Day 13: Coachella, pt. 3
Welcome
Yesterday we attended the third day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
It would have taken me a lot of guesses before I correctly predicted that I would see a mechanical dinosaur on night three of Coachella. I am very patient when it comes to guessing things and I think I would have made it there eventually, but it would have taken a couple of hours.
When my day began, I wasn’t try to predict anything. Not even the tiniest bit of speculation. I didn’t know anything about the bulk of the artists on the day three line-up, so I focused my energies on the important things: clean off whatever red substance got spilled on my shoes the previous evening, locate and consume a breakfast, and write another blog post before it’s time to leave for the festival. Anything else on top of that would be a bonus.
I was lucky enough to find myself a spot in the kitchen for the creation of the morning meal, a contested position with many enthusiastic and talented cooks in the touring party. It wasn’t challenging work, but it was novel, the act of cooking one’s own breakfast on tour. Cooking is a slight exaggeration, I must admit, for the pancakes did come from a box, pre-baked and frozen, but I re-cooked them anyway for vibe and for extra butter flavour. While I made a berry compote Daniel manned the other side of the hob and turned out a huge quantity of caramelised bananas. Everyone crowded around the outdoor table and we ate together, plates piled with factory made, precisely-sized pancakes topped with butter, berries, bananas, and pancake syrup.
I blogged, hard and fast, so I could enjoy some time at the poolside, precious time to work on my shoulder tan in preparation for the winter back home. At 5:30pm we began to make our way towards the festival, drifting out of the house and into the van and driving the fifteen minutes to the fields of the Empire Polo Club. It was me behind the wheel on this occasion and when we entered the gate I took the driving test slowly and carefully, avoiding all the cones and avoiding embarrassment in front of my peers.
Once we were inside the group split up. I wanted to climb the spiral, the colourful cylinder that I had been seeing beautifully lit up for the past two nights looking like a magical pathway to ascension. Known colloquially as the “Rainbow Tower” this steel and Perspex structure is actually called SPECTRA, a reference to the journey through the colour spectrum that is repeated multiple times as you walk the ramp up each of the seven stories. The views from the top are supreme. A unique chance to comprehend the staggering scale of the festival, and then gaze all the way up and down the Coachella Valley, and somehow an experience that is improved by the filtered colours arriving through the windows.
Gabe and I explored the festival grounds for a while, not watching anything in particular, just trying to branch out into stages we hadn’t seen or find any interesting attractions or giveaways. The Aperol Spritz tent seemed promising but we quickly found out that there were no free drinks; we had been queuing for the chance to purchase an $18 beverage and consume it in a cramped orange bar.
As with previous evenings the dusk was sublime; epic and drawn out, pinks and violets reluctantly giving way to a deep indigo scattered with bright stars. The heavy hitters were coming out to bat now on the big main stages bringing with them the impressive production that you come to expect at this defining corner of the United States popular music calendar. It was Columbian pop singer J Balvin who stepped things up a notch with a colossal inflatable alien, clawed fingers creepily moving around and a flying saucer hanging from the lighting truss. A manic laser display coupled beautifully with this extra-terrestrial theme and this was augmented by on-screen visuals to help the process of overwhelming your optic nerve. The curve ball was near the end of the set when a familiar song blasted through the PA, a song from our childhoods, a song that topped the US airwaves charts for four weeks in 1997 featuring none other than Agent J. Black-suited backing dancers emerged as and an ageless Will Smith launched into Men in Black sounding just as good as he did twenty seven years earlier on the recording.
The headliner for Coachella night three was Los Angeles rapper Doja Cat, not an artist who I was intimately familiar with but one I’m glad I was able to catch. This performance had it all: tall, scaffolded set-pieces to climb, terrifyingly high platforms to sing and dance on, a long catwalk out into the audience, an incredible live band, guest rappers, and a mechanical dinosaur. It should have been enough, but it wasn’t, and Doja Cat disappeared right before the last song, emerging a minute later in an elevated mud pit in the middle of the crowd, soon to be joined by her backing dancers for an astounding piece of choreography that could be described as both messy and erotic. It ended with a slow walk back to the stage, Doja traipsing back along the catwalk caked in dried mud, crowd screaming wildly at this brilliant ending to the weekend’s festivities.
Here are Tristan’s highlights from our weekend in Indio, California.