The year to go might have been 2004. Radiohead, the Pixies, even
a surprise performance by Beck. This weekend, Indio’s Empire
Polo Field will pack as many indie acts as possible on the
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival bill, but though
it’s close to selling out, the festival seems to have lost
some of its appeal.
Headliners Depeche Mode and Tool are hardly the draws that
Radiohead or the Red Hot Chili Peppers were, and with Madonna and
Daft Punk in the dance tents, many of the major acts are ones
revived from decades ago.
Fourth-year English student Toby Estes, who attended in 2004,
will not be going to this year’s event. According to Estes,
the headliners aren’t engaging enough for his taste.
“It’s great they offer all those musical options for
people,” said Estes. “It would just have to take
something like another Pixies or Radiohead to get me to go because
I’m not interested in many of the smaller acts offered this
year. If they were bringing in edgier bands, I would reconsider. If
the rumors were true about the Smashing Pumpkins reunion, I would
have definitely been there.”
The rest of the concert bill includes buzz bands such as the
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, TV on the Radio, Wolf
Parade and Animal Collective, as well as a slew of DJs and hip-hop
acts including Kanye West and the much-hyped Gnarls Barkley.
While any L.A. resident can see many of the smaller acts for
less than $20 per show at a close-by venue, Coachella does offer an
opportunity for fans to catch lesser-touring bands.
“We only come around twice a year,” said Avey Tare
(aka David Porter), singer/guitarist of Animal Collective.
“There are a lot of people that wouldn’t get to see us
otherwise.”
Jennifer Bennett, a fourth-year music student, already has her
two-day camping passes and tickets to this year’s
festival.
Bennet, along with a surge of others, is going this year to
catch the smaller bands.
“Sleater-Kinney, Sigur Ros and Wolf Parade are the top
three I want to see,” Bennett said. “The headliners are
an extra for me. It would be cool to see Depeche Mode or Massive
Attack, but they come second to a few of the other bands that I
really like right now.”
The number of bands has led the members of Animal Collective to
sacrifice the quality of their sets, according to Tare.
“It takes us a while to progress to where we want to be
time-wise, so our set lists tend to be pretty long,” Tare
said. “Since we’ve been doing more festivals
we’ve had to cut it down and be very time-conscious.
It’s a challenge for us.”
Overbooking acts also creates overlapping performance times in
addition to cutting down the length of sets. Coachella’s Web
site, as it has in the past, offers a method of selecting the acts
concertgoers want to catch with the virtual
“Coachooser.” Fans can thus “coachoose”
which bands to sacrifice in favor of other acts.
“I won’t be able to see all of the bands I want to
see because of the way they schedule it,” Bennett said.
Some of the bands playing also echo concertgoers’
worries.
“It does seem like the festival is too big this
year,” said Tare. “I guess the way they see it is the
more diversity or the more bands that they have, the better they
are. The concert industry and ticket sales (don’t) seem to do
as well anymore, especially after Lollapalooza fell apart, so maybe
the new way to approach it is to see how many bands they can
get.”
For fans willing to see their favorite bands while frying in the
Indio sun, Coachella has become a tradition with a huge following
since 1999. Though the big acts are less impressive to many this
year, size doesn’t always matter.
“I know about two-thirds of this year’s
lineup,” Bennett said. “The fact that all those names
are at one place seems like something that won’t happen
again.”