Crazy from the heat
There was something for everyone at Coachella, if you were willing to die for it.

By Gabriel Roth

THEY WERE GIVING out free copies of Spin at Coachella, and the magazine included a list of the "Ten Greatest Shows You Never Saw." Four of them were less impressive than the one we were seeing. The lineup for this, the fifth attempt to re-create the European summer festival vibe in the SoCal desert, was the kind that doesn't come along many times in a concertgoing lifetime.

Which is a good thing, because the experience of attending the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is pretty fucking miserable. At noon it's painfully hot, and at four the sun is at the perfect angle to make friends with the back of your neck. Getting to a spot where you can see the performers means showing up at the relevant stage an hour early and waiting while thousands of people press into you on all sides. During quiet songs you can hear whatever is happening on the adjacent stages with impressive clarity. The site has exactly enough room for all 50,000 people, as long as nobody exhales, and the parking lots have exactly enough room for all the cars until everyone tries to leave at the end of the day. (When those cars finally make it out of the parking lot, there are no signs pointing them back to the highway.) Most important: enclosing 50,000 people in 105-degree heat and barring them from bringing water isn't just mercenary; it's dangerous. (Overheard in the parking lot Saturday evening: "... and I woke up in the infirmary, and there was free water and free Gatorade!") As recreational experiences go, desert rock festivals have a lot in common with internment camps.

For two hours on Saturday night – from the beginning of the Pixies' set to the end of Radiohead's – all these concerns were as a fart in a hurricane.

Cut to the bone

The Pixies take the stage, and they're immediately recognizable as the Pixies – which is to say, they're immediately recognizable as Frank Black and Kim Deal and two other guys. The last time the world saw the Pixies (discounting a few warm-up shows last month) they were a cult band with some minor hit singles. Now about 40,000 people have been plunged into sudden ecstasy by the sight of the four of them walking onstage together. I'm standing maybe 50 yards away, but I believe I can see the word whoa on their faces.

Deal starts to play the bass line to "Bone Machine," and it's as if 40,000 circuits have been completed. The Pixies were always a love triangle whose points are Black and the audience and Deal: Black loves the audience, and the audience loves Deal, loves her for her bass lines and her beauty and the way she obviously doesn't care about them at all. Jealousy makes Black squeal and moan: I was talking to Peachy Peach about Kissy Kiss ... he bought me a soda ... he bought me a soda ... he bought me a soda and he tried to molest me in the parking lot! Black looks out at the audience. He used to see this a dozen times every summer, touring festivals in Europe, 40,000 faces looking back at him. Ten years ago he decided he could live without this. I think he was wrong.

The Pixies play one song after another, barely stopping to wipe the sweat from their fingers. The Pixies' music isn't great because of all the parts that rock so hard; it's great because there aren't any parts that suck. This is what they brought to music: a scalpel. They cut away everything that didn't rock. They took out the crescendos, so the full force of a shift from soft to loud comes on a single downbeat. They took out the dead space from the song structures, which is why so many lines from Pixies songs last six bars instead of the more conventional eight. Black scratched out any lyrics that didn't excite him, and what was left were strings of short, sharp shocks: You're so pretty when you're unfaithful to me! Losing my penis to a whore with disease! It's educational! When Deal starts in on "Bone Machine," 40,000 people feel it: this is what indie rock is supposed to sound like. The Pixies finish playing, and the four of them stand on the lip of the stage for a full minute, not bowing or waving, just standing there looking out at the screaming crowd.

Nirvana MIA

Nothing can exist in its platonic form for more than an instant, and by the time Radiohead came on, melodic curlicues and operatic emotionalism were back in style. Over a long, brilliant set, they made every flourish count: Jonny Greenwood's piano on "Karma Police" and glockenspiel on "No Surprises," the skittering beats on "2+2=5," a light show that drove home radical shifts of mood in a single song.

The result is a long way from pure indie, or pure anything. Grandeur is built into the songs' DNA: Radiohead's unusually rich chord changes derive more from Edwardian pops composers and mid-century film scores than from the Beach Boys or the blues. The band swung "Karma Police" as if they were the Rolling Stones, but the Stones wouldn't be caught dead playing such fruity changes.

In between their guitar masterpieces The Bends and OK Computer and their synthetic-noise masterpieces Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, Radiohead morphed from a great band into another great band. (The only other pop artists to pull off such a radical transformation at such a high level are the Beatles and Bob Dylan.) At Coachella they drove home the stately classicism of the rockers and the warm-bloodedness of the bleeps and whirrs. In either incarnation they're monstrous: fiery, casually precise, capable of landing both the largest and the smallest gestures and making them signify to 40,000 people at once.

During the encore Yorke gave a shout-out to the Pixies, and then the band played "Creep," its first hit, which rides to glory on the Pixies-Nirvana quiet verse-loud chorus formula. At the end of the song, Yorke mugged a bit. "I'm a creep," he sang, stretching the words out comically. "I'm a weirdo – yes, it's true," like a parody of a lounge singer. And then he delivered the last lines completely straight. "I don't belong here," he sang quietly, sincerely, giving voice to the creep, the loser, the patron saint of indie rock before it was hijacked by fashionable rich kids from Manhattan private schools.

The only band that could have gone on between the Pixies and Radiohead is Nirvana.

Lips service

Besides nostalgia bands (the Pixies; Kraftwerk; and the Cure, who phoned it in Sunday night), the biggest names on the Coachella bill were Radiohead, Wilco, Beck, the Flaming Lips, and Belle and Sebastian. I have a lot of love for all these acts, but I've got to admit that as a group they're long on intelligence and taste and short on anger and testosterone and slobbering Jaggeresque sexuality; they represent rock's mature ego rather than its teenage id. Beyond the Rapture, no substantial libidinists were booked to play – no Strokes, Stripes, Hives, Vines, Yeahs. So Coachella became a showcase for the state of what we might as well call AOI, for adult-oriented indie. It appears to be in decline.

Wilco canceled when Jeff Tweedy went into rehab, reportedly for painkiller addiction. You can't blame Beck for stupid programming decisions (unless his rider specified that he perform in the middle of the afternoon in a tent that felt like a sauna and had room for about 7 percent of the people who wanted to see him). But you can blame him for a short, lackluster set of acoustic numbers, played without finesse and sung by rote. Beck is a talented singer and songwriter and a genius arranger and bandleader, but he's not a solo act.

Belle and Sebastian are a crack live band complete with strings and horns and piano and organ, something like what the old Motown revues must have been like back in the day, and Stuart Murdoch has written as many wonderful songs as anyone else under 40. But Murdoch's current material takes a dispiriting swoon into pastiche, as though he was sick of outdoing Morrissey-Marr for sad-boy pathos and Ray Davies for character studies and wanted to write theme songs for Austin Powers movies instead.

And some people seem to go for chief Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne's acid-prophet shtick, but I can't feel it. Coyne started by climbing into a giant ball that was passed from hand to hand by the crowd. Then he did a bunch of rambling monologues, explained that he'd used up much of the band's set time with the giant-ball thing, and led the crowd in a rendition of "Happy Birthday" for Beck and his wife, who are expecting a baby. (It took Coyne about a minute to explain that "birthday" here would signify not the anniversary of someone's birth but the day of the birth itself.) Somewhere in the middle of all this, the Flaming Lips, who have made two of the most powerful, most delicate records of the past 10 years, got to play exactly four songs.

Kid stuff

For the kids, meanwhile, there was emo: Thursday and Cursive and Sparta.

Can we please just for the sake of discussion agree on a working definition of emo? Emo, I submit, is hardcore-derived rock music that places a premium on sincerity and directness of expression rather than artfulness. As such, it's the musical lingua franca of adolescents, who have a tendency to confuse strategy with mendacity and literalness with truth-telling. Also, there's nothing more emo than denying you're emo.

The most emo moment in history came during Thursday's set, when singer Geoff Rickly said, "You've probably heard that we're an emo band or some stupid shit like that, but we're just a bunch of kids who grew up loving hardcore, and this is the only way we know how to express ourselves." Thursday's music is by-the-numbers emo: chugging guitars, soaring choruses, primal screaming; the sound of a teenager who honestly believes that his heart is the first ever to be broken by the world.

A few thousand kids go crazy for it, and although I'm as unmoved as it is possible to be by something that loud, some dim memory of adolescence allows me to sympathize. When you're 16, every new event pushes the boundaries of your heart's capacity to feel, and it's all you can do to hang on and write some terrible poetry about it. It must be a relief to have that awful overload shaped into music, and to have a crowd to sing along with. "I have never felt as loved as I do right now," Rickly announces at the end, and his narcissism is funny and repellent to me, but the kids act like he's given them something valuable. From the outside, it feels icky, some kind of peculiarly private transaction between performer and fan that I shouldn't witness.

I didn't see Cursive (thanks to the five-stages-at-once setup everyone missed four times as much music as they saw), but I did see Sparta, which consists of all the guys from At the Drive-In except the ones with the big hair. Like Thursday, Sparta feature a guy with a mic screaming about how he feels, riding on chunky power-chord riffing and peals of delay-pedal guitar. But here's the difference: Sparta are fucking ferocious. The music is big enough to fill the California sky, and the delicate drums and spiraling bass lines lift Jim Ward's voice up into space. They played an anti-Bush song that felt like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" must have felt before it became part of the furniture.

Heatstroke

Most rock bands don't belong outside on a hot afternoon. The Stills, for instance, played a strong set of post-punk pop – they seem to be picking up the living-with-theory baton from where Gang of Four dropped it – but the sunshine threatened to turn them into Simple Minds. The bands that did the best in the daytime were Death Cab for Cutie and Broken Social Scene. I'm not a Death Cab fan, but the P.A. gave their guitars a little more raunch, and their music, it turns out, can be blown up to big-speaker scale without sounding forced. I think my mistake was to think of them as a too-slick club act, when in fact they're more like Weezer's serious little brother: indie rock built for basketball arenas, anthemic and ambivalent at once.

And Broken Social Scene rocked a side-stage crowd with what I would probably call indie rock jamming if the arrangements weren't so close to the recorded versions. (Their art is making something painstakingly rehearsed sound spontaneous and alive.) The band's airy textures, lazy vocals, and stoned vibe are a long way from the Pixies, but they fit very comfortably under Coachella's big tent. At the end half the crowd turned to the other half and said, "So what did you think?," and the other half said, "Awesome!," and the first half said, "See?"