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. “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. Sonic Youth songs for guitar (acoustic chord and electric tab), tablature for bass guitar, ukulele chord, notes for drum. “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’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |