right things when I needed it,” he says. The memory of a stranger helping him inspired Michael to work as a ranger. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said of the work the rangers do.
From the adjacent medical tent, perhaps a dozen EMTs and one doctor responded to more serious medical problems. One of the EMTs, Savannah, said she liked working events such as this because “the vibes are good and chill,” and the people are generally well-behaved. “And you get to see the show for free, right?” She explained that medical personnel are there for intervention, not enforcement; there was at least one police officer onsite, although judging by the increasingly thick, aromatic cloud pervading the hall and grounds, the venue’s prohibition on marijuana is very, very loosely enforced. “Anything the rangers can’t handle, we take care of.” That onsite care can include first aid, and even stitches (“The doctor has), though sometimes serious issues — such as overdoses on substances the afflicted and their friends cannot or will not name — arise requiring an ambulance trip to the hospital.
After Ghengar’s set, Rawhide’s five screens displayed enormous red numerals counting down from ten minutes to the appearance of the evening’s impresario and namesake — former Los Angeles Lakers center (number 34), occasional rapper, sports analyst, frequent television show guest, and generally recognizable seven-foot-plus presence, Shaquille O’Neal, performing under the moniker DJ Diesel.
That countdown, like all the evening’s lights and sound, was controlled from beyond the barriers marking the edge of the attendee area, where, behind and somewhat to the side of the stage, stood two embankments of consoles and computers. Each of these corresponded to one set of lasers, lights, sound, or steam vents on the sides of the stage, which proved popular during Diesel’s set. The technicians worked without cues or sequences provided by the DJs. It is largely an improvisatory task. “We’re kind of just jamming,” one technician explained. “We’re like DJs with light.”
For the final single-digit seconds of Diesel’s countdown, the crowd chants along with the changing red numerals. The screens were then filled with clips from O’Neal’s basketball career set to bombastic choral-orchestral music similar to the “O Fortuna” opening movement of “Carmina Burana,” the kind of thing often used to cue the audience to feel awe during a movie trailer. A drone with blinking lights began circling and swooping at low altitudes where Shaq was expected to enter. The crowd was by then so dense that, despite the famously large stature of the man awaited, most could not make him out until he had climbed the central stage with entourage preceding and following, filming his every move and gesture. Even way back by the trash cans and tiny ADA zone, even when the mass of attendees and enormous scale of audiovisual equipment and stage make judging distances a dubious business, there was no mistaking the tall bald man in the black tank top with a line of grey grizzle along his jaw as he approached the DJ console. Diesel had arrived.
Then it began.
“You ready, Phoenix?”
Many of Diesel’s videos featured some sort of simian character. In his first video, multitudes of muscular gorillas in formation glared with blazing electric blue eyes. Others featured muscular chimps riding hover pods through apocalyptic urban landscapes—cut with clips of enormous gorillas smashing those cities — or golden apes in the position of Atlas, holding up the spinning globe. There was also a disorienting video of a semi-truck speeding through a narrow valley of speaker stacks with glowing amber rings around their throbbing cones, as well as a perplexing video of a caped “300”-style Spartan hacking at a horde of floating rocks in a Greco-Roman hall filled with lightning bolts.
Perhaps the highlight of Diesel’s set came with a remixed “Seven-Nation Army.” Unlike some of the other remixes of the night, for which the aesthetic seemed to be sonic dismemberment, Diesel’s was a juiced-up version, the riffs and Jack White’s nasally whine in a hotter, more aggressive mix. And everything was louder in Diesel’s set, the frequencies and amplitudes twitching along the septum and wiggling the end of the nose. A remix of Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night” from 1993 recalled Diesel’s Lakers era and, more broadly, the halcyon days of the nineties, a better time.
Diesel’s audience patter consisted largely of imperatives.
“Put those fucking phones away. It’s time to get crazy.”
“Middle fingers up.”
“Hands up, ladies.”
And, to the descending buzzing riff that opens Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction,” the call to “show those muscles,” as Diesel flexed his arms in the classic double biceps pose.
Though Diesel asked, “Where’s my mosh pit?” several times, it was not forthcoming. It seemed, from a vantage point near the back of the hall, a well-behaved and polite crowd, its motion largely vertical — for Diesel’s requested jump shot gesture, or for hoisting friends upon shoulders — rather than horizontal. The steam vents at the sides of the stage, set off frequently but without discernible regularity, roused the crowd each time, though mainly vocally rather than physically. Despite Diesel’s late set exhortations that the crowd mosh and “break the fucking rail,” politeness prevailed for the most part.
“I go to a lot of fucking places,” Diesel said. “And Phoenix is number one.”
The chorus from the Queen song “We Are the Champions” began to play, and many in the crowd swayed side to side.
“I love you, Phoenix,” Diesel said. “Get home safe.”
Another set followed, but so many in the crowd left, and Diesel’s farewell — although using the adjective where the adverb should have been — was so definitive, that even though the show continued in sound and light, it had, in some spiritual sense, concluded then.
