Locations famous as destinations for transformative musical tourism/travel/pilgrimage

head to the plateau on a hot summer night and you will see jazzy jeff giving turntable benedictions by charcoal light.

I imagine New Orleans was like this for a lot of people.

Berlin for raves specifically?

berlin for art rockers like eno, bowie, iggy & reed

head to the plateau on a hot summer night and you will see jazzy jeff giving turntable benedictions by charcoal light.

Hopefully I'm not ennabling anything by saying this, but Scott, you should be drunk more often.

I have to imagine that Berlin as a transformative experience is... well, naive. So much of what made that experience was the whole east/west divide, the city-island, etc. You neither have that environment, nor, frankly, much physical remnant of it.

a transformative experience can be had at any time in any place. for real. you never know where.

I once went to Te Awamutu in New Zealand and found the "road hedged with roses", as described by Tim Finn in "Walking Down A Road". It was a transformative experience for me.

xpost-ish

Well, then shouldn't Glastonbury and Woodstock be listed as well?

I don't think that the east/west divide is necessarily the crux of what made time spent in Berlin a so called "transformative experience" for musicians/artists. Or perhaps more accurately, the 'removal' of this divide, ie. the fall of the wall, hasn't had such a drastic effect on the atmosphere of Berlin as an extremely liberal city, a place where difference seems to be embraced rather than shunned. The history of a place can't be erased by physical changes in the landscape. I've only been there twice myself, and maybe I've been lucky, but I've had some amazing, eye-opening times in the short periods I spent there. I recommend time spent in Berlin to any artist who feels stifled by their home environment or who simply longs for fresh experience. As for music in particular, the east-side especially has a pretty astonishing diversity of clubs and live music venues. There are a LOT of interesting people to be met and places to be seen.