High Weirdness: Coachella '08
Pigs Enter Paradise
By Ron Garmon
It was blazing hot already when the car arrived for me and my driver bumped the mercury still higher. Mary-Jane is a platinum-haired vixen in leopard prints who makes the old men in my Boyle Heights ’hood quiver like cartoon lupines, so against a backdrop of skinned eyeballs, we bolted for the big noize n’ art party in Indio. I was sanguine my previous two years covering this high-Fahrenheit amalgam of dance marathon, open-air absurdist museum, and Dick Clark’s Day of the Dead would offer no challenge to my party-commando ass. Even ominous political signage like JOHN BENOIT: CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN dotting the roads betrayed only the obvious fact we were entering Planet Dubya, a place little understood by the international rock & roll set.
Security inside the Coachella compound Thursday night was already amped to palpably uptight levels; rude officials in cheap polo shirts made already-burdensome activities like camping and parking a confusing welter of closed gates, long marches and barked orders about wristbands. Indeed, events staff seemed concerned with little else; any conversation with them that didn’t turn upon what strip of paper around which wrist was universally met with cud-chewing apathy and, by Friday, the general atmosphere among campers was heavy with fuming. A Do Lab neighbor and longtime Coachella vet noted, “There are a lot of new rules changes this year, and all of them for the worse.” MJ was indignant. “I didn’t come all the way out here to be bossed by some guy in a three-dollar hat!” she huffed.
Friday lifted off magnificently despite the clampdown, and, by afternoon, the polo field was alive with dance kids and the rock fancy giggling gobstruck at the monumental art. The Do Lab’s acre-sized mist paradise was jammed with a pleasing variety of squirming half-nakedness and the grounds beyond were a sea of sweating goodtimers. American Bang tossed off an impressive series of Southern rock M-80s, as these Tennessee boyos went with brio after the young ’uns crowding the Mojave tent, jerking the kids around like marionettes.
Outside, festival curator Phil Blaine’s upended toy box of outsized art obliterated the event’s iconic palm-ringed horizon. The Copper Droopscape gleamed like doubloons hung in air, while the Big Rig Jig – two 18-wheel tanker trucks welded together in a Peak Oil corkscrew – towered monstrously over the midway. MJ and I endured a series of young, clean-cut locals whose pleas to sell them drugs had a noticeably coplike briskness. We lingered under the Lab’s gigantically spreading petals until night fell.
A skirl of bagpipes summoned Goldfrapp to the Mojave stage. Allison looked ravishing in a pink minidress, leading her band through frantic bursts of maximum disco ending with a chain-lightning rendition of “Strict Machine” splattering the air with sweat and pheromones. At the Sahara, Richard D. James of Aphex Twin presided over a lysergically creepy graveyard hum. Passing on Aesop Rock’s clotted hip-hop, we waded through the early-evening chaos to mainstage to tarry for every second of the Verve’s proud, soulful turn. Their first American performance since the breakup a decade ago was one of the most moving I’ve ever heard, as they spellbound a vast haul of old-line fans and blinking novices right up through “Bittersweet Symphony,” which front man Richard Ashcroft dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson. After such professionalism, the half-hour wait for Fatboy Slim at the Sahara seemed a bit steep a tribute for a mere iPod in shoes, so my girl and I adjourned to our tent, passing junk garage-rockers the Black Lips twittering at the Mojave some minutes before they wowed the NME by burning a guitar. Thrillsville.
Saturday, security backed way off and attendance grew to record levels, with the L.A. underground contingent there in noticeable force. Daleydale and Shiranda operated a floating party back at camp, while Curious Josh the photographer told of having charged the mainstage the day before. The cream of the DJ set disported themselves at the Do Lab while Dance Commander got a long Jumbotron look from the mainstage cameraman during Minus The Bear’s freakish and fine set. MJ and I drifted back to camp, where we solemnly ate shrooms and wandered back out for Kraftwerk.
The psychedelics came on slow, but lifted us both with decisive force. By “Trans-Europe Express,” the quartet’s celebrated cyborg disco seemed to transform a swirling hivelike crowd into dancing robots, with a long conga line of freaks clattering by at one point like unoiled, ill-coordinated androids. The atmosphere mainstage was still upbeat and party-hardy, until Portishead filled the acres all around with a stunning and magisterial gloom. I imagined the evening’s star attraction sitting backstage with a fine, foxy grin.
Prince made us wait a good while after the Portishead funeral obsequies shut down, with the lights going up at the magical and modest time of 11:11. Then, aided by Morris Day, Shelia E. and an uber-slick cast, he uncoiled a stupendous Greatest Hits show, with “1999,” “U Got the Look,” “Cream” and a puzzling cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” rolling over the polo field. The star did several virtuoso guitar runs, occasionally mugging impatience with his own awesomeness. A prolonged audience demonstration fetched Prince & Co. back to close out the night with a ferocious “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Sunday was hot and overcast, with only the hardest-core braving the last afternoon. I’m a huge fan of first-wave shoegazers Swervedriver, so not even wobbly sound and underamplified vocals took the propulsive shimmer off classic Swervie tracks like “Last Train to Satansville.” At the mainstage, gypsy punks Gogol Bordello were making the people move, with Slavic conga lines snaking through gangs of mazurka-maddened youngsters leaping in the heat. My Morning Jacket topped even this, turning in a complex and forceful set as the haze gradually dimmed to darkness.
My girl and I briefly watched Syd Klinge’s twin Tesla coils stage a wattage brawl as temperatures dropped and tens of thousands gathered for Roger Waters’s two-and-a-half-hour performance. We shoved up front during the wait, surrounded by kids who were plainly aware this was the closest they’d ever come to seeing Pink Floyd. The golden geezer emerged to play a long set of old and new songs, with fans receiving “Have a Cigar” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” with open reverence. As intermission time approached, a plane dropped bales of confetti which turned out to be Obama flyers that papered nearby neighborhoods, angering locals. Gas torches blazed perilously close to Floyd’s familiar giant inflated pig wallowing over the crowd, its white hide festooned with anarchist symbols. Eventually, the pig was set free, receding into a dot in the night sky just as Waters came back on to perform Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety.
As the registers rang for “Money,” MJ and I split for home, with the rest of the album following us out into the streets of Indio. As we made for the 10,“Eclipse” rattled windows along Monroe Street, and we were well ahead of one mother of a traffic jam.
Published: 04/30/2008
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