*Blaine Bishop is a musician from the Philadelphia area writing about his time playing music on the road. Check his band Murph out! https://www.facebook.com/MurphRock
It was around 4:30 when Andrew and I pulled into the parking area around Salvation Mountain. This was the destination, a hundred miles or so east of San Diego, and a few miles north of Mexico in the small town of Niland, California. We had arrived. In front of me was a desert hill that a man named Leonard Knight, painted and built upon with hay bales, old tires and plaster all of which were donated. Leonard was a man of faith who believed that god wanted him to paint this out of the way desert mountain as a testament to Christianity, faith and love. The Southern California desert is the most desolate, harsh, sparse,sun beaten place I have ever experienced, and to see this technicolor piece of art in the midst of it is truly a bizarre sight. Things only got stranger as the day progressed. Salvation Mountain is the unofficial gateway to an unofficial "city" called Slab City. Slab City is located on some 600 acres on a decommissioned military base in Imperial County, California, the states poorest county. After the base closed some of the military personnel began squatting there, and forty years later it is home to around 200 year round residents and between 1000-2000 snowbirds, tourists, eccentrics, addicts, homeless and various other types who all live there rent free. Slab City and Salvation mountain have gained some notoriety after the areas were featured in the movie "Into the Wild."
If there is one thing I have learned from Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Morrison and Tony Soprano its that when your in the desert psychedelic drugs are an essential ingredient. That being said it was around 6:00 when the sun had set and the weekly music showcase at "The Range" Slab City's outdoor music venue started...The drugs began to kick in about the same time. The p.a. system, amps and lights were run on generators and blasted the out of tune, distorted songs into the night. The fluctuating temperatures in the desert wreak havoc on guitar necks, so basically every musician I heard is completely out of tune, but the sound that comes out is perfectly in tune with the bizarre surroundings and sounds exactly as it should. There is nothing for the sound to reverberate off of in the desert and which gives the music a very crisp and almost desperate sound like every note is fighting to sustain and be heard for just a little bit longer. The music is there and and just as quickly disappears into the night. Everyone played music rooted in the blues,on old beat up cheap guitars through solid state amps with the gain cranked way up.
Andrew and I were scheduled to play a set much later in the night so I took to listening, digging and dancing to the desert blues. . A well dressed musician who looked to be in his early twenties took the stage and it turned out that he was from Iceland and had traveled all the way to Slab City to play a set at the famous "Range." His name was Raggi and he played a really pretty song about the first time he saw Manhattan, called Every Brick. It was a bit sappy and sentimental but sung with such an honest enthusiasm and sense of excitement that it tugged my heart stings hearing about a small town Icelander seeing New York for the first time. I met a trumpet player named Mason who carried his trumpet wrapped in towel under his arm like it was a gun...And he tells people it's an A.K. 47... which although isn't true could very well be true. This place is not like the wild west it really is the wild west, the inmates have taken over the asylum.. Several other bands played classic rock and blues songs, with different musicians sitting in. The usual lineup was two guitars, bass, drums and various accordion players, horn players and percussionists sitting in, giving all of the music kind of a similar sound.
All the while I was dancing like a mad man, there was a group of young, good looking, well dressed musicians standing next to the stage waiting to play. It looked like these kids were raised on Avocados and California sunshine and were way too well dressed and healthy looking to be full time desert people.. The five piece band took to the stage and tuned up for a few minutes and then burst into a distorted explosion of driving, dirty, desert blues. The band was called Jesus Son, and sounded like a mix between early Rolling Stones, the Black Keys and a freight train. Their tube amps cranked a fury of distorted blues into the air, and everyone at the Range was put under the same spell, dancing and shaking to the strange vibrations. The celebration and madness had a religious fervor to it as people danced like wild Indians, snakes and lizards. The music and the people dancing had this very primal and animalistic energy to it that the band propelled and fed off of. I couldn't decipher a thing the singer sang but understood every word. For their last song they invited everyone on stage so I hopped on the stage next to the drummer and jumped around and played an empty Miller High life bottle with a drum stick. I'm was surprised the bottle didn't shatter every time I crashed in on the one alongside the drummer. There were ten musicians or so on the stage grooving , playing and dancing with band, while I was jumping up and down dripping with sweat and completely out of my mind playing my empty High Life bottle. There was no separation between the band and the audience there was just this explosive celebration of noise, music, life, death, blues and rhythm that everyone was creating and was apart of.
It was a truly transcendental experience banging on that bottle with that band in the desert that night and one of my favorite musical experiences ever. Right before Andrew and I were set to play I realized that he was gone. He had disappeared in to the desert with his guitar and the only flashlight. I ended up playing a few songs by myself which are not really noteworthy. By this point in the night the drugs had really taken a hold of me and the neck of my guitar was moving around like a snake, which made it a struggle to get the songs out. After my set it was really late, the crowd began thinning out and things seemed to get a lot shadier and more dangerous without lights and music. I had no idea how to get back to my campsite so I tracked down Mason, the A.K. 47 carrying trumpet player to walk me to my campsite. There was no possible way I would have been able to find it in the desert blackness...and especially in my condition.
Andrew had gotten sketched out by the madness of The Range and got lost in the desert for a few hours before eventually finding the campsite. At one point during his trek home, lost and tripping, he laid down on his guitar case to gain his composure and was almost peed on by a very startled woman. Mason was singing "Purple Rain" as he guided me effortlessly through the dark sand and brush with no flashlight. As I got back to the campsite I saw that Andrew made it back before me and had a fire started. We drank all night, traded desert stories, laughed hysterically, and took in the beautiful night sky and landscape that looked like a postcard from another planet.
In the morning the euphoric notion of this free city where great art and music are cultivated was pretty much shattered. There is no plumbing or any kind of sanitation in slab city. People dig holes and do their dirty and fill them in...Or just shit where they stand... There are no rules so why not?The morning sun really shows the utter filth that "Into the Wild" failed to quite capture. There are a lot of meth addicts, ex cons, current cons, run a ways and every kind hustler, criminal and dealer imaginable. Wild abandoned dogs run around and bark all night, guns go off in the middle of the night and there is an active air-force bombing range right next to Slab City. It was a once in a lifetime visit and something I will never forget but I felt a huge sense of relief and excitement as I drove out of "The Last Free place in America. So the moral of the story is this; take L.S.D in the desert, listen to "Jesus Sons" (I'm not sure if they're a Christian rock band or being ironic. On the road if you carry your instrument like it is a weapon people just might believe it is.
