Coachella Day One: Bubble Toes

Friday, April 25, 2008

By Jonathan Zwickel
Special to MSN Music

For the last nine years, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has been held at the Empire Polo Fields outside Palm Springs, 115 miles from Los Angeles. By every definition, this place is desert: 95 degrees by 1 p.m.; the same monotonous, parchment-colored mountains slumping in every direction; sublime sunsets.

See photos from Coachella

"The surprise of the day was Professor Murder"

More specifically, this place is American desert, meaning that decades ago it was reimagined as a playground for the rich and idle, and today swimming pools, strip malls, and golf courses are as common as date palms and sagebrush. Palm Springs is a man-made mirage, really, and so is Coachella -- for one short weekend a year The Coolest Place on Earth (as it would be dubbed on Saturday by no less an authority than Prince. More on that later).

Jack Johnson headlined the first night of the festival, though he was an anomaly -- the majority of Coachella's 140 performers are under-the-radar indie rock and electronica acts, not mainstream pop stars. Such contrast has long been the signature of the massive European festivals after which Coachella is modeled, and it served well here. From noon to after midnight for three days in a row, music fans could sample from a huge spectrum of sounds and styles, taking in as much or as little of each as whim determined. Imagine eating at a gourmet buffet where you never get full.

Jack Johnson comes to MSN Music in Concert on May 8, 2008

Indeed, Coachella's relatively compact, eleven-acre layout and five continuously running stages cater to binge listening. Early on Friday, Australian electro-rockers Cut Copy played a much anticipated set at the Gobi Tent, while on the Outdoor Theater stage underground favorites Les Savy Fav jangled through their strange, singular brand of indie-rock, backdropped by endless blue sky and ranks of date palms aligned as trim and neat as soldiers at attention. Spastic lead singer Tim Harrington climbed all over the stage rigging, an unlikely daredevil rock star sporting a big beard and bigger belly.

On the main stage, the Breeders revisited their 1990s heyday with "Cannonball," while Swedish indie-pop darling Jens Lekman kept the Mojave Tent swooning. Much-buzzed quartet Vampire Weekend creaked out a shaky set back at the now-sweltering Outdoor Theater stage, their happy-go-lucky afro-pop pulled blinking and disoriented from its usual nightclub setting as the band made their festival debut.

The Sahara Tent pulsed with DJs and live electronic acts all weekend. At 8 p.m. Friday, Aphex Twin -- aka Richard James, one of the most respected if underappreciated electronic artists at the festival -- leveled a packed house with hard-charging drum 'n' bass, a surprising, crowd-pleasing switch from his typically twitchy experimentalism. He was preceded by global-beat mashup maestro Diplo and followed by hard-rocking Austrlian drum 'n' bass five-piece Pendulum.

On the main stage, the Raconteurs dished out the most meat-and-potatoes rock set of the weekend to an adoring crowd. The band is only three years old but theirs is true classic rock, with all the brash confidence of songs 30 years beloved. They tore through "Salute Your Solutions" off the just-released "Consolers of the Lonely" as well as older singles "Steady, As She Goes" and "Hands," Jack White making a claim as Guitar God of his generation. He clearly relished his stage time with Brandon Benson et al, with the band that was once considered a side project. With the White Stripes on indefinite hiatus, the Raconteurs are more than a suitable stand in.

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