When Orange Amps proposed a journey to Joshua Tree to film at world famous Rancho De La Luna Studio we were definitely intrigued. Looking back on it now and writing it onto the long list of awesome shit that I’ve done in thirty-one years of life on this planet, that few days spent with legendary desert rock and rollers falls pretty high up there on my list, and I suppose we owe a great deal of gratitude to our friends at Orange. Specifically Alex Auxier, although I wouldn’t say it to his ginger face.
This session here occurred at the tail end of the debauchery. We’d been there a couple of days. Our shoes were properly dusty, our coolers were getting towards empty, and we were damn close to tired. However, this was the culmination for a reason. This was the one we were looking forward to. If you get all of these dudes in the same room together with guitars, you are fortunate. Let alone get them together at Rancho De La Luna Studio with their instruments in a van. To put it all in perspective, Rancho De La Luna is one of the studios that Dave Grohl picked to showcase in his “Sonic Highways” program on HBO. Its proprietor, Dave Catching, was one of the kindest hosts we’ve come accross in all of our Jam Van travels. The man is a wizard on the guitar and he’s also pretty damn good on a BBQ grill. So there we were, already overwhelmed by the hospitality and the desert sunset, eating tacos made for us by Mr. Catching himself, and to top it all off, Eagles of Death Metal serenaded us into the desert night with two songs, one of which you aren’t going to find anywhere else. In fact, they were practicing it and working on the lyrics as they prepped in the studio room for the session. The title, “Out of Closet Experience” came to Jessie Hughes only after they had performed it in The Van. “Hey, I got it! I know what the song’s name is. Out of Closet Experience.” Yeah, it was that type of a once in a lifetime experience. Most of the memory is not safe for children, but the music, that’s good for all ages…