Coachella 2010 Day One: Friday

Been a crazy month for me so far. Got a new job starting in May, quit my contract job, and went to the Coachella Music Festival for the first time with my friends Kurt, Dan, and Mikey, and their friends Mark and Don.



I will try to complete these posts before I head off to London tomorrow, so let's get to it.

I had never been to Palm Springs before and was pleased to find it is really a lovely city with one of the most striking mountain backdrops I have ever seen. The weather for the whole festival was nearly perfect, not too hot and had a nice breeze almost every day. I have heard that just a few weeks from now Palm Springs gets ridiculously hot, so my experience is a little clouded by the nicer climate.



We had a nice, but not great, house in a resort across the street from the festival grounds. Even though we were that close, it was still quite a haul to the venue. For one, we were at the very opposite side of the resort from the main gate so it would have been a 40 minute walk from there. Luckily we drove and parked up near the gate and then walked to the polo fields. Even after driving, we had another 30-40 minute walk. In the morning it was hot, but we were so excited about the shows that we overcame it. Coming back, the walk would seem much much longer, however, at night the temp fell into the 60s and was lovely.

It is a bit of a nightmare getting onto the festival grounds. You have to stop at a security station and get your three-day band, which you then have to wear for three days straight. Got to be a little irritating by the final day, but I suppose was necessary. Here is a pic of me and my housemates powering up for the day:



It is difficult to explain Coachella to most people. There are a lot of bands. Too many to ever see. There are two huge outdoor stages: the Main Stage and the Outdoor Theater. Then there are three tents. The smallest is the Gobi, followed by the Mojave, and ending with the Sahara which is where all the DJs and electronica acts perform.

First act of the day for us was Australian singer-songwriter Kate Miller-Heidke in the Gobi tent, which is smallest tent, and would turn out to be logistically challenging when acts that had blown up overnight were booked in there. Kate is a cute, petite blond woman who is a classically trained singer with a phenomenal range. Everyone I was with knew of her and wanted to see her, yet I didn't know a thing about her. Turned out to be a very lovely surprise. I will try to post videos from the actual sets if I can find them. Doesn't seem to be any from her Coachella set. Here is a pic I took of her:



Next, I went off on my own to see a Canadian band called Jets Overhead in the much larger Mojave tent. My friend Mark Gillespie was also at the festival and he told be about them. They had elements of 90s shoegaze with a more melodic songwriting sensibility. I immediately downloaded their cd afterwards.



My friend Kurt dragged me afterwards to see DJ Lance Rock, who is a very skinny African-American man in an orange music conductor's uniform who hosts a children's show on PBS called Yo Gabba Gabba. It is profoundly silly and very childlike, but surprisingly is also brilliantly demented in a Sid and Marty Kroftt kind of way and was one of the highlights of the festival for me.



Afterwards, I went back to the Mojave tent to wait for one of must sees: Yeasayer. Of course I had to sit through As Tall As Lions, which just seemed like a Muse wannabe. I was not impressed.



Yeasayer have really grown on me throughout the year and I had heard their live shows could be painfully bad or extremely brilliant. Luckily I think we caught them on a very good day as it was one of my favorite performances of the festival. It was upbeat and the crowd really seemed to get into it.



My whole group met up to see Passion Pit at the Outdoor Theater. We had all fallen in love with the album and were very excited to see them live. The sound unfortunately was not good and the singer's voice, which is not strong to begin with, seemed even whispier in the desert air. I so wanted to love them, but I just didn't.



All of us housemates gathered together to see La Roux in the tiny Gobi tent. I have never seen that tent so packed in my life. The audience was spilling out into all corners from it. Initially, I was going to go see Grizzly Bear, but decided at the last minute to check out La Roux. Grizzly Bear put on such a perfect show here in Atlanta that I really didn't want to ruin its memory. La Roux, I thought, would be sort of boring, seeing as it is mainly programmed music. Was I in for a shock. The show had amazing energy and the singer was spot on. It was such a wonderful show and definitely one of my favorites of the festival. Here is a clip of the final song, "Bulletproof" which caused the crowd to go crazy.



Next, Kurt and I ran over to the main stage to see LCD Soundsystem, who put on a very dynamic show. They have very long songs and sort of blurred them all together, but were just so much fun and musically tight. A definite festival highlight for me. The new cd This Is Happening is brilliant.



The final show of the evening was from the enigmatic Fever Ray. The show was brilliant. Very dark and spooky and really did a great job of highlighting the songs. The only bad thing was having some very obnoxious Euro-trash in front of us who talked throughout the entire performance. It just became infuriating.



All in all, it was a lovely start to my festival. Saw some amazing bands I wanted to see, and was introduced to bands I never would have sought out. Was an exhausting day, but a lot of fun. Really got me excited for the rest of the festival. There would be more disappointments and a lot more surprises set in store for me.