Reaching Coachella weekend mid-April means a lot to me: getting past the dark, dreary Winter and connecting with the sunny warm festival world again. The live streams from sweltering Deep Desert, California help me feel it might be safe to crawl out of my alpaca underthermals and that I should empathize with all the brave beset concert-goers suffering sunburn and dusty dehydration. I dream of attending in person again, but I end up thinking about what a pain it would be to pay, travel, traffic-jam, camp, and be stuck out in the vast, barren polo fields over several days with a quarter of a million other humans rather than just flannel pajamas streaming it. I can comprehend how it’s worth a fair amount of grief as an attendee for the experience, but what is it like for the performers? How on earth does Goldenvoice pull off such a huge project? I presume each of the acts are basically already on tour and they have their own set of roadies, transport/party vans. But with ~160 acts over the two weekends, how do the bands lock into the logistics months ahead and is there a glut of hundreds of tour trucks and buses on the I-10 from LA? Do the bands make a profit or to they take a loss for the exposure? Do they have to actually pay to play? Are any acts banned from Coachella? Like Cage the Elephant 2014, clearly tripping mental balls.
By rough estimate this involves 1,782.7 actual performers (vocalists, guitarists, percussionists, acid jazz flutists, dancers, high school marching krewes), a thousand roadies, 3,000 semi-trailer gear trucks, 50 unrelated cameo guests, a few hundred entourage groupies, a thousand string/wind symphony instruments, 500 custom video monitors, 50 miles of A/V cables, 12 didgeridoos, 800 various saxophone/oboe/bassoon reeds, 500 dropped guitar picks, and twelve pop dropped contact lenses. Maybe ok converging for a quick single time slot, but they stick around for two weekends. What do the bands do during the week? Wait around? Fly off to other gigs? Go undercover sunning on the Salton Sea wig/trench coat/sunglasses? Does your font size on the poster indicate your level of accommodations? Do performers get full-weekend passes to watch the other shows? Then do they wear wig/trench coat/sunglasses? At least at Comicon you can cosplay, but what if you want to be anonymous in the open desert? Are there PA’s who go out and make sure performers are not sleeping or passed out at their time slots? Are there showers/laundries/cleaners? How do they pull off all the sound checks? So many setups, so little time. Does Indio have its own nuclear reactor for all the electricity? Can you see it from space? Has Scott Kelly photographed Coachella from the International Space Station yet? No answers, just many questions.