I’m Still Processing What Happened Last Night
On stoner rock, secondhand fear, and the gentlest room I’ve been in years
I’m writing this from a Starbucks the morning after. Cute pop songs. Everything curated not to offend. No personality, but nothing to get mad about.
Last night everything was alive — sink-your-teeth-into-it, holy-shit-I-love-being-alive kind of alive. And it wasn’t in a curated Starbucks.
I grew up where strong feelings were suspect. It was in the air like secondhand fear. Loud is dangerous. Heavy is dark. Intensity means something’s wrong with you. The approved music was soft, controlled, lyrics you could print in a bulletin. Anything that made your body move was suspect at best, satanic at worst. Even songs that sounded fine were probably full of subliminal messages trying to get you to do drugs, make babies, and fall victim to your inner monster just wanting to burst out.
I was told more than once that people who watched MTV were way more likely to get pregnant and ruin their lives — and even if they didn’t, they’d never make as good of choices as they would have without it.
But it wasn’t just my town. This country was built on the belief that your own humanity can’t be trusted. Your instincts will mislead you. Really feeling things — letting them move through your body — that’s the doorway to losing yourself. The people who keep that in check are the good ones. The people who don’t — who feel too much, play too loud, move too freely — get a label. Stoner. Burnout. Problem child. Once the label lands, nobody has to take them seriously. Nobody has to walk into the room and see what’s actually there. The label already told them.
There’s a voice in me — a protest, a fire, a part that says something is wrong here — and I spent decades trying to make it quieter. I thought it was the dangerous part.
It was the most honest part of me. The part that cared.
Last night I heard what it sounds like when you let that part out to play.
All Them Witches in Phoenix. King Buffalo opened. Drove down from Salt Lake with my partner Suzy. 1,800 people at The Van Buren.
If you haven’t heard desert rock — stoner rock, heavy psych — it’s not what you think. It’s everything. A song opens quiet and melodic, almost tender. A groove settles in, low and warm, bass you feel in your ribs, drums that don’t rush. Then the fuzz creeps in. Guitar gets heavier. Tempo pushes. Something building that refuses to stay polite —
And then the whole thing busts open. A badass hard-rock crash of fuzzed-out, bass-driving awesomeness with a swagger no other genre can touch. Big. Loud. Takes up space. Grabs everyone by the throat — not to hurt them, but to get their attention.
Then the groove comes back. It was there the whole time. It held the explosion. Made room for it. Everything feels more whole — nothing lost, nothing suppressed.
One song holds all of that. Tenderness and fury. Patience and protest. Whisper and scream. In the same seven, ten, fifteen minutes. The songs are really long. You’ll love it.
Teenagers in Palm Desert, California couldn’t get booked at a single club in the late 80s. So they dragged generators into the open desert — big sky, no walls, no audience — and played for hours. Not for money. Not for anyone. Just humans expressing every part of themselves for the pure joy of it. Under the stars with nowhere to be and nothing to perform.
No suit forcing them to make it shorter. No label saying that part’s too heavy. All of it given room to exist in the same song at the same time.
Thirty years later it’s in Munich, Tokyo, Norway, Greece. Crossed every border without a marketing budget because it speaks to something that doesn’t need translation.
For those same thirty years, the people who loved it were called stoners and burnouts. Filed away. And the people doing the labeling weren’t malicious — that’s the thing. The little old church lady who sees the devil in anything that doesn’t match her version of good — she’s not a bad person. She’s running software she didn’t install. And the software tells her she’s in the right group. The good group. Those people — the heavy ones, the loud ones, the ones who never learned to make themselves smaller, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t — they’re the other group. You don’t have to listen to people in the other group.
I walked into their room.
1,800 people. Gray ponytails, band tees, van people, spreadsheet people — feeling all of it at the same time. All of it in the same body. In every body in the room.
A big dude bumped into me, hand on my shoulder, “sorry bro.” A girl pulled Suzy and me to a better spot, grinned like we’d known each other for years.
Beautiful, kind people. Open. Present. The music had already given every part of us somewhere to go.
When we don’t give the different parts of us a voice — especially the scary parts, the rage, the sadness, the protest — they build up with nowhere to go. Instead of finding release in an awesome riff, they explode in real life, where the damage is real. Desert rock gives voice to all of it.
That’s what it sounds like when nothing’s being suppressed. When good people and their thoughts and feelings aren’t being made to feel like they don’t belong.
The stoners understand this. Thirty years of being dismissed and they built the gentlest, most alive room I’ve been in years. No doctrine. No hierarchy. No one telling anyone what to feel.
Something I think churches could learn from.
We’ve been wrong about them. Wrong about every person and every sound we filed away because it was too heavy or too raw or too much. The thing we called dangerous was the thing that was working.
There’s room. For every kind of music and every kind of person. For the soft and the loud and the furious and the tender. For the grief and the joy and the loneliness and the love. For the part that wants to hold someone and the part that wants to scream.
Every voice in us needs a place to exist. The stoners knew that. The music knows that. Maybe it’s time the rest of us caught up.
Sounds like a redefining evening. Loving the Desert Rock vibe lately BTW (for many of the same reasons you mentioned). 🤘