As soon as my friend and I got out of the car to begin our mile-and-a-half-long walk from “Coachella: The Parking Lot” to “Coachella: The Music Festival in the Desert” a couple weekends ago, I could hear them, faint but instantly recognizable and uniquely heartwarming to a girl of a certain age: Ponies. Ponies neighing. Coachella kicks it upscale–instead of spreading out a zillion-band lineup on the sticky blacktop of a sports-arena parking lot, the fest rents 78 acres of manicured fields from the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. And before you get to the bands, or even to the long snaky line for the sun-ripened Port-O-Lets, you walk past the sheds and corrals that house the scene’s year-round residents. When I got there they were stamping and saying hello to a few of the roughly 96,000 people who’d come to pass out facedown in the grass, relive their goth teenhood, and/or see the Arcade Fire.
Me: “Really? They’re awful.”
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I decided to skip UK hype victims Razorlight, since I felt like I already knew everything I wanted to about them–sitting behind me on the flight from Chicago, they’d spent the entire time talking loudly about how fucked-up they’d gotten at such and such a party and which extremely famous persons they’d been hanging out with. Instead I went to the VIP area, where I saw the very sweaty editors of several major American entertainment magazines shaking hands with the bassist from Snow Patrol. Then I overheard a couple of them trying to decide which one of the two black dudes wandering around the tent was the black dude from Bloc Party.
Around 7 PM, just as Wilco was starting up, the sun began to set over the mountains that surround the Coachella Valley. Maybe people just needed a rest after spending hours cooking in the desert sun or getting sloppy with the mamis in the beer tent, but it seemed like everyone was prone on the grass, taking in the scenery. Wilco’s breezy sound, trilling Hammond organ, and soft-thrill solos turned out to pair well with sunsets and swaying palm trees–I felt the majestic rightness of it in a sudden easy swell, my first “Ahhh . . . Coachella” moment of the weekend.
I was never goth, and back when it mattered I never liked Bauhaus enough to own one of their records. But I am telling you now that the band’s performance at Coachella was unfuckingbelievable. They hit the stage obscured by fog and white light and struck up the descending bass line and graveyard rattle of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and everyone was craning their necks because you could hear Peter Murphy but not see him. He finally entered stage left, suspended upside down eight feet off the ground with his arms folded like bat’s wings, being towed slowly sideways toward center stage on almost invisible cables and crooning “Undead undead undead.” It wasn’t till Murphy had been pulled back offstage, still upside down, and returned on foot that I first noticed his outfit, which was probably astronomically expensive designer stuff but looked like 70s ski pants and a top from Jacques Cousteau’s clubwear line. He gave up the zillion-watt drama nonstop, brandishing a long staff that looked like a martial-arts weapon–he slung it around for emphasis and almost took out bassist David J twice. (Murphy, sans Bauhaus, plays the Metro on Wednesday.) Whatever Coachella paid these guys to reunite, it was worth it.
Sunday’s sunset slot belonged to the reunited Gang of Four. I almost didn’t watch, afraid that my favorite band might suck. The guys in Gang of Four are nearly as old as my parents, but took the stage spry and lively and jumped immediately into “Damaged Goods”–a song that is, more than a quarter century later, still inarguably the template for dance punk as we know it. Front man Jon King threw himself around the stage in a slate gray suit, wild-eyed and vitriolic, spitting “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust” as Andy Gill’s guitar jutted and slashed–and then, when the frenzied final choruses stopped and switched to the outro, bassist Dave Allen flubbed it, not only playing through the pause but continuing to play the wrong part. Despite his shit-eating grin, the rest of the band glared at him openly. And he kept fucking up–by halfway through the fourth song I was disgusted with him. His mind-breakingly subpar playing was forcing Gang of Four to fake their way to the ends of the tunes, band-practice style, in front of 50,000 people. I left too early to catch the set closer, but it was in a local paper, the Desert Sun, the next day: King destroyed a microwave with a baseball bat.
