This years San Francisco Love Parade, organized only for the second time, has turned out to be a massive success. A success owed not only to the work of numerous volunteers, crackerjack organization, but first and foremost a fantastic crowd, tens of thousands of music-driven lunatics, who, by foot, car or plane, came or arrived to be here for the Love Parade, for a wallow in their self-indulgence. They were people of all ages and varying degrees of personal beauty, all dressed-up in fake furs or without anything on (like in: “v e r y m u c h without anything on”). And they sure had plenty to choose out from: 24 official floats playing musical genres ranging from hip-hop, through funk, dnb, breaks, progressive, electro, to NRG trance and housey italo-disco and a number of un-official ones in the form of shopping or baby carts with fancy-shmancy decorations and a portable stereo playing everything, including country & western.

Does it really make sense to once again try to implement an idea which in Europe may, at least to some, seem to have burnt out long ago? Where quite recently the Love Parade Berlin had to be, officially due to financial reasons, cancelled? Sean Norris, who is on the Love Parade San Francisco Board and the treasurer, and who we had a chance to talk to before the parade, is positive about that:

Dr Motte’s idea - (whose one of birthday parties started the Love Parade Berlin – editor’s note) that music is a universal language, which can be understood by all people, is still alive. We didn’t care about any political or other messages but that was his idea which appealed to me at the time when we first started thinking about bringing the Love Parade to San Francisco.

It all started over six years ago when Sean and a group of his friends and SF club owners decided to bring the parade to the US west coast. It took them five years to convince officials, administrators and others who had something to say that it was worth it and that San Francisco is the best of all places to organize the parade in. Finally, when the first parade took place in October last year – it was a success, a success measured by the number of participants which, as it turned out, doubled compared to the pre-parade estimates.