When we last left you, a strange, but curiously ballsy Australian named Joel was using some spare time during his visit to explore how exactly gravity and inertia work in the United States, specifically, South Austin Texas. Yes, we had finally secured the house we'd all been wanting, shelled out the necessary fundage to get there and now it was only a matter of moving our belongings out and cleaning up the mess.
There wasn't much of a mess left as we had only occupied the space for a measly six months, but later on we would come to find out that our landlady needed most of our deposit to "clean" the entire apartment. Thank you Tonia, you overpricing, speakerphone-only-using, unavailable, twat of a landlady. Upon getting everything lumped into our new three bedroom house at 1103 Fieldcrest Drive, we then started the arduous task of packing for what has been called the biggest music festival in the West, ...Coachella.
Since Scotty was just starting on his third week of snowboarding in the beautiful mountains of Lake Tahoe, it was up to Travis, myself, and what was left of Joel after his abrupt encounter with the stone pylon outside our old apartment. It wasn't too difficult, but let's face it, I still had a job, an internship and a theatre company that were all asking for me to be present during all of this. It didn't take too long and before you know, the carport my mother had brought up to Austin, was fastened to the roof, the bags were packed and the gas tank was full. We were ready.
So we set off on Wednesday from Austin around 3pm on what could only be described as the LONGEST drive ever. We had company, another car, filled with friends of old was caravanning with us out there along interstate highway 10. We practiced many driving essentials including, but not limited to: codenames (We were car Ramrod/Battlestar Tealactica and they were White Lighting, Cherry Thunder, but I always just called them "White Lighting, Cherry Balls), smoking cigarettes, speeding, rocking out, stopping quickly in the strange place between Austin and Cali, and of course trying to stay awake.
There are some sections of this drive that I found completely boring to look at because basically, there's nothing out there, but occasionally, we'd come over a hill and descend into a massive valley with a perimeter of mountains as far away as the eye could see and THAT was gorgeous, especially if it happened around sunset.
Then night came and the "Late Shift" started. I managed to drive my car from Austin all the way to Phoenix, but alas, I could go no further and I had to finally relinquish my vehicle to either Travis, who hasn't operated a motor vehicle in more than a year and a half or Joel, who is from a place where they drive on the other side of the road and also hasn't operated a motor vehicle in some time. Travis would take the helm of my car and Joel grabbed the reigns of the other car in our caravan.
Finally, after 24 hours (including stops) we found ourselves in the desert town of Indio, California on Thursday around 3pm. We had made it. A little worse for wear, but alive and desperate for the fun to begin.
Coachella is an interesting place at first, but once you've been there for two hours, you quickly figure out that the only reason this town exists is to facilitate this festival and that most the people you see there are actually from somewhere else. We began on Thursday by setting up our tents in camping field designated by large letter suspended over the grounds. We were in section C near the large and sometimes loud shower trucks. I guess it was nice having the shower trucks nearby, but as we would come time find out, it didn't matter how many times you showered, you would be sweaty and filthy in less than hour. The heat on every day we were there climb past the 100-degree mark and acted as a thermal alarm clock of sorts.
On Friday the rest of the campers had pretty much moved in and Jeff, Laura (car White Lighting, Cherry Balls), Travis, Joel, myself and a reacquired Scott Henderson (Freshly dropped from Tahoe) were ready for the music that we had been anticipating since February, when we got the tickets.
Coachella in a NUTshell had basically the makings of a great music festival with tooooooo many stiff (and in a lot of ways unreasonable) rules in place that pretty much sucked most the life out of the experience. You can't have this, you can't bring this in, you can't do that, keep walking here, no stopping there, no In and Out of the festival gate to the campground during the day, beer is $7.00, water is $2.00, or you can dive into the trash cans filled with people's refuse and if you were lucky to come up with 10 empty water bottles, you could get ONE new one for yourself. After spending $300 dollars on this experience, we were made to feel like nothing more than cattle. We even had to leave on Saturday to get more ice for our melting rations in our storage tent to keep the water and food cold. If I had known that leaving and coming back was going to be such a clusterfuck, I would have never even given it a second thought. The police and Coachella staff had relatively no information about the festival or goings-on anywhere other than where they were at. For instance, one police officer only seemed to know how to say one thing to us and that was to "turn around and go back the way you came, you're on the wrong side of the grounds." This comes after waiting 45 minutes in the perimeter traffic around the overheated polo field called Coachella with my Air Conditioning relentlessly on high. It was infuriating and totally stressful. The only redeeming quality of the entire festival was the music. It was enchanting and when the sun finally tucked itself behind the mountains, the cool air began to blow. It's almost like the temperature drop made the festival better.
At night after we were "herded" into our campground with massive dust clouds and inebriated revelers, we were suppose to quiet down and go to sleep. People who wanted a solid 8 hours of sleep and the chance to not be awoken by the sun at 7am crashed quickly, but c'mon, it's fucking Coachella. Why else are we all here on this little plot of well-manicured grass if not to get crazy? Well, Saturday night, about 24 hours before Rage Against the Machine was to go onstage and close the festival out in a most memorable fashion, things back at the campground took a turn for the worst, ...sort of.
Around 4am, I was sitting in our tent area and Scott had wondered out into the unknown. Joel, Travis, Jeff and Laura had all gone to sleep and I was pondering the same end to my night when very quietly, I heard sirens. They continued to get louder and louder and before you know it, police cars from five or six different local policing agencies had driven up to the main gate of the campground. I got up to find Scott and to see what was happening. Apparently, a party that Scott swears started with some drunken Canadians had reached "riot" proportions and the police were here to shut down the curfew violators. They got out of their cars in full riot gear as a helicopter circled above, it's light trained on the masses below.
For about an hour, I stood next to a fleet of people using their digital cameras to record the whole event. In a way, it felt like the camera I was recording with was the only thing REALLY stopping the police from descending on the crowd. They had the rubber bullet guns, the dogs, the shields, the tazers, and the tear gas. It had become scary in moments. Finally, after an hour or so, they packed it up and went home while the campers sung aloud, "na na, na-na-na-na, hey hey hey, ...gooodbye." The campers had won, the crowd broke up completely an hour after that and day three would be under way with the sun forcing me to wake up in less than two hours.
The festival closed on Sunday night with Rage Against the Machine playing for the first time in 7 years and in fact reuniting. The show was nothing shy of amazing and even though I wanted to hear something about the "Battle of Coachella" that happened the night before, it couldn't put asunder the sheer brilliance and emotional eargasms had by 60,000 people when they closed with "Killing in the Name."
That's it. The festival was great. I fell in love with LCD SoundsystEm and cEmEnted some new friEndships with people from far away from here. There was a really grEat moment on Sunday night as we ran from end of the festival grounds to the other to catch Rage. We were running with our arms and hands outstretched to our sides like airplanes. I fElt likE a kid playing with my friEnds and in fact, I felt frEe.
but that would only last for 12 more hours as the trip home was inevitable and beckoning us.
24 hours after we got into our sand soaked cars and headed back East, we had arrived in Austin. We were tired, stressed, and angry with one another and we needed to be separated and slept. So that's what we did. We took an extra day to do nothing but recuperate. Now it would be time for our lives to return to the norm again, whatever that was for each of us.
It would also be a time for some changes... (more to come)
