![]() If it brings you joy and it brings other people joy, what happens if you just do it?’”Īnd Mayer did, in fact, do it. I told myself, ‘Don’t steer away from it. “I’m using sonic color-coding, like the sonic paint codes from the '80s, but I’m making new images with them. Sounds unusually specific? It is. “I don’t want to say it’s a costume, but it is an intention,” Mayer says. I’m using sonic color-coding, like the sonic paint codes from the '80s, but I’m making new images with them The result is a record that recalls Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac, Toto and Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller and various members of the Eagles – but recalls, precisely, the type of matured, occasionally mellowed-out music these seasoned artists were making in the '80s. After Sonic Youth finished and the Meat Puppets came on, they asked for the lighting to be switched off and performed by moonlight as hundreds of revellers pulsed along to the music in hallucinogenic synchronicity.“I think everyone who makes music comes at it from a fantasy,” he says, “but for me the fantasy this time was, what if it’s 1988 and I had had a band in the late '60s through the '70s, and now I’m my age in the '80s and people are handing me these things called chorus pedals, or people are going, ‘Hey, you don’t need a tube amp anymore.’ And I go, ‘You don’t? Okay. “There really was no show like that that we ever did again,” says Ranaldo. The band knew something special had happened. The combination was a potent one as the furious assault of tracks such as Death Valley 69 surged into the now pitch-black and icy-cool desert night. “Everybody I’ve ever met who was at that concert was dosed.” ![]() “Aside from the four of us in Sonic Youth, everyone else was tripping,” says Ranaldo. It turns out someone had brought 500 hits of LSD – enough for everyone in attendance. A lot of people were kind of stunned by it, with us using screwdrivers to play and the strange tunings on our guitars.”Īs the band hurtled through their set, with frenzied guitars buzzing, screeching and ricocheting off the mountainous backdrop, the audience became even more transfixed. Plus, nobody had seen us play before and what we were doing at that time was pretty unique. People gathered around the band in a circle, with everyone on the same level in the sand. “The crowd was completely absorbed by what we were doing,” he says. It was dusk as Sonic Youth started, and Ranaldo felt a palpable intensity from the audience. “We had no expectations of what was going to go down.” ![]() “We really didn’t know what it was going to turn into,” Ranaldo recalls. ![]() “It had an element of danger that normal events never have,” says Ranaldo.Īnticipation was high for the New York band who had never played a show on the west coast before. I don’t even remember there being toilets.” There was also no food, no bar, no merch stall, and people had to sign a liability disclaimer so that they wouldn’t sue the promoter if they got hurt. We stood right on the sand, kicking up dust storms as we played. “We were nestled in between some sort of rocky mountain walls and they just demarcated an area where the bands played. “It was completely makeshift,” Ranaldo remembers of the set-up. Sonic Youth and the Desolation Center crowd. ‘We were kicking up dust storms as we played’. ![]()
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