The year to go might have been 2004. Radiohead, the Pixies, even a surprise performance by Beck. This weekend, Indio’s Empire Polo Field will pack as many indie acts as possible on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival bill, but though it’s close to selling out, the festival seems to have lost some of its appeal.
Headliners Depeche Mode and Tool are hardly the draws that Radiohead or the Red Hot Chili Peppers were, and with Madonna and Daft Punk in the dance tents, many of the major acts are ones revived from decades ago.
Fourth-year English student Toby Estes, who attended in 2004, will not be going to this year’s event. According to Estes, the headliners aren’t engaging enough for his taste.
“It’s great they offer all those musical options for people,” said Estes. “It would just have to take something like another Pixies or Radiohead to get me to go because I’m not interested in many of the smaller acts offered this year. If they were bringing in edgier bands, I would reconsider. If the rumors were true about the Smashing Pumpkins reunion, I would have definitely been there.”
The rest of the concert bill includes buzz bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, TV on the Radio, Wolf Parade and Animal Collective, as well as a slew of DJs and hip-hop acts including Kanye West and the much-hyped Gnarls Barkley.
While any L.A. resident can see many of the smaller acts for less than $20 per show at a close-by venue, Coachella does offer an opportunity for fans to catch lesser-touring bands.
“We only come around twice a year,” said Avey Tare (aka David Porter), singer/guitarist of Animal Collective. “There are a lot of people that wouldn’t get to see us otherwise.”
Jennifer Bennett, a fourth-year music student, already has her two-day camping passes and tickets to this year’s festival.
Bennet, along with a surge of others, is going this year to catch the smaller bands.
“Sleater-Kinney, Sigur Ros and Wolf Parade are the top three I want to see,” Bennett said. “The headliners are an extra for me. It would be cool to see Depeche Mode or Massive Attack, but they come second to a few of the other bands that I really like right now.”
The number of bands has led the members of Animal Collective to sacrifice the quality of their sets, according to Tare.
“It takes us a while to progress to where we want to be time-wise, so our set lists tend to be pretty long,” Tare said. “Since we’ve been doing more festivals we’ve had to cut it down and be very time-conscious. It’s a challenge for us.”
Overbooking acts also creates overlapping performance times in addition to cutting down the length of sets. Coachella’s Web site, as it has in the past, offers a method of selecting the acts concertgoers want to catch with the virtual “Coachooser.” Fans can thus “coachoose” which bands to sacrifice in favor of other acts.
“I won’t be able to see all of the bands I want to see because of the way they schedule it,” Bennett said.
Some of the bands playing also echo concertgoers’ worries.
“It does seem like the festival is too big this year,” said Tare. “I guess the way they see it is the more diversity or the more bands that they have, the better they are. The concert industry and ticket sales (don’t) seem to do as well anymore, especially after Lollapalooza fell apart, so maybe the new way to approach it is to see how many bands they can get.”
For fans willing to see their favorite bands while frying in the Indio sun, Coachella has become a tradition with a huge following since 1999. Though the big acts are less impressive to many this year, size doesn’t always matter.
“I know about two-thirds of this year’s lineup,” Bennett said. “The fact that all those names are at one place seems like something that won’t happen again.”