There was something percolating in the Southern California arts and music scene that spring of 1983.
Scot Allen, recently graduated with degrees in photography and art history from the University of Redlands, certainly felt it — the propulsive energy, the raw aesthetic, the conviction that art need not be beholden to anything that had come before.
Where the New York scene celebrated the street-level brilliance of its Basquiats and Blondies, SoCal boasted a decidedly unfashionable underground movement of artists and musicians who lived out of Ford vans and plied their trade in Veterans of Foreign Wars halls.
“There was a very strong underpinning of DIY (do it yourself),” said Allen. “Just get in the van. If you want to be an artist, be an artist. If you want to make music, make music. That attitude permeated the scene. There was so much diversity, and I saw myself as a witness to these things.”
Indeed it was Allen who would go on not just to witness, but to capture in his own inimitable way a series of unique outdoor concerts that served as a powerful historical marker of those times. A precursor to Burning Man, Coachella and the like, the Desolation Center concerts brought a clutch of seminal SoCal punk bands and busloads of young punk fans to a remote dry riverbed in the Mojave Desert. Allen shot two of the concerts. Now, some 35 years later, his work is being featured in a new documentary about the concerts.
Some two years in the works, the documentary provides both a high-profile showcase and an opportunity for reflection for Allen, whose last 20 years have been most notable for the prodigious workload he shoulders as associate director of communications at Mid-Pacific Institute.
“I felt I wanted to capture what I saw and remember,” Allen said. “A lot of people felt that what we were seeing was important.”
Allen, 57, was raised in Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County, Calif. His father worked in the aerospace industry early on before operating a gas station and, later, a family restaurant.
Allen took up photography as a child, learning the fundamentals on an old Leica camera. By the time he reached college, his fascination with the device’s ability to capture images that individually and collectively tell a story had developed into a professional guiding light.
Upon graduation in 1982, Allen took a job with a weekly newspaper. There he wrote articles and shot photos for a wide swath of beats.
Along the way he befriended Bruce Licher of the Los Angeles post-punk band Savage Republic. It was Licher who told Allen about the Mojave Exodus, the first of the Desolation Center concerts, for which the band had been recruited to play.
Scott was on hand — part fan, part objective spectator, part chronicler — to witness up-and-coming acts like the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, the Swans, Einsturzende Neubauten and others perform furious, rapturous sets before an impassive backdrop of stunning natural beauty.
“They had an anarchic quality,” Scott said of the events. “There was no hierarchy and no rules except ‘be cool to each other’ and ‘be kind.’ Going to a dry lake bed or canyon was really different at the time.”
And while taken with the juxtaposition of punks with guitars and amps and the high, striated ridge faces, what Allen focused on were the expressions of the musicians and the concertgoers, the way their eyes reflected the wonder of taking in the wide panoramic landscapes, their unguarded emotions as they moved to the music.
The shoots were not without their challenges. Allen recalls the dust that infiltrated his hair, his clothes and his equipment. He also recalls being plucked from his high vantage point of one of the cliffs just minutes before the performance-art group Survival Research Laboratories blew up the area with dynamite.
Allen eventually would pack away the experience as he set his professional sights in a different direction, leaving California for Hawaii, where his wife, Verdena, was from.
Here he found work in MPI’s communications department. The pairing of Allen’s strong media background and the school’s progressive journalism, media production and arts programs was a natural, and Allen found himself quickly enamored with being able to witness the everyday discoveries and accomplishments of the students.
These days Allen finds himself developing and producing content for social media platforms and a variety of school-sponsored media.
“I have the honor of witnessing these kids taking chances and surprising themselves,” he said. “I get to see them make mistakes and get back up and try again. Even with something small, the accomplishment it represents can be tremendous.”
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
