Caught in the Carousel

Coachella 2007

Notes, Complaints, and Reviews
By Alex Mattraw

Friday—27 April 2007
2.24

The airport. $3.15 for a Vasa bottle of water. Three bleached blonde middle-aged ladies dressed in Bourgeois black talk about Jenny Craig and somebody’s Hawaiian wedding. Still, flight is the best route. The amber of Friday night traffic makes driving a 14-hour ordeal. Why do they always call Palm Desert Palm Springs? Four blonde twenty something women sit down with their smoothies and airport salads, presumably on their way to the show. Disturbingly thick frames support their matching Gucci sunglasses. Do any of these people really know that Peter Bjorn and John have nothing to do with Peter, Paul, and Mary? Did any of them ritualistically wear their college boyfriend’s faded Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt to bed?

4.45

I pick up the rental car at Enterprise: A cobalt blue American tank. The Pontiac GT. The dusty roads are wide and the air smells vaguely of fried chicken. It’s about 90 degrees.

6.30

I’ve already missed Gillian Welch, who was number one on my Friday list. I am eating dinner with my family, who strangely enough, live five minutes from Coachella Valley.

8 something

I’ve already got blisters. I’ve sprinted from the parked cobalt to the festival entrance: A three-mile dustbowl. Note for tomorrow: old school vans = raw feet. A manly woman pats me down and takes away my water bottle. But what can compare to hearing your own heart beat in the distant drums, as if you yourself were on stage? I push myself into The Jesus and Mary Chain crowd, who now belong to me. The first chord of “Just Like Honey” pulses through the masses. They sound better than their records and I’d never guess they must be in their 40s. I am tearfully flooded with flashbacks: the summer of 2003, Bill Murray, 7th grade, and the one who got away.

9.25

A darkness. It should be 3 a.m. Interpol surrounds with Paul Bank’s I’ve-known-your-pain voice: suicidal self-assurance. He severed segments so secretly you like that. But you’re sucked into his timbre, which melts you in its depth and early Iggy Pop edge. Interpol has a seriousness I want to scold in this desert sweat, but they’re tight, and I’m pulled into their Hades like Orpheus. I’m sure every gender in the audience wants to bed every one of them. Simultaneously. The residual pot sticks to the sweat now outlining my cotton dress. By “NYC,” Banks stares into the ecstatic crowd with a fierce, almost tearful intensity. I'm sick of spending these lonely nights/ Training myself not to care. Feedback segues into “Obstacle 1.” But she can read, she can read, she can read, she can read, she's bad...A red light glow, as in Amsterdam or 19th century St. Petersburg streets. Their desperation reminds me of the Dostoevsky I’m reading, where little girls carry yellow cards so they can be harlots and pay for their mother’s consumption. You go stabbing yourself in the neck. Like Dosto, Banks loves to suffer. Smoke swells. Guitar jabs, blood rushed reverb. Her rabid glow is like Braille to the night. I want to suffer drum beatings, bass thuds. She swears I'm a slave to the details.

10.25

I buy a $5 lemonade because I’m thirsty. Realizing the lemonade won’t do it, I buy a $3 bottle of water.

10.40?

I’m sitting on the cement steps of the drinking corrals. Scent of beer, sun block, hot dogs, and maybe vomit. A friendly thirty something Asian couple chat with me. They’re here to see LCD Soundsystem and RHCP, but mostly RHCP. The seven-dollar glass of Cabernet I drink is my second; it tastes like Sutter Home. I might be feeling ill.

Later

Bjork dances in. Unknown song involving low moaning and layered keyboards. She’s looking busty in a black and white striped spaghetti strapped dress. A chorus of trombones and French horns. I go through all this/ Before you wake up/ So I can feel happier. She appears to be attacking the floor in some kind of dance ritual: a slow motion, red flag waving Bjork in falsetto. Our love/ in a ball of yarn. She’s also Native American tonight: red makeup stripes pasted to her forehead. I'm going hunting/ I’m the hunter. But I’m bored quickly and decide to vacate early, hoping to beat the parking lot herds. Like Paris, Bjork is everything you’d expect her to be in her eccentric romanticism, but somehow, not more than that.

12.38 a.m.

I was almost positive I’d have to hire some bald guy in a golf cart to find my car in the endless parking lots (5 total and all poorly marked). It took at least an hour of trekking alone through the prickly, shrub-dotted dust with my blistered bare feet.

Saturday— 28 April 2007
3.34 p.m.

The car thermometer reads 111 degrees. Sundress, sun block, sunglasses, hat, emergency sweater, tickets, book, bottle of water to drink between car and entrance. No bands worth seeing before 4. Traffic between mom’s and the parking lot: 0 miles an hour.

4.30ish

It takes me over an hour and ten minutes to get from my mom’s to the porta-potty. Because after all the camel style water drinking, that’s the first thing I have to do. And then another line for more water. My feet are dust black, my legs sticky, and my flip-flops have created a new blister, somehow, on the bottom of my right big toe.

Peter Bjorn and John: Their full suits look out of place in this heat. Neither their guitars nor their voices manage to stay in tune. Appearing wilted, not even the snickering rock of “The Chills” enliven them. The crowd peers quizzically, nodding vaguely to a rushed beat. The guitarist is hot, I admit, but he seems more into waving his axe around like Prince than playing accurately. Some nice reverb, but overall, I’m sorely crushed. This was one of the bands that brought me here, and I am only able to listen for four songs before I cringe and walk away.

5 something?

Andrew Bird plays at least four instruments, and often, simultaneously: violin, glockenspiel, guitar, and keyboards. And he whistles. Even though his frail frame must not carry more than 130 pounds, he sings like he could support 300. His technical skill is sharp and the audience knows it; they are listening so hard you can hear the wind between songs. He’s emotionally compelling and my favorite act so far.

7ish

A “wine” margarita for $7. But it’s working.

Permachill. Accordion, French horn, violin, mandolin, piano, keyboard, guitar, bass, drums, cello, double bass, xylophone, hurdy gurdy, and harp. Arcade Fire organizes more than ten diverse instruments and people on stage; most of them can sing but all of them fit. Their energy may be better than P.J. Harvey and The Pixies in Italy (2004), better than Cat Power in Reykjavik (2005), and maybe even better than Depeche Mode’s Devotional tour (1994). They’re good because their fierce stage presence matches their sound in an honest way. They earn their Interpol-brooding with better music. They’ve got dynamics, too; while lead singer Win Butler is angst-explosive, his sidekick and wife Regine Chassagne dances around like a carefree Orphan Annie. A surprise to me, their best song tonight is the darkly political but celebratory “Haiti,” which they bend into an ecstatic 10-minute confirmation of the human condition: Tous les morts-nés forment une armée,/ soon we will reclaim the earth./ All the tears and all the bodies bring about our second birth.

LCD Soundsystem

It’s nearing 10 I think, and I’m not exactly a fan, “losing my edge” and all. Still, I walk over to battle hundreds of manicured faces in designer jeans, all pressed into the electronic tent. I just can’t get into it. As with museums, I’d rather hear three great bands than eight because fewer “pieces” allow me to have a truly personal response, while more inundation means sensory overload. Later, I hear from passersby that he’s amazing.

10.30ish

I leave early, too heat-worn to listen to Perry Farrell’s new incarnation and too eager to find my car faster than last night. But I search four parking lots, thinking, in each one, that I am in “5.” No. It takes over an hour and the flip-flops eat through much of the skin on my feet. But it was worth it.

Sunday 29 April 2007
3.26

Today, a friend of mine is trekking with me in the 104 degree GT

4.20

Explosions in the Sky. Or really, water bottles hurled into it, crisscrossing the barebacked Frat Brothers of America. I do like this band, but in person, they sound much more like Mogwai, and live Mogwai is certainly more convincing.

5.04

I sit on the ground near the bio diesel booth (is that what it is?), using my own spit and sweater to rub the desert off my blackened, otherwise pasty legs. Sexy.

5.30ish

Body heat and sun sweat. Rodrigo y Gabriella are a surreal kind of good: she drums her guitar and strums shaman-echoes, he fingerpicks melodies so fast you think he must have five extra fingers and a hidden midget playing a third part. They tap into rock, metal, flamenco, classical, and blues. I love them and so do the obviously guitarist-populated crowd. Most of the audience is male and most hold their breath, projecting bullets of testosterone and primal angst. We are in Brazil or Mexico, seeing red, yellow, and orange. Clearly, these two learned much about both technique and crowd pleasing when they recently busked the dirty Dublin streets. The crowd goes nuts when they market their performance with “Wish You Were Here.” Everyone sings every word, pressing each other into the swollen tent. They later play their rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” which is just more bait. Honestly, they would have been just as loved without these obvious choices. Not that I regret a single moment: R and G top Coachella for me.

6ish

Crazy for thinking my love could hold you after two glasses of Sutter Home, your breath hard as kerosene. Whiskey river carry me. Willie Nelson all in black. Willie in a cowboy hat. Don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks/ Make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such…He’s a cold beer in such swelter, but he lacks some of the conviction I imagined. They'll never stay home and they're always alone/ Even with someone they love.

We decide to avoid the masses and sit in the beer garden. I turn to an eager young man who quickly makes our acquaintance. Julio is a 22-year-old jazz guitarist who drove from Arizona State University for the show, even with finals awaiting him. He tells us that he ended up scouting a fake concert ticket in the parking lot today. He paid $100 for a body search. As they turned him away they also turned their heads, so he took advantage and walked through amiably.

After Willie, the three of us push our way through the crowd knots to wait for Manu Chao. Most of the audience brims with Rage lovers who’ve come early to bust their way up front. Manu comes on, all palm tree and belly dance, and the Ragers begin to grind themselves into an old school mosh pit. I’m 5’2 and come up to everybody’s elbows. I think I might lose my shoes. Luckily, Julio protectively pulls me away and back towards the estrogen. But first, I feel red neck elbows, nerd knees, and some guy’s fly. I have a flashback to Nirvana in San Francisco (1992). I’m flat tired and lose a filp-flop, angrily chucking my other one into the crowd. With bare feet, I step on a needling cigarette. Now shoeless and raw, I don’t really remember much else from Manu, except a great desire to dance, nonetheless, and Julio’s gallantry.

We leave shortly after; neither my friend nor I wish to repeat high school with Rage. We’ve no energy left to navigate the desert’s cottonmouth. Amazingly, today we find the GT in 20 minutes.

Monday 30 April 2007

I awake dehydrated, contemplating my top 10. I still have yet to ride in a car, a shuttle, a plane, a shuttle, and a car to get home.

My Top 10

1. Rodrigo y Gabriela
2. Arcade Fire
3. Andrew Bird
4. Jesus and Mary Chain
5. Interpol
6. Bjork
7. Manu Chao
8. Willie Nelson
9. Blonde Redhead
10. Peter Bjorn and John

In reality, these are basically the only bands I managed to see…another downside of attending a festival where three good bands are playing at the same time…

But you’ve got to love to hate it all. Breathing sand and buying $5 tea warm Gatorade. You’ve got to love the hair dyed emo girls in black bikinis, the hippie chicks in flowered balloon dresses, the tie dyed Zeppelin beer bellies, and the hairless, bare-chested, 115 pound hipsters who limply walk the dust. You love beer battered turkey corn dogs, bantering Veterans Against Iraq, cheap wine, and the propagandist tissue art maze. You covet heat rash and drunk girl, who cuts you off at the porta-potty. You’re even in love with the savior porta-potty itself, which is so full of shit and toilet paper you can see the oxidized details of several used tampons.

This is my third Coachella. Every year I go, I vow never to return. But I am always wooed back. This year is no different.