How a rave on a Bay Area battleship almost crashed and burned

During the first night of the Rattleship rave on the USS Hornet in Alameda in July, Noah Bennett has his hands full. The mastermind behind the event, he serves as the promoter, the booker, the logistics lead, internet troll response manager and a headlining DJ. On top of all that, he’s also the pizza delivery guy. 

Around 11:30 p.m., Bennett, aka DJ Dials, boards the decommissioned WWII aircraft carrier via a clinky Indiana Jones-style rope bridge, two pizza boxes held high above his head and a cellphone and Polaroid camera balanced precariously atop the boxes. Wearing all white, he strides past decommissioned WWII fighter jets wrapped in blue LED lights and somehow wades through a crowd of 4,000 bodies like a nightlife ghost gliding through the function. 

In less than five minutes, he’s made it behind the festival-sized stage and literally climbs down “the hatch” to an infirmary below deck, walking past a room full of bunk beds and Navy showers to a rave mission control room of staffers hungry for pepperoni.

Bennett is in constant problem-solving mode as soon as he sets down those pizzas. Just like a DJ has a ticking timer before they need to play the next song, Bennett has an internal countdown before the talent needs set time details, before the USS Hornet Museum’s managers need an update on the additional 400 feet of barricades purchased for the second show the following night, before a literal fire alarm goes off — and with it the risk of a $10,000 fine.

Above mission control in the hull of the ship, alarm strobe lights flash as British drum-and-bass duo Delta Heavy drop a raging remix of their song “Anarchy” for thousands of fans. Bennett frantically excuses himself from conversation.

 “Sorry, I need to go make sure the fire department doesn’t come,” he says, apparitioning his way back through the crowd to the fire marshal waiting outside.

If you’ve seen a touring DJ in San Francisco anytime in the past 20 years, odds are that Bennett was involved. The name “DJ Dials Presents” is ubiquitous atop promotional fliers, and a now-dormant Instagram account of Polaroids serves as a scrapbook of acts he’s booked, from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy to Grimes to Kali Uchis to Moodymann. Prince, who he once threw a last-minute afterparty at 1015 Folsom weeks before his death, declined a photo.

Bennett is the head booker for arguably the biggest club in town, 1015 Folsom, but the Rattleship show may be his most complicated logistical feat yet. It has support from not just the USS Hornet Museum crew and his LA partners Brownies and Lemonade, but a staff of over 100. It’s events at unconventional spaces like aircraft carriers and secret warehouses that keep him inspired. It’s also good business, and a way to distinguish his operation from industry giants like Live Nation and Goldenvoice, whose influence has made it almost impossible for newer independent promoters to book any of the acts in Bennett’s Polaroid collection.

“It’s really important to me to go back to the purity of it, which is: A good party feels like you shouldn’t be there,” he said a few weeks later, chatting outside The Mill in San Francisco. “You go to a house party when your friend’s parents are out of town, everyone’s experienced that in high school. Your idiot friend decides to throw a rager, it gets out of control, you’re having the time of your life because you feel like you’re breaking the rules.”

Back at those high school ragers, there’s a good chance Bennett was the one controlling the music. He began DJing as a 12-year-old in Spokane, Washington, inspired by a rave he attended in a wheat field: “My mother dropped me off at 6 p.m., I lied to her and told her it was a ska concert. About 45 minutes later she realized what it was and pulled me out by the ear.”

By the end of high school, he had opened for the Roots and scored a fake ID in order to play in clubs. (The name on the ID? Jose Canseco.) He moved to San Francisco for art school in 2001; it just so happened that the city was the epicenter of West Coast rave culture at the time. Around 2010, Bennett stopped working in the arts and became DJ Dials full-time. 

At this point he considers himself an “open format” DJ, which means no gig or genre is off-limits. That might mean playing Paul Simon and Toots and the Maytals songs at an afterparty for Dead & Company’s Oracle Park performance, dropping the 1986 Congolese disco tune “Hafi Deo” in an opening set for Fred Again, or pulling off left-field transition selections like sneaking Weezer into an EDM set at Northern Nights Festival. 

“It has been 27 years dedicating my life to this thing. And a lot of times, in its best moments, you’re in service of others. In its worst moments, you’re in the service of your own ego. Which is like — ‘I want to play this gig, I want this slot, I want this moment, I want this thing.’”

One thing Bennett’s been wanting to do for quite some time: Be the first to throw a rave on the USS Hornet. Another thing he wants? To pull the plug on our interview the moment we sit down.

“I was almost thinking about canceling this, because I’m at the point where I’m tired of the criticism. And I’m tired of everything being nitpicked,” he said, citing a 20-minute review of Rattleship from a vlogger who had never been to a rave before. To his chagrin, his public-facing promotional role means he can’t just ignore the trolls — or clap back at them. The only way to defend himself is to work harder, better, faster, stronger.

When talking candidly to other nightlife veterans about Bennett, the most common refrain is that he does, indeed, work all the time. The next most common observation is that, well, he’s a complicated individual.

It’s easy to see why Bennett has a target on his back — he’s not one to hold back an opinion. Despite his trepidation about an interview, he lays out a litany of complaints about the current state of San Francisco nightlife: He condemns Beyonce vs. Rihanna (or Taylor Swift vs. Olivia Rodrigo) DJ nights, calls out “nonplayer characters” who attend events solely for Instagram photos, and takes to task modern DJ fans who go to “see” their favorite acts instead of to “hear” them. He describes the DJ booking landscape in modern-day San Francisco as a “war zone between three major promoters,” all of which he works closely with in a complicated dance he refers to as “gangster s—t.” He says that being a DJ at his age — 39 — is a “red flag,” he’s ready to retire the Dials moniker and let the next generation take over, but his packed gig calendar tells another story. And when your job is literally to build relationships with DJs like Diplo, it’s impossible not to flaunt a few famous friends — by the end of the 90-minute interview Bennett has dropped so many names that the sidewalk outside The Mill looks like a Coachella flier.

But what’s most clear from speaking to him for 90 minutes, and watching him quarterback a rave on an aircraft carrier, is that he’s very much not full of s—t. Bennett is a DJ lifer who talks about DJing with reverence for the craft, disdain for its commercialization and weariness from reconciling the underground dance music legacy of the 2000s with today’s kitschy Shrek raves. The bedroom EDM DJs who flood his Instagram with targeted ads haven’t even heard of the DMC DJ championship tournament, let alone competed in them as a teenager like Bennett. Despite all his work, San Francisco’s legendary dance music culture has strayed from what attracted him in the first place. 

Despite a tendency to sound like a grumpy aging DJ, Bennett also seems overwhelmingly grateful — because it all almost went away.

The Rattleship show has been in the works since before the pandemic, when like almost all entertainers, Bennett faced the harsh reality of a world without events.

“In the pandemic, I think all DJs realized that they were the world’s most nonessential employees. No one stands up in a plane and goes, ‘Help! Does anyone on board know Ableton Live?’” he jokes, referencing the popular music production software. “No one says that.”

Bennett pivoted to throwing socially distanced car concerts under the name Hotbox, organizing more than 100 events in eight months with the likes of Major Lazer and Marc Rebillet. When clubs started to open back up, talks began again with the Hornet. 

Weighing in at 27,100 tons — 36,380 when carrying a full load of planes — the USS Hornet is roughly the size of two football fields. It faced 59 air attacks during its 16 months stationed in Japan during World War II, with its fleet of planes destroying 1,410 enemy aircraft. The ship’s guns fired a total of 532,034 rounds of ammunition in World War II, spent several years off the coast of Vietnam in the 1960s and even recovered the Apollo 11 astronauts on their reentry to Earth before being deactivated in 1970.

Since 1998, the aircraft carrier has served as a museum and hosted a wide variety of events over the years, from furry conventions to punk rock shows, but this is the first time it hosted a proper electronic music event. As one might expect, it’s impossible to carry a festival-grade sound system onto the ship across that rickety rope bridge.

“We’re not a hotel, we don’t have a conference room where we just roll everything in the door,” said Faye Navarro, private events organizer at the Hornet. “We have to lift it onto the ship … we have a shipping container, it’s really ginormous. We use the aircraft elevator crane to lift it up.”

At first, Bennett envisioned the event as a Halloween event with a haunted house during the day and dance party at night. That evolved into Rattleship, a collaboration with Brownies and Lemonade, whose logo adorned souvenir flags handed out at the event, and production manager Tommy Speer of Vate Creative. The lineup was kept secret until the day of the show — and it still sold out with a capacity of 4,000. But given that the headlining DJs command fees of more than $50,000, and the high overhead costs that included a staff of nearly 100, the event barely made a profit.

“The expectation that the crowd has now is that everything has to be a festival,” Bennett said. “It’s a production battle. You can’t just see your favorite DJ play music, it has to be like your favorite DJ is spending his entire fee on flamethrowers and confetti and a giant led wall that’s huge. It’s an arms race for production.”

They say you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and Rattleship was no exception. When something isn’t going right, Bennett hears it in the DMs. During Night 1 of the Rattleship, the recurring complaint was that despite being surrounded by water, people couldn’t find a drop to drink (without buying a bottle at the bar). 

“I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of water coolers. I paid someone all night to just sit there and refill this free water. That was the best thing about having two days. Day one, there were obvious things we didn’t expect.”

Another issue: barricades. 

“From my perspective, if I was going to do something else like that, I would either suggest less people or more barricades through all of the hangar bay so we would have an actual fire lane for emergency flow. It did become an issue,” the Hornet’s Navarro said.

The solution? Bennett’s Hotbox partner Matt Feldberg went out Sunday morning, on two hours of sleep, and spent a couple thousand dollars on additional barricades.

Those complaints were warranted, but in the social media age, it’s hard to ignore the commenters. Guards at the entry did full pat-downs, but a few people complained there weren’t any metal detectors. Bennett bought metal detector wands for Night 2, even though he claims patdowns are more effective at finding both weapons and drugs, of which he has a zero tolerance policy.

“As much as I want to be a cool party guy, there are too many dangers associated with drug use in America,” he said. “Fentanyl, ketamine — if you have some ketamine and take three or four shots of tequila, guess what, you’re going home in a stretcher because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Bennett cites the pandemic as a contributing factor to the rise of irresponsible drug use in the dance music community.

“People coming of age weren’t being taught by their big brothers how to play it cool, and keep it mellow, and be safe,” said Bennett. “There was a guardianship that existed in dance music culture, and drug culture, that isn’t there anymore. It’s a big free-for-all now.”

But from Navarro’s perspective, whatever substances might’ve made it onto the ship didn’t spoil the atmosphere.

“I can say I’ve been to a rave now,” the 52-year-old Navarro said with a laugh. “Everybody was respectful, regardless of whatever state of mind they were in.” 

Bennett himself was supposed to perform the headlining set from 2 to 3 a.m. on Night 1, but the fire department had other plans.

That fire alarm siren and resulting strobe lights — which to partygoers just seemed like an extra party ambience — weren’t caused by smoke, but haze. When you have the same heavy artillery lasers used by EDM superstars, you need a San Francisco afternoon’s worth of fog for the full effect, but smoke detectors on the ship can’t tell the difference between party fog and run-for-your-life smoke. However, even when the fog cleared, the alarms didn’t stop.

“​​It was a faulty fire alarm system,” said Navarro. “ It kept saying it was pulled, but it wasn’t. … It made us aware that there was something faulty, and it got fixed.”

At the time, none of that was clear to the Alameda Fire Department, which had to return to the ship when the alarm went off a second time and — despite being “friendly, helpful and informative” according to Bennett — cut off the music in the middle of a set from an up-and-coming 18-year-old Berkeley producer named W IN K.

Around 2:30 a.m., Bennett stepped up to the DJ mixer, but by then the music had stopped and the only sounds were the high-pitched howl of the fire alarms and the confused rumbling of thousands of young ravers. He hopped on the mic and delivered the bad news— there was no emergency, but the show was ending 30 minutes early. He pushed the power button to turn off the DJ mixer, the house lights came on, and the crowd marched out of the ship, across that rickety rope bridge and back to dry land, ready to return to do it all again the next night. It wasn’t the ending Bennett had hoped for, but thankfully, there’s always another party.