Kodama, in black shirt center-left.

While Jude Kodama and I are sitting and drinking kombuchas in the sun on his Mt. Helix back porch, he draws my attention to one of the photos in the brown leather album — the one with the big groovy turtle on the cover — that he’s set out on the table in front of us. The album is filled with photographs from the mid-‘90s, and so it is also filled with nostalgia. These are the sorts of pictures those of us older than 35 will remember getting developed at drugstore photo counters. The shimmering light of magic hour sun — early evening, earliest morning — washes over the subjects of most of the shots.

Photograph Courtesy Jude Kodama

Kodama rests his finger on his chosen image: a young woman caught in a still moment with her eyes closed, standing in the midst of a crowd in the wilderness. “Heavy journey,” he comments. “You can see the work being done in the soul.” With a smile that creases his distinguished laugh lines, he quotes The Eagles: Some dance to remember, some dance to forget. “In Moontribe,” he says, “people were trying to remember. We were trying to remove the clouds so that we could be in the light.”

Moontribe — that would be Moontribe Collective. He’s telling me about its early days, how he started to get involved, how he eventually began to DJ, the way this period of his life shaped both his sensibility and his interests forever after. He’s speaking in the past tense because he’s telling me his own story from the ‘90s, but the tribe itself is still going strong, still governed by the same principles that made it special from the beginning. Here is what the collective’s website says today:

“Moontribe is a community of friends and family who gather in the desert to dance beneath the full moon...Moontribe is not publicly marketed, is non-profit in practice, is funded completely on donations, staffed lovingly by volunteers, does not allow vending of any kind yet encourages a gift and sharing culture, enjoys one sound-system, and shares directions only to those on the email list.”

Kodama had some experience with electronic music before Moontribe. One night in 1993, a friend took him to The Flame on Park Boulevard; that’s where he first heard underground house music — not the stuff that was on the radio — and the music and the scene were enough to keep drawing him to The Flame. He partied in clubs, but also in parking lots and warehouses.

The city scene was cool, but something was missing. “There seemed to be this disconnect from why music and dance is used spiritually to help elevate and connect to the ecstatic realm.” By 1996, he’d heard about a different scene, one with happenings held here and there in remote, semi-secret spots in the desert: around Palm Springs or Indio, up through the Mojave Desert, all the way to the lower Sierra Nevadas. He found his way there. “Instead of drugs, it was sacraments, and instead of concrete, steel, and electricity, we had dirt, plants, and the moon.” There was electronic dance music, but it was more expansive, more conducive to long, drawn-out trance states. Sometimes there might be a sitar. There were acts with names like Golden Buddha and Electric Skychurch. The dancing was more ecstatic. There was psychedelics and prayer, and there was an ethos of self-discovery and mystical questing. Sometimes a spiritual teacher would be on the bill. That was Moontribe. Eureka. “That’s the family. I finally got it.”

“Moontribe never promoted whatsoever,” he says. “In fact, Moontribe probably had to work as hard to keep it quiet and underground as most promoters would put into publicizing.” Just finding the gatherings took some commitment and a sense of adventure. In addition to driving four or more hours outside of San Diego, there were the communication and map challenges. “There were no cell phones. But we all had pagers, and we had text code. There was a phone number you would call, and there’d be a recorded message telling you to go to a record store to pick up a map.” The maps were tricky. Directions might involve having to keep track of various forks in the road, or setting and re-setting the odometer to log distances between turns.

The directions might also just be wrong. “You knew you were going to Moontribe to learn something and get a lesson and grow and evolve,” says Kodama, “and that not making it to the event might be your lesson.”  Sometimes, the car full of desert ravers might just decide to get out of the vehicle, turn up their radio in the dark, and do their thing under the moon wherever they were, with the little fragment of the tribe that was there.