POP MUSIC : Rock in a Hard Place : An oasis of creativity has bloomed in the desert of the Southwest, tucked away from the music capitals of either coast. ‘We may as well be on Mars,’ says one musician. ‘The thing is, we’re a very satisfied bunch of Martians.’

PALM DESERT — Out past the diner with the life-size dinosaurs in the parking lot and the high-tech windmills that dot the hills like oversized wildflowers, Kyuss has found a rock ‘n’ roll oasis in the California desert.

The beautifully bleak expanses of the Coachella Valley might seem an unlikely home for cranked-up guitars and thundering drums. But members of the hard-rock quartet see something in the landscape that they couldn’t find in the music industry hub of Los Angeles--inspiration.

“The desert is the key ingredient in our sound,” says singer John Garcia, 23. “We’re always trying to work the desert vibe into our music. Whatever power and integrity our sound has comes from living around here.”

The members of Kyuss--the group takes its name from the game Dungeons & Dragons--are lazing about a genuine oasis, complete with a spring that nurtures a stand of palm trees and a lush tangle of vegetation.

The band recently completed a European tour and is getting ready to hit the road for three months across the United States opening for Dinosaur Jr. There are plenty of last-minute details to worry about, but right now, the band members are content to spend a few hours soaking up some more of that desert vibe.

“You can’t find medicine better than this,” bassist Scott Reeder, 28, says with a shrug.

Musical hot spots come and go, from Seattle to Chicago’s “Guyville,” but the desert doesn’t budge. At the outskirts of towns such as Palm Desert, up in the high desert of the Wonder Valley or out in Arizona’s Sonora Desert, bands can work free of most urban distractions and enjoy life in the slow lane.

The sun, wind and wide open spaces of the Southwestern deserts don’t create a single, identifiable sound--the whomping metal of Kyuss wouldn’t be easily confused with the loopy meditations of Tempe, Ariz., group the Meat Puppets or the shambling, countryfied rock of Tucson’s Giant Sand.

But the harsh beauty of the desert does seem to pull uniquely powerful music from the players who call it home.

“The desert can be the biggest, coolest club you could imagine,” says the compact, athletically built Garcia, who fronts Kyuss onstage like a man possessed but in conversation is serene and soft-spoken.

“We didn’t have many real clubs to play in around here, so we’d take a generator, a light, a keg and a bunch of kids out in the middle of nowhere and throw our own party,” he says. “We’re only two hours away from Los Angeles, but considering how different things are out here, we may as well be on Mars. The thing is, we’re a very satisfied bunch of Martians.”

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As Highway 62 slides eastward between the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base and Joshua Tree National Monument, the world gets awfully quiet. That makes Dick Dale a very happy desert resident.

“There’s perfect peacefulness here,” says the veteran guitarist. “You can close your eyes and just listen to your ears ring. . . . You don’t want to turn on a radio, because you feel like you’d dirty the air. You don’t even want to speak. It’s that powerful.”

For most of his career, Dale has been known as the King of the Surf Guitar, and he and his group the Del-Tones had hits with such genre-defining tunes as “Let’s Go Trippin’ ” and “Miserlou.”

Six years ago, disgusted by the polluted waters surrounding their Newport Beach mansion, Dale and his wife, Jill, set out for the desert and built a house for themselves. The man who once spent half of every day in the surf now hauls his own water to his home and frets over faucets left running too long.

“I’ve been able to experience the spirituality of the ocean all my life, but I feel that’s been destroyed,” says Dale, whose 2 1/2-year-old son Jimmy rounds out the household. “Now I’ve got the spirituality of the high desert, and I don’t think I could get any higher.”

Dale, 57, says the desert has added a new ferocity to his music, but he didn’t take to his stark surroundings all that quickly.

“When I first came to the desert, I said, ‘Who the hell would want to live here? You’d have to be out of your gourd.’ But property was cheap, so we bought land and built the house. We were coming out once or twice a week, and then we started asking, ‘Why are we bothering to drive back to the beach?’ ”

The desert has given Dale peace of mind, but it’s also refired his desire to make powerful, primal rock ‘n’ roll. He says he’s given up his “Surf King” crown and has no second thoughts about his move inland.

“For $3 million and perfect surf, you couldn’t get me out of this place. I don’t need to be in the world of riches anymore. Diamonds and Rolexes and all that crap are gone. I have a Rolls-Royce that’s got four flats and a rat living in the trunk. The rat’s happy, and so am I.”

There’s no rat in Curt Kirk wood’s trunk, but he does have a desert tortoise hibernating in his closet. The Meat Puppets’ guitarist and singer has been creating oddly soothing mixes of punk, country, pop and rock music for nearly 15 years.

Having grown up in Phoenix and now living in nearby Tempe, Kirkwood couldn’t help but be influenced by the desert around him.

“I don’t think we try to consciously write music for the desert,” he explains. “But the band appreciates our natural surroundings, and through our music we enjoy satisfying that primal need to be outdoors.

“When we’re really playing well together, the music rings out with some of that sunny, windy, desert feeling, and we all understand that particular vibe without having to talk much about it. Living here, the desert creeps into everything you do.”

Kirkwood, 35, says that the desert’s influence shows up strongly on such songs as “Station,” “Shine” and “Severed Goddess Hand,” from the band’s latest album, “Too High to Die,” a hit in college-alternative radio circles.

He also credits the desert with bringing him, his bassist brother Cris and drummer Derrick Bostrom together as a band in 1980.

“As soon as we got cars, we started driving to the edge of town to hang out, because there was never much of a club scene to get involved with,” he recalls. “We were on the fringe of the Phoenix desert stoner scene. It seemed really natural for a band to come out of our desert peer group, but when it came time to make music, only myself, Cris and Derrick were into showing up to play on a consistent basis.”

As the band progressed, the members greatly appreciated the comfort and solitude that the desert offered.

“One of the reasons we liked going there so much was that none of us were very good in social situations,” Curt Kirkwood says. “We loved the desert because it was real pretty and we didn’t have to deal with other people.”

Down in Tucson, Howe Gelb, the lanky, laid-back singer-guitarist who fronts the band Giant Sand, is beginning to admit to himself that the desert may have more influence on his music than he previously believed.

“For the last umpteen years I’ve been saying that there’s no connection at all--that Thelonious Monk would have made the same music if he lived out here.

“But I’m starting to change my mind. The desert doesn’t give you a specific sound, but it definitely gives you an overview. Maybe a band like mine just wouldn’t grow anywhere but the desert.”

Gelb is especially pleased by the incidentals of the desert lifestyle. “Rent is cheap, the pot is practically free, and no one cares if you can really sing or not,” he notes with a laugh.

He has no qualms about musicians’ tapping the desert as an influence, but he says the connection should not be flaunted.

“The people that call themselves desert bands and actually sing about the desert come off as kind of laughable and obnoxiously naive,” says Gelb, whose latest Giant Sand album, “Glum,” was released at the end of August. “We don’t need more people stating the obvious.”

Giant Sand’s previous album, “Purge and Slouch,” was recorded in an old house outside Tucson, with Gelb contributing most of his guitar parts and vocals while slumped on a living room couch.

Gelb has also lived and worked in the Mojave Desert, at an isolated ranch called Rim Rock. He says that both experiences beat working in Los Angeles.

“Very few musicians stop to think how L.A. might work against them,” he says. “Every day I drove out to this house in the desert to record, and no matter how hot it was, I’d be thinking that this was another day I didn’t have to deal with the traffic on Venice Boulevard.

“You don’t have to deal with all that extra grief out here. If you’re caught up in dealing with everything from parking tickets to riots, you’re going to make music that reflects that, and great music can come from that. But in this setting it’s easier to clear your head out. Once you experience the solitude of the desert, it becomes necessary.”

Kyuss--whose members grew up in the small communities around Palm Springs--came together in the late ‘80s, when Garcia and guitarist Josh Homme made a tape to sell in local record stores.

Catherine Enny, the manager of the studio where they recorded, thought so much of the band’s large, loud sound that she began booking shows for Kyuss, often sending them 100 miles west to gigs in Los Angeles.

While the group made a powerful impression in some of Hollywood’s big rooms, the band’s favorite venue remained the wide open spaces of the desert.

“We can’t get that sound anywhere else,” bassist Reeder says. “But it’s the standard we shoot for.”

He helped throw the first generator parties with his previous band, Across the River, and is happy to continue the tradition with Kyuss.

“It’s pretty nice to be playing as loud as you can and look up and see a full moon,” he says.

The band had made the trip to Los Angeles only a few times when it was spotted and snapped up by Chameleon Records, which put out “Blues for the Red Sun” in 1992.

The album was produced by Masters of Reality guitarist Chris Goss, who had become a close friend of the band’s after attending a few of its generator parties.

Kyuss’ future looked uncertain when Chameleon folded last November. But Elektra Records, the label’s distributor, elected to pick up the band’s contract and released the album “Sky Valley” in June.

“People have said it’s amazing we survived,” Reeder says, “but it’s no big deal. We just kept playing. That’s the easiest thing in the world for us to do.”

Adds Garcia: “That’s the way things go out here. It’s laid-back. We’re in no hurry to do anything. We want it all done right.”

Doing it right has occasionally meant saying no. When MTV wanted the band to bring a film crew to one of the generator parties, Kyuss politely demurred.

“I thought that was the coolest thing,” says Goss, 37. “There’s a commitment to being genuine that I love about Kyuss. Those parties are something that the local kids really enjoy. Why make it flavor of the week?”

Goss had such a good time visiting and working with Kyuss on its home turf that a year ago he moved from Hollywood and bought a home and space for a studio in Palm Desert.

“It’s been sheer pleasure,” he says. “If you can take the heat, the desert’s great. I used to have the philosophy when I was making rock ‘n’ roll in L.A. that the music had to be louder than the noise all around me, and I thought that the competition made the music stronger.

“I don’t think that way anymore. Wherever your soul is comfortable, that’s where you should make music. I’m comfortable in the desert. I hit those windmills and I’m free.”