Under the first full moon of 1985, the psychedelic punk band Meat Puppets shredded in the depths of the Mojave Desert, powered by a generator and surrounded by incandescent cactuses. Some 500 pink-haired, leather-clad punks had traveled — many in a caravan of yellow school buses — from downtown Los Angeles to what was advertised only as a “remote desert location.” Those who came to the gig, called the Gila Monster Jamboree, in cars were given hand-drawn maps directing them to a checkpoint in Victorville, Calif., where they received a second guide, pointing three miles down a dirt road to a dry lake bed. Many were on acid.

“It all seemed like a cartoon,” the Meat Puppets guitarist Curt Kirkwood said in an interview. “It was someplace no one was supposed to be.” In her memoir, the Sonic Youth bassist and singer Kim Gordon called her band’s performance that day — its first on the West Coast — one of her “favorite shows ever.”

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The spectacle was a part of Desolation Center, a series of guerrilla punk shows in Southern California that set an adventurous precedent that lingers today. Fifteen years before the world’s highest-grossing festival started, Gary Tovar, the founder of Goldenvoice, which produces Coachella, attended a Desolation Center gig. Perry Farrell, who helped mastermind Lollapalooza, played the Jamboree with his pre-Jane’s Addiction group Psi Com. These anarchic desert happenings didn’t last long — they ran from 1983 to 1985 — and have rarely been celebrated, but now their history is chronicled in a documentary called “Desolation Center” that premieres this week at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Its director is the Desolation Center organizer Stuart Swezey, who began booking shows in 1982 as a 21-year-old college dropout.