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Powering Through Day 3 at Coachella

April 22, 2009 by Jason Rubin

Day three finds me in the grips of a massive hangover. The house is a mess, littered with torn up 1970s tennis gear, burned socks, and random heads sleeping everywhere. We have officially entered bat country. The couch dwellers look to be a pack of vicious prehistoric lizards out for blood. They also appear to be 17 years old.

We did pick up an interesting couple of crashers. Two kids from Chicago that had — and probably still have — more energy than Hunter S. on a Sports Illustrated assignment. I simply can’t keep up, but I appreciate every second of their presence. They did the right thing and ditched the camp ground for the greener pastures of the tennis mansion. They are awake when I enter the living room, still bobbing their heads to some beat that is inaudible to me, still glowing in their neon sunglasses.

All of a sudden the day’s prospects look up. Hangover be damned! There is talk of hitting up the Indioasis party before the show. Free booze, free food (from a long forgotten friend’s catering company), and free parking walking distance to the venue. And a line-up to make your head spin. The sexy sounds of Sebastian Tellier; Lykke Li and Murder City Devils with PB&J sandwiched in the middle. Jamming out to Paul Weller, freaking out to My Bloody Valentine, and rocking out with the French cubist Etienne de Crecy to wrap it all up. Oh, and I heard The Cure are playing a three hour set. But, as I said in the primer, plans and actions are two very different things, and awfully hard to reconcile when your brain feels like cookie dough.

In times like this, the best thing to do is simplify. Don’t make plans too complicated, don’t try to do too much. If you do, you wind up doing nothing. Just trust the fact that your brain is only really working at 25% capacity and you are really incapable of making plans. So we sat around our own luxurious pool and baked our cookie dough brains into delicious soft-batch. We didn’t even get to Coachella until 6pm.

As I said in the day 1 post, don’t depend on scalpers. But sometimes they can come through. The scalper on day 3 came through with a main stage backstage wristband for $60. Yes, half the box office ticket price. And it actually worked. But instead of using it, I sold it right back to someone for $60.

Day three looked like this — Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Paul Weller, a bit of the Orb, the end of My Bloody Valentine, about an hour of The Cure, and then closing the weekend off with Etienne.

The closest thing to a jam band at Coachella, Paul Weller did not disappoint.

My Bloody Valentine is a bit of a different story. Try this for an exercise. Tune your radio to some static, turn it all the way up, and lay of the floor looking at something psychedelic for about 20 minutes. That was My Bloody Valentine doing their playing one chord at max output and distortion thing.

I have mentioned Etienne de Crecy a lot, as he was my most anticipated artist. I have a thing for French non-gentrified electronic music like Daft Punk and Justice, he never plays in the United States, and his stage and light setup is pretty much unparalleled. His set was spot on, if only a bit brief and a tease. If he had played for days, I would have stayed for days.

One has no choice to come to grips with the acts they miss, and there are many every year. There is simply not the time or energy to see everyone. I especially regret missing Murder City Devils. But for that, there is always next year. Maybe we can have BYT sponsor our party next year. Co-sponsored, of course, by SPF 45 Tequila.

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