It was 9:00 in the morning and we were all wide awake already, anxious for the day's adventures. Sensing an obvious need to calm our nerves and enjoy the sunlight and 80° breezes blowing through our campsite, a spliff found its way to fruition in the capable hands of BB dearest. Its subsequent enjoyment was followed closely by a hardy breakfast of Costco muffins, Gatorade, and of course, LSD. "And down the rabbit hole we go!" said Max.
"I love rabbits," said Monster.
The entrance to the stages was a huddled mass of human cattle slowly, methodically, making its way past security, guzzling down restricted beers and other substances in the interim. The temperature's reading was 85° and we were donning, at most, a tank-top and some board-shorts. Shoes? Fuck Shoes.
(continued)
And so we made our way through security and onto the polo fields, shoeless. Walking through that grove of palm trees on the hill, overlooking everything. There was a moments pause. "This place is a like fantasyland," slipped through my lips, from a loud unconscious.
"Yeah, it is," breathed Max. He was awe-struck. We all were. The field looked like what every acid-trip is supposed to look like in the movies. It was comforting then, how perfect our present set of situations was. There were twenty-foot origami swans resting on the lawn, there was the Do-Lab with its scantily trimmed, water mega-gun toting ladies providing us with our Spring Break 2010 experience whenever we wanted. There were two-story high mirror optical illusions, there were people tied to lines of balloons stretching hundreds of feet across the sky, there was a fire tornado, and me, Max, BB, and Grant were about to peak on acid. We slid through a now more spread crowd, the freshly pruned grass tickling our bare feet, to one of the smaller, farther tents and made our way to the middle of the crowd before we realized who was playing.
The name on the line-up said DJ LANCE ROCK, but one had the sneaking suspicion that it was the guy from Yo-Gabba-Gabba. That's because it was. Out of nowhere, these life-size plush toys came out and started dancing in time to the music and the tweens throwing down moves on the side-screens. Uh, our minds exploded. We had been utterly consumed by this ridiculously incredible environment in the Sahara tent for 45 minutes and Grant and BB and the others were talking about seeing Yeasayer soon in the next tent over. Then a notion dawned on Max and me. "We should take more acid," said we. Grant and BB weren't about to join us on that journey so we told them we'd meet them at Yeasayer.
Max and I skipped off back towards the campsites now with our shirts off and our heads in the clouds. We were walking about 10 minutes before we came to the jumbled, dehydrated conclusion that if we wanted to catch any of Yeasayer, we had better run the rest of the way; we were still super far away. Jog? I think not. We invariably sprinted the remaining 3/4 of a mile to the car, thankfully greeted by more muffins ("mmm"), and Gatorade ("ahhh"), and yes, of course for a second time, dear LSD. We sprinted back only to find that we'd all but missed Yeasayer's set. Finding our friends amidst the embalming forest of moving bodies, we danced our fucking faces off for the last two songs.
From that moment on we were lost, but only in the best way possibly imaginable. Skipping and dancing and laughing between this stage and that. One moment your swaying, entranced by and by-the-minute falling ever more slightly in love with Zooey Deschanel on the mega-screens of the Outdoor stage. I attribute this in part to the incredible video editing of these arbitrary face-less mega-screen video producers, and in part to the insanely good audio She and Him had set up. The acid headphones helped too. A week before, some Rolling Stone writer was spouting off about how far audio quality had come since the Woodstock days. I had been to my fair share of shows, mostly small venue shenanigans epicentered in Hollywood, eh, with a pair of Warped Tours, and the occasional Home Depot Center or Greek Theater show thrown in, but nothing like this. If I had doubts about the article and its relevance, those doubts were brutally murdered in the broad Indio daylight. The Rolling Stone article, oddly enough, reminded me of a magazine article I'd come across in high school French class of all places, clearly (not so clearly; it was in fucking French after all) trying to convey the fact that marijuana being smoked now is generally ten times more potent than it was 40 years ago. To me in that moment, the logical thing to pull away from it was that smoking a spliff and listening to music now is just about ten times better than it was 40 years ago, and that was just from the weed. Coupled with the leaps and bounds in the advance of concert audio technology, the degree to which Coachella most likely blew Woodstock out of the water is unimaginable. All I knew was that it was big, and it was probably exponential, and John Paul Jones must've been shitting his pants. He didn't play any gigs like this when he was with Zeppelin. Maybe I could see it in his face when he sat down at that piano, the rock gods of the day - Josh Homme and Dave Grohl - backing away off stage, to leave his fingers and keys to romp and play, and cry soul to the a remembrance in his life of how it used to be. And was it really any better?
(continued)
Here's the thing about acid. It needs to be cold. Always. Sure, perhaps it's a metaphor, a true tell of the beast behind the splatter-blot, that little slip with a punch. But who cares. The point is that if those tiny tabs aren't on ice, the buzz turns to something different. Each moment of heat and warmth soften the blow, by ever so much. Our acid was lukewarm in the thermos. A hint of chill maybe passed my fingers when we'd opened it to the desert day. Just a hint though, if anything. Oh, we were high all right. And it was something tangible and real and I felt animalistic and all, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't that Lovefest high. It was like running with a dog next to riding a horse. Just not the same. But as the night continued into LCD Soundsystem, that dog Retriever turned to a great Great Dane, a thing never before seen or felt or heard. The king. The greatest. The great that all Danes looked to with awe. The spliffs lent a helping hand. And we danced barefoot with her and she ran and we ran. We felt her in our bones as James Murphy was howling at the disco ball. The sun was almost over the crest mountains off far to the west. The grounds were getting dark and the grass cooled to our toes, and the sky was still bright, though growing dimmer. I don't know when the spotlights began and turned that enormous disco ball to diamond above the stage, but we were there. Together. As Murphy talked out the verse to a pulsating melody and pleaded with the diamond above. We were there. With him. In that camera onstage behind him and I saw what he saw. And I caught my breath at the beauty of it. The ferris wheel and the origami swan and the balloon arcs of color all lit up before a backdrop of light towers. And that sea of adoring faces stretched out and swayed and lived to their creation. Doing what they did in this magical wonderland. I'm sure it was a special feeling.
He was telling us Jay-Z had to set up between songs and the trance falls. "We're playing one more song, folks."
A little precursor: don't do what we did. Now I never do. But we made our way through the crowd to the right, towards the Outside Stage where Vampire Weekend had just begun. There was that line you cross between two stages in which you hear both stages equally - first more so, then less so - and it fucks with your equilibrium and you float into the next state of being. And like that, we were in the back, not quite centered on the Vampire Weekend and their stage. We got lazy. And LCD Soundsystem was playing another song. Just one more, I supposed. We could still see their mega-screens. So we stopped a little to the left of Outside Stage. Vampire Weekend was incredible. They sounded just like the album, but better. The frontman, Ezra Koenig, hit it all. It was pleasant and impressive. LCD had quieted down now, but they were still on stage. C'mon. Really? They were playing another one. Oh, well. The vampires were nice. They were talented.
But then the Main Stage just exploded. And the thing was all white lights and the disco ball was screaming. On the mega-screens, everyone was going off with every bit of passion and sweat and furrowed brow and eyes closed to the ecstasy and we can't even hear Vampire Weekend anymore. The whole crowd turns to the spectacle on the left. The guitar's weeping from the strings, as loud as it could I believe, and Murphy's chords are bursting and that tingle you feel every so often on that moving blue moon, I feel it shoot down my spine and out through my limbs, and it was numbing euphoria. At a distance though. We looked at each other in bewilderment. "Why did we leave?!" we croaked in despair. "We should have stayed!"
And I didn't even know what song it was. Murphy was blind by the moment. He had to be. It was plastered on his face in HD and was nothing I think I'll ever be able to feel; bringing the house down in the most epic way. The Vampire Weekend didn't stutter though, not even once. But they still felt it. They heard it. They saw the faces turn like moths to the bigger flame. To something great beside them. Always the professionals, and I applaud that Weekend. There has to be a lust for that. That imprint on thousands of minds, that Main Stage gravitas. I bet it pedaled down softly right before Ezra Koenig's eyes, and he wanted to grab it so bad, ever so slyly out of the air in front of him. But he had to play guitar. He killed it in all proper fashion. Then it was time for Jay-Z.
Talk about commanding an audience. Discuss it with your colleagues. How to do it. What it takes. For Jay-Z, it took a fifteen minute countdown and three red lines. But we all gladly waited. We squeezed and snaked our way as far forward as possible, closer to the stage, to that hypnotizing countdown. "Still, fifteen fucking minutes?" I was giddy. "Are you serious, Jay-Z?"
But we take it. The whole load right in the face, sitting down where we stood in a hot, thick-aired forest of legs. The sky was a little hole five feet above us. It was cozy, and we swayed and massaged each other's shoulders and smoked a spliff. The last minute came and the crowd started counting. The forest around us transformed into a chorus of numbers at a NASA shuttle launch, so we stood up and waited for the rockets to light. And when they did, it was only a moment before Jay- Z was out on stage in front of a full band and a hundred thousand people. Sunglasses on and preaching to congregation over a bass that dropped so I jumped, and we all jumped, and on the mega-screens he was just driving through his life and telling his story as we caught every word and lyric of album platinum, glistening like waves of water rolling in the spotlight before him. He got problems, he got cities he loves, he 's still young and he will be forever.
And we all nodded our heads, in recollection not because our trains of life were on the same track neccessarily, but because we had all had him on our trains at some point between this stop and that, and through that escapade, however long, he had become something that meant something to us. Something special and comfortable and instantly recognizable. Something that made us feel tough, but most times good, and oh, so real. We "ooh"-ed at his life and "ahh"-ed at his presence. What did we have to compare really? He was a prophet, and we were his followers in the night. But he saw us. He knew we were real. He took off his sunglasses just to make sure. And in that moment we really saw him. The happiness, the accomplishment, the joy of being where he was presently; onstage, performing before thousands on some embalming, magically-lit night in the desert. There was something to that place.
