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).