Q’s With Desert Daze’s Phil Pirrone on New SoCal Locale, The Mystic Bazaar

(Photo by Oliver Walker/Getty Images) –
Let Your Light Shine: Spiritualized performs at Institute of Mentalphysics on Oct. 15, 2017 in Joshua Tree, Calif.

Now in its seventh year, the Desert Daze festival is set to soar to the astral plane this weekend (Oct. 12-14) with its debut at a new SoCal locale in Lake Perris State Park, CA. My Bloody Valentine, Tame Impala and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard top a bill filled with a preponderance of psych rock and other mind-expanding and/or face-melting independent fare. Pollstar spoke with fest co-founder Phil Pirrone to find out more about the new site, his booking philosophy, buy-out offers and, of course, the Mystic Bazaar.

Pollstar: How’s the new festival site at Lake Perris looking?
Phil Pirrone: It’s looking beautiful. It’s funny, the site feels really free. It’s wide open. It’s a huge site. I was driving around in a cart last night and you can’t hear the outside city. You can’t hear anything. It just feels like you’re on your own planet.

Is it directly on the lake?
Yes, it’s called Moreno Beach, the side of the park in front of the water. The beach, the water itself, and the camp grounds above it.

How come you the left Joshua Tree and The Institute of Mentalphysics
We haven’t really left it. We are working on things and we’ll continue to host events in Joshua Tree in the Greater Desert area. We want Desert Daze to remain feeling like Desert Daze. What I mean by that is it doesn’t really feel like a festival, it feels like you were invited to some backyard barbecue where everybody kind of knows the host, even though you don’t know each other.  We wanted to maintain that feeling and as the event grows you can’t fit 10 pounds of fun in a 5-pound bag. We just needed a little room to breathe. It was smaller, and it is very historically significant; and significant to us philosophically, and spiritually. We just don’t want to ruin that place. We want to respect that place.

What was the capacity there?
Five-thousand…Well, sorry that’s not entirely true. There was a few more people than that. During Iggy Pop we probably had closer to 7,000 people on site. That was our biggest crowd to date. We’re going to surpass that this year.

Do you know how many you’ve sold thus far?
For now I’ll just say we’re gonna surpass the numbers from last year.

Was that part of the reason for the move?
I’ve been looking at Lake Perris for about five years. I didn’t really think that Desert Daze would take place there. But as things are starting to shift and shuffle, following the 2017 festival, we really started to dig deep on this place and the more I dug the more it became appealing. Everything from working with the state park rangers has been just a total pleasure.

–
Phil Pirrone

What music markets are you trying to hit with your programming? You seem to get a lot of independent, psych rock bands is that the market you’re trying to hit?

Who are your festival partners? 

We started the festival in 2012 by ourselves, and we taught ourselves how to do a festival. We were very fortunate for things to go right, for things to stay safe and everybody stay safe. Along the way, we’ve picked up some skills and some knowledge. In 2016, we partnered with Spaceland and Knitting Factory. We continue to run day-to-day operations, however. My company Moon Block runs the operations for the festival. It’s a team of about 200 people when we get on site. One of the cool things about Desert Daze is, it’s not only a magnet for creative’s, but it’s a magnet for really great festival professionals.

Does the 200 people include all your ops people, security, and all else?
That includes all of our ops people, security is on top of that. Obviously, there’s the local and government agencies. This year, we’re working with the park rangers which has been great. I can’t say enough good things about the state park rangers system.

Do you have sponsors?
Yeah. We’ve always had sponsors. We’ve just been really crafty about how to integrate it, so it feels like it’s not just tacked on. There is no difference, we’ve got some brands on site, to help fill out the experience. We work with them to make sure that it’s in line with the Desert

Who is your ticketing company?

We’re with Eventbrite.

What’s the Mystic Bazaar?
We’ve gathered practitioners and healers and shamans from around the world via this group, they’re actually called the Mystic Bazaar, they are an organization out of Los Angeles. We programmed this area together, it’s in the campgrounds. It’s another level of Desert Daze that you can experience. There’s everything from black metal yoga, to cacoa ceremonies, tea ceremonies, and Reiki and sound baths, electric sound baths, and modular sound baths. A couple of musical performances We have members of the Source Family coming and speaking on the teachings of Father Yod.

Can you speak to any sort of epiphanies or enlightenment people have found at the Mystic Bazaar?
it’s interesting when you have people you don’t know coming up to you at the festival and telling you, word for word, your mission statement. And they’ve never seen it, And they’ve never read it. And you’ve never told it to them, and they recite it back to you word for word. People end up having a profound experience. It’s the same thing for the staff and the audience and the artists that play. We keep hearing it year after year, especially for the last three years.

Have you been approached for a buy-out?
Well, we’re in Southern California and the festival world is turning into homogenized milk. We had the conversation when we partnered with Spaceland and Knitting Factory, we knew that if we were gonna take this thing to the next level we needed a strategic partner. Maybe one day there will be a time that we need to rethink things and maybe consider working with someone in that realm, but I don’t know if that’s the right move.

It sounds like this year is a real pivotal year of growth, and change and could really determine the next couple years.
It feels like a pivotal year. We’re turning the corner in a lot of different ways and the one that is just on the top of my mind is operationally. We’ve grown from my wife and I sitting around a coffee table with both of our laptops, and every bit of planning was screened between our two laptops. We’d be leaning across the table going like, “What’s the thing about this thing? Oh, okay, great. What are we doing about the… Oh, okay, got it. Yeah, great. Where’s that thing? Got it.” Now there’s so much division of labor, I feel like once we get through this year, it’s going to feel really good. We have a lot of systems in place. We’re getting our sea legs as a bigger organization.