top ten best things about my trip to coachella 2004:
10. our hotel room.
i think i had gone far too long in this life without having slept in a car. it was also good to verify that my ride makes a very decent mobile motel if necessary. just ask gino, or my leg. we were perfectly comfortable sleeping off our drunkenness here until 5:30 am when in the dawn glow a lady on an ATV told us we had 3 minutes to leave the coachella parking lot or we get a ticket — no overnighters allowed. we relocated to a movie theatre parking lot and slept 3 more hours, then went to denny’s to start day 2.
9. …and you will know us by the trail of dead.
i had a picture of them but it’s not very good. they play a massive rock show, even though i was embarrassed that i didn’t know they had two drummers until that day. i thought they just had one really good one.
8. thom yorke dancing
their whole set sounded impeccable actually, but i had never seen them before and had no idea the spastic joy that takes over that little guy’s body during the breakdowns on some of their songs. fantastic set. pretty cool they played ‘creep’ in the encore too.
7. being vip’s.
with the right colored bracelet you got access to a beer tent area with couches and bar stools and no lines instead of a beer tent area with a few picnic tables and not enough shade. also: vip port-o-potties. found them adequate, considering.
6. this guy.
can you even say anything? i mean, those really ARE butterfly wings, and that really IS a bowtie. you don’t need to say anything.
5. leaving the rave tent to go see belle and sebastian.
i really like 2manydj’s, but they were having sound problems, and gino wanted to see b&s, and when you take hundreds of dancing people in weather that’s already over 100 degrees and put their sweaty bodies into an enclosed tent in the desert, you get pretty much the closest thing to a jacuzzi without water. it seriously made the outside feel air conditioned in comparison. i heard they tore it up after we left though, which is a shame.
4. being close enough to the pixies to take this picture.
i was never even seriously into them, but i haven’t been able to stop singing their songs to myself since saturday night. they played just like they’d been doing this all those years in between; sounded just as good as the cds my friend burned for me a few years ago and said, ‘dude, you should listen to the pixies’. now it finally makes sense.
3. the afterparty
through work connections part of our perks were also going to a spin-hosted party. round after round of top-shelf drinks and jager shots, all complimentary. we saw marisa from the O.C. and neve cambell there too, although they sure didn’t look like they’d been at coachella all day. not only was it in a really nice rose garden with cool dj’s, but since we didn’t know anybody, we randomly decided to stand in a line we weren’t sure went anywhere. we asked the people in front of us and they didn’t know either. turns out it was for FREE SNEAKERS. i’m not kidding! we tried on shoes and they’re sending us free pairs in the mail. unbelievable.
2. the flaming lips.
words simply do not suffice. they put so much effort into their presentation they only got to play 5 songs, but the whole experience was just amazing. wayne walked out over the audience before the set in a huge inflated hamster ball, for starters. it was spectacular. then the whole place was raging and smiling and dancing along with the people in bunny costumes on stage in front of the huge projector screen while batting enormous balloons around and singing along to the music . . . i haven’t had a concert experience that euphoric in years. definitely the musical highlight of the weekend.
1. remembering intermittently that IT WAS ALL FREE.
every time we thought about that we couldn’t help but get really really excited. i think it cost maybe 30 bucks apiece for the whole weekend on water and some food. and we even got free shoes out of the deal — how can you beat that?