Coachella Valley Music & Arts Fest 2008 Was Incredible!!

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I spent about a week in SoCal, and I’m still recovering from three nights sleeping in the desert!

Last Wednesday was a long night racing across CA-41 and CA-46 in the pitch black, which was a very eerie experience with literally no other cars on the road for miles and miles. After downing two Rockstar energy drinks and six shots of espresso, and slaloming down US-101, I finally arrived at in Goleta, CA, at 11pm and spent a couple days enjoying Santa Barbara and Isla Vista with my friend Nicole Pefley and her roommate Benita Chow.

Nicole and I traveled east toward Palm Springs to attend this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, CA. Last year with Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Björk was great, but this year undoubtedly blew all my past live music experiences out of the water! Coachella is a three-day concert where you set up camp in the Southern California desert and get your pick from about 125 bands. Nearly 60,000 people attend the festival each of the three days. Indio is sort of an oasis out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by golf courses, palm trees, a few rocky ridges, and little else. The festival is held on the massive Empire Polo Fields, which provide a large, flat, grassy blank slate for the venue. The headliners this year were Jack Johnson, Portishead, Prince, and Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd).

We got a late start, and after sitting at a standstill in traffic passing through Riverside, we were about 3 hours late to the concert grounds. We struggled to get our tent up as the sun sank over the horizon, so finally we rushed to get into the event before dark. As Nicole and I arrived, we were just in time to hear The Verve perform their 90’s ballad “Bittersweet Symphony.” A powerful song to start off a great weekend with. (I’ll include a number of Dave Bullock’s gorgeous photographs from the event. Bullock was live blogging from Coachella this year and wrote several articles for Wired magazine)

Above, a bird’s-eye view of half the Coachella venue, including the Gobi, Mojave, and Sahara tents. As the sun set, and as The Verve wrapped their set, we played in the Sonic Forest, an array of 8-foot-tall metal pillars that chirp birdsong at us as we interact with them. Then we grabbed our first drinks at the beer garden.

Later, the crowd filled in at the Coachella Main Stage for Jack Johnson’s set Friday night. This is just one of five venues that play simultaneously! Jack Johnson is always a fun act to see live, since he brings a carefree, upbeat atmosphere to the concert. It was an exciting surprise when he brought Matt Costa and Mason Jennings on stage to accompany him for a few songs!

Saturday was 103°, so we spent the daytime hours trying to keep out of the heat at the local Starbucks. The first big attraction of the afternoon was Death Cab for Cutie. We found a decent place to lounge for the duration of their show, and we were both pleasantly surprised at how many of their songs we knew and enjoyed. I guess I liked Death Cab more than I knew I did!

Next up was the German quartet Kraftwerk. The experimental group, part of a movement dubbed “Krautrock,” actually got their start back in 1970, and have had nearly two dozen members cycle through the quartet. They were some of the original pioneers of electronic music, and some of the earliest artists to give a voice to post-war Germany. Their show is an extremely powerful mix of aural and visual sensations as they perform their progressive electronica beats in front of a massive LED screen on Saturday night. Opening with “The Man Machine,” and continuing with “Tour de France” and their psychedelic “Vitamins,” the only way I could express it to someone who wasn’t there is that it was like the music reached inside your mind and wouldn’t let you turn away!

Being at these live music venues is an entirely different experience from any other music listening experience I’ve had, and I think it opened my eyes to the fact that with electronic music in particular, while many people don’t seem to “get” it at first, it is something that you fall in love with when you hear it live. Whether it’s because of the extreme volume, the energy of the crowd, or the intense audio-visual experience, needless to say this set the mood for the weekend.

Once we were able to shake ourselves from the mind control that Kraftwerk was exercising over us, we raced over to see M.I.A. perform in the Sahara tent. M.I.A. is an unimposing young woman from Sri Lanka, by way of London, but on the mic she puts out loud, thumping rap anthems with heavy African and Brazilian influence, and a lot of original Sri Lankan flavor. She brought Afrikan Boy out to help rile up the huge crowd with “Hussel” Saturday night, above—and when I say crowd I mean it. I’ve never seen the Sahara tent so packed—the audience was literally climbing three levels up the rafters! It was sort of unreal to step back, take a look around, and see yourself as a part of this huge unruly mass of people all dancing to the primal bass beats (Nicole appropriately called the experience “getting bassfucked”!) and sounds of gunfire as they cranked it up again with “Paper Planes.” The difference is, Nicole says, at the favela parties in Rio de Janeiro, the gunfire would be real.

Finally, we rounded out Saturday night at the Portishead show. The band is a trip-hop trio from Bristol, England, consisting of DJ/percussionist Geoff Barrow, guitarist Adrian Utley, and lead singer Beth Gibbons, who still croons her signature powerful, haunting high notes after nearly twenty years as the group’s front woman. The trio hadn’t put out any new songs together in nearly a decade as they each worked on their respective solo material, and Coachella was their first live performance in nearly as much time, on the U.S. tour to coincide with their brand new album release Third. Standing at the center of what felt like the world’s largest surround-sound system, Portishead’s classics like “Sour Times” and “Mysterons,” as well as their new songs like “Machine Gun” and “Silence” struck a powerful chord in the audience. As the last song hit its crescendo, I lay there in silent wonder—in a musical trance—enjoying what I can only call the afterglow of a night of music more perfect than I can describe, a musical experience akin to great sex.

You’d think Saturday night would be a hard act to follow, but Roger Waters was miles away from any sort of let down on the main stage Sunday night. The Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter played a full set that night that featured many of his solo works and several hits from Pink Floyd favorites like The Wall and Wish You Were Here. I hear they also released a gigantic flying pig covered in political graffiti, that somehow managed to disappear! After about an hour, Waters and his band disappeared for a set change and returned twenty minutes later to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Yes, that’s right, they re-created Pink Floyd’s entire 43-minute classic rock trip under the stars in the middle of the Indio desert. And they did it quite well, utilizing the gigantic Coachella main stage surround sound to its full functionality with all the album’s original voice-overs and sound effects coming from all directions. The entire set was also accompanied by some pretty cool visuals captured by one audience member over at Vicarious Music. All-in-all it was a great initiation into Pink Floyd’s music for me, and for other listeners outside of that generation I’m sure. Waters played for nearly three hours, as the audience just couldn’t get enough on the last night of this festival, doing an encore with “Comfortably Numb.”

Nicole and I stayed for the very last act of the festival, the French DJ duo Justice, who waited respectfully for Waters to finish out his set before they started mixing their signature thumping techno/dance music at about 12:30 AM. These guys really have energy; you can tell they really have fun with it, bobbing their heads to the beat while they mix up blaring electronica with a heavy rock flavor. The two perform on turntables and laptops alongside a giant lighted cross, and their up-tempo beats were the perfect thing to give the audience one last rush of energy before getting on the road back home.

This year’s event was beyond a doubt the richest musical experience I’ve had, and as long as Coachella continues to have great lineups each year, I plan to continue going regularly. It’s a fun road trip down to Southern California, and a beautiful natural setting for a great concert. If you’re interested in making the trip with me from Sacramento in 2009, get in touch.

All photos are copyright Dave Bullock/Wired.com

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