A new monthly music series trades rock-show production for raw songwriting.
The Desert Beat: Southwestern Songwriters Showcase is quickly becoming one of the desert’s most special musical events. Instead of loud amps, colorful lights and fog machines, Desert Beat features solo singer/songwriters, minimal lighting and an up-close-and-personal experience. The series—which previously took place at Mojave Gold, and is moving to the Dune Room as of May—features local musicians sitting in the round and sharing the stories behind their songwriting before singing a song.
You can catch the next Desert Beat on Thursday, May 21.
The event is hosted by Brad Parker, a renowned singer/songwriter who started Desert Beat alongside his partne, Deb Greco. During a recent interview with the duo, Parker discussed how he went from embracing rock-star theatrics to valuing the process of crafting a song.
“When I got to Nashville is when things changed,” Parker said. “Songwriters were beginning to get their own place and space in Nashville and country music. The songwriter was traditionally more valuable, but they weren’t honored.”
Desert Beat takes heavy inspiration from the Bluebird Café in Nashville, a famous music venue that hosts songwriters in the round and helped launch the career of a few country superstars.
“Willie Nelson, after writing a few hits including ‘Crazy,’ Nashville told him, ‘Nobody wants to hear your music; get out of here,’ and he went back to Texas,” Parker said. “You would think a songwriter that good, they would really value, but they didn’t. Then Amy Kurland, who started the Bluebird Café in Nashville, she just wanted to hear songwriters, pure and simple.”
Desert Beat’s in-the-round style offers a home-y vibe, helping foster deeper connections between audiences and musicians—who sit mere feet from each other.
“We were lined up against the wall, and we decided we didn’t want to play against this wall anymore, so we started setting up in the middle of the room, and that became in the round, which was like an old ‘sit on the front porch in the backyard,’ kind of Southern Appalachian thing,” Parker said. “… In the round, you’re only looking at the person doing the song, and with the lighting we achieved at Desert Beat, everything else disappeared.”
Parker elaborated on that lighting.
“We put a light in the middle of everybody, and the light is like a campfire, because we’re evoking the spirits of all the people who influence these writers, so that they all come to the room,” he said. “Deb came up with this idea. … The writers are going to be influenced and inspired by what they hear the other writers do, and what the audience reacts to, and all the side comments. People will be writing songs in that room right when it’s going down.”
Before starting Desert Beat, Parker started Western Beat, a songwriters’ night in Hollywood.
“One night, Spinal Tap walked in—in costume, wigs, the whole thing, with accents,” he said. “They talked totally in character from the minute they walked in to the minute they left: ‘We just wanted to play a few tunes for you guys,’ and my first comment to them was, ‘Well, we don’t have any amps, so you can’t turn it up to 11,’ and they didn’t even crack, especially Christopher Guest, who goes, ‘Well that’s the theory about us, that we really can’t play, so we’ve come here to show people what we can really do, because you don’t necessarily need the amp.’”
“You can’t build a music community with imported stars from New York, L.A. or anywhere else—you have to build it from the ground up with the people who were there, and I think we’ve proved it with Desert Beat.”
Brad Parker
Parker found his way to the desert after re-connecting with Greco, a long-lost love.
“We met each other in 1980 and didn’t see each other after ’85,” Parker said. “Thirty years.”
Greco, a desert resident since the late 2000s, happened to hear Parker on the radio in 2015.
“I was driving, and I heard this song, and it was his song, called ‘This Is the Song,’” Greco said. “I said, ‘Huh, that sounds familiar; I think that’s Brad,’ and it was an NPR station, and (the host) says, ‘We’re talking to Brad Parker about his new album, Days of Poetry.’ I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I heard that for a reason.’ … I found him on LinkedIn, and I sent him a note and said, ‘I’m your number No. 1, and I remember you.’”
Added Parker: “I wrote her back and said, ‘How do you know I’m not your No. 1 fan?’ And then we got together, and the rest is history.”
In a way, the desert helped Parker find his way back to an impressive songwriting career. Across his catalogue, Parker has songwriting and producing credits for everyone from Cher to Hurricane!
“The whole songwriting thing was a random happy accident,” Parker said. “I really wanted to be a rocker, and then I really wanted to be a blues artist, and I achieved both with my brothers over 15 years, from ’69 to ’85. I was writing all these songs that I couldn’t even get my own band to play. They were so wordy. I was really a big fan of Chuck Berry and Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and writers who wrote for writing’s sake, not for the music’s sake, and telling big stories. I liked all of that, but I didn’t really have an outlet for it. When I got to Nashville, suddenly it was, boom, ‘You’re a writer.’ That’s the No. 1 gig in town there.”
Parker’s biggest hit was Kathy Mattea’s “Nobody’s Gonna Rain on Our Parade.”
“It stayed on the (Billboard) Hot 100 for six months,” he said. “It just wouldn’t go away. Right at the end of its run, there was one station of the 210 reporting stations that made up the (rankings for) No. 1, and this guy who ran the station hated Kathy Mattea. He hated her personally, because she had done a benefit for AIDS victims, and he said he wasn’t going to support anybody who supported homos. He never let it be No. 1 at that station, to block it from getting the No. 1 award on Billboard. When I was working with Johnny Rivers many years later, and I told Johnny the story, he said, ‘I never want to hear you say that again. That’s a No. 1. … You’re going to call it No. 1 from now on.’”
Greco promised that he will fight to make sure the Southwestern Songwriters Showcase remains a free event.
“Desert Beat is free, and we fought about that,” Greco said. “The first thing (venues) say to us is, ‘Well, what do you want to charge at the door?’ We don’t want to charge anything at the door. That’s not the point. Why are you trying to monetize something before it even exists? It’s almost kind of offensive to look at it that way. We support it, and it doesn’t cost us a lot of money, but we support it.”
Parker praised the local community of songwriters.
“You can’t build a music community with imported stars from New York, L.A. or anywhere else—you have to build it from the ground up with the people who were there, and I think we’ve proved it with Desert Beat,” Parker said. “The basic talent of the music business is songwriting, and we have a scene, between the valley and the high desert, that’s got more than enough songwriters for any kind of records you want to make.”
The next Desert Beat will take place at 6 p.m., Thursday, May 21, at the Dune Room, at 82707 Miles Ave., in Indio. Admission is free. For more information, visit duneroomindio.com/our-shows.
