Here's Why Desert Stars Is the Chill Antithesis of Every Other Festival in America

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Here's Why Desert Stars Is the Chill Antithesis of Every Other Festival in America

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Dinosaur Jr., Sloan, and a few 1000 music fans decamped the Joshua Tree for some good times.

The desert hippie is a lucky individual. The desert is everywhere, and the hippie, bound by nothing, can be anywhere. In America, where the wilderness is consistently and furiously intruded upon by invasive (human) species, the desert is one of the last relatively untouched refuges. In this the midst of this brutally beautiful landscape is Pioneertown—a little less than 15 miles west of Joshua Tree—and the annual home to Desert Stars music festival. First established in 2007, Pioneertown is where those lucky hippies called home this past weekend.

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Founded by musician and producer Tommy Dietrick​, the fest is preposterously unassuming, but its charm appears from the moment you turn off Highway 62, and drive up the breathtaking road flanked by stacks of boulders. There lies Pioneertown's one-block strip of pottery shops and mercantiles, the heart of which is Pappy & Harriet's, an indoor-outdoor bar and venue to which locals travel from various parts of the Yucca Valley—and, amidst festival season, LA—to drink, eat, and dance.

As it's wont to do, outbound traffic from LA precluded me from seeing Friday's early acts, although I arrived just in time to catch Toronto's Sloan, who led a masterclass in pop songwriting. The quartet (with a fifth player added for this show) blasted through their 1996 staple One Chord to Another in its entirety. Given that the festival is purposefully kept small, there were only about 300 people in attendance. I had to keep on reminding myself that Sloan is still one of the biggest bands in Canada. To see them perform on a such a small stage with Joshua trees and a desert sunset as the backdrop was pretty unforgettable.

Desert Stars has kept fans coming back for nearly a decade now because of such moments. It's hard not to compare this festival to its desert neighbor, Coachella, although in scale it's practically 100 percent smaller, but because of this, Dietrick and his organizational team treat their concertgoers as friends, not dollar signs. The two stages at Pappy & Harriet's outdoor venue were free of any obvious corporate branding, the beer was cheap, and Dietrick himself was a constant presence in the crowd, making sure everyone was having a good time when he wasn't enjoying the lineup he'd handpicked. Desert Stars feels like the platonic ideal of a festival: It exists for good music and fond memories.

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Sloan play Desert Stars Festival 2016

The opening evening's festivities continued after Sloan's set with music from Strawberry Alarm Clock. This LA-based band are an actual 60s relic, and I had no idea they existed outside of "Incense and Peppermints," let alone were still making music. Unlike other perceived one-hit wonders, the quartet (plus a keyboard player at least 40 years younger than the band's original members) had no interest in banking on "Incense" to keep the audience engaged. The group, led by Ed King, had to be a combined age of almost 300 years, but that didn't prevent multiple drum solos, a weird electric sitar thing, or a full embrace of being perhaps the most tangible definition of an anachronism I've ever seen. They were an acid flashback coming to life, a Woodstock memory your weird uncle told you about 10 times. It was tremendous. Seeing old dudes who not only don't care what you think, but are actively uninterested in your opinion, is a wonderful sight. At one point on Saturday I peed next to King, who was confused as to why he was peeing so much. I said it was probably the altitude. It's probably because he's, you know, old.

Strawberry Alarm

Speaking of anachronisms, it's hard to watch …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead without thinking they existed 10 years too early. Any post-rock band from the early 2000s was inevitably and swiftly swallowed by the Explosions in the Sky death star, which isn't particularly fair considering …AYWKUBTTOD isn't really post-rock at all. They played Source Tags and Codes in its entirety, an album with vulnerable lyrics, heavy, emotive choruses, and pummeling yet melodic guitar lines. Sound familiar? …AYWKUBTTOD could co-headline a 2016 tour with The Hotelier, Cymbals Eat Guitars, or Modern Baseball. They pretty much invented the emo-art rock aesthetic a decade before anyone gave a shit, except for the few hundred fans screaming along to every word the Austin, Texas-based group sang at them. It seemed as if every person who cares about the band was in attendance—I admittedly did a double take when I saw they were headlining the first night—but their set was enthralling. Dietrick has curated a festival less concerned with appearance than performance. And so it's easy to show up to the festival's opening night expecting to leave early and instead stay for every single moment of Source Tags and Codes, leaving shaken during its finale, and wishing the album was 10 or 20 songs longer.

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…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

And this is precisely what the Desert Stars organizers do best. They attract bands with niche, dedicated followings. None of the 20 or so bands on the lineup could be described as huge, or even particularly relevant. But by including groups that inspire rabid devotion, the audience is constantly involved—happy to be witnessing their heroes in such close proximity—meanwhile the bands are swallowed with love and energy. When Lou Barlow's Sebadoh spent the first segment of their Saturday set trying to work through tuning issues, there was no heckling. The audience was waited for the issue to resolve itself, and if it didn't, oh well. There's always more music. The band eventually worked it out, although Barlow shifted over to bass and usual bass player Jason Loewenstein handled the guitar.

The festival's second day wasn't as consistently engaging, with the lineup catering to an LA audience, the evening slots taken up by local bands. And some of those bands weren't very good. Tennis System: Bad name, bad camo-centric merch, ehhhh music.

In the early afternoon, Portland's Federale were nothing more than a live band rock interpretation of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, but there are certainly worse ways to spend an hour when in an environment so similar looking to the one Morricone's music called home. The seven person band regularly called on their lone female member to sing the operatic melody from "Ecstasy of Gold" almost note for note, but there's a reason why artists steal good shit: it works.

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Elsewhere, Heron Oblivion put on the best set of the festival, merging Meg Baird's ethereal vocals with pummeling guitars and pulsing bass lines. The mix was intoxicating, and the band's 4 PM set was the perfect soundtrack to the scorching desert sun. Their Sub Pop debut is one of the year's best albums.

J Mascis at Desert Stars Festival

I spent some of Saturday evening with Lou Barlow, who walked me through the various intricacies of being in Dinosaur Jr. Watching J Mascis on stage, going from song to song without even acknowledging the audience's yelps—let alone that they exist—was a bit odd. He felt disconnected and it's easy to see why he and Barlow don't really get along.

Aside from showmanship issues, an outdoor festival venue with minimal soundcheck time isn't the ideal setting for Dinosaur Jr. J surrounds himself in a fortress of amps, in conjunction with Murph and Barlow playing heavily and with serious force. When J's wall of sound was too loud, his voice was lost, and when his voice lead the way, it was hard to hear the melodic bass lines Barlow uses to underpin the band's sound. Despite the issues, it's an absolute pleasure to watch three middle-aged dudes slay an hour-and-a-half set, taking pride in closing out a seriously special two days.

It's easy to be cynical towards a festival like Desert Stars. It features mostly past-their-prime rock groups, embraced by an almost entirely white audience, aged from their early 30s to late 50s. The festival goers wear cowboy hats and too much denim, and there are a lot of ponchos. They dance too freely (isn't everybody as self-conscious as me?), and they're weirdly not stressed out about the shoddy Wi-Fi. Desert Stars seems fairly antithetical to modern life. There were also one too many adults dressed as Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing (one too many is one, by the way). It was, however, hard to stay unimpressed with the guy when he was able to keep a cigarillo dangling from his lips while dancing harder than anyone else to the between-set DJ.

The crowd at Desert Stars Festival 2016

But it's easy to be a hardened cynic and that disillusionment washes away almost instantly because the music is great and no one's cranky or too drunk or taking too many selfies. There are a few wounded soldiers, sure—wandering around wide-eyed, convinced you don't notice just how hard they're tripping on 'shrooms—but that's part of the fun. It's a special event, mostly because people are there for the right reasons. This comes down to the festival existing for the right reasons. The volunteer checking wristbands at the artist/media entrance spent her spare time blowing bubbles for the crowd to enjoy, only occasionally missing the sneaky entrant. Security kindly asked attendees to chug off-property beer instead of confiscating it, and if your favorite band played a killer set, chances were you would be able to find them and buy them a reasonably priced beverage after their show. It's a festival of misfit toys; of misfit bands in a make believe town temporarily occupied by a displaced people. And they wouldn't have it any other way. None of them.