S5, E28: Travel to Listen: The Spacey, Sunbaked Rock of California’s Mojave Desert

Welcome to “Travel to Listen,” a new Unpacked series hosted by veteran music journalist Tim Chester. Over four episodes rolling out every other week, Tim takes us into the cities where music is more than entertainment—it’s the shortcut to a place’s soul.

This week, he heads into the high desert of Southern California to find out why the Mojave has been spawning some of rock’s most original sounds for decades. Along the way, he discovers a landscape that’s every bit as wild and inspiring as the music it produces.

Transcript

Tim: Hi, I’m Tim Chester. This is Unpacked: Travel to Listen. And that is Queens of the Stone Age with “Regular John” from their self-titled debut album. As a freelance travel and culture writer, I’ve always loved music. In fact, I’ve spent the past 20 years exploring the world through the lens of music. As a reporter for magazines like NME and Afar, I’ve travelled to some of the world’s best festivals and music scenes everywhere from Manhattan to Malawi and Beijing to Berlin.

One thing I learned pretty quickly is that music really gets you to the heart of a place, and in this new Unpacked series, we’re looking at four different destinations in the US. Through Musical Lens. We’ve explored bright, bouncy Minneapolis funk and gotten soulful in Macon, Georgia.

In this episode, we’re setting our sights on the wide open spaces of the Californian desert. Most people associate the area with Coachella, the annual big pop fest near Palm Springs in April, or the country music weekender, Stagecoach. But the Mojave Desert around Joshua Tree has long been home to a very different kind of music.

It’s called desert rock, and it’s a loud, fuzzy, amorphous genre that encompasses stoner rock, psych rock, and any number of heavy guitar subgenres. Crucially, though, it’s a kind of sunbaked, spacey music that could only be concocted in the cactus filled, wide open spaces of the Mojave. You might have heard of some of the big names, like Queens of the Stone Age, Fu Manchu, and Kyuss, but there’s a whole sprawling family tree. On one of the branches of that tree sits Volume, a band from the city of Twentynine Palms, just outside Joshua Tree.

Give me. Give me what I want. Give me.

Tim: The band’s frontman, Patrick Brink, put on a two-day desert rock festival in the area earlier this year. It was called the Mojave Experience and was a great success. The lineup included key players like John Garcia from Kyuss, and the influential Yawning Man, who hailed from the desert city of La Quinta. Patrick wants to make it even bigger and better in spring 2027. His festival is a great primer on desert rock.

Patrick: That’s where the desert scene starts. There’s many people that try to emulate it, a lot of people in Europe and so forth. But I think it’s a hard thing to really emulate and capture unless you’re out here and part of it.

Tim: That’s the crucial thing about desert rock and what makes it so unique. It’s so firmly tied to a really singular landscape, I think wide open spaces full of cactus trees, rocky outcrops and small towns connected by a handful of roads.

Patrick: You know, even though the place has grown over the years, there’s still this isolation that the desert, I think you feel, you know, you walk outside in the night and it’s just you just see this whole night sky and the stars and you just feel minuscule in there. It’s just like, you know, you could walk in downtown and there’s people, but you go out in the desert and it’s like you’re just alone and you have time to reflect.

Tim: The climate plays a big part, too.

Patrick: We have some harsh weather out here. It gets sometimes 125, but the average is about 115 during the summer and then the winters get cold. I think some of those extremes help to inspire to write certain songs, and they come out certain ways, and you kind of have this desert sound. A lot of it, like I said, the isolation, the destituteness of the desert brings out some desperation in songs. And but there’s beauty in that too.

Tim: And this sense of space leads breathing room to the heaviest of the genre’s songs, which I personally find one of its biggest appeals.

Patrick: A lot of the desert rock scene, even Kyuss who were heavy, really heavy. They still had some space to their sound. And I’m not talking about outer space. I’m talking about. They let their songs breathe. There were songs that weren’t just just full riff-o-mania, but they breathe. They had some dynamics to it, and I think that’s a lot of the desert sound. There’s lots of dynamics. They could go from heavy to something very trippy and subtle, but never losing the edge overall.

Tim: Deserts can seem like harsh, unforgiving places in a widescreen view, but when you get up close and explore them on foot, you quickly realize how much life they harbor.

Patrick: You have flowers that bloom on cactuses, the contrast, the cactus is harmful, but they’re beautiful. And so there’s a lot of contrasts.

Tim: And the Mojave Desert is also a pretty spiritual place. The new agey kind of place for meditation, sound baths, and maybe even the odd UFO sighting. A lot of that dates back to the 1960s, when aviator and inventor George Van Tassel built a dome shaped structure known as the Integratron, which you can still visit today. Van Tassel held UFO gatherings at a place called Giant Rock, which, as the name suggests, is a giant rock that’s one of the biggest freestanding boulders in the world.

It’s a pilgrimage site for bands. Psychedelic San Diego rockers Earthless played an immense show there a few years back. Check it out on YouTube. Earthless headlined this year’s Mojave Festival, which was inspired by the generator parties bands used to throw out here in the desert. If you’re lucky, you might catch one.

Patrick: You’re out in the middle of the desert, under the stars, listening to bands, you know, being powered by generators. And that’s a cool place out there. They have lots of shows, obviously during the summer, not so many, but during the fall and winter there’s way more shows.

Tim: Desert rock is great road trip music. The tracks lend themselves to widescreen daydreams behind the wheel. You could load up a playlist from our show notes or tune in to local radio.

Patrick: We have a local radio station up here, Z107.7, For the most part it’s Top 40, but we have some local showcase shows. There’s one that Pat Kerns curates bands every Sunday. It’s a 2-hour show and it has all the local bands playing on it. So he has an eclectic mix of different bands from folk to way spaced out crazy stuff to rock stuff to punk stuff like. It just runs the gamut of all sorts of music that’s coming out of this high desert Morongo Basin area. It’s called the Local Show on Z107.7.

Tim: After the break, we’re going to hear about why the desert appeals to a whole range of creatives, and we’ll dive into some top spots for travelers to check out.

I want to take shelter from the poison rain. Where the streets have no name.

Tim: The rock and roll connections to the Californian desert are legion. U2’s Joshua Tree album was inspired by the landscape. Lennon and Morrison both visited. Gram Parsons was particularly taken with the place. He sadly died in a motel here, and his ashes were scattered in the desert by his manager. That is a whole other story worth looking up.

A few years back, I took a trip to find the shrine to him, hidden behind a small rock out there. But it’s not just musicians who’ve been drawn to this barren yet captivating landscape. Filmmakers and other creatives have been pulled in to Roc Gardner, who moved here just over a decade ago from New York. The songwriter and entrepreneur bought a house and some land to turn into a recording studio. He wanted something different from the big city, and he got exactly that.

Roc: You can imagine on the first night, them handing over the keys and saying, see you later, and just being there in pitch darkness with, you know, a million stars, but kind of every single noise, thinking that it was something or something was going to jump out of the bushes.

Tim: His place is fittingly called ESCAPE, and it’s a creative retreat for artists, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians. It was inspired by the famous Rancho de la Luna, a studio here that has played host to a wide range of bands from the desert rock scene and beyond. ESCAPE itself has been used by everyone from usher to the Arctic Monkeys since it opened, but guests come from a range of fields.

Roc: It’s a meeting place for people, and we’ve had lots of, you know, business people to thought leaders to spiritual people.

Tim: I asked Roc why this seemingly barren, out of the way place is so appealing.

Roc: The very core of it, there’s this creative juju that exists where I don’t know if it’s just getting away from the city and the static and the noise, but you actually go somewhere. Hutch, who works over at Rancho de la Luna in Queens, stone age engineer, front of house. He always describes it as finding the space between the notes, which I really like.

They made it far too easy to believe that true romance can’t be achieved these days.

Roc: It’s really the space. And then there’s something where it’s kind of like this idea of ideas flying past your head and you catch them. And as a musician, you’re catching musical ideas or narratives.

Tim: There’s loads to do for travelers here. To Joshua Tree National Park is a big one with its hiking and rock climbing. And then there’s Pioneertown, an old cowboy movie set you can walk around, with Pappy and Harriet’s saloon and restaurant.

Roc: Pappy and Harriet’s is, um, a mile away from where we live, which, for anyone that doesn’t know, is a sort of legendary music venue. It’s had people like Paul McCartney in there. Basically, anybody who’s anybody who’s touring, if they’re coming through that part of the world plays at Pappy’s. 300 people inside, 1,000 people outside. So it’s just it’s a vibe.

Tim: The whole area’s got a lot more popular. In recent years, broadsheets have run profiles, hipster hotels and boutiques have opened up. But Roc insists the place hasn’t lost its charm.

Roc: It definitely hasn’t lost it. I mean, it’s too far away from anything to really get destroyed. The truth is, is that, you know, most people that go out there that aren’t a good fit will tend to go back home, you know, 6 weeks later.

Well, you say it’s dead and gone.

Tim: For him, the real draw is the space and the silence. Something I think many of us are seeking out more and more. Whether we want to create or just feel more alive in an increasingly digital world.

Roc: I mean, that’s been, it’s been my absolute heart and soul since I moved there. I mean, there was a sort of initial shock of being chucked into the, the, the deep end of a cold bath and then, um, you know, just learning to live, live with the silence, finding what’s important, switching off from all the, the BS that we all get fed every day and kind of realizing that there was this universe above us. You know.

Tim: I know what he means. I live pretty close by, and I can attest to the benefit of a few hours hiking or gazing at the stars to reset yourself after too many pings and notifications. If your travels take you to Los Angeles or Palm Springs or Coachella. I definitely recommend taking a detour to the Mojave and Joshua Tree.

Roc: I mean, lots of people know about the desert, but if you’ve never been there, get a group of friends, get an Airbnb, you know, go out for a few days and just just go and see a show. The Integratron is awesome. Honestly, just the stargazing and getting to kind of realize that you’re not just in a city always that you’re actually on a planet. It’s really good. It’s good for your mind, you know?

Tim: Check out our show notes for tips on visiting, plus music to stream on the trip. This has been Unpacked: Travel to Listen, a podcast of Afar Media. The show is a part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. The podcast was produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland and me, Tim Chester. Music composition by Chris Colin.

I’ll be back in two weeks hearing about big news at Detroit’s Motown Museum.