Day 11: Coachella Valley
Welcome
Yesterday we played at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
I woke up and drew the curtains, finding that the view from my window was filled with the textured trunks of palms. Lobby call was 7:15am and we were a few tricks away from feeling refreshed. We boarded the van and headed to soundcheck, a forty minute drive down the Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway, also part of I-10, a piece of road that runs southeast down the Coachella Valley before continuing on its way across Arizona and New Mexico. To the north lay the Little San Bernadino Mountains and to the south the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains, and in between these great ranges the desert had been conquered by the cities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Palms, and Thousand Palms, divided into squares and filled with the rich green sprawl of country clubs, golf courses, and resorts.
The palms were even more impressive in daylight. Thousands and thousands of them, planted close together in rows, sometimes alternating between different species to give a more natural feel, like I used to do in Cities: Skylines. We were approaching the Empire Polo Club where this annual music festival is held, driving down a thoroughfare that was clearly marked with towering date palms, a cosmetic choice by city planners and also a safety precaution, a guardrail of sorts, for low visibility conditions.
At the front gate we flashed our wristbands and were let in pending a short driving examination, a series of tight turns which had Paul sweating but were completed competently.
There was another checkpoint and then we entered the carpark where we would leave our van and load everything into festival vehicles for transport to the stage. A big, long truck turned up for our gear, and a couple of carts picked up the human passengers, setting off along a series of service roads, tidily paved and with the regulation fence of palm trees to mark the edges of the roadway.
Our stage was a huge white tent, dark and cool on the inside, huge systems pumping conditioned air in through vents all across the structure. We loaded our equipment into the backstage and began to assemble things, waiting for our turn on the stage, our allocated forty-five minutes of soundcheck time. When that time arrived, we were on there like a flash and had everything up and running in nine minutes by Gabe’s count, plenty of time to check everything and rehearse a few numbers before wheeling everything off again to make way for the next band.
Next stop was the catering tent, another vast temporary structure similar in size to the one housing our stage, but this with open sides and a buffet at one end, and round tables covering the remaining floor space. I was starving and found it hard to pace myself around the tables of food and ended up with a heaped plate of items, some of which I can’t recall the correct names for, but I’ll do my best to describe. A side salad began the proceedings, baby kale and mandarin segments, candied pecans and blue cheese, and a sweet vinaigrette to tie it all together. Potato tornadoes are visible near the top of my main plate as well as similarly coloured egg rolls that could be dipped in the pottle of sweet and sour sauce on the side. There was a cucumber salad, and a cauliflower coleslaw, there were battered shrimps and there were thick stir-fried noodles, perhaps udon, to enjoy with whatever protein you had chosen. I topped it off with two crispy dill pickle spears, and then a cup of freshly chopped fruit, strawberries, watermelon, and pineapple. For hydration I enjoyed a hibiscus tea, unsweetened and subtly flavoured, crisp, and refreshing, the way I like it.
We spent the afternoon in the backstage area, a quadrangle of air-conditioned trailers that served as green rooms and in the middle a gazebo that sheltered a quartet of couches acting as the communal area. There was plenty of greenery everywhere, potted saplings and shrubs that stood around hiding unsightly things like power generators and portaloos, and even though we said we were content with the amount of small plants they delivered to us another truckload.
It felt like a relief to finally play after waiting around for so many hours in this overly comfortable backstage area. Back home friends and family were watching us on the YouTube live stream as we walked out onto the stage of the Sonora Room at 4:50pm PST. The room was full which was surprising, and extremely gratifying; you never know what to expect at a music festival with such a diverse line-up. Up on stage it was difficult. The tent next door was sending a throbbing loud bass that drowned out our own low-end sound and made things rhythmically challenging. That is the compromise of music festivals though, and it wasn’t completely unexpected, so we enjoyed ourselves just the same and played our forty minutes with gusto and as much accuracy as we could muster.
Afterwards we packed down quickly to make space for the next band, and then finally could breathe out and relax as we neared the end of our workday. Paul and Gabe decided to be heroes once again, offering to supervise the transfer of our equipment back to the van so we could head out and watch some music, and that’s what we did for the rest of the evening. We wandered around the enormous festival ground, getting lost and investing a good deal of time trying to reunite with each other, enjoying the playful, colourful lights, and the beautiful mountainous backdrop of this spectacular desert festival.
I’ll leave you with a small selection to enjoy, some of my favourite palms of the day.
