edward sharpe & the magnetic zeros

Last week we went to the 9:30 Club on a school night to see Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

We were introduced to the group at Coachella and loved the vibe (cheesy word, I know, but there’s no other way of putting it) so we’ve been fans ever since.

We weren’t wild about the concert being on a Tuesday but we’ve been denied several shows recently because we thought about them for too long and then they sold out. 

I mean, we’re 30, people. 

Late nights after early mornings followed by more early mornings are not in our bag of tricks any longer.

But we were sure glad we went.  Because it was an amazing show.

It started out a little odd because they managed to “lose” one of their lead singers, Jade.  She sings lead on a whole bunch of their songs so they were more than a little thrown off.  And they don’t even have an opening act to cover for them so they began with a couple of songs from their piano player, Tay Strathairn.

Then the rest of the band trickled out and they played a few things but they would have to pause and consider what to play next whenever they finished a song because they, obviously, couldn’t follow their prepared set list.  At one point, they even had us calling for Jade but she still hadn’t been found – she was in a cab in DC somewhere without a phone. 

There’s Nora Kirkpatrick, aka Katherine from Greek, again.  An oasis of calm amidst all the hippy dippy crazy.

When she finally did arrive, she burst through the backstage door and leapt up on the stage – absolutely ecstatic to finally be there.  Then they took a break, presumably to regroup.

They came back out with a rousing rendition of "Janglin'"  You might recognize the tune from the 2011 Ford Fiesta commercial.

I recorded most of the song but not all of it – they went kind of nuts after they finally found their groove. It was AWESOME! Jade is the girl with the short dark hair on the right by the piano.  She’s nutty and she only sings and plays random bits of percussion out of a basket of “toys” that sits on the stage.

They also had a few extra players in the wings. The first was an older guy playing a lap guitar – at least I think that’s what they were calling it.  It looked like a steel guitar to me. 

Later a sitar player joined them for "Desert Song."  They must have had a 5 minute intro to the song wherein half the band sat down on the stage to join the sitar player on the floor.  Just totally chill…

It's not the greatest video but I had to include it because I’m so proud of myself for figuring out how to flip a video.

The lead singer – Alex Ebert – jumped into the crowd about 3 times at various parts of the show.  It was pretty funny.  Once he got a girl in the audience to sing with him.  Another time, he literally got into some guy’s shirt – with the guy still in it.

I really don’t think I’ve laughed and smiled so much through a concert.  It was so much fun!  Ok, I could have done without the exceedingly enthusiastic girl next to me.  But we had a great time.  Really.

One thing that we noticed on our way out that we couldn’t see from where we were sitting/standing during the concert was that the backdrop was the Emerald City.

day 3 – spoon, phoenix

Started off the day with another fantastic big breakfast, this time at the hands of Stephanie and Lieberman.
Lieberman at the stove; the boys waiting patiently to fill their plates.

Will decided to take a few pictures of the ceiling fan in the living room because it was sooooo cool.  The fan blades spin and then the whole thing rotates like a ceiling fan.  The only thing we thought that would make it cooler is if the fans also oscillated.

After getting to Indio, we caught some part (we missed the beginning because we stopped for food) of Mayer Hawthorne and the County before we headed off to snag good spots with the crew for Florence and the Machine. 

This was the first day – ok, the only day – that we decided to take our “good” camera into the festival.  The rules posted on their website defined a professional camera as one with a removable lens which our Nikon does.  But we had a nice chat with one of the “guards” on the first day only to find out that they were allowing lenses that were credit card length or less.  Ours was pushing it but for the last day, we went for it and the guys checking our bags didn’t even notice I had it.  So while we waited for Florence to come on stage, Jocelyn and I played with the camera from the ground -

Ok, but back to Miss Florence… She was pretty amazing.  She has a beautiful singing voice so even though we didn’t know her music, we enjoyed the show.

Toward the end of her set, one of the guys from Cold War Kids came out to join her. 

But one of the more heartwarming sights of the festival occurred during her show.
Yep, this guy in a wheelchair had decided to forego his special handicapped seating to stay with his friends and they, in turn, lifted him above the crowd so he could see. Very cool.

Next up – Julian Casablancas.  He was pretty good but we didn’t stay for the whole set.  And after that – Jonsi.  Now he was super chill and pretty cool so we were sad that' we’d missed some of it.

Afterward we moved on to the Coachella Main Stage for a band we’d been looking forward to – Spoon!

Jocelyn had a really good time; there were a ton of people there.

Pretty sunset from the Outdoor Theater.

We were super excited about Phoenix so we didn’t stay for all of Spoon so that we could get close to the stage.  And we got close.
 

They were so much fun and they played in the “dark” because their lighting guy had gotten stuck in France due to the volcano in Iceland.

Will really wanted to see Yann Tiersen (of Amélie soundtrack fame) so off we went.  He had quite the sparse crowd so we were able to get really close.
It didn’t hurt that he was really good in a really odd way.

The fiddle playing was awesome!

Next up, Plastikman in Sahara.  This show was recommended by some of our friends as being the potential breakout electronic act of the festival.  Here’s a shot of the set from the first “song.”

This was all we saw.  We couldn’t tell the difference between the house music and when the act began.  Basically we decided that everyone there fell into 2 camps: 1. mostly (or totally) sober and so completely confused (the camp we were in) or 2. high as kites and loving it.  Needless to say, we left after the end of this “song.”

We went off in search of our last bit of festival food.  I ended up with a bunless hotdog for a dollar off.  But while we were sitting there, we realized that we knew, and liked, the song that was coming from the next tent (Mojave) - “Dominoes” by The Big Pink so off we went.

Jocelyn and the majority of our crew were in there from the start but Ravi’s comment afterward was that “live they sounded like they'd just left their parent's garage and finally got to turn up the amps.”  We enjoyed it though it turned out to be the end of their set.

And then it was off to the grand finale – Gorillaz.  We were curious as to how the show would go given that the band “hides” behind their cartoon characters. 
As it turned out, they didn’t play anything that we knew because they played all songs from their new album.  As we walked out to go back to the house, every time they started a new song Ruben would pause and say “this is from the new CD.”

We headed back to the house to have our last night of dance party fun before we all had to leave Palm Springs.  Will, Ruben and I had a 7am flight out to SFO and I was the first to bed at about 2:45am – right about when they all started playing Rock Band.  Crazy boys.

Well, this might be the end of the chronological story but there’s a few more odds and ends before I’m truly done with the whole story.

day 2 – MGMT, muse, z-trip

Thankfully, we’d finally adjusted to West Coast time and recovered from our trip to Palm Springs so we were able to get up and enjoy the day before heading out.  We started with fabulous breakfast at the hands of Vic and Ruben – though we did have to teach Ruben to make “al dente” bacon since he likes really crispy bacon.

Afterward everyone spent some time enjoying the pool.

Will and Ruben and Jocelyn in the pool.  Vic and Ruben started goofing around off the side of the spa.  Ravi is responsible for the photography as I missed most of the action.

We headed out a bit later than the previous day and ended up defying the parking lot watchers and moved the behemoth from its original spot for better positioning to leave.
 
Here’s the whole gang (minus the long-haired dude on the left and Ruben cuz he’s taking the picture) walking in.

We started the day with the whole group at Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.  This was another band that we hadn’t really considered but they were awesome.  Definitely one of my new favorites.  Very hippie and seemingly predictably baked.  I commented that we were lucky that Edward Sharpe had pants on.

This was the the awesome part though:

That girl on the left plays Catherine on Greek!  Singing back up, playing the keyboard and the accordion with the Magnetic Zeros is a steady gig for her apparently.

We didn’t have a whole lot that we were set on seeing on the second day so we took a few recommendations from others so next up was The XX. 

But the exciting thing to happen during the show was that there was pyrotechnics on the Coachella Main Stage.  For a few minutes, it really looked like the Main Stage was on fire.  My first thought was “Oh, this will be bad.  Most of these people are high.” Then the smoke stopped and it was obvious that it was an effect by Coheed and Cambria.  Since the entire crowd was staring over at the “fire,” the lead singer for The XX felt compelled to comment on it.

There wasn’t anything on the schedule we were super interested in for quite a while so we more thoroughly wandered the grounds stopping by Dirty Projectors for a bit.

Afterward we decided to check out the Ferris wheel.  I’ve actually never been on a Ferris wheel and it was so much fun.
  View of the origami crane on the grounds. (more on the art later)

Next up MGMT.  We were excited to see them and they were good but they played a lot of things from their new album which had just come out the Tuesday before Coachella. 

We’d decided while on the Ferris wheel that we would watch Muse from the “comfort” of the beer garden – Ruben and Jocelyn wanted root beer floats that we’d spotted while on the wheel.
 
Because we were in the beer garden, we could hear well but couldn’t see much.  We were kind of sad to have missed the laser show.  Here’s one of Ravi’s pictures.
 
We didn’t wait out the whole show and headed over to Sahara to catch some Z-Trip.  I don’t think I’ve ever really seen a DJ spin and it was by far the best part of the day.  He was just this kind of doofy balding white dude but it was sooooooo much fun!

The fact that we didn’t stay to the bitter end made the trip home much better.  And into the spa we all went.  Another good day.

day 1 – she & him, vampire weekend, jay-z

A little after 1 o’clock, we all piled in the behemoth Suburban and headed out for Indio and the festival grounds which is, even under good circumstances, about an hour away.

Getting there wasn’t too bad but getting in… holy cow! 

There was a small problem with getting out of the parking lot wherein most of us hopped the fence before that guy in the yellow shirt came over to put an end to that. (and yes, because of his allergies, Ravi sports a ninja-like face mask while at Coachella, particularly in dusty areas.)

Then we waited in the craziness (shown below) for like 45 minutes to get our bags checked and get wristbanded. 
Apparently the wristbands are new this year because of 2 things:
1. you had to buy 3-day pass just to attend.
2. because of the new car camping, they were allowing “ins and outs” (you could actually leave the venue and then come back in throughout the day).

Once we made it through that mess, we figured “ok, we’re all checked out and wristbanded; we’re good.”  Not so much.  As it turned out we had to go through a second entrance where they checked our wristbands (they had RF ids in them for authentication) and a more thorough bag check. 

We finally made it in to catch the end of The Avett Brothers on the Outdoor stage (yes, everything was outside but one of the stages was called “Outdoor Theater” go figure) with the entire group.
 
They weren’t a band that I had originally wanted especially to see but others that we were with were really interested so we took their suggestion and they were really cool.  One of my new favs.

After they were finished, we headed off to find food and then to one of the 3 tents (all named for deserts – Gobi, Mojave, and Sahara – the latter of which specialized in more club, house, techno, electronica, DJ, etc.)  There we caught a bit of Yeasayer.  They were actually pretty cool and we wished that we would have been able to see more (this was a constant theme given how the schedule was working with 5 stages).

We ended up spending most of our time in a subset of the larger group that was Will and me, and his two friends Ruben and Jocelyn. We had some time to kill before we started our pursuit for good positioning back at the Outdoor Theater for She & Him so we took the opportunity to check out some of the vendor tents.  Most of them were offering free internet, free cell phone charging (either by leaving it in a locker or by virtue of having a ton of power strips to hook up to), a bit of respite from the heat, and some promotional something or other.

The Odwalla tent was having a magic show wherein the guy was using an optical illusion to either grow or shrink his head.  Kinda freaky.

Then it was on to She & Him which we were really looking forward to even if it meant that we had to miss Ra Ra Riot – we had to choose and it came down to the reality that we’ve seen Ra Ra Riot before and She & Him doesn’t tour much what with Zooey Deschanel having a day job and all.
The show was great and she is super cute.  We also know their music fairly well because this was actually one of the few bands that we knew before we even considered going to Coachella.  They actually ended 10 min early and then came back for an “encore” once someone backstage told them they had 10 more minutes which was funny.  Afterward we couldn’t help but wonder if she was wearing cotton since she’s the new face for the cotton commercials.

By this point it was time for food again and we didn’t have anything that we in particular wanted to catch so while Ruben pushed ahead to Passion Pit, we enjoyed them from the comfort of the grass while we ate.  Once we got Ruben back, we took off wandering the grounds before Vampire Weekend.  In our travels we caught parts of Them Crooked Vultures (I like them but I’m not totally sold yet) and LCD Soundsystem (according to the rest of our crew who did go, they were fantastic but didn’t do the one song that we really know).

One of the things we found in our travels was a whole set up to generate power in different ways. 

Bicycles (Ruben, Will, a random, and Jocelyn) or the human hamster wheel (which both Ruben and Jocelyn did)

But we’re pretty sure that if they powered anything – it was the DJ who was spinning there.

We made it back to get good positioning for Vampire Weekend which was AWESOME.  They were another band that we’re really familiar with – Will associates them with the week we got married and our honeymoon since he had just purchased their first CD before we left.
 

just a clip from Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”  The audio sucks because we were right close to the speakers.

They had quite the enthusiastic crowd.
 

Afterward we just hung out until Jay-Z came out on the Coachella Main Stage to headline the day.  I wasn’t terribly jazzed about Jay-Z but I was curious.   I didn’t think he was all that good until he started in on the old stuff – I pretty much quit listening to rap and hip hop after I got out of school.  But the best was when Beyoncé came out to sing “Forever Young.”

No, I did not take this video.

As it turned out the main “problem” with having Jay-Z as the headliner was that everyone stayed for the entire performance.  Once we got to the car, we didn’t get out of the parking lot for about an hour and a half.  I felt bad for Ravi because most of the car was passed out off and on the entire way back to the house.  At one point I fell asleep for about 45 min only to find we’d only moved about 5 feet.  Thankfully half of us were awake off and on so that he had someone to talk to. 

It was a tough first day for us East Coasters but we had a great time and made it through (though I went immediately to bed upon returning to the house while most folks got in the spa).