Full Moon Drum Circle: Like Burning Man, But Without the Naked People

Jugglers. Fire dancers. Kids. Businesswomen and men. Teenagers. Grandparents. A potluck. A sunset. Glow-in-the-dark hula hoops. The roar of the rising tide. A full moon trekking across the sky. A massive bonfire. And drumming.

Lots and lots of drumming.

There is an underground movement gaining momentum every full moon at . A movement that began as a weekly community drum circle almost a decade ago. A movement that continues to evolve into a time and place of free and unregulated self-expression. Not unlike Burning Man, the famed annual festival that takes place this week in the northern Nevada desert, but sans naked folks. 

Enter the man behind the movement: Billy Fried (as seen facilitating the drum circle in the video accompanying this story). A world traveler and lifelong musician with a degree in Asian philosophy, Billy moved from Venice Beach to Laguna in 1999 to work for an advertising agency, where he simultaneously fell in love with the vibes of the beach town and out of love with his corporate aspirations.

WATCH VIDEO FROM THE AUGUST 13 FULL MOON DRUM CIRCLE BY CLICKING ON THE YOUTUBE ICON IN THE BOX ON THE RIGHT —>

So in 2002, he started La Vida Laguna (LaVidaLaguna.com) in a bid to make a living off his passion for recreation (e.g., paddleboarding, kayaking, biking, surfing). Around the same time, Billy, who had been a regular at the Venice Beach drum circle, discovered the Sunday afternoon Phat Drum Circle on Main Beach, founded by Marcus Tucker (i.e., the Conga Man).

The two drummers forged an instant kinship. But when Tucker moved to Long Beach, Billy sensed a void in the community. That’s when, in 2003, he launched the first Full Moon Drum Circle on a small residential beach, Fisherman’s Cove. It wasn’t too long, however, when he realized the extent to which locals desired a reason to spend an evening in nature, make new friends, and get lost in the rhythms. After only three full moons, the circle outgrew its original spot, and the festivities were moved to a place with plenty of room to grow: Aliso State Beach.

And grow it has. Eight years later, and the Full Moon Drum Circle just keeps getting bigger, with upwards of 200-300 people during the summer, and about 50-100 people as the temperatures cool off in the winter.

“This is one of the only forms of mass entertainment that is free and unregulated—something rare in Laguna,” says Billy. “It’s a great party. Families come to watch, people dance. It’s just a great celebration of life. Everyone can participate and play a beat. Like Burning Man, this circle is about self-expression, in some cases radical. I love the accompaniment of fire dancers, hoopers, kids, grandfolk, jugglers. It’s a wonderful gathering of people who yearn to express themselves.”

Although for Billy Fried, drumming runs deeper than mere carnivalesque diversion.

“Rhythm is as essential as, well, a heartbeat,” he says. “A drum circle is a universal, primal experience that is about connecting to our African ancestry. It is a way for the community to come together and synergistically inspire the whole; a way of releasing oneself from attachment to daily suffering; a means of living totally in the moment.

“Native to virtually every culture for communication, celebration and prayer, drumming binds people of all age, race and gender in a non-verbal conversation that is unifying and healing,” says Fried. “It has a spiritual effect on people. And it is particularly powerful when done in a setting with all the natural elements: moon, fire, water, sand.”

From a medical perspective, drumming is one of the leading forms of music therapy in the world today, employed to help lower blood pressure, reduce stress and depression, assist in the mobility of patients suffering from Parkinsons disease, even help increase the cognitive abilities of Alzheimers patients. Studies have also shown that drumming aids the production of T-cells, thereby boosting the body’s immune system.

The Full Moon Drum Circles not only offer the community a chance to experience such health benefits (whether of the body, mind, or spirit), but also a chance to enliven a gratitude for lunar cycles, a custom widely lost in the West since the global standardization of the solar Gregorian calendar. Like drum circles, full moon celebrations and moon goddess worship date back hundreds of thousands of years, long before being misconstrued by the church as an evil/unlucky pagan superstition. Enter: fear-inducing wer-animal folklore, phobias of the moon (selenophobia) and the number 13 (triskaidekaphobia), not to mention the origin of derogatory words like “lunatic.”

Such repressed traditions of positive influence bring to mind something the famous American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance,” first published in 1841, but perhaps more applicable today than ever:

“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. [...] And it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have lost by refinement some energy …”

Perhaps drum circles should remind us all that sometimes the best way to look forward (whether in our own lives, or as a civilization persisting in a state of amnesia) is to rediscover knowledge that has been forgotten or stifled underground along the way. And by the look of the most recent Full Moon Drum Circle (see video), even after centuries of propaganda campaigns, people remain innately drawn to it.

“Our role is to bring it back and integrate it into our Western society, where we can communicate non-verbally, and find that common thread with others that promotes peace and compassion,” says Billy Fried. “If we could get Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Hindus to sit around together and drum, they might discover we have more in common than they thought.”

The next Full Moon Drum Circle will be on Monday, September 12, from 7-10 p.m. Potluck starts at 6 p.m. Needless to say, all are more than welcome. For a full schedule of upcoming circles, visit www.lavidalaguna.com/full-moon-drum-circle.