As music venues across the desert and beyond struggle, a unique spot in Idyllwild is doing anything possible to stay alive … including becoming a church.
Audiowild Studios is no stranger to struggle. Opening during the height of the pandemic, the recording space and venue has hosted rock, metal, punk, experimental, funk, jazz and more. When many other businesses close at sundown, Audiowild Studios opens for late-night concerts, attracting music lovers from Idyllwild, the Coachella Valley and beyond.
Audiowild has faced issues with attendance and the ability to attract bands, as well as factors beyond the venue’s control, such as issues with permits and building repairs. Despite it all, owner/musician Brian “Puke” Parnell has continued to push on.
Throughout the summer, Audiowild is hosting a series of fundraiser events to keep the lights on and pay for venue repairs. The Rockovation Benefest begins on Saturday, July 26, with Dufreign headlining, and continues with People of the Sun headlining on Friday, Aug. 8; the Endorphinz on Friday, Aug. 22; and Mushroom People on Saturday, Aug. 30. (Full disclosure: I will be performing at the Aug. 8 event.) Tickets are $10, and attendees are encouraged donate more.
“Before I was a professional musician, the first experience that I had with the music industry was as a guitar tech, stage hand, roadie, and I got to travel around and experience every different kind of venue, from a hole-in-the-wall dive bar to the Hammerstein Ballroom (in New York) and the Warfield in San Francisco,” Parnell said during a recent phone interview. “The first big tour that I did, we got to play those spots. So over the years, you figure out what works, what doesn’t, what you like and what you don’t like. … It’s always been a dream to have my own spot where I can do the things right that other people get wrong, and also try to innovate in certain ways and maybe do things a little differently.”
All other “music venues” in the immediate area sell coffee, pizza or beer, with live music coming second.
“If our only income is going to be music (during shows), there’s really no way to do it other than charging at the door, and that was something that nobody had ever really done in Idyllwild before,” Parnell said. “I had local bands that were telling me I was crazy. They’re like, ‘Nobody’s going to pay a door cover in Idyllwild; this isn’t L.A.’ … It was this big unknown, and I didn’t want to get shut down right away. In Idyllwild, there are a certain amount of liberties that you can take, because you don’t have a city breathing down your neck. It’s not like Mayor Max (the town’s unofficial mayor—a dog) is going to scratch at the door and be like, ‘Knock it off.’”
Audiowild quickly began winning over the skeptics.
“There were people who were naysayers, but as soon as they actually came to a show, or saw footage from a show, or heard somebody telling them what an awesome time they had, they realized that this is something that the town has been missing.”
The Struggles of Venues
While Audiowild Studios has succeeded in hosting some well-attended, engaging shows, Parnell has often taken to Facebook to share the painful yet truthful experiences of being a venue owner in California. Parnell credited his stubbornness for Audiowild’s continuing existence.
“I think that there’s a certain amount of pig-headedness that can be applied to one’s benefit, especially if you’re able to mix that with a certain amount of confidence, or even over-confidence—that’s when things really work for you,” he said. “The confidence side, I’ve been lacking in. I’m working on all of that, but the stubbornness is definitely ever-present. … When it comes to the studio, there have been multiple times in the last four months where I’ve considered, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Should I just try to sell the idea to somebody else?’ I feel like the folks who do this, who do it for the right reasons, would totally understand and agree with me that there’s this feeling that you can’t stop, that it’s bigger than yourself.”
Parnell said he’s proud of the diverse range of performances Audiowild has hosted.
“No one else in town is going to be hosting an experimental music festival, or if the former guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins wants a spot to do some ambient guitar stuff, there’s nowhere else to do that,” he said. “… We’ve made that name for ourselves now where people expect to come here and see something that they wouldn’t experience in other ways, and they trust us to be curators of new musical experiences.”
Parnell said words of encouragement and relentless support have kept him focused and determined.
“Anytime I think about giving up, there’s somebody who comes up, and they’re like, ‘Man, this place is so important to me,’” Parnell said. “I’m so thankful. We started doing jam nights again on Thursdays, and people are just so overjoyed, and tell me how much they missed it, and how, even though we’re not done (with renovations) yet, they love the place. … For so long, I was focusing a lot on the negative and on the struggles, but it’s a lot easier to keep going when you can focus on how much it means not just to yourself, but to everybody else.”
Parnell said a majority of the support for Audiowild comes from the Coachella Valley.
“If it wasn’t for all the support that we get from the Coachella Valley, we definitely would not still be here,” Parnell said. “Whenever we’ve done fundraisers and stuff like that, we have gotten saved because somebody from the desert swoops in, and they’re like, ‘Here you go; just thank me later.’”
“This building was constructed in 1985 in the unincorporated town of Idyllwild, where building inspectors and code enforcement and stuff like that was not really too much of a thing.”
Brian Parnell, on his struggles to renovate audiowild studios
Funds from the Rockovation Benefest will go toward the major renovations needed for Audiowild Studios to survive, such as a new HVAC system, soundproofing and an electrical overhaul.
“With the construction and with the remodel … we keep discovering fun new things,” Parnell said. “This building was constructed in 1985 in the unincorporated town of Idyllwild, where building inspectors and code enforcement and stuff like that was not really too much of a thing. There have been a lot of interesting discoveries. Stuff that I thought was going to be very simple ended up being quite elaborate.”
Becoming a Church
Audiowild Studios is awaiting IRS approval to become a religious nonprofit, with music being the religion. The Church of Divine Vibes is the name.
As Parnell explained in a Facebook post: “In this religion, the Creator is a musician, and all the vibration of life results from a cosmic song. The sacred tones of music are a divine gift, and our frequencies collaborate with this song to shape our entire existence. We need to rid ourselves of our internal Dissonance to become in Tune with our world and live in Harmony with one another.”
Parnell explained that all the money coming through the studio will become donations.
“Paying for studio time, paying for any of that stuff—it all becomes a tax-deductible donation,” he said. “There are people who are lucky enough to be in certain tax brackets where it really behooves them to give certain amounts to charities and nonprofits and that sort of stuff. There are a lot of people who have approached us and are like, ‘Hey, man, we’re just waiting for you to get your approval, and then we can start helping.’”
Parnell said he’s serious about the mission of the Church of Divine Vibes, and he hopes to create a paradigm that other music venues could use.
“The mission statement is to universally celebrate and harness the divine and healing power of music through cultivation, exploration and community,” Parnell said. “Cultivation: That’s helping people with songwriting; that’s helping people with recording and cultivating their musical abilities. Exploration: There are not enough outlets out there helping bands to figure out the difference between mechanical royalties and physical royalties, in the same way they don’t teach you how to write a check in high school or whatever. There’s all this stuff that people don’t know about their intellectual property rights and stuff as musicians and as creators, and most of the people who want to teach you this stuff—there’s a fee involved. The community part is super, super important, too, because as musicians, as music fans, as people in the music community, this is how we feel connected to each other. It is a very spiritual feeling being at a concert—feeling that transcendence and feeling the connection with the other people in the room.”
Parnell described music as “a gift for everyone.”
“It’s just these frequencies, these notes that existed,” he said. “None of us invented it; we just kind of stumbled across it. … The songs come from wherever they come from, and we’re the ones who are tasked with writing them down and performing them and teaching them and all that other stuff. … We’re really heavily going in that direction. We’re not going to start knocking on people’s doors and being like, ‘Have you accepted music as your Savior?’ But it’s how we’re going to get music to get the respect that it deserves, instead of just being a disposable commodity that makes wealthy CEOs wealthier to invest in a robot army or something. … When you’re all at the concert together, nobody’s really checking to see who’s red or blue or whatever; we’re all just enjoying the same shit.”
The Rockovation Benefest begins on Saturday, July 26, with Dufreign headlining, and continues with People of the Sun headlining on Friday, Aug. 8; The Endorphinz on Friday, Aug. 22; and Mushroom People on Saturday, Aug. 30. All events are hosted at Audiowild Studios, 54240 Ridgeview Drive, in Idyllwild. Tickets are $10, but you can donate more. Visit audiowild.studio.