Tampa's annual Hallucination Before Christmas music festival preps a two-day takeover – Creative Loafing Tampa

By John W. Allman on Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 11:06 am
If You’re Going:
What: Hallucination Before Christmas
When: Friday, December 13 and Saturday, December 14
Where: The Castle, 2004 N. 16th St., Ybor City
Tickets: Two-day tickets start at $65 and single-day tickets start at $40

Information: HBC Party 

It started as a simple idea. Throw a kickass music concert, invite lots of friends and do something good for the community.
Twenty-five years later, look how Hallucination Before Christmas has grown.
To celebrate its silver jubilee, Tampa’s annual food drive/mini-music festival is pulling out all the stops as it expands to two nights in Ybor City at The Castle, starting with a lineup that features 51 of the best EDM deejays from across the country.
In addition, Hallucination Before Christmas is giving longtime local supporters a trifecta of old-school deejay reunions, including Nick James of Czar’s Filthy Richard; Mike Roehr of Pop N Wave, which was a Castle Thursday night mainstay from 2003 to 2012; and the return of Blood on the Turntables, which celebrates all things Friday the 13th.
Many of the Castle’s resident deejays, both past, and present, including Roehr, Tom Gold, Jason Barco and Danny Bled, also will be featured as well.
“It’s a little bit of old guard and a little bit of new guard. People from when it all began to kids of today,” said Steve “Monk” McClure, the founder of Hallucination Records, who has helped shepherd the party every year since its debut in Atlanta, Georgia in 1994. “There’s no other party like it, really.”
McClure credits former DNA deejay Rich Leslie with coming up with the name as a play on the iconic film, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
“It was his idea. ‘Let’s do Hallucination Before Christmas, instead of Nightmare,’” McClure said. “It really all just made sense.”
The first Hallucination parties were held in Atlanta, which is where McClure first met Tommie Sunshine, a perennial performer at the event, who also used to play Santa Claus. After two years, McClure said he asked Leslie if they could relocate to Tampa.
“The idea in the first place was to throw a cool party that raised food for the less fortunate, but also kind of a record label Christmas party for us,” McClure said.
Everyone who attends Hallucination Before Christmas is asked to bring at least three canned goods, which are collected and delivered to Feeding America Tampa Bay, a local food bank. “It’s grown exponentially to the point we raise over a ton of food, literally a ton, every year,” McClure said.
This year, in addition to accepting canned goods, McClure’s company, Hallucination Media LLC, which he runs with Bryan Nichols, also is taking online cash donations to help purchase meals.
Nichols said they are expecting more than 2,000 attendees this year, but by expanding to two nights, he said they hope to alleviate some of the congestion of past events.
Another plus, Nichols said, is that by taking over one club for an entire weekend, the Hallucination crew will have more time to decorate than in years past. “We get the week to decorate,” he said. “Normally we start at three in the morning right when the club closes for the Saturday event.”

McClure cautioned attendees to pace themselves in order not to miss any of the expected musical highlights staggered over both nights.
One must-see performance is expected to be Rabbit in the Moon, which formed in Tampa in 1992 with McClure, Bunny and David Christophere. The band, minus McClure, who left in the early 2000s, is helping headline the second night.
“I’m glad to have them back,” McClure said. “I know one-hundred-percent that David and Bunny will do something fun on Saturday.”
Looking at the lineup, it’s difficult to adequately describe the wealth of talent that will be on hand, or the scope of influence and impact that many of the performers have had in shaping electronic dance music.
Friday night’s co-headliner Christian Martin, the co-founder of Dirtybird BBQ, is doing two sets (drum & bass and house) in different rooms. “He’s the guy you don’t want to miss,” McClure said.
He’ll be joined by Sunshine, Monk, EDM mainstay Dieselboy, whose work dates back to the early 1990s, Dip Vertigo, co-founder of LA BEATDOWN, Tombz, a house and bass artist from Milwaukee, festival favorites Laser Assassins and more.
Saturday’s lineup includes a two-hour set by DJ Pierre, who is credited with pioneering acid house in the mid-1980s, Miami-based E.R.N.E.S.T.O., up-and-coming producer Aylen, Nerd Rage and more.
In addition to the artists, the custom-made props, video mapping, laser light show, stilt-walkers and go-go dancers that have become an integral part of Hallucination Before Christmas’s brand will all be on display.
After 25 years, McClure said it’s hard to believe how far the party has come.
“I’m proud of what we’ve done,” McClure said. “It’s pretty magical when you really think about it. It’s not just another club thing. It’s something special.”

John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
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