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What Goth Wroth

Local Goth scene rises from the dead By Rob Pratt AS IF TO PROVE Barnard Hughes' line in The Lost Boys--"One thing I could never stand about Santa Carla [or Santa Cruz, where the movie was filmed] is all the damn vampires"--the local gothic scene has long haunted downtown streets, from the Vampires scooter club to vampire game-players who once gathered every Friday near Bookshop Santa Cruz. Lately, the Gothic scene has shadowed the Blue Lagoon on Mondays led by Yuma Tripp, a member of the Octane DJ collective who spins vinyl under the handle DJ Tripp. "It basically started out for me between the end of junior high and high school," says Tripp of his mid-'80s fascination with bands like Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. "When I first came here and started spinning at the Blue Lagoon about a year and a half ago, I'd do '80s and mix in a lot of that stuff. Then I realized that this town is full of people who like it--just go to Caffe Pergolesi and everybody's dressed in black." Monday, though, is a tough night. Attendance has waned, and Tripp has found it difficult to please the devoted who do show up with a mix of Gothic sounds and harder industrial and electronic metal from the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. "It's really going good in bigger cities with more variation," he adds, lamenting that Santa Cruz's growing scene hasn't reached the kind of critical mass that San Francisco's has. "We're going to change the focus of it a little with stuff like Portishead and some more electronica-based sounds." [ Santa Cruz | MetroActive Central | Archives ]