By Sean Flinn and Eric Solomon | October, 1999
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| Beck gets funky as the Day 1 headliner at Coachella. |
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The 1999 Coachella Valley Festival of Music and Arts proved that you don’t need a radio-friendly super-trendy lineup of bands to give hordes of people a great time. Oh, yeah -- and that rock as you may know it is dead.
The highly anticipated Coachella Festival promised, at the very least, a spectacle worthy of intense scrutiny. It was the first U.S. festival to attempt to capture the feel of European festivals such as Reading and Glastonbury; it also occurred close on the heels of this year’s disastrous Woodstock Festival in New York. Choler couldn’t let such an event come and go without dispatching a couple of agents to investigate the hubbub. They chose us because -- well, everyone else in the office seemed to have plans for the weekend.
We danced. We rocked. We sneezed. We occasionally feared for our lives.
The temperatures were hot, the crowds mellow, our noses runny. (Wouldn’t you know, the entire polo field seemed covered in Bermuda grass). But despite backstage rumors of infuriating disorganization, attendants experienced little but smoothly run facilities and energetic performances from a wide, wide range of musical artists.
The good news for both fans and promoters alike is that Coachella bore zero resemblance to Woodstock ‘99 -- except, of course, in that music was featured at both events. The issues that some people blamed for causing such a ruckus at Woodstock (overpriced water and food, bathrooms that quickly degenerated into mini toxic-waste dumps, a lineup of bands that emphasized thuggery) were expertly addressed at Coachella. The promoters provided cheap water (and plenty of it, though waits to acquire it sometimes seemed interminable) and tasty food at halfway decent prices (I scored a heaping plate of Chinese food, including shrimp tempura and more chow mein than I could hope to ingest, for under $9 -- more than your average takeout but better than a sit-down meal). The event staff was courteous, the bathrooms cleaned frequently. As promised, marketing was kept -- at least on this first day -- unobtrusive. Best of all, an under-capacity crowd made for a delightfully spacious environment.
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to read to read an interview with Coachella 1999 performer Moby |
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The promoters deserve credit for intentionally underselling the venue to accommodate attendants’ desire for personal space.
Only once did the event threaten to erupt into violence. Shortly before agit-pop ensemble Rage Against The Machine stormed the main stage late on Day 2, fans of the group began packing -- and we’re talking Sardine City here -- the area in front of the stage. Event staff attempted to use steel girders and poles to shore up a heavily strained barrier between the crowd and the stage, but eventually all press and photographers were evacuated from the pit for fear the barrier would break and a tsunami of sweaty 20-something flesh would make us all permanent fixtures of the Empire Polo Fields. The press pit remained off-limits through Tool’s set for safety reasons as well. To the best of my knowledge (which is scant, given that we each spent our day running our legs down to stumps scurrying from one place to the next, and so missed a few details here and there), nothing worse than the odd case of heat exhaustion or head-squashing crowd-surfing occurred in the more vigorous moshing areas.
The only real problem -- if you can really call it a problem -- was an overabundance of great acts. At any given time, three or four great (and at times, legendary) performers were playing in different areas of the venue. Good luck catching every band worth watching.
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