F is for F*cking Fab Freeland Friday: Coachella Music Festival

Coachella Music and Art Festival is the perfect spring festival for a sullen northwesterner: sun, music, art, grass, heat, and shiny beautiful people. There's big names (Prince, Roger Waters) as well as "who-is-THAT?" discoveries. The grounds are small enough to float stage-to-stage to catch as many acts as possible.


The festival kicked off on Friday with the to-be-expected stupid traffic jam to get into a parking lot. It's just part of the experience, yo. Note to self for 2009: remember to bring a cable to plug the IPod into the rental car stereo.
Due to the traffic I miss out on a shitload of groups I was hoping to see: Midnight Juggernauts, Rogue Wave, Dan Deacon, Les Savy Fav, Battles. Oh well. A housemate drives my rental car and we park next to another car full of our posse. Careful observation of where the car is parked pays off in the dark later since there are no row numbers or markers of any kind. Racing away from the cars, we are in a big rush to get to the meet up place inside for fun and games during peep Adam Freeland's set in the Sahara tent.

At the meet up spot, we don gold lame robes and are each handed a silver balloon of the letter "F." We are stunning. Truly. We congratulate ourselves on how fabulous we look, then the driver of my rental car says, "Do you have the keys?" WTF. No I don't have the keys. You drove. Shit. Where are the fucking keys? Bags emptied, pockets emptied, we come up empty. This puts a damper on our afternoon, but hey: let's just go with the flow and hope it all works out in the end. The fallback position is a cab ride back to Palm Springs (goodbye $175) and calling the rental company in the morning.

All in our shiniest, the 25 posse members walk across the grounds and enter the backstage of the Sahara tent. W00t! Backstage. Hey, there's DJ Mehdi. And Xavier deRosney! And Alicia Silverstone! And a bunch of other people I should probably recognize but don't! I'm the perfect person to bring to a party with celebrities: I won't recognize any and thus can converse without gushing. (Maybe one of them has our keys.)

We laugh and take lots of pictures of ourselves, the balloons, the backstage area: trying to capture what it feels like to live the fabulous life for a minute.


Then it is onstage for Adam's first song. He starts slow, builds up, breaks it down. We dance our asses off, then a few brave posse members stage dive. Holy crap! Off the stage, into the audience, dance madly, cheer for Obama, then get right up front to catch Adam as he stage dives. Yow! One of the funnest times, evah! End of set, backstage again (free water!), more pics, then back out into the teeming masses in our gold robes and balloons.



We get lots of love from the other Coachella-goers. We can find each other all day with those F'ing balloons. People use us as markers to meet up with their friends. "I'm by the shiny people."

The rest of my musical adventures on Friday? Here's the run down as I moved from stage to stage:

Tegan and Sara: 2 songs. Ok, but I don't hear enough to decide if I like them or not.
Dan LeSac and Scroobius Pip: 1 song. I'm not in the mood.
The Raconteurs: 3 songs. Jack White is an awesome rocker. I'm sorry I missed the show at Neumos.
Goldfrapp: 2 songs. The singer is an angel and the band is tight. I could listen to more, but no time.


Santogold: 3 songs. Energetic, great voice, great funk-sounding band. Need to see her when she comes to town.
Aesop Rock: 1 song. I like this guy lots but too much schedule competition and I've seen him before. Next time.
Aphex Twin: 6 songs. He has panda bears dancing on stage. Grreat show; good mix of crunchy techno dance shit.



Datarock: 3 songs. Boys in red tracksuits whip the crowd into a roaring frenzy. Fun, fun, fun. Packed tent. They are a must-not-miss when in town.
The Verve: 2 songs. They feel and play like a schedule-filler band. I won't be seeking them out.
Spank Rock: 1 song. I like his mixes but I'm not in the mood.
Fatboy Slim: 7 songs. Good, reliable, energetic, with an excellent light show. The tent is packed and crowds are overflowing outside. We hang out in the back with elbow room to move around (and dance!).

And the keys? Turns out they were left in the unlocked car. Unfortunately a purse was stolen out of the trunk -- but at least the douchebag didn't throw the keys into the bushes.

At 1:15 am we start the long, painful exodus from the parking lot. An hour later we are out of the walled-in rectangle of a parking lot and we finally roll into our Palm Springs house at 2:45. We are too bummed about the stolen purse to hit the after-party at the other posse house. There's always tomorrow. It's only day one, after all.