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Dancing All Through the Day: Breakfast of Champions 2013
Author: Nicholas Mann
Last week on New Year's Day, the Space Cowboys hosted their 13th annual Breakfast of Champions event, a six-to-six rager of pure, bass-thumping afterburn. There were four simultaneous decks spinning this year, with two stages sweating inside Mighty and a giant, tent-shrouded outdoor stage flanked by stacks of high-quality European loudspeakers. A smaller stage behind that, Silent Frisco hosted eight hours of headphones-only "Silent Disco" sets, which wrapped up shortly after I arrived with the rest of the hungover crew to relieve the all-nighters. Breakfast of Champions is a premiere event in the San Francisco party horizon, and this year was no exception.
The Crowd - Outdoor Tent, ~4:30 PM
The crowd was really feeling the music, with primary talent being furnished by the Space Cowboys. One of the first massive dance-party camps at Burning Man, the Space Cowboys are known for their irascible sense of humor and marathon dance parties. Their trademark art car, the Uni-Moog "All-Terrain Audio/Visual Assault Vehicle", presided over Utah Street, while costumed celebrants shook their tail feather until close. It's not all day-drinking and sloppy make-outs, though. In typical Burner fashion, it's about giving back to the community. With dollar-for-dollar matching from the Space Cowboys, the event reportedly brought in $5000 for the San Francisco Food Bank in addition to dry good donations.
What about the ever-intriguing "special guests"? Having finally secured visas, the Plump DJs (Lee Rous, Andy Gardner) came all the way from London for their first daylight set of 2013; the crowd thoroughly devoured their breakfast breakbeats, and it's always nice when a bill's "special guests" prove to be a secret worth revealing. It's sometimes a letdown to still not know who the special guest is even after they've started playing.
Highlights from local talent included Zach Moore and Chip "Mancub" Corwin from the host crew, the Space Cowboys. According to Steven T. Jones in "The Tribes of Burning Man," the Space Cowboys were formed in 1996 but began their conspicuous presence in the San Francisco party scene after merging with another camp; one of their favorite Playa bars had suffered sound malfunctions, and the Cowboys stepped in with their own system to keep the music pumping.
Mancub - Crushing it at the end
The next time you hear art cars synchronizing their sound systems to a single DJ set near some Porta-Potties, thank the Space Cowboys; they were the first to implement FM transmitters for synchronized dance parties, and, for those of you who are awake during the day for Burning Man, the Space Cowboys are a fixture in the daytime-dancing scene. But you don't have to wait until the burn to party with them, as there's a SPACE COWBOYS Show at The End Up in San Francisco from 10pm to 6am on January 19. If you can't make that, their annual SnowFest will take place at Squaw Valley March 1-3.
Holiday Food Drive:
Links to BoC Sets:
Space Cowboys Podcast: