You never know which of your quiet suburban neighbours might once have been a globetrotting “superstar” DJ.

Chris Frolic, né Samojlenko, has been leading a spy-like double life for nearly 15 years since retiring both his giddy Anabolic Frolic alias and the beloved Hullabaloo! rave brand in July of 2005, guarding his secret past so closely that until recently he almost didn’t admit it to himself. Not because there wasn’t a lot of joy involved in that past, but because when darkness intruded on that joy it weighed on him all the heavier.

“That part of my life, I kind of ran away from for a long time. Like, I just didn’t want to think about it,” he concedes. “I needed time to heal. Some of the stuff that I went through was just so traumatic to me, but I didn’t even realize it. Here was a significant part of my life and I just didn’t talk about it.”

Frolic’s dramatic rise to the top during the late-1990s era of “peak rave” in Toronto, when thousands regularly flocked to underground dance parties in dimly lit corners of the city and this town was essentially ground zero for the movement in North America, is detailed in his new memoir, “Requiem for My Rave: The Story of Anabolic Frolic, Happy Hardcore and Hullabaloo!” So, too, are the tragic circumstances that brought it all crashing down for a big-hearted human being who cared deeply about the events he threw and the young crowds who attended them.

When a 20-year-old Ryerson student named Allan Ho died of a drug-related mishap at a Hullabaloo! event dubbed “A View to a Thrill” in October of 1999, Frolic quickly became a media scapegoat for the rampant anti-rave panic then bubbling over amongst local authorities and conservative politicians — not least because the ludicrously overdriven, 150-bpm “happy hardcore” sounds beloved by the Hulla hordes, and in which he dealt when DJ-ing as Anabolic Frolic, were largely impenetrable to all but their devotees and tended to attract a youthful crowd fond of playing garish dress-up in fun fur, phat pants and DayGlo bracelets. Most parents were never going to understand this scene and Frolic, who admits in the book to trying Ecstasy exactly once in his life, was painted in countless news stories to follow and during the ensuing court inquest into Ho’s death as a sort of electronic-age Pied Piper leading Toronto’s children down the road to hell.

When another Hullabaloo! patron was stabbed to death at a party held at the lakeside club then known as the Docks (now Rebel) a year later, the end was already in sight. So Frolic, more emotionally devastated than he let on but also sensing the gradual fragmentation of the rave scene and its retreat from disused warehouses and loft spaces into more traditional club settings, decided to gradually wind it down toward one last bash, Hulla’s 44th, dubbed “All Good Things …” at the Opera House in 2005.

Fittingly, Frolic, now 45, will return to the Opera House on Tuesday, Nov. 19, for a new Hullabaloo! event dubbed “One Last Group Hug” to mark the release of “Requiem for My Rave.” It’s not a rave itself, although traditional Hulla costumery is welcome, but “a version of a high-school reunion” and a place to reconnect with friends and familiar faces who shared formative experiences on the dancefloor all those years ago.

“I’m starting to hear from people how important this time in their lives was, y’know, 20 years later and they’re really excited and they’re making me remember how important it was for me and them,” says Frolic. “I was just a young guy. At the time I was in my early 20s and I didn’t even understand it, the responsibility of everything and what raves offered to them and what I was offering, specifically. And that service to them was paramount over everything.

“In pinball, you use the term ‘beneficial malfunction’ when the machine is not working properly but it’s benefiting the player. And in the book I refer to my own beneficial malfunction, which was just to compartmentalize my trauma and all this overwhelming stuff that was going on so I could stay focused on my mission — which was to continue the events and to continue to serve the ravers because this was important to a lot of people.”

Pinball terms abound in “Requiem for My Rave,” so it should, perhaps, come as no surprise that this interview was conducted in the basement arcade Frolic and his wife, Robin — who have two young boys aged 11 and 13 — have built below their home in North York. They’re both pinball freaks and often host tournaments and charity events in the space. Robin presides over her own women’s pinball league.

Frolic, who briefly took up stage hypnotism after leaving the DJ world, was able to pay for this passion after co-creating the highly successful “webinar” platform StealthSeminar.com with the very same chap who mentored him in hypnotism. The software now boasts 25 million users and has reaped far more rewards than he ever saw from his days as a promoter and a DJ. Even though Anabolic Frolic’s “Happy 2 B Hardcore” mix-disc series for the old Moonshine Records sold more than 400,000 copies, for instance, such achievements didn’t exactly make him rich. In the book he recalls being paid a flat fee of $1,000 to do the first volume.

“I did that work under an alias to not reveal that the person who created this technology was also this DJ,” he says of StealthSeminar. “I didn’t think it was going to serve the business. I was kind of leading a different life. And I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t maintain an online presence, I didn’t do anything. Until this year.”

Even the manuscript for “Requiem for My Rave” languished on Frolic’s hard drive for a decade. It was only through working with a therapist and “unbottling these deep memories” that he got to a point where he was to go back to it and realized “this is good, powerful stuff here.” And it is: not only does “Requiem” put you right in the middle of an important chapter in Toronto’s musical and counterculture history, it’s also a nakedly self-analytical coming-of-age tale and a rather sweet love story. If you were part of the rave scene that Frolic brings back to vivid life in the book’s pages, you can’t help but agree with his conclusion that “what a shame it was” it disintegrated so quickly.

“Toronto has this desire to be a world-class city and a tourism destination and for a brief moment we had this thing that was world-class and amazing and awesome and some people just decided they didn’t want it,” he shrugs. “We were doing something that had never been done. And it was palpable. You knew it. You were in the middle of it and you were, like, ‘This has never been done before.’ It was an awesome feeling. And there was certainly a naïveté for myself — well, I believe collectively we all had a naïveté — that anything bad could happen. And, well, it was a blow, that’s for sure.

“I would say it took me 20 years to fully recover, to the point now that I’m not only able to share the story but in a deeply authentic way. I hope that comes across in the book. There’s nothing held back.”

If you’re harbouring hopes that Anabolic Frolic might get behind the turntables at his launch party next Tuesday, keep dreaming.

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“The short answer is ‘no,’” says Frolic. “I feel I accomplished everything I wanted to. This book was my last bit of unfinished business (and) it was never about nostalgia — people ask me to spin all the time but I know but I know it’s a nostalgic reason that they’re asking and I don’t want to be part of that. Or sometimes people will be, like, ‘we need you’ because of what I represent. But what I represent has passed. It doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s nothing for me to give you any longer except to reminisce and I just don’t want to do that.

“I’m not interested in nostalgia. What we did, it was not nostalgia and when it was going to become nostalgia I didn’t want to continue. It was always about creating something new and I want to help people create something new today, and how might I be a bridge between what we did then and something else now. And I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m throwing it out there.”