Songfacts®:

• "Death Valley '69" is a collaboration between Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch, who worked in a subset of punk rock known as "no wave" - very loud and discomfiting. She wrote and performed the song with the band.
  
  The song is filled with disjointed images - a Chevy, someone named Sadie - and takes place in Death Valley, California in 1969. The word "death" and musical tone lead many to believe it's a rather evil song, but Lunch says it isn't. "That's a happy pop song," she said in a Songfacts interview. "Read into it what you will. Evil? I guess. I have far more malignant material than that. More terrifying, that's for sure."
• Appearing on Sonic Youth's second album, Bad Moon Rising, "Death Valley '69" was their first single. The group never aimed for mass appeal but found a devoted audience and earned steady airplay on college radio. Many bands cited them as an influence, including Nirvana, Pavement, and My Bloody Valentine.
• The first Sonic Youth music video was for this song. Directed by Richard Kern, it's filled with gore, as we see the band members if various states of dismemberment. The lead in the video is Lung Leg, the actress/model who appears on the cover of their 1986 album Evol.
• The album was named after the 1969 song "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. "The Creedence song 'Bad Moon Rising' was all about the negative energy of America around the time of Vietnam and to revisit that was exciting and subversive," vocalist Thurston Moore told Mojo magazine. "It allowed us to continue our interest in nihilism."