The first time I heard about a massive two-day music festival in the desert, I admit I thought people who went must be crazy. Two full days of standing around in sweltering heat with thousands of people, long lines for fragrant Port-A-Pottys, and overly expensive concessions? Madness. Total insanity.
But then I actually went to Coachella, and realized that it's both exactly what you expect and wildly different.
When I started dating Kevin, I knew immediately that music was something we didn't have in common. Don't get me wrong, I love music, I play one instrument and can navigate a couple others if pressed; I'm just incredibly lazy about my fandom. I tend to wait for music to come to me, rather than going in search of it, and I don't spend much money on CDs because I'm cynical enough to figure that it's money wasted on a few songs I like and a bunch that stink. Kevin is the opposite -- in that he goes music shopping all the time, has a massive CD collection, sometimes buys things without sampling it first, and is rather on top of current and upcoming bands. He's not a snob about it; he loves Journey, Justin, Britney, and R. Kelly -- yes, R. Kelly; don't knock it until you've heard his latest single, "In The Kitchen" -- just as much as the next person. And thank God for that, because if I dated another person who rolled his eyes and acted miserable every time something mainstream came on the radio, it would fill me with murderous rage.
Anyway, Kevin being plugged into the music scene means he's on top of which bands are coming where, and when. Ergo, it was Kevin who first found out last spring that The Pixies -- a band I've loved for ages and ages -- were kicking off a long-awaited reunion tour with a performance at Coachella. We both decided that the prospect of a Pixies live set, before any renewed bickering threatened the group's peace pact, was well worth braving a day in the blistering desert heat. And since he could take Monday off, we decided that we might as well go for both days if we were making the trek down for one.
We had an amazing time. Sure, it was sweltering at times, but the music was excellent and the atmosphere ruled, and Kevin and I were completely sold. So we eagerly snapped up tickets for this year's festival as soon as they came available.
The thing about Coachella is, yes, it's technically in the desert, which means there's going to be dust -- in the parking lots, near the entrance to the venue, lurking amid the grass. But the festival itself is held on polo grounds, which means that it's a well-groomed expanse of lush lawn, framed by palm trees and mountain vistas; the earlier you arrive on Day One, the more you can appreciate how pretty it is, because the grass hasn't been trampled. It's not about standing around on a barren field wheezing through Weezer. The beer gardens are large and plenty, as are the shaded areas, and the food options -- though costly -- are actually rather good. The bathroom lines somehow never become prohibitively long, even at what I call the "Port-A-Prissys," which are essentially air-conditioned trailers with five or six stalls in them that flush, and running water. There are at least four clusters of these trailers in two areas of the polo grounds, set up specifically for people like me who get easily squicked out by staring at and then peeing onto a pile of other people's intestinal waste. Yes, I pee in the Port-A-Prissys, and I'm proud of it.
The crowds never get belligerent -- at least not in our two years -- and I think part of that is because they do a great job policing the beer gardens. You can drink inside, but you can't carry it out, which means you don't have rowdy people two-fisting it during a tightly packed set in one of the tents, spilling everywhere as they guzzle and bump the people around them. Sure, you can still get hammered, but unless you're being crafty -- and definitely, those people are there too -- you're not pounding during the actual sets, which makes the atmosphere a lot more pleasant.
This year, we drove down the night before the festival so that we could do a little gambling. It's here that I had the most insane luck I've ever had at a blackjack table, winning something like ten hands in a row; I stood up a hundred bucks richer after a relatively short time had passed, figuring that I shouldn't push my luck after losing two hands in a row all of a sudden. Kevin taught me that strategy for making yourself leave the table after you've won or lost your acceptable amount, and I'm grateful for that, because I probably could have been tempted to keep playing and see if my hot streak would last. As it was, I was content. (We would later learn that I had a hot hand that weekend; at a booth where you paid a dollar to see if you could roll a seven and win a free shirt, I successfully tossed a six-plus-one, and promptly opened up a Diet Coke bottle whose cap promised me a free one-liter bottle upon redemption. A beautiful thing.)
Then we checked into the Howard Johnson in Palm Springs, which is where we stayed last year. Now, at that time, Kevin and I vividly remember being pretty pleased with the place and how comfortable it was for the price. It had just become a Ho-Jo back then; now, it had a year of Ho-Jo-ness under its belt, and I have to say, it hurt. The mattresses were like cardboard, the towels were thin as the toilet paper, and none of us got a good night's sleep either night -- including Saturday, when we should have been out cold due to a long day of concert-going, draining sun, walking, and some assorted sneezing. "I can't figure out why Ho-Jo would take out good mattresses and replace them with crappy ones," Kevin said, genuinely confused. "I just... I don't understand. Help me understand." I sat down on the bed next to him to give him a hug, and the whole thing creaked like a broken staircase. When we stood up, the mattress looked tilted; when we returned to it after Day One, the dent still hadn't popped back out. I don't know what that thing was, other than From Hell.
This year, temperatures were cooler -- it was in the 80s during the day and dropped about twenty degrees once it got dark. The Santa Anna winds kicked up a bit, too, offering scattered relief from heat before sunset and even the occasional chill at night. That made it less daunting to be outside and in crowds as often as we were; although we made it through last year just fine, the aggressiveness of that 100-degree weather really zaps your energy.
Coachella is a haven for t-shirt slogans. Kevin lamented more than once that our Go Fug Yourself shirts weren't out in the world yet, because he was certain we'd have seen someone wearing one. "I don't know if this is our crowd or not," I pondered. "But then, I'm here, so maybe it is." Best t-shirt slogans we saw: "Iceberg Lettuce Sucks," "I *heart* Bob Saget," and "Guns Don't Kill People; People With Mustaches Kill People."
Kevin did outstanding pre-gaming this year, downloading songs from all the artists on the bill that he hadn't heard before and making himself a tentative Must List, then making me three CDs so that I could get familiar with the stuff I didn't already know. By the time the schedule came out, we were antsy to make sure we could see everything we felt we needed to see.
Day One was packed, with a schedule that pitted everyone we wanted to see against each other in some cruel form. We bounced around as best we could, catching beginnings and endings of some sets, opting to stay the entire time for others. Occasionally the crowds made those decisions for us -- if the tent had no elbow room, we'd hear a few songs and then wander somewhere else. The Doves bowed out, which was sad but made our day easier; still, we missed Stereophonics altogether, which bummed us out.
Initially I wanted to recap every band in detail, but there were too many. But here's a list of the bands we did see, either in full or in pieces; italicized are the highlights: Day One was Buck 65, Radio 4, M83, Snow Patrol, Keane, Rilo Kiley, Wilco, Cafe Tacuba, Weezer, The Secret Machines, Bloc Party, Mercury Rev, The Chemical Brothers, Coldplay, and Spoon*. We missed: Stereophonics. Day Two was Shout Out Louds, Sloan, Autolux, Jem, Kasabian, The Fiery Furnaces, The Futureheads, Tegan and Sara, The Arcade Fire, The Dresden Dolls, Pinback, and Nine Inch Nails. We missed: Bright Eyes, The Faint, Prodigy, New Order, and The Blood Brothers -- all on later than we could stay, except for New Order, which was a conflict.
* Spoon would have been a highlight, had the lead singer not been hoarse. Poor guy. Their sound was also effed up because of technical problems on that stage.
Easily the best moment was The Arcade Fire's set. We knew that would be a mob scene if we waited late to head for the stage, so instead we set up camp there during the previous set -- meaning we had to sit through Canadian sisters Tegan and Sara as they wailed and strummed their way through a forty-odd minute set. They were fine, but we were restless, so I didn't really give them a fair shake and I knew it, but man, one of them has a voice that's like nails on glass. Still, the strategy paid off the same way it did with The Pixies last year -- we ended up in a prime spot for the show we really wanted to see. And it was so worth it. The crowd had an amazing energy to it, the band sounded fantastic, and everyone was shouting along and dancing while being vastly entertained by the group's other various shenanigans. Their red-headed guitarist/drummer likes to put on a motorcycle helmet and then either ram things with it or drum on it while he's wearing it; this time, though, he climbed the scaffolding around the stage and beat on that for a while until his partner in tomfoolery -- another random floater who handles drums, xylophone, and general antics -- chased him up there and they started trying to drum on each other. There were also assorted pranks with cymbals and a cape. It was the perfect live set, the kind where you already like the music but the concert takes it to another level. I think we're going to try to see them again when they hit the Hollywood Bowl, although we're really hankering to see them in a smaller club setting.
The Shout-Out-Louds and Jem were both surprises early in Day Two, the former because I'd never heard them before and the latter because I figured she'd be a low-energy Dido type with little to offer live. On the contrary, she was charming, and playing with a live band enhanced the songs I already liked and made good things of the ones I hadn't become enamored with yet. But the most interesting set was the third one we saw on that outdoor stage by The Fiery Furnaces. Kevin and I decided that they must've made a bet to sing every song in their catalog during the 40-minute set, because they were performing things three times faster than the recorded versions, and in some cases didn't even sing the whole song before segueing seamlessly into another tune. Definitely bizarre, but so much so that it actually enhanced our enjoyment of it despite the fact that in some cases we didn't realize we'd just heard a song we knew until two minutes after they'd moved on to the next one.
Buck 65 was a particular hit for us. He's a Canadian act who was described as a "boho rapper," which basically means he has kooky-poetic lyrics, a twangy backing track, and a voice like Tom Waits. He sing-speaks funny and occasionally poignant lyrics; disappointingly, he came onstage alone, without a guitarist to play the backing twang, but he more than made up for that in charisma and the way he basically told the story of his songs with gestures and inflection. One song he wrote is about a centaur, and how being a centaur can be awesome because you have massive genitals, but sometimes it sucks because it's tough to screw a woman when you're half-horse. It's so weird, but damn amusing the way he presents it. Another song boasted the utterly incongruous, apropos-of-nothing chorus of, "Skeleton... on fire... riding... a motorcycle." A third song was all about craftsmanship, and how people don't appreciate it these days. "I don't know if I can think of anyone else who could pull off an ode to craftsmanship," Kevin observed. "In fact, I'm not sure anyone else has even tried to pull off an ode to craftsmanship." I don't know how else to describe him. Kevin and I got really attached to "Wicked and Weird," which he'd downloaded before we came, and that's why we went to his early Saturday performance on the main stage. He started the festival off for us, and we felt like it was well worth it already.
Predictably, Keane was good. If you hate the album, you'll hate the live performance; if you love it, you'll love it. They sound pretty much exactly the same, which can be good, although I do wish they'd work a variation in, kind of like how Radio 4 does its bongos. Still, I remain devoted to the keyboard player, who is a twitching genius of tortured artistry. He hangs his head like Schroeder, thrashes like he's in a mosh pit, and kicks his leg out like Billy Blanks is urging him to conquer something. Several times I gasped, expecting him either to crack his forehead on the corner of the keyboard, or kick out so hard and far that he knocked the legs out of some of the tables. Both came dangerously close to happening. This man is well worth watching; I had binoculars trained on him for half the set.
I had been dying to see Rilo Kiley live, and that intensified once I found out that the lead singer, Jenny Lewis, played the little red-headed girl on that highly saccharine old series Brooklyn Bridge, which I'm not sure lasted even one season, but which my mother and I used to watch together because we thought it was cute and Marion Ross was kind of great in it. I couldn't imagine that sweet little pug-nosed kid scripting the kind of stirringly poetic lyrics she now does for the band, nor could I picture her wailing "Does He Love You?" Indeed, seeing her hasn't changed that sense that it's all incongruous, but I did detect traces of the little actress in her and that was kind of amusing. Beyond that, the set was fantastic, despite a late start because they were on a stage plagued with technical difficulties. They mainly played things from the latest album, More Adventurous, and they sounded absolutely terrific. Oh, and they gave us our rock-and-roll moment of the first day: At the end of the set, which they closed with "Does He Love You?", they riffed for a while, Jenny added some impromptu wailing, and then the guitarist finished by tossing his guitar in the air after his final chord and then bolting before it crashed down onto the stage. That sort of counts as trashing something, right?
The biggest disappointment for me was Weezer, although the more I hear from other attendees, the more it seems like we're the only ones who were so underwhelmed. I think part of the problem is that we were in a decent spot relative to the stage, but not close enough to be part of the mob that was totally enamored with and infected by the performance. Their energy didn't carry, so we didn't get swept up in the set. The band played everything I wanted to hear, but the first half of the set was all slow songs that sounded even half a step more lethargic than they should have. Things picked up with their new song, "We Are All On Drugs," after which they played "Hash Pipe" and the new single "Beverly Hills," and then "Buddy Holly," so that was a plus, but otherwise I just got very little from Weezer at all. Other letdowns were The Futureheads, who I wanted to be awesome because I like the songs, but it was an average performance; and The Dresden Dolls, who sound like they should have a kicky cabaret-style live act complete with crazy mechanics -- "Coin-Operated Boy" just begs for some kind of insane prop -- but were instead kind of mundane. I'll give them that we were sitting out near their tent listening to the set while eating, so maybe things got more exciting, but from what we could see when we popped in for a look, it didn't live up to the potential.
The Secret Machines sounded great; we drifted in and out, but I caught "Erased," which is my favorite song of theirs. That's the real reason I ended up enjoying this band so much -- I first heard it last year, when Filter Magazine left a free CD under everybody's windshield wipers, and it contained "Erased," as well as stuff by The Thrills, The Killers, Ozomatli, The Secret Machines, Modest Mouse... Ah, it's so good, one of the best mixes I have. Ergo, I loved the symmetry of discovering The Secret Machines for the first time last year at Coachella, only to see them live in 2005.
Bloc Party was the buzz show of the first day, and they sounded good enough, but I'm not sure they were worth all that hype. I like the music but it didn't change my life or send me running to buy up all of it. The band performed in one of the tents, which means limited space for an intimidating pack of bodies, and it was completely packed. We squeezed in between some people and managed to make it four or five songs into the set before the heat -- and this is long after sunset and amid a brisk wind, so that gives you an idea how many people were in there -- and the crowds started to frustrate us, so we bailed and went to see Mercury Rev. (Incidentally, a teeming throng was a problem for a couple bands; Kasabian was so crammed, we couldn't even get close to the side entrances of the tent. We listened for a bit and then drifted elsewhere.)
Nothing will beat seeing The Pixies last year, but on the whole, we saw a hell of a lot of good music and didn't have one sunburn among us. I think, as a fair-skinned wench, I'm the most proud of that. The sun and the standing and the constant scheduling conflicts were really tiring, but by the time we'd gotten back into Los Angeles, we were already thinking ahead to next year.