Sonic Youth - Death Valley '69 (Live at the Mojave Desert, California, Jan 5 1985)

Recorded live at the Mojave Desert, California on January 5, 1985 for the "Gila Monster Jamboree" concert. Originally released on VHS tape in 1992. Sonic Youth is Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon and Bob Bert. The audio from the VHS release is captured by two cameras and tends to be a little muffled at times so I eq'ed it to sound brighter while also trying to bring Kim Gordon's bass more into the mix. It's just an experiment, the original audio is widely available everywhere, I just hope you enjoy it. To prevent the audio from total processing annihilation, I extracted it in lossless format before the editing to keep the sound quality intact and synced the eq'ed track with the resulting footage. "'It was completely makeshift,' [Lee] Ranaldo remembers of the set-up. 'We were nestled in between some sort of rocky mountain walls and they just demarcated an area where the bands played. We stood right on the sand, kicking up dust storms as we played. There was no backstage. 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. 'It had an element of danger that normal events never have,' says Ranaldo. (...) It was dusk as Sonic Youth started, and Ranaldo felt a palpable intensity from the audience. 'The crowd was completely absorbed by what we were doing,' he says. People gathered around the band in a circle, with everyone on the same level in the sand. 'The exchange was really intimate. Plus, nobody had seen us play before and what we were doing at that time was pretty unique. A lot of people were kind of stunned by it, with us using screwdrivers to play and the strange tunings on our guitars.' As the band hurtled through their set, with frenzied guitars buzzing, screeching and ricocheting off the mountainous backdrop, the audience became even more transfixed. It turns out someone had brought 500 hits of LSD – enough for everyone in attendance. 'Aside from the four of us in Sonic Youth, everyone else was tripping,' says Ranaldo. 'Everybody I’ve ever met who was at that concert was dosed.' 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. The band knew something special had happened. 'There really was no show like that that we ever did again,' says Ranaldo. 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." (Daniel Dylan Wray, "The Guardian", 2020) #sonicyouth #leeranaldo #kimgordon #thurstonmoore #mojavedesert