On Thursday, the lineup for the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California came out. Usually these things only really exist on the periphery of my attention to the music world (which is to say that I could probably recite you this year's lineup for Benicassim faster than I could give you a summary of the readings I'm supposed to be doing for uni, but I think that's partially because I have a freakish memory). Festivals have always seemed a bit too hardcore for me. They're full of thousands of people and mud and camping and activities that I find questionable, like not showering for three days straight. But they're also full of epically good live music, so I always said someday, when I had the money and a festival had the right lineup, I'd go. Turned out that would be this year.
The lineup is fantastic. I can only think of about three or four bands that I would add to that list to make it so good I wouldn't be able to handle it. At first I just was like "wow, that's awesome, too bad I can't go." A few hours later of watching people on the internet express frustration that they would also be unable to attend the most awesome music event of the year, the wheels of my brain started turning, just out of curiosity. I started to do what I do best: logistics planning. I would be in the US during the festival, after all, just on the other side of the continent. And despite the fact that I already knew it wasn't going to be cheap to potentially get me to California from Connecticut, the money in my savings account is pretty much solely intended for use on music and/or travel, and a jaunt to SoCal would count as both. So I started to research. I made a budget, that I ended up going ever so slightly over in the end, and I figured out how to get every aspect of the weekend short of food and gas taken care of. As crazy as it was, it was doable. Expensive, and probably ill-advised, but doable. I convinced myself to go over the course of about 12 hours. My bank account quaked in fear. All I needed was someone to go with.
I could have gone alone, of course, and I really considered it for awhile. But not splitting the cost of a hotel and a car and the like made the whole thing a bit out of reach, and as independent and isolationist as I am, I'm kind of sick of doing really cool stuff by myself. I'm still enjoy spending time alone in my room above all else, but when it comes to the exciting things, like travel and concerts, I've done it alone and had a great time, but I think it's time to stop doing that. So I was on the hunt for a Coachella buddy, which is a lot harder than it sounds when all of your friends are either on the other side of the country or the other side of the world from California. I had high hopes for three different Coldplayer friends, who have done crazier things in the past, and they almost said yes. But on Thursday night, 24 hours before tickets went onsale, I was convinced I was going to have to give up all hopes of going, mostly because the cost was just too much for one person. But then I got an email from my mom: her best friend's daughter, who actually used to be a concert-buddy of ours in high school, goes to college in San Francisco, was in the same boat as me. She wanted to go, but she had no one to go with, and wanted to go with someone who was there for the music rather than the shenanigans. I had also forgotten that she was an epically huge Strokes fan like myself. Everything fell into place.
I've gotten a hotel in Palm Springs, California, and either tonight or tomorrow I will be booking my flight and reserving my rental car. Oh, and we got the three-day passes yesterday. I'm going to be on a mini-roadtrip from Los Angeles to Palm Springs to Indio. This all sounds like someone else's life to me. But for that lineup, man, it's going to be so worth it. It will be about 90*F in April and I will be outside all day and I will smell and be jammed up against people under the influence of various things, but I will be seeing The Strokes and Arcade Fire and Kings of Leon and The Black Keys and The National and Brandon Flowers and a whole host of other artists that I have been meaning to check out and get more into. All of this in a new place I've always been meaning to go to.
82 days until I fly to California. Every time I say "California" in my head, it comes out like Arnold Schwartzenegger: CALLYFOURNEEYAH. And, for the record, 18 days until The Strokes first single, "Under Cover of Darkness," and exactly two months until their first album in five years. I never thought I'd see the day.
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