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Coachella 2007: Reunions and Indie Acts Under the Desert Sun

Nine years since its debut, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival remains the granddaddy of American music festivals. It's spawned a host of imitators—Sasquatch, the Virgin Festival, and retooled events like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza—but still manages, year after year, to assemble lineups that make it the must-go festival of the summer. The 2007 edition of Coachella is no different, with marquee reunions like Rage Against the Machine, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Crowded House, plus a host of indie rock stalwarts (Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire), hipster-friendly DJs (MSTRKRFT, Felix Da Housecat), and music industry buzz magnets (Amy Winehouse, Peter Bjorn & John).

Coachella takes place on the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, California, a dusty desert town near Palm Springs, 120 miles east of Los Angeles. It's a vast expanse of grass festooned with Gatorade and ice cream carts, large-scale art installations (like a pair of massive Tesla coils), recycling bins, and the festival's five main stages, two outdoor and three in tents. For the next three days, I would spend much of my time trekking back and forth between stages, trying to catch at least a glimpse of about half of the weekend's 123 acts.

Day One: Friday

My favorite moments at Coachella are always the unexpected ones, when a lull in the schedule or a change of plans allows me to stumble across something new. The first such moment for me this year came courtesy of folk singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, looking resplendent with her partner David Rawlings in matching red and white Grand Ole Opry outfits as they reeled off a set of acoustic numbers that were, ironically, the most electrifying things I heard all afternoon. Rawlings plays almost exclusively on a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop, an old-fashioned acoustic guitar that looks a little like an oversized violin, and he plays it with a passion and precision that many a would-be Hendrix could aspire to.

After Welch's set, it was time for Amy Winehouse, the wildly popular and notoriously erratic London soul singer whose song "Rehab" has become the unofficial theme song for every celebrity gossip show on basic cable. Winehouse took the stage on time and sober, but apart from that, she lived up to the hype, a pint-sized dynamo of tattoos, beehive hair, and a voice that rivals the Stax and Motown divas of old. Her ten-piece backing band, dressed in matching white shirts and strutting to the beat in perfect unison, would have been corny if they weren't so completely on-point.

I managed to wriggle out of the packed Gobi Tent about midway through Winehouse's set to dash over to the main outdoor stage for the Arctic Monkeys. I had seen the Monkeys once before, during their first U.S. tour, and was impressed with how much their stage presence had improved, and how much muscle new bassist Nick O'Malley adds to their spiky post-punk sound. Their 45-minute set was a model of brutal economy, with nary a wasted moment for guitar tunings or on-stage chatter. And the new songs stood up well alongside their older material, although "A Certain Romance" and "When the Sun Goes Down" remain set highlights.

After the Monkeys, it was time for some Peaches, whose raunchy electro-rock was a nice, sleazy way to start the evening. Peaches had the misfortune of playing the Outdoor Theatre, the smaller of Coachella's two outdoor stages, which was plagued all weekend by bad sound, late start times, and loads of bleed from the main stage's much heftier sound system. Peaches was still hanging from the scaffolding when I was lured back to the main stage by the Jesus and Mary Chain and their oceanic waves of feedback.

This was unexpected moment number two. While I'm the first to acknowledge the importance of JAMC as a hugely influential band, the godfathers of shoegaze and pretty much any other subgenre of dense, guitar-heavy rock you care to name, I've never been a big fan of their music. But at Coachella, they sounded amazing, churning out layer after layer of tightly controlled, snarling feedback that lead singer Jim Reid still managed to top with a withering sneer of a voice. Yes, Scarlett Johansson came out in a vintage print dress and straw trilby to sing backing vocals on "Just Like Honey," but the real highlight was a devastating version of "Reverence" off the band's fourth album, Honey's Dead. "I wanna die like Jesus Christ," Jim Reid jeered as the guitars twisted together into a veritable crown of thorns. It was easily the highlight of the evening.

The remaining three-plus hours of music boasted workmanlike but unspectacular sets from Interpol and Sonic Youth, a barefoot Björk debuting songs from her forthcoming album, accompanied by a horn ensemble and someone playing what appeared to be a computer interface lifted from the set of Logan's Run, and the New York-based gypsy punks Gogol Bordello inspiring a frenzy of pogo-ing with their cult hit, "Start Wearing Purple."

Apart from JAMC, the evening's most interesting set belonged to DJ Shadow, who used audio and video mixing software to turn the Outdoor Theatre's projection screen into a trippy music video mashup of his best-known tracks—everything from classics like "Organ Donor" and "The Number Song" to significantly improved mixes of "This Time (I'm Gonna Try it My Way)" and "3 Freaks" from his latest and most disappointing disc, The Outsider. Shadow's start time was delayed by almost 30 minutes, so he returned the favor by promising to play until they shut down the power. As I walked to the parking lot, I could still hear his thunderous breakbeats reverberating in the distance. [keep reading...]

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