25 years later, How Weird Street Faire still embraces burner and raver culture

With its unexpected postponement at the last minute due to rain this past May, Saturday’s rescheduled How Weird Street Faire sorta kicked off autumn street fair season here in San Francisco —

If this coming weekend’s Folsom Street Fair is your older leather daddy, and next Sunday’s Castro Street Fair is your rich gay uncle, then How Weird, with its colorful costumes and loud sound systems blasting several types of electronic music, is definitely your raver girl little sister.

Although at 25 years old, she’s not so little anymore. It all began in 2000 at Howard and 12th Streets and — despite a 2008 shutdown similar to Burning Man’s early days — the event persisted. Now the longest-running EDM festival on the West Coast, How Weird has continued uninterrupted, even outlasting the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, which took several years off.

“This is my gift to humanity,” said Brad Olsen, founder and co-producer of the annual event. “It started very small, but it blew up, and it’s great to see it take on a life of its own. We are an electronic music lovers’ delight.”

That Burning Man connection runs deep at How Weird, with many of the stages run by the same local DJ crews that bring their large-scale sound theme camps to the playa, most notably Opulent Temple, who continue to hold down the intersection at 2nd and Howard each year. Indeed, before there was an official Burning Man Decompression event in San Francisco, How Weird was the unofficial local burner street party.

Despite their neighborhood troubles in 2008, the organizers persevered and managed to move the event 10 blocks east, where it’s been ever since. Olsen noted how these are the same blocks that now host the recent Downtown First Thursdays, pointing out that How Weird started that trend.

“They kind of stole our thunder a little bit,” he said, before looking around at over 10,000 costume-clad revelers surrounding him on all sides. “But obviously, there’s still something special about How Weird. It’s the Burning Man culture, it’s the costumes, it’s being whoever you want to be.”

Olsen is obviously proud of what he has wrought.

“We’re certainly the loudest street fair,” he yelled over the booming sound systems around him. But he’ll soon be ready to pass the torch. “We’re looking for good, solid producers who can step in and be the next generation, to take the mantle for the next 25 years.”

The day was packed with people in costumes that looked like they’d been pulled out of a thrift store and from a dream sequence. We wandered around through hula hoops and impromptu dance circles. It was the kind of chaos that only San Francisco would probably attempt — much less pull off.

I asked Olsen how it felt getting rained out on May the 4th — aka Star Wars Day — and he pointed to the How Weird 2024 shirt he’s wearing, complete with a Star Wars-inspired logo and design. “It’s the only time we picked out a specific date and then we couldn’t do it,” he said with a shrug.

“We knew a huge freak storm was coming in the morning, and all through set-up, it was a very hard rain. If someone had gotten hurt or electrocuted, it would have been the end of How Weird, so we just decided to take a break and live to fight another day.”

In the end, the delay didn’t matter much. How Weird came back louder and just as weird as always, and it was a beautiful day.

Adriana Roberts is a DJ and performer with her Bootie Mashup parties, as well as a writer and trans influencer.

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