Ill-fated music festival shaped today's local rock scene
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20101121/LIFESTYLES0101/11210303/Ill-fated-music-festival-shaped-today-s-scene
Pushed out of city limits, new sound thrived in desert
Bruce Fessier
November 21, 2010
Today's desert rock scene is defined by an eclectic mix of artists
inspired by the generator scene that produced the platinum-selling
Queens of the Stone Age, a band led by Palm Desert's Josh Homme.
But the seeds of that scene were unwittingly planted just over 40
years ago, when the biggest rock festival in Palm Springs history
took a violent turn and dramatically altered the local musical landscape.
It was 22 months after the Monterey Pop Festival proved huge rock
audiences could coexist in peace, with love and understanding. It was
four months before Woodstock and eight months before the festival
movement came crashing down at Altamont.
The Palm Springs Pop Festival in April 1969 showcased Steve Miller,
Ike and Tina Turner, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Flying Burrito
Brothers featuring Gram Parsons, the Jeff Beck Group featuring Rod
Stewart, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band with trumpeter Steve Madaio,
Procol Harum with guitarist Robin Trower and John Mayall with future
Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, all playing for about $4 a night.
"Underground" Los Angeles FM stations, including KPPC and KMET,
presented the festival over two days during Easter week at the old
Palm Springs Drive-In on Ramon Road and what is now Palm Springs Stadium.
The first night became "a riot situation" when 5,000 concert-goers
filled the drive-in. The team of 55 Palm Springs police and sheriff's
deputies swelled to 200 law enforcement officers coming from as far
as San Diego to keep the peace. Three Indio deputies were injured
amid rampant vandalism, and The Desert Sun reported "Free love was
evident in the arrest of a 16-year-old who was found in a sleeping
bag in the nude with her shorts-clad boyfriend."
The second night was described as "virtually a battle royal between
officers and more than 1,000 hard-core hippie and Yippie types.
Comparative peace was maintained" among the 3,500 youths inside the
stadium, the newspaper said, but 1,500 outside the festival "became
irate when they were not permitted to crash through the gates without paying."
When the crowds spilled across the street and vandalized a Shell gas
station, the police formed a line. The service station owner stood
armed among them and shot and killed a 16-year-old boy in what
authorities later deemed self-defense.
The Desert Sun didn't write about the music or even mention the names
of the bands. It did review a benefit concert hosted by Frank Sinatra
and Don Rickles that same week. It was accompanied by a photograph of
Sinatra wearing an Indian headdress.
Original, raucous rock 'n' roll has always played second fiddle to
Sinatra-type music in Palm Springs. It has been nurtured in
blue-collar bars outside of the city since the mid-1950s, but the
disastrous Palm Springs Pop Festival drove it further into the sand
in the desert.
Permits weren't issued for outdoor concerts in Palm Springs for more
than a decade. When a new rock movement surfaced in the 1980s, it
took root in areas so remote that young musicians used portable
generators to power their instruments.
That "generator scene" has since become legendary in select regions
around the world:
• The London-based Facebook page, facebook.com/desertscene, has 5,000
friends and is starting a fan page to support more than 150 bands
with Coachella Valley ties from Queens of the Stone Age to the
short-lived Hermano. Those fans launched Desertscene.co.uk earlier
this month to follow "downtuned and fuzzed out" bands touring the UK
and Europe.
• At least five documentaries have recently been produced with
footage on the desert rock scene. "Lo Desert Sound" focuses on the
Coachella Valley and "Nowhere Now (The Ballad of Joshua Tree)"
features the high desert scene.
• The Desert Rock Music Series at the Indio Performing Arts Center,
called Desert Rock at the IPAC, launches tonight to showcase bands
that grew out of the generator scene and new artists whose music
ranges from rock to hip-hop. It's presented by mydesert.com and
executive produced by musician and restaurateur Mario Lalli Jr., a
seminal figure in the evolution of the desert rock scene.
Lalli, 44, says he didn't start the generator scene, but he became
its major organizer.
"A friend of mine turned me on to the idea of having a generator to
be able to practice wherever we wanted to play," Lalli said. "We'd
hike up a dirt road off Mulholland Drive and just jam there and drink
beers, and nobody bothered us. So we started thinking, 'Let's do
something down in the desert because we've got some great spots.' You
can do whatever you want if you go far enough out at least we thought so."
Zach Huskey of Dali's Llama recalls the desert scene coalescing in
the early 1980s, when they were temporarily able to rent the old Frye
Building near Palm Springs Stadium. Huskey recalls Lalli as one of
the pioneering figures, along with:Sean Wheeler, whose latest band,
Throwrag, just played the Orange County Hootenanny with Chuck Berry
and Jerry Lee Lewis. Alfredo Hernandez, whose powerful drumming has
been integral to perhaps a dozen bands, including Kyuss and Queens of
the Stone Age and Lalli's Yawning Man.
'No grand design'
The punk band Target 13, which recorded the "Rodney on the ROQ" theme
song for the influential disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer of KROQ in
Pasadena, was led by Myke Bates, who owned Bates Skates in Palm
Springs. The punk scene was inextricably linked to the skateboard
culture of the late 1970s and early '80s, and when the city of Palm
Springs passed an ordinance banning skating on downtown sidewalks in
1979, the skateboarders found sites out of town.
"Everyone would meet at Bates Skates down on Palm Canyon," Lalli
said. "There were some older guys that had long been playing original
music influenced by the punk scene. I was like, 'Wow, this thing you
think only happens in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's
happening here!'"
The skateboarders were "a very tight-knit group," Lalli said, and
they shared a philosophy with the punks.
"It wasn't so much about music as it was about, 'What can we do
around here to express ourselves?'" he said. "You hear skateboarders
talk about that all the time 'this is my expression, this is my
art.' Pretty soon for me, the skateboard went into the closet, and
the guitar changed my life."
Lalli began promoting generator parties to give the group something
to do and developed what he called "a business sense of organization."
The parties grew in popularity until one in the Indian Canyons drew
1,000 youths.
"They were very stealth," Lalli said. "You'd go around the high
schools and give them fliers with a map on the back call this guy
to get the directions and we'd move it around. We'd go to the dump!
Indio Hills was insane."
But Fatso Jetson drummer Tony Tornay said the the generator parties
have been romanticized in the media.
"There's been this sort of mysticism of the whole generator scene,"
he said. "I'd love to say we were just a merry band of mystical
punkers that had this awesome idea, but Palm Springs, Palm Desert,
Indio, there wasn't a place if you were 15 years old and you had a
band for you to play. So, you were either playing house parties, or
you're getting a generator and going to find a place. There was no
grand design to it. It just so happened we used to have all that space."
Lalli opened Rhythm & Brews restaurant in Indio in 1994 to give young
musicians a mainstream place to play. It closed in less than two
years, and Lalli and his cousin, Fatso Jetson bassist Larry Lalli,
now run Cafe 332 in Sierra Madre.
Many of the musicians from the generator scene, including Josh Homme
of Queens of the Stone Age and Joe Lester of the Silversun Pickups,
moved to Los Angeles to pursue their musical careers.
But like Lalli, they keep coming back to the desert, their creative
fountainhead.
When the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival moved into the Empire
Polo Club in 1999, not far from where generator parties had been held
a decade earlier, it seemed the culmination of years of trying to
bring compelling, independent rock to the desert.
"Up to Coachella, every time someone tried to do something, like
Rhythm & Brews or all the things Mario tried or various festivals
it always fell on deaf ears," Homme said. "So it's really great to
see there really is some permanence to the idea that there's a desert
sound and a scene and that Coachella works."
--
Related
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http://www.mydesert.com/article/20101121/LIFESTYLES0101/11200360/New-generation-expands-desert-rock-sound
Desert rock first began at nightclubs outside city limits
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20101121/LIFESTYLES0101/101120004/Desert-rock-first-began-at-nightclubs-outside-city-limits
Five songs that best represent the desert sound
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20101121/LIFESTYLES0101/101120005/Five-songs-that-best-represent-the-desert-sound
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