I greeted Saturday’s sunrise at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with a beer. I was still wearing my work clothes even though I got off work two days earlier as I stood in smoky crowds on a hot field normally reserved for horses for much of the festival’s first day.
After taking an early afternoon swim courtesy of the Palm Springs Marriott, I returned relatively refreshed to catch the tail-end of Regina Spektor’s acoustic set before I roasted like bacon the rest of the day, from the set by the Scot-rock band Travis until the sundown performance by Kings of Leon
However, the day’s highlight was by far the Arcade Fire if only because it gave the crowd a break from hard guitar riffs. The band’s recognizable songs like “Rebellion (Lies)” and the “Neighborhood” series were instant hits with the crowd, but I was even more impressed with its newer material like “Keep The Car Running” and the darker “Black Mirror.”
Sunday’s shows were some of the best of the weekend but probably drew the smallest crowds. Against Me! had a hard-hitting and catchy punk sound, yet it lacked a mosh pit the occasion called for. I saw similar scenes with the Kaiser Chiefs and Placebo, and by the time I saw Lily Allen finish her hour with Alfie, it was obvious that most people there were spending their time at the main stage.
Not that you could blame them for camping out in the cannabis clouds found at performances by The Roots, Willie Nelson and Manu Chao, but crowds were plainly gathering in anticipation for the long-absent Rage Against the Machine
Fortunately, Rage brought the goods. To put it simply, the band’s performance was epic.
Having inched my way past the feet-drummers and head-nodders, I made my way to the pit. In actuality, I was quite far from the stage – I call it the pit because I felt and regrettably smelled like a packed sardine as I received splatters of blood and sweat from the crowd around me. The “real” pit in front of the stage was so tight and inaccessible that the lucky few to be there, I was told, came in and out at the mercy of a surging current. Anyone who wanted to get out had to be crowd-surfed to security.
From the first strums of “Testify” to the sendoff of single-finger salutes at the end of “Killing in the Name,” the crowd was continuously erupting in cheers.
Lead singer Zach de la Rocha refrained from making side remarks until the end of “Wake Up.” De la Rocha, absent from the microphone for the entire Bush administration, finally called for a simple solution: “He needs to be tried, hung and shot, just like any other war criminal.”
After being worked into a frenzy by Rage’s performance, the crowd took several hours to leave the grounds of Coachella. I myself made it back to Long Beach by 5 a.m. with a sore throat, ringing ears and heavy eyes. Even though I had to gently rest my sunburnt body on my bed, the performances I saw were worth the pain.
