Desolation Center was a festival in the
California desert without food, drink or toilets, but with a lot of hallucinogenic drugs. Lee Ranaldo recalls the danger – and the freedom
In 1983, 20-year-old promoter Stuart Swezey was sick of his gigs getting shut down by
Los Angeles cops. On a road trip across
Mexico he had an epiphany: move them out to the desert. Under the name Desolation Center, he booked local post-punk bands Minutemen and Savage Republic, hired some school buses and drove people out to the uninhabited windswept landscape where the bands played on a dried up riverbed with socks over their microphones to keep sand out. The following year, the German industrial outfit Einstürzende Neubauten played in a more sheltered location in a canyon; there was also an explosive performance from Survival Research Laboratories who decided to make bombs and blow up the discarded fridges that had been fly-tipped there.
It had an element of danger that normal events never have