Scenic: Mojave Desert Music From 1992
"Paying homage to a land that is persistently inspiring."
On a frigid January day in 2024, my family went into a Portland resale store. As our six-year-old daughter searched for vintage toys, I searched a bin of 7-inch records. Among a litany of unwanted ’80s music, I found a record with an old train depot on the cover, by a band named Scenic.
The image looked desert-y. My heart raced at the sight of it.
I grew up in the desert. Ever since falling in love with The Friends of Dean Martinez’s first album in Tucson in 1996, I’ve looked for more instrumental music that sounds like the desert feels—something austere and haunting like that seminal instrumental album. If I could find another album that channels the spirit of the American desert or evokes it slightly, I’d be stoked. Maybe Scenic was it?
I searched inside the sleeve for clues.
Formed in 1992, said one paper insert, this band had recorded a full album, named Incident At Cima, and this single contained three of those songs. As the cover said:
The album consists of 18 pieces of music which serve as a soundscape to the sights one would experience when visiting the East Mojave Desert. In part, this is our way of paying homage to a land that is persistently inspiring.
That sounded promising. So did the song titles “East Mojave Shuffle,” “Down Black Canyon Road,” and “The Kelso Run.”
Inside the sleeve were three other paper inserts—one for each song. Each featured an antique-looking photo of the desert, printed on a washed out, sepia-scheme that evoked a dusty August day.
The sturdy textured record sleeve was a work of art in itself. It felt good to touch. It was essentially an envelope, made of firm paper stock, that folded up sideways. “Insert tab in slot to close package,” the text said. I did. The way the pieces interlocked felt satisfying, too.
This was no normal record. It was handmade. Clearly a lot of thought went into it. That’s partly why it stood out.
I grew up in the analog era. As much as I love the digital age, modern times could be too digital. So much exists on-screen, out of touch. Records like this offer a return to earth. So does discovering them accidently in a physical store. That’s one way people used to find music before algorythms and streaming services.
The cover said the train station is called the Kelso Depot and that it’s located in a ghost town in the remote Eastern Mojave. The sleeve was printed in Sedona, Arizona. And Scenic’s guitarist, it turned out, was Bruce Licher, from the avant-garde band Savage Republic. I loved Savage Republic. This boded well, too.
Holding my phone to my ear, I listened to some faint but beautiful instrumental track someone posted on Discogs. Even through my tiny phone speakers, it was clear: I’d found the desert music I’d been searching for since 1996.
Even though the whole Scenic album was already on Bandcamp, I needed this record.
The cashier pulled my record across the counter and studied the cover. “Do you know what you’re in for here?” he said.
His question reminded me of shopping for music in my youth. You’d take a chance on a record because you liked the cover or band name, or maybe you’d heard one song from the band on MTV. You didn’t know what to expect of the whole album but you bought it anyway. Maybe every song on the album but the single would suck?
“I do,” I said, and told him about my eternal search for desert music like the Friends of Dean Martinez.
He’d never heard of them but loved the sound of desert music. “My friend introduced me to Calexico when I lived in Tucson,” he said. “Can I take a pic?”
He also wanted to track down this band.
When I got home, I found more info about Scenic online. The phone number for Bruce Licher’s design firm was listed on Discogs, so I called it. When no one answered, I left a message. Three days later, we spoke. Two weeks later, I understood Scenic’s story.
Design + Music
When I bought The Kelso Run for $5, I had no idea that band-leader Bruce Licher is one of the most respected letterpress artists in the world. I only knew his guitar work from Savage Republic. Although Scenic had formed in 1992, the ideas and experience that led to its creation date back to the late 1970s, as the second wave of punk rock was splintering in interesting artistic directions.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Licher studied fine arts at UCLA, where visual art and music became permanently intertwined as his career.
In 1979, he took a photography class and started taking his camera to the punk shows that his classmates were going to.
“I was taking pictures of some punk band at the Whisky A Go-Go in my shoulder-length hair and Pink Floyd shirt,” he told Wire. “I don’t know why I did that! Halfway through the set, some little punk girl came up to me with a Marks-A-Lot marker and began X-ing out my Pink Floyd shirt. I tried to stop her and she wouldn’t stop, and the guy that was with her was like, ‘Oh c’mon! Let her do it!’ It was then I thought, She already wrecked it, so why not? After she was done ruining my shirt, she grabbed my hair and shook it and danced off.”
The experience of photographing underground musicians eventually drew him into performing, because he realized that he could do this himself. So did Brian Eno’s 1978 no wave compilation, No New York.
“I bought that album and it just kind of blew my mind,” Licher told me in 2024, “especially the two bands on the B side, Mars and DNA. I was just like, oh my God. It was DNA. Listening to DNA, it finally clicked in my mind: I can do this. They were just these really simple, repetitive things that were layered, and it just was like, I can do this.”
That’s when he went to buy a guitar.
“When I bought my first guitar I didn’t have a clue what to do with it,” Licher said, “so I signed up for lessons. I took guitar lessons for six weeks. Ok, here’s how you make this chord. Do this. Do this pattern. After six weeks I got tired of learning Chuck Berry riffs, and I was just like, Okay, I know what to do now, so I quit, and I just started experimenting. What kind of weird sounds can I get out of this thing?”
In 1980, Licher took a UCLA independent project class, called “New Forms and Concepts.” Led by an infamous conceptual artist named Chris Burden—a guy who shot himself in the arm during a performance piece—Licher befriended some interesting students in that class.
“One of them was wearing an Ultravox shirt so I immediately was like, cool! I’ll talk to these guys!” he told Wire. “They told me they were in a band called Neef and that they were opening for The Urinals at the coffee house on campus next week. So I went to that show and thought it was really cool. The guys in Neef were pretty much self-taught, and I could tell because they couldn’t play very well. So that’s when I thought, maybe they’ll let me play with them! So I asked them if they’d let me play with them the next time they got together and they said sure. Those were the first guys I started playing with, and we came up with some interesting stuff, but they never wanted to rehearse anything. They always wanted to improvise. I kept thinking we had good stuff and if we practiced it, we could get good at playing it. But they didn’t want to do that, so that only lasted about six months. We decided to do our own record because our friends in The Urinals had done it and we realized how easy it was. So we all put in $40 and pressed up as many as we could for $200. That’s when I realized I could do this by myself.”
For his UCLA independent project class, Licher recorded his own experimental music, named Project 197.
To release it, he needed his own record label, so he created Independent Project Records. “I had to create a name for my record label, but everything I came up with just sounded really pretentious,” Licher said. “Then I thought, ‘What is this? It’s an independent project record, so that’s what I’ll call it.’ By the time I got finished, it was like, ‘Hey, that was fun. I’m going to do another one.’”
He didn’t think he was creating a label for life. He just saw it as the vehicle for this project. But the label that he grew from there became one of the most unique and recognizable in underground music. The music magazine The Big Takeover called Independent Project Records “a magical realm where uncommercial approach meets accessible hook…” Licher’s work is a mixture of music and design, art and product, which he used to think of as art with a function. But there at the very beginning, he was still finding his chosen mediums and developing his visual vocabulary.
In 1980, punk rock was alive and well in underground Los Angeles. The punk ethos was revolutionary because it was all about accessibility and self-definition. The idea was that anyone could learn an instrument and form a band. Anyone could publish a zine or start a label and sound however they wanted. You just needed to learn a few guitar chords and utilize the means of production. Post-punk music—meaning, everything that came after the first wave of punk rock—could embody that ethos, no matter how the music sounded stylistically.
For a few months, Licher had been eying a certain open door on campus. He’d spotted it and wondered where it led. It was always open. So one day in early 1980, he went through it and entered a new chapter of his life.
“I got permission to shoot a film in the tunnels for an art project,” Licher told me. “They literally just gave me a key for six months and said ‘Bring it back when you’re done.’ So we had free reign.”
“Once inside, he discovered an intricate and claustrophobic entanglement of underground passageways,” reads the Savage Impressions book. “As the tunnels were built solely to service the campus’s utilitarian needs, they measure only about seven feet in diameter and are lined with conduit and pipe. Lighting is sparse, often provided only when there is a bend in the pathway. The air is hot and stifling, and once inside, one is subjected to the constant roar of the boiler rooms to which the tunnels are connected. The feeling one gets in the tunnels is that of being inside an industrial animal, amidst the arteries that carry the stuff of life. Here was an ideal location for Licher to create work exploring the limitations of an individual’s experience of freedom within the modern, industrialized world.”
With the key, Licher and his friend Daniel Voznick, aka Chez Voz, used their cassette boombox to record themselves playing in the tunnels. They called the project Bridge. It alternated between a jam session, performance art, and noise.
They pressed those recordings on Independent Project Records and sold them to local record stores on consignment. Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard even took a few copies. It was IPR’s second release.
In 1980, a UCLA student named Jonathan Gold heard the records and asked Licher if he’d assemble a band that could open for Gold’s electronic band Overman at their upcoming gig in Burbank.
Licher liked the idea. It also made him nervous. Although he and his art school friends had played for small gatherings of friends on campus in fleeting bands like Neef, they’d never played on what counted as a “real stage” at a real working venue, where people paid to attend.
To prepare, Licher, Daniel, and their percussionist friend Mark Erskine started practicing inside UCLA’s parking garages, still under the name Bridge. After recording in a tunnel, writing songs in a parking garage didn’t seem so odd. After all, it was LA. Why let cars rule everything?
Erskine played a pile of scrap offset lithography printing plates. Their friend Michael Gross sang on a megaphone that Bruce bought at a junk store.
Curious about the noise, a woman named Debbie Spinelli wandered through the garage to check it out. She liked what she saw and mentioned that she was a drummer. So the guys asked her to drum on the songs that required actual drumming, and a band was born.
Their show went well.
“When we came to a song in the set we’d named ‘Tools,’” Bruce said on Facebook in August 2025, “Michael prepared to do what he’d planned, which was use a number of different electric hand tools to make noise into the megaphone in between shouting ‘Tools!,’ and did something we’d planned to do (but had not rehearsed), which was to use an electric drill to drill a hole through my guitar while I was playing the song. As it happens, I had no idea of the amount of pressure he was going to need to use to get the drill to go through the wood, and the more he pushed, the harder it was to keep playing, and eventually we started spinning around and got all wrapped up in the electrical cord, and then the drill bit snapped off, still firmly embedded in the guitar.”
People applauded. That was Bruce’s first real live show.
It all happened in what you’d call a very organic way. It also offers proof of the value of the analog world. Stuff happens when you leave your house—and in our time, get off our phones and get outside. People bump into each other, and lives change after creative souls have random encounters.
“In the early ’80s, I think the rest of the world saw LA as this braindead, sunbaked, smoggy sprawl,” filmmaker Stuart Swezey said in his documentary Desolation Center, “which it actually kind of was. For those of us that grew up here, the early ’80s was actually a really vital and interesting time. It was a time of experimentation and rebellion.”
Licher and his friends developed in that fertile environment, surrounded by fierce, adventurous music and people.
Savage Republic
In 1981, while Licher still had the tunnel keys, he and Erskine went back under UCLA to jam and co-founded their experimental band Savage Republic.
Erskine brought his weird wooden drum set. Licher’s friend Phil Drucker suggested they bring his friend Jeff who wanted to learn experimental bass playing. Licher said cool, bring him. They recorded themselves on their boombox again, this time playing two basses.
Above ground after their session, they had a snack by some campus vending machines and listened to their recording, and they decided to keep doing this as a band. This was shortly after the Iranian Revolution. A lot of Iranian students attended UCLA. On the wall above the vending machines, Licher spotted a torn up flyer with Farsi and the image of someone getting executed. He told the others, “That’s our record cover.”
Originally named Africa Corps, Savage Republic pulled inspiration from African, Arabic, Greek, and Eastern European sources, as well as surf music, industrial music, post-punk, and psychedelia. It was original and weird—slicing and angular, feeling both international and from nowhere at once.
They banged old pipes, 55-gallon oil barrels, and railroad ties. They collected things at junkyards. Members listened to everything from Flipper to Can to the Beach Boys. They also really liked soundtracks. That’s one reason they covered composer Mikis Theodorakis’s anti-government song “O Andonis” from the 1969 political film Z.
Tribal, percussive, dissonant, droning, their early music had ferocious screaming vocals and noisy clattering. From the mid-80s and beyond, it had more cinematic, melodic, and hypnotic songs that alternated vocals with instrumentals. But even the tamest songs were unconventional.
Erskine was completely self-taught.
“And he did some completely wacko things, but he did some brilliant stuff too,” Licher told me. So he did. He didn’t read music, and he didn’t want a professional drummer. He wanted somebody who could play with feeling. “I value creativity over ability in some sense. I mean, ability is important, but it’s highly technical stuff I don’t need necessarily.”
Coming from the punk rock and art school worlds, he appreciated the freedom of creating beyond convention, and took an intuitive, rather than technical, approach. It worked. He was also ambitious, and he applied his creativity to life off his instrument.
During his final year at UCLA, he took a silkscreen class. So he silkscreened, Xeroxed, and hand-folded the sleeves for his first three IPR records: Project 197, Bridge, and Them Rhythm Ants. Because he was also making experimental films, he turned a still frame from a film into a postcard record insert.
“I was trying to do something different and creative with each of those in terms of silk-screening the packaging,” Licher told FLOOD. “But I don’t know that I necessarily succeeded greatly until I ran across the letterpress. That was when the ah-ha moment came.”
In 1982, Licher learned to do letterpress printing in a class at the Women’s Graphic Center in downtown LA. “For a lot of years, it seemed like most people that were doing letterpress were really into fine books, using it for making limited editions of some famous writing, which was all pretty dry for me,” he told the New Times.
As a fan of music and records, though, he was curious about the idea of making a record that was fine art. He liked the idea of art with a function. He liked the idea of getting fine art out of the gallery space and letting people find it in the real world. He enjoyed drawing and painting as an undergrad, but he wanted to do something different, too. “I always felt if someone else is doing it, I don’t want to do it,” Licher said. “I wanted to forge my own path.”
To see if he could print his own album covers differently, he signed up for a class in offset lithography at the Women’s Graphic Center downtown.
“The class got canceled,” Licher remembered, “but the teacher said, ‘Well, we have this letterpress class that we’re teaching next week. You could sign up for that.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But I had no idea what letterpress was. So I took the class, and the project was to make a postcard. So I made a postcard advertising the forthcoming album by Africa Corp. And while I was there working on that, I saw this other big flatbed press with an 18- by 24-inch bed that nobody was using. I kept thinking, ‘That’s the perfect size for an album jacket!’ The teacher said, ‘If you take the class again, I’ll teach you how to use that press. Nobody uses it because they’re kind of afraid of it!’ So I took the class a second time and bought a thousand sheets of chipboard, and I made an album jacket for Tragic Figures, Savage Republic’s first album. And then, once I’d done that, I was like, ‘Oh, this is it!’
Meaning: He managed to use a class to both teach him how to make records, and to create the actual covers for his own band’s record. That’s the punk approach. That’s DIY.
Learning letterpress led to him founding Independent Project Press, the publishing outlet for his graphic design work. The Press handled design, printing, and hand-letterpressing of album sleeves, labels, and inserts. Using IPR as Savage Republic’s platform, they released their first full album, Tragic Figures, in 1982. Naturally, Licher designed and letter-pressed all of Savage Republics’ album sleeves, by hand, himself, after that. He often hand-numbered the records, too. With his singular aesthetic, he made the world of fine art books somehow fit the world of underground music.
Licher knew he didn’t have to rely on existing commercial channels to release the band’s music or anyone else’s. They could do that themselves. He still needed to earn a living, though.
While working as a campus courier at UCLA, Bruce looked for ways to put his skills to use and generate more money than courier afford.
“I started approaching other bands about putting out their releases,” he told the New Times, “and as I did that, the word got out there. After a year of working at the [Women’s Graphic Center] it became obvious to me that I needed my own press. I was in there all the time, and I started getting jobs where I was getting paid, and that was not what the center was set up for. A friend of mine from UCLA—who, earlier that year, had been involved in a car accident—he got a big settlement and was basically looking for investments. He loaned me $5,000, and I was able to buy equipment, rent a space downtown, move in and start trying to make a living.”
The studio was inside the old brick Nate Starkman & Son building at 544 Mateo Street, in the industrial district by the LA River.
Through his label and his design firm, Licher went on to release records from other underground bands, including 100 Flowers, Party Boys, Kommunity FK, Ten Foot Faces, and Human Hands—as he continued recording music with Savage Republic. “I’ve come at this from being an artist in a sense. I didn’t study graphic design in school. That’s why it’s kind of ironic that here I am making my living as a graphic designer.”
Licher’s relationship with the desert deepened around this time.
The Desert
“When I was growing up, my parents always took my brother and I out to the desert,” Licher told me. “They owned a glider, a sailplane. And so they would go out to the desert to fly the sailplane like once a month. So I was very familiar with the desert from that experience, just going out there. And then when I was in college, I used to go out to the desert.”
As an undergrad around 1982, he had an idea for an experimental film. It would mix Eraserhead with Lawrence of Arabia. He’d film it in the desert, and Savage Republic would do the soundtrack. “I had no idea what it was going to be about,” he told the Independent Podcast Review. “I just had this idea in my head that we should make a film in the desert.” So Licher and Savage Republic drummer Phil [Drucker] drove to the desert to scout locations.
They never made the film, but Licher’s attraction to the desert remained. “So yeah, I’ve just always been drawn to the desert,” he told me. “It’s very beautiful and stark.”
In 1982, his underground artist friend Stuart Swezey had his own idea.
Sweezy was traveling with friends in the desert of northern Mexico. They were playing music like Minutemen, Wire, and Savage Republic. Looking out the car window, Swezey wondered: What would happen if they put on a punk show in a desert environment like this? You know, get away from the cops who kept breaking up their shows. Get away from conventional music venues. Just do it on the dirt, under the stars. What if? “That’s when it just clicked to me,” Swezey said in Desolation Center. “This is where I want to see this kind of music.”
Licher was the first person Swezey called to discuss this desert show. (The second person was D. Boon from Minutemen.) And not only was history made, but Licher’s connection to the desert deepened further.
“When Stuart approached me about doing a desert show,” Licher said in Desolation Center, “I said oh, I’ve got a location that I think could be really appropriate for this. …so I took Stuart out there to see the location, and we both agreed that it would work really well.”
It was Soggy Dry Lake near Victorville.
As with Licher’s record label, Swezey needed a name for the organization that put on this show. He called his operation Desolation Center. He called that first gig “Mojave Exodus.”
Savage Republic and Minutemen got invited to play. Swezey asked the keyboardist from the band Psi-Com to help organize the event.
Licher not only played. He hand-printed the tickets. Proceeds from the $12.50 tickets paid to rent a generator, a PA system, and three school buses.
For the first gig, a handful of punk rock kids got bussed from central Los Angeles out to the dry lakebed. The bands played on the cracked playa, using the buses to shield them from blowing dust. Decades later, that and Desolation Center’s subsequent desert shows inspired Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Burning Man. And it left a deep mark on the people who attended.
Everyone played near a Savage Republic flag planted in the ground.
“I felt like, Savage Republic, we need our own flag,” Licher remembered. “So I made this flag. We were art students, so I had access to canvas and paints, and I made the Savage Republic flag.”
In 1984, Swezey’s Desolation Center put on a second desert show. This time he and Licher scouted locations together. They liked the name of the town Mecca, near the Salton Sea. It intrigued them, so they drove to check it out. They ended up on a road in the Orocopia Mountains. Past a sign that said “Road Closed,” they found a dead end in Box Canyon and figured it was the perfect place to put on a show, since no one would drive that far up a closed road. So that’s where they had the German band Einstürzende Neubauten play with the Savage Republic-adjacent band Djemaa el Fna—named after a market in Marrakesh. They called the gig “Mojave Auszug.”
In the desert, attendees felt free to do whatever they wanted. They drank. They danced. They climbed crumbling hillsides. And free of fire codes and police surveillance, the performers were free to play what they wanted. They blew things up, banged rocks on sheets of percussive metal, and used saws to shoot sparks to make music. No one had a permit for any of this. It was just dirt, desire, and generators under the stars.
The desert environment itself changed the nature of live music. Stripped of urban convention and artifice, the desert provided a more direct form of communication between musician and audience.
“We’re not gonna be standing on a stage performing for people,” Licher told a camera person before the show. “The whole environment is gonna be our stage, and we’re gonna be using that.” In fact, before the show started, Licher’s crew played percussion on the top of a cliff to welcome attendees. “I just thought it would be really interesting to do some site-specific performance,” Licher said in the Desolation Center documentary, “to create something that was inspired by where we were.”
It was.
A kid named Victor Krummenacher, who played bass for what became the band Camper Van Beethoven, saw Savage Republic play at that first desert show. He’d bought their first album, Tragic Figures, and mailed back the reply card that Licher slipped into each copy. Licher wrote him back, and they began a correspondence. They finally chatted in person at Mojave Exodus, where the whole show experience left an impression of Krummenacher.
Camper Van Beethoven was young and developing—so young they hadn’t chosen their name yet—but they recorded a demo at the singer’s mom’s house and mailed it to Licher. “It was fun stuff,” Licher remembered, “but my first reaction was, ‘This is kind of interesting, but I’m not sure how I would work with it.’”
They eventually sent Licher a newer recording, and he found it more to his liking. And in 1985, he designed and released Camper’s debut LP. The album sold like crazy and became a cult classic.
“I said I’d be glad to get it out, so we printed up 1,250 copies of Telephone Free Landslide Victory in 1985, and it just took off. I did a second edition with a hand-printed cover, and it got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with it, so we licensed it to Rough Trade. ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’ became really popular as a single.”
Hell, as a middle school skateboarder, I loved that album. Back then, it was as cool as anything by The Cure, Black Flag, and Violent Femmes.
That popularity helped bring other bands into the fold.
In 1987, Licher designed the cover for For Against’s debut, Echelons, his artist wife Karen illustrated, and it got nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Package.” Not only did the album have a die-cut, letterpress cover, it had letterpress-printed labels and a letterpress reply card. It also included a real stalk of wheat—a nod to the band’s Midwestern origins—and, according to Discogs, “some copies also included live moths that hatched out of the wheat stalk after the LPs were assembled and shipped to distributors.”
Grammy, please.
Licher tells it a different way in the Savage Impressions book: “My wife and I had gone down to Mexico for a little weekend getaway. We went into this little store down there, and I saw this bundle of wheat stalks hanging from the ceiling. I was like, ‘Oh, we can put a wheat stalk in every record.’ So I bought the bundle of wheat stalks, and brought it back and we did that. And then there was a whole problem, because moths started hatching out of the wheat.”
Licher designed Camper Van Beethoven’s first major label LP, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and in 1989, that also got nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Package.”
As underground music caught commercial record companies’ attention and got greater airplay on college and mainstream radio during the late 1980s and early ’90s, his designs crossed out of the underground, too, and his distinctive design sensibility—and his ability to package music and imagery together—built him a deserved reputation as a dependable, devoted graphic designer who cares deeply about the quality of the work. He ended up working on albums with everyone from Hank Williams JR to John Lee Hooker and Stereolab, and with every label from Universal to Rhino, MCA to Touch & Go.
“One of the guys in the band Fourwaycross,” Licher told Wire, “who I ended up working with later on was a graphic designer at Warner Brothers Records in the ’80s and told me I should bring my portfolio in there. So I ended up taking a meeting with them and they really seemed to like my stuff and kept saying, ‘Jeff should see this.’ After that, they all went back to work and I was sitting there thinking, when is this Jeff guy showing up? It ended up being Jeff Ayeroff, who was the creative director at Warner Brothers at the time, and he ended up giving me the biggest job I ever got designing promotional sleeves and posters for Scritti Politti and their song ‘Perfect Way.’ That led to more projects with Jeff Ayeroff, and then some of those designers went onto other labels, so from that, I ended up doing a lot of work for major labels in the late 80s.”
He did the sleeves for a series of R.E.M.’s singles, which they released through their own fan club, starting with “Christmas ’89” and ending with their split 7-inch with Pearl Jam in 1997.
“I think it was 1989 when I got a call from the REM offices hiring me to print a Christmas card for them,” Licher told Wire. “Two years later, they came back and told me they wanted me to design and print the entire fan club package for them this year. They got such a good response that I ended up doing that for them for about ten years. I found out later [R.E.M. guitarist] Peter Buck was a huge Independent Project and Savage Republic fan. Someone who went to his house once told me he had an entire wall of his house dedicated to Independent Project Records. That was a great gig that sustained us for a number of years. It would keep us busy for three months out of the year and it would pay for half of our expenses every year.”
Boom times.
“Kind of the approach that I have is I want to make a beautiful object and I mostly want to make it for things that I love, whether it’s music or photographs or writing or whatever,” he told the Phoenix New Times. “At the same time, I don’t want to make things that look slick; I like the hand-done nature of things.”
No wonder Scenic’s The Kelso Run was such a seductively beautiful object: Everything Licher knew about music and graphic design at that point had gone into it.
Rather than printing on different types of paper stock, he printed on what’s called chipboard process. “It’s all recycled board,” Licher said. “They just sweep up whatever’s left on the floor and throw it in. Almost every time you buy chipboard it’s a different shade, color and texture.”
Many paper vendors carry chipboard, but he sources bulk chipboard from all around. In 1995, he bought some from a drywall company. He used to buy some from a reseller in Long Beach who stocked 10 to 15 different weights. For economy of scale, Licher bought a ton of chipboard a time, because $400 worth could produce around 5,000 album covers. But running a label and trying to make a living as a graphic designer while playing in a band got complicated.
After Savage Republic’s first LP, Tragic Figures, the band members developed different ideas about where to take the music. Some wanted to do more vocal music. Some wanted it to be more instrumental.
It’s telling that the 1985 Trudge EP is Licher’s favorite Savage Republic recording, because it embodied the direction he was heading.
“My original idea with Scenic was to go back to the part of SR that hits me the most deeply,” he told Perfect Sound Forever, “which is the Trudge EP material, and then take off from there with a new set of collaborators and see where we can take things.”
That led to Savage Republic’s next LP, Ceremonial, in 1985.
“That album ended up coming out way cleaner than I wanted,” Licher told Wire. “I also wanted it to be instrumental. Most of the other band members wanted vocals, so I just said, OK, whatever. I think it worked better as an instrumental album.”
Ceremonial also brought them back to the desert, which appeared on a different version of the album cover. It’s California’s Orocopia Mountains, where the Mojave Auszug show took place.
After playing and touring with Savage Republic for nearly a decade, Licher and the others disbanded in February 1989 and they perused other projects.
“That whole Ceremonial experience made me give up trying to lead the band and let it become a more collaborative effort,” Licher said. “Then it hit a point after our album Jamahiriya where I just didn’t want to do it anymore. This was not the direction I wanted to go in, and the people I brought in to be members were fans of Tragic Figures and wanted more of that. They didn’t understand I had already done that and wanted to move on and do something different. So that’s where Scenic came from. I wanted a band where I was directing what we’re doing.”
He was also returning to the desert as a source of material.
The eastern Mojave Desert, around the Depot, used to be very off the beaten path. “You have to purposely want to go out into a place where you’re 40 miles away from the nearest gas station,” said Licher. “At that time I was really enjoying exploring the backroads. We’d get a map and say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting. I’ll go check that out.' Or ‘That’s got an interesting name. Wonder what that looks like.’”
Naturally, his artwork changed.
“My wife is an artist, and she had been wanting to do some collaborative art projects, like land-related installation-type pieces in the desert,” Licher told me. “So she conceived of getting a group of artists together to go out and spend a weekend creating land art that we would document and then create a print of and sell, and donate the proceeds to environmental causes. So we ended up doing two of those projects. The first one was at the Kelso Dunes, which is in the East Mojave Desert. My introduction to that particular area was just going out there and doing that collaborative experience. It kept bringing me back. …And when I started getting these cheap cameras, I was like, well, that’s where I want to go photograph.”
Scenic
After photographing the Mojave Desert on his various excursions, he discovered these little point-and-shoot panoramic cameras. They cost $12. They had a plastic lens and you didn’t focus them. You just aimed and clicked the button.
He started sketching the instrumental music while he photographed.
“My idea for Incident at Cima was that I wanted to make an imaginary soundtrack, like an imaginary film soundtrack,” Licher told me. “But as time went on and we began working on it, I thought, well, that kind of idea had been done before. And it wasn’t that interesting. In the meantime, I’d been going out to the East Mojave Desert and taking these photographs with this little plastic point and shoot camera, fixed panorama. So all those photographs were on this little twelve dollar camera that I got at Spirited Drugstore [in LA]. And you put your own film in it. So I was putting black and white film in. And actually, I did like here’s, there’s a silver, sepia toned exhibition print that I had made of this, the image that’s on the first album. So I was doing all these photographs just because I love what I was getting from this camera. I mean, it’s a cheap plastic lens. It’s a little fuzzy around the edges, but it somehow just gave a feeling that this picture could have been taken a hundred years ago, or could have been taken yesterday. And I like that. So I was taking all these pictures in the East Mojave and I started thinking, well, what if this was a soundtrack for the East Mojave? What if we kind of switched it from being an imaginary film soundtrack and make it a soundtrack for a place? So that was the idea.”
When he and his wife left LA for Sedona, Arizona in 1992, he took his vision for Scenic, and the Independent Project Records business, with them.
“It took me a couple of years to get to the point of actually doing something. Moving to Sedona, that was the catalyst for it,” he said. A month after moving to Sedona, he took his first trip back to Los Angeles and had an early rehearsal with James Brenner and Brock Wurtz.
Licher had a lot of music he’d started sketching.
“James, the bass player, had a recording studio that he had set up in his house,” Licher said, “and he heard me playing some of these songs and said, ‘Bruce, just bring your guitar over. Let’s get these song ideas down. We can work on them, you know.’ So I went over there and I played everything that I had been working on, and he recorded it. Some of that is on the bonus disc [on Incident at Cima] and some of it is not very good at all, and so will never see the light of day. But we decided to just choose some of the songs to work on. Then we brought Brock in to be the drummer, and the three of us recorded all the basic tracks. Then we went into another studio to do overdubs. That’s when we started bringing in other people to flesh the songs out. Robert Loveless, who I had worked with in Savage Republic, did some keyboards and other instrumentation. We asked Jeffrey Clark to come in, who is now my partner in Independent Project Records. He was the singer in Shiva Burlesque. I first met James because of his bass playing in Shiva Burlesque. And that was why I decided I wanted to work with him, because of the band that I’d seen him play in before. But Jeff just did a few harmonica pieces on a few songs like ‘Kelso Run’ that he did with the harmonica. And we asked a couple of other people to come in and add spice here and there.”
Turns out, it’s not a big leap from Savage Republic’s raga-industrial-noise-rock to the desert in Licher’s own backyard. Where SV has songs like “The Ivory Coast” and “Andelusia,” Scenic has “The Road to Ivanpah” and “Chiriaco Summit.”
Listen to these songs side-by-side. While distinct entities, sonically, the bands share certain qualities.
Instrumental rock ‘n roll is it’s own form of expression. In high school, Bruce was a huge fan of The Ventures and mid-century instrumental surf music. The Ventures directly inspired Savage Republic’s song “Attempted Coup: Madagascar,” and that influenced Scenic.
“Sage” is one of Licher’s favorite Scenic songs.
“A lot of that has to do with James playing this melodic bassline,” he said. “He’s almost playing the lead line, in a way, on the bass.”
“Tundra,” one of Scenic’s 8-track demos, had another 1960s origin.
“I had been listening to an album by The Byrds,” said Licher, “and they have a song called ‘Why.’ There’s a couple different versions of ‘Why,’ but there’s one version that starts off with this dahdahdah, and it goes into the song. I was like, ‘I love that.’ I kind of did my own version of that intro and took it in a completely different direction.”
In Scenic, Licher played rhythm and lead guitar on the recordings.
The same place names that drew him down certain desert roads also provided the band’s cinematic and evocative song titles.
“We recorded all this music, and we didn’t necessarily have titles for it while we were recording it,” said Licher. “Afterwards, we would listen to it, then I would pick names off of the map of the East Mojave: ‘Hole in the Wall’ or ‘Down Black Canyon Road.’ You know, like, oh, okay, I remember driving down that black dirt road. That’s Black Canyon Road. You’ve got this huge expanse in front of you, and you’re miles from anywhere. Maybe there’s a campground up there, but there’s very few people. And just that sort of lonely feeling with the harmonica and everything.”
Scenic released The Kelso Run 7-inch in 1993 and then the full Incident At Cima LP in 1995.
Rolling Stone writer David Fricke described Incident At Cima’s sound as “Ennio Morricone dune-surfing in Death Valley…” Peter Gilstrap at Phoenix New Times described the debut LP as “Ennio Morricone meets Brian Eno.” In Raygun magazine, Grant Alden wrote: “Incident At Cima plays like futuristic chamber music. It is like nothing else on the landscape.” And in huH magazine, Robert Levine called the LP “a sweeping, swirling (sound) that’s full of both darkness and wonder.”
And as always, Licher designed the album art to match the feel of the music: austere, seductive, mysterious, washed out.
Even the band’s name functioned as part of the overall artful design. One word: scenic. It was descriptive. Punchy. Demonstrative. Typset.
“So for me,” Licher said, “Incident At Cima is, I think, one of the most successful records I’ve ever played on. I think there are issues that I have nowadays with some of the sounds on it, but on the other hand, I just love it. It’s kind of like: It fulfilled what I wanted to do with creating something as a musical expression. …[On] all the albums that I’ve been involved with, with the different bands, that’s the one that is most closely to how I conceived it.”
When they finished recording the album, Bruce, James, and Brock camped at a cool volcanic site called Hole in the Wall, in the East Mojave. “After we had dinner, he had a boombox, and we played a cassette of the entire album,” Licher remembered, “and just laid out there listening at the start of the album, like Yeah, we did it. I’ve heard from a number of people who have bought the CD, and they’ve gone out to the East Mojave, and they play it while they drive around out there and say, ‘This is the perfect thing.’ It feels great. It’s like, yeah, we did it.”
Incident At Cima completely eluded me during the 1990s, as it seems to have eluded many music fans.
While Grunge was peaking and kids worshipped Kurt Cobain, these outsider artists from the early ’80s L.A. underground had shifted their attention to very different sources of inspiration. Their instrumentals put the alternative era in reverse, favoring contemplative atmospherics inspired by a half-deserted land, instead of human voices. Loud singers dominated MTV at that time. Silence dominates the desert. Looking back, Scenic stands out not as an anomaly in the alternative era, but as a timeless, evocative musical statement, something wholly original and unconcerned with trends. It sounds as fresh 30 years later as the desert feels now: full of mystery and power and beauty.
Long after the ’90s, IRP finally digitized the out of print vinyl and made it available to a whole new generation of listeners.
The front cover of The Kelso Run single invites listeners to contribute to the preservation of the Kelso Depot, which graces the sleeve.
Originally opened in 1924, the Depot served Union Pacific passengers and employees food, and refilled steam engines with water, in an otherwise unpopulated part of California. Locals went there to eat and socialize. The Depot’s lush grounds had date palms and shady cottonwood trees. But after economics and technology changed, the Union Pacific railroad terminated passenger service to the Depot in 1964. Even though the railroad kept the Lunch Room working for railroad employees until 1985, the building had been falling apart. The once lush grounds withered in the desert heat. In 1985, Union Pacific suggested demolishing the property. Some people resisted, raising money and awareness in an effort to preserve the building. When the members of Scenic photographed the Depot, it had just been transferred to the Bureau of Land Management’s East Mojave National Scenic Area as a site of historical value, but it still needed help. Scenic invited listeners to write the Kelso Depot Fund, in Barstow, for more information about the restoration. The community activism worked.
By the time the Incident At Cima came out in 1995, the Mojave National Preserve had been established, and the National Park Service was managing the building. The Depot has since been fully restored. It includes a restaurant and hotel and functions as the official Mojave National Preserve Visitor Center. It’s located on Kelso Cima Road.
Scenic kept writing. In 1996, they released new music on the Aquatica album. They released The Acid Gospel Experience album in 2002, and The Long Run EP in 2003, and some singles, compilations, and live material. But for Bruce, it grew in a direction that veered from his original vision.
“So it’s kind of like everything else in Savage Republic ended up becoming much more of a collaborative process,” Bruce said, “and I didn’t really want that. But what happened, the same thing happened with Scenic. As we went along, we brought new people in and we developed new material. It became much more of a collaborative process. I’m not saying anything bad about the collaborative process, because there’s some amazing stuff that I would never have been able to do myself. I value the people I’ve worked with. But on the other hand, in terms of an artistic vision, Incident of Cima is the closest to anything that I’ve done so far that fulfills that.”
Eventually, he set Scenic aside and worked on many other projects.
“It’s interesting for me,” Licher said, “because I’ve been making music for almost 45 years now since I bought my first guitar. And I couldn’t tell you what notes and chords I’m playing. I mean, I don’t read music. I don’t. I know what the strings are, and I know what some notes are, but… It was interesting because I’ve played some music with a few people and they’ve said, ‘Well, you know, Bruce, you could probably do more if you learned music theory and all of that.’ And I almost don’t want to because I just, I like the creation of sounds that are pleasing to me. And fortunately, I’ve found some people that I can play with.”
2024
In 2009, Karen and Brucer Licher moved from Sedona to tiny Bishop, California, a small high desert town in the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada. There, the Lichers, co-curated an art gallery named The Project Room at Independent Project Press, which is their letterpress print studio.
And Bruce dug deep into his own archive, rereleasing his own music, releasing music by other artists both modern and archival, and expanding the offerings of his beloved record label, which he’s put so much energy and care into during his productive life.
The 7-inch is such a joy to hold, and to behold. It has heft. The jacket unfolds like an envelope to reveal the record and inserts inside. “I’ve always liked the idea that you don’t just get the record,” Licher said. “You get other cool stuff inside, too.” He made the sepia and black inserts on a Minolta two-color photocopy machine that he bought in the late-80s. “That was the most expensive piece of equipment I ever bought for my shop.
The day I found Scenic, ice still covered Portland’s sidewalks, after two serious winter storms had hit our city. I wore Sorrel snow boots, and my daughter wore her big boots. Everyone in town had been dealing with ice all week.
I hadn’t been craving desert warmth. I wasn’t searching for new music. We just wandered into a store after our daughter’s pediatrician appointment next door. When I saw bins of records, I pawed through them, and found my new favorite from 30 years ago.
Sometimes the digital age’s algorithmic power can’t deliver you the music you don’t know you need.
Sometimes you have to go into a store and search. Or listen to what’s playing overhead.
Sometimes you need to get lucky.
That’s one of Licher’s hopes when he designs such striking packaging.
“I just really liked the idea of somebody going to a record store,” Licher told Bandcamp, “perusing the bins and finding something really beautiful, pulling it out and going, ‘Wow, what is this? Where did this come from?’ and deciding that they wanted to take a chance on it, because they just got a feel from it that this could be good.”
Because as some wise person once said, luck isn’t only born-in good fortune. It’s also showing up.
Here’s my full conversation with Bruce Licher. Huge thanks to Bruce for his time and sharing his story!
This was so interesting to me, as I have a deep interest in both the desert and 90s music, too, and now I will look up Scenic for sure! My family took a road trip through the Mojave in 2024 as we drove from Death Valley to Joshua Tree, and we went right through Kelso. I'm so glad our GPS sent us on that remote stretch from Baker straight south instead of favoring the interstates and bigger highways. It also stirred my memories of reading the Grapes of Wrath in high school, as that was the area they traveled through as they went west, so I was inspired to finally reread it recently.
Living on the East Coast (Georgia), our trips out West are never long enough (it was a full four days' drive back home from Joshua Tree with no sightseeing stops). Would love to go back and explore it more slowly.
Great piece, Aaron. Thanks for the introduction to this record - I really dig it. Also, I was only vaguely aware of Savage Republic and I'm listening to them now.