Kansas City Blog

My flight arrived at the Ontario, California, airport, about 50 miles outside of LA, on the afternoon of Thursday, April 26. I got a rental car and began driving the 90 miles east to Indio, where my hotel and Coachella awaited. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road because I kept gaping at the mountains on either side of the freeway. The farther east I drove, the higher the temperature rose. Still, I didn’t turn on the air conditioner the whole way to Indio.

The traffic even in the early afternoon was pretty heavy. Once I got past Palm Springs, I could see windmills on the side of the road. I was in the desert. I arrived at my hotel in Indio at about 2 p.m. and crashed until the next morning.

At 10:30 a.m. the next day, I was in. Maybe a half a mile down the field was the main stage, where the DJ duo Flosstradamus had just wrapped up its performance, and Brother Ali from Rhymesayers was taking the stage. He said into the microphone once, “It’s hot out here, but the heat keeps all those radio heads inside.” I couldn’t have agreed more.

There was flesh everywhere. It had been a long time since I’d seen anyone walk around shirtless or in a bathing suit in Kansas City.

Beyond the merchandise tents of the south side of the field, there was an open dome where DJs played all day long and into the night, providing a spot where dance music fans could get their techno or drum and bass fix while the bands played on the stages.

I caught DJ David Guetta in the Sahara tent at 5 p.m. The energy that these southern California kids had for DJs was incredible. They went absolutely ape shit for every DJ I saw the whole time I was there. At a breakdown during Guetta’s set, the crowd began clapping their hands in anticipation for the return of the beat. These kids were in tune and on time. When Guetta dropped his new single “The World Is Mine” the vibe was nothing short of explosive.

Before I knew it, I’d been at Coachella for seven hours. It dawned on me that two different people with varying tastes in music might not even cross paths for the duration of the three days. I went and watched Stephen Marley, son of Bob, at the Outdoor Theater just to get out of my element.

At 8:40, I caught a band called Peeping Tom in the Mojave tent. Danny DeVito, of all people, introduced them to the crowd. They’re an eclectic outfit, to say the least. Mike Patton (also the lead singer of Faith No More) took to the microphone, and a woman who could’ve passed for RuPaul sang backup and played the violin. Dan the Automator worked the turntables. There was also a female beatboxer -- she was fantastic.

I stuck around in the Mojave tent for El-P, a rapper who’s the head honcho of the indie label Definitive Jux. He came out in an orange jumpsuit and wasn’t lacking in energy as he ripped through tracks from Fantastic Damage and his new album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.

At the end of one song he invited the entire crowd over to his hotel that night to throw down on cocaine and “just talk all night long.” Then he improvised a hypothetical conversation between two characters at the would-be party, talking a mile a minute to the crowd’s delight.

When El Producto’s set was over I went to the Outdoor Theater to watch DJ Shadow. Bjork, the night’s headliner, was playing just across the way at the main stage. I wanted to check her out, but I’d never seen DJ Shadow before, and he’s had a huge influence on my musical tastes.

Shadow played mostly his own songs, “Celestial Annihilation,” “Six Days,” and “B-sides that some of you might not have heard.” He played a track off his latest album released last year (The Outsider) called “Seein’ Thangs,” featuring David Banner. The song’s theme centers on Hurricane Katrina, and on the video projector behind the stage was an image of George Bush’s head sinking under rising water. Morbid, but the crowd loved it.

Just as I left the photographers’ pit, I saw a slender blond girl in a red summer dress pass me and walk up to the front of the stage with an entrourage. Immediately I thought to myself, Was that Paris Hilton? I asked the security guard, and he said he didn’t know but that it wouldn’t surprise him.

I was ready to call it a night. As I walked across the polo field to the parking lot, I could hear Bjork wailing with all her might on the main stage. I didn’t become a Bjork fan until two days later, when I picked up a Coachella DJ mix-CD featuring tracks from many of the artists who performed at Coachella, with two standout tracks from Bjork. She can do some amazing things with her voice.

The next day I found myself back at the Sahara tent, lying down in the grass while MSTRKRFT performed a DJ set. I could hear the crowd go wild when he dropped “Pump Up the Jam.” The critically acclaimed DJ Mehdi from Paris went on next, but didn’t draw much of a crowd.

About a half an hour later at the Outdoor Theater, Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan was ready to perform before an antsy crowd chanting, Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with! Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with!

After one of Ghostface’s songs, he announced that Wu-Tang “started a lot of shit” in the rap industry. It made me wonder if Wu-Tang will ever regain the allure that they once had in the ´90s. He said the new Wu-Tang album, 8 Diagrams, set for summer release, was going to be a force to be reckoned with. He dropped “Cherchez La Ghost” and invited girls on stage to “shake they asses.” He pulled a similar stunt at The Granada in Lawrence last fall.

After Ghostface’s set, I approached the same security guard that I had talked to the night before and asked, “Did you ever find out if that was Paris Hilton last night?”

“Yes, it was,” he answered with a smile.

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers played on the main stage at nearly 10 p.m. with a solid 20,000 people in front of them. That ended up being my favorite act of all three days. It wasn’t until their performance that I realized I was probably getting about as picture perfect a SoCal experience as I could hope.

Tiesto, the reputed number one DJ in the world, closed out the night on the main stage after the Chilli Peppers. He played new tracks off of his upcoming album, Elements of Life. The crowd loved him, too.

After that I went and scoured the parking lot(s) for my rental car for more than three hours until I offered to pay off a staff member to drive me around in his golf cart to find my car.

Sunday morning my feet and legs were cashed. I didn’t arrive at the polo field until about 5 p.m. I stretched out on the grass outside of the Sahara tent for techno posterboy Richie Hawtin. A number of people asked me if I wanted to smoke hash with them. I declined without a second thought.

Paul Van Dyk, a progressive house spinner from Germany went on next. About 5,000 people were in front of him for that show. I’ve never seen that many people clapping their hands, so crisply to the beat, at any DJ event in Kansas City. Van Dyk simply killed it. Even the security guards were standing up in the photographers’ pit looking out at the crowd, pumping their fists and bouncing to the music.

Rage Against the Machine played on the main stage for the festival finale. This was to be their first show since breaking up seven years ago. I was relatively close to the stage for the beginning but then scaled the fence once a mosh pit broke out a little too close for comfort during “Bulls on Parade.” They also played the “Renegades of Funk” cover. There was talk floating around the polo field before Rage’s show that a riot was not out of the question. It was tense out there, but nothing got too out of control.

Zach de la Rocha no longer sports dreadlocks, but wears his hair in some kind of small, curly afro-puff type of thing. He spoke to the crowd bbetween songs, at one point calling for the current administration to be “hanged, tried and shot.” He encouraged young people to put themselves at the forefront of social change, citing that it takes “generations and generations and generations” to break the chain its predecessors have set. When Rage’s performance was over, I left Indio and drove back to the airport in Ontario to catch an early flight back to KC.

Music is made for mass consumption, and there’s no better setting for that formula than a massive field in Southern California, one of the most densely populated areas of the country. With so many different kinds of people there, so many different cultures and sub-cultures, you don’t have to create your own reality – you can choose it. And that’s what Coachella’s all about. If I could, I’d take all of Kansas City with me next year.