Palm Desert Stoner Rock

Not a genre so much as a postcode and a power supply. A handful of Coachella Valley kids with no venues hauled a gas generator into the sand and played until it ran dry, and the sound that came back — downtuned, loose, long — got labelled stoner rock by everyone except the people making it.

The family tree matters more than the riffs: the same dozen names keep reappearing in different bands for forty years.

Coachella Valley, mid-1980s: Palm Desert, Indio, La Quinta. Across The River came first; Yawning Man formed in 1986 around Gary Arce, Alfredo Hernández and the Lalli cousins, playing marathon jams in garages and improvised desert shows that grew into "generator parties" — informal concerts held in the uninhabited outskirts of the valley.

Kyuss, teenagers at the time, absorbed it and carried it to a major: Blues for the Red Sun (1992, Dali/Chameleon) then Welcome to Sky Valley (1994, Elektra), both with Chris Goss producing.

The diaspora did the rest — Josh Homme's Desert Sessions started at Rancho de la Luna in 1997 and ran through Man's Ruin, Queens of the Stone Age signed to Interscope, Brant Bjork went solo, John Garcia formed Slo Burn then Unida.

SST picked up Fatso Jetson, and by the 2000s European labels — Alone, Heavy Psych Sounds, Ripple — were keeping the catalogue in print.

Who: Mario and Larry Lalli, Gary Arce, Brant Bjork, Josh Homme, John Garcia, Nick Oliveri, Scott Reeder, Alfredo Hernández, Tony Tornay. Producer Chris Goss is the connective tissue.

Two rooms matter: Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, founded by Fred Drake and Dave Catching, and Rhythm & Brews in Indio, the Lallis' own venue, where Fatso Jetson cut their debut. What: guitars pushed through bass amplifiers, tunings dropped low, tempos that sit back, songs that stretch past their natural end.

How it works: you get in by playing the parties and by being in somebody else's band — the scene is defined by shared personnel, not by a sound anybody agreed on.