A well-known German stoner-rock band is making its way to the United States for the first time.
The rock heavyweights of Samavayo have been fortifying a doomy, fuzzy, fast brand of hard-hitting jams for more than 25 years. Their balls-to-the-wall, speedy and riff-tastic sound has blasted beyond the band’s home of Berlin, earning the band fans across Germany and the rest of the world. Despite being many, many miles from the heart of the desert-rock scene, the band takes inspiration from the originators of desert rock, carrying a down-tuned, fiery vibe into their song creations.
Samavayo is heading to the United States on a seven-date tour, with a stop on Saturday, Jan. 25, at Lo-Bar Social.
During a recent Zoom interview with vocalist and guitarist Behrang Alavi, he discussed how Kyuss’ albums changed the course of Germany’s music scene.
“Samavayo is probably one of the oldest bands active in Germany,” Alavi said. “We started doing music in 2000, and there are not many bands that people in this genre know from Germany. We started when we were 18 to 19 years old, and we had a rehearsal room close to some older folks who were doing some really heavy music. They came from a sort of Pearl Jam kind of music, but they had a really heavy tone. It was at that time when our friends in Berlin, Germany, started spreading around Kyuss LPs, and we started listening to that music. I think each one of us fell in love with this kind of metal, with a lot of bass and groove.”
The band started tapping into other bands of the desert-rock scene, like Monster Magnet and Queens of the Stone Age. Indie labels and underground festivals helped Samavayo become part of a rising tide of desert-rock popularity in Germany.
“We didn’t know it yet, but there were labels like Nasoni and Elektrohasch, pretty active labels, doing this kind of music and also bringing American bands to the German market, all on a pretty independent level,” Alavi said. “We started doing music, and we got connected to the people who are doing probably the most important stoner rock festival in Germany, which is a crew called Caligula 666; they do the Stoned From the Underground festival. We played there in 2004, and in those times, it was a really small scene. … Nowadays, we have lots of huge stoner-rock festivals in Germany, like 20 or 30 different ones. In those years, we were one of the first bands.”
Samavayo’s tour spans California, Arizona and Nevada, with one stop being at Las Vegas Planet Desert Rock Weekend, a festival celebrating stoner, desert and other heavy rock genres.
“It’s our first time ever playing in the states,” Alavi said. “We had some weird tours, like in Brazil 10 years ago, and we played in different countries like Greece and Albania and (across) Europe, way before other bands explored it, but we never managed to come to the States. The root of the whole U.S. tour is the request from John Gist from the Las Vegas Planet Desert Rock Weekend. He had already asked us five or six years ago, but it was pretty spontaneous, and we didn’t manage to make it happen. This time, he asked … at the beginning of 2024. We had a lot of time to decide what we’re going to do with this request, and we quickly confirmed it and tried to check if we can do more than just this one show in Vegas.
After being enthralled with the mythos of the desert for more than 25 years, Samavayo got help on their tour from desert-rock pioneer Mario Lalli, of Yawning Man and Fatso Jetson fame.
“We just started listening to Kyuss, and from that, we went on, of course, to listen to Yawning Man and other bands,” Alavi said. “That’s why it’s pretty special to have Mario Lalli helping us with these shows. … Being one of our idols of our youth, now he’s helping us out with booking shows. The connection to Mario is through the fact that we are on the same booking agency, which is Sound of Liberation. … My wife was a booker of Sound of Liberation. She quit two years ago, but she was very well connected to Mario, and said he’s a really awesome, nice guy. … I sent him an email and said, ‘Hey, you know my wife has been the booker, and we know each other from festivals. Could you help us out?’ He was, unexpectedly, easy to access, really quick to answer and just helped us out.”
Lalli is a godfather of desert rock, as it was his generator that started the era of the desert generator shows that birthed stoner rock—yet he is always looking to help out fellow artists.
“I find it awesome when people are so well-connected and have these options to help other bands out,” Alavi said. “He has to help us with the merch we’re sending; he helps us with equipment; he gives us a lot of advice about where to rent the van. … He’s helping us out on different levels of this whole tour happening, so without him, I don’t think there would have been a tour.”
The band is celebrating 25 years, and their first U.S. tour is a great way to celebrate. Alavi explained how the band has stayed together for so long.
“You have to be like experiencing new stuff and doing new stuff,” he said. “Just playing around the same cities and places each year is going to get boring after a while, so doing these kinds of experiments, going somewhere, investing a bit of money and trying to do a tour in America or maybe some region you haven’t been before, is one thing that is good for us.
“The other one is, every two or three years, we release a Christmas song where we sing really traditional Christmas stuff, which is just fun. It doesn’t have anything to do with being a stoner-rock band. We released a ‘White Christmas’ cover as a trio, like everyone singing a classical voice of a choir. This kind of stuff is a bit weird, a bit funny, and it just brings you out of that thing that you’ve been doing for over two decades.”
Alavi said Samavayo loves playing live, and wants to continue playing for as long as physically possible.
“The music, the way we play, is pretty intense and physical,” he said. “We’re one of those sweaty bands that really move on the stage, not just stay there and jam for an hour, so it’s also a question of, ‘How old can we be playing this kind of music?’ … There are still a lot of things to achieve, like personal goals, and some festivals we’ve never played before, and some countries we’ve never been to. This is also a job. We’re not hobby musicians. Each one of us has a main job, and the other one is a musician, so there is a certain degree of professionalism. To get these two together is not always easy, but we managed it for 25 years—and I think we were going to move on still for a lot of years to come.”
Samavayo will be performing at 8 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 25, with Shotgun Sawyer and The Happy Trails at Lo-Bar Social, 445 California Ave., in Reno. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.samavayo.com.