How does one even begin to explain an experience like their first Coachella? There are so many distinct aspects that separate the experience from everyday life. For me it was so eventful and rich with new perceptions that the 4 days I was there could easily fill a high school yearbook with my moment to moment thoughts about what was happening around me. It was like a year away in a distant far off reality. Work, romantic relationships, Friendship drama, taxes, TV schedules, Traffic, and all the other things that make up our day to day lives was a distant planet away from my Coachella routine. Yet despite the difficulty, I'm going to make my best effort.
First of all, I have to explain that I think everyone had a very different Coachella experience and I am only trying to explain mine. Sure, we all traveled to the desert and braved sweltering heat, to party in the presence of music and culture, sleeping in overly crammed quarters, spending personally relatively large amounts of money on the trip. Yet, there were very different sub-cultures within the "Coachella-goer". There were those that bought there tickets in advance and went for the music because they go every year, there were those that put themselves up in extravagant houses, chartering comfortable transportation and had their hearts set on having only the "BEST" Coachella, there were those that went because "everyone" was going and they just didn't want to be left out, so they last minute found a couch to crash on and scrounged up money or favors for a ticket to the Parties, and then there was the likes of me who went to Coachella for the first time without really knowing what to expect.
Early on, I felt the pressure to be cool. There was so much talk about how to dress, where to stay, and what kind of ticket to get. Being a LA/Hollywood resident there was a lot of talk about getting VIP versus Gen Admission. Once we got to the concert the attitude was really different. Nobody cared who you were or what you did or who you know or how good your accomodations were. They were just ecstatic to be there and only wanted to talk about who you saw so far and how it was and who you were going to see next. They were focused on experiencing the shows and wondering if they missed out on something you got to see while they were gambling on some other artist. By contrast, it became pretty evident that some people wanted to have conversations about where I was staying and how nice it was. What parties was I gonna go to and when I thought I would check out Oasis, or Trousdale, or Lacoste. I admit it was fun to talk about the place we got, VIP, and the parties, but by the end of my experience I didn't care about that stuff anymore.
We started out as a group of 5 guys. As we woke up in our condo and prepared for day 1 after partying our asses off during day 0, we laughed at our own preparation process. We cooked a hearty breakfast ranging from Yogurt to Omelettes and bagels. We took vitamins, drank energy drinks, and protein shakes. We asked for advice on our Coachella outfits and made fun of Brandon for putting in his Crest white strips and Ironing a shirt that was about to get sweaty and dusty. Obviously we still cared about all that frivolous stuff. We talked about the parties and when we should check them out and came to an agreement about our music schedule for the day. Getting to Coachella was a process and partly due to my personal mission to find a battery charger for my camera, it took close to 4 hours to even get in through the gate. The first thing we did was run! Gitty as children and compelled by uncontainable excitement we sprinted to catch Skrillex hollering like a pack of Indians going to war. It was our first show. We were late so we found a spot on the outside close to the stage but outside of the crowd. We enjoyed the beats but weren't really participants. We jumped up and down and pumped our fists sporadically.
For the most part, I imagine that this was the limit of most people's Coachella experience. And for those people they were probably miserable by day 2. It was Hot. It was dirty. It was over crowded. Half the bands you've never heard of and you can't even hear them very well from the outside. I don't blame those people for spending a lot of time in comfortable cool VIP or at the Hollywood parties. If I hadn't been with the friends that I went with, I probably might have only had that kind of Coachella.
You're in the middle of 200 thousand people so meeting up with friends was an elaborate process. You had to choose a landmark to stand by and you had to give detailed descriptions to direct them to where you were. We had met up with a group and were now a group of 12 but were trying to meet up with Brittany and Chelsea and their group. After standing in the beer garden for 30min, going to VIP and 2 different bathrooms, we were unable to find them (typical). Not only that but we lost our original group and were down to 3. Shit like that always happened. keeping a group together was near impossible.
So, Julian, Brandon and I set off for Afrojack in the Sahara tent to find the rest of our crew that we just lost, vowing to find the girls later. It was there that I first got my taste of the choice drug of Coachella. No, it wasn't any of the ones you druggies are thinking. They told us they were in the very middle 50ft from the stage. We fiercely fought our way through the dense cluster of bodies and couldn't find them. Earlier we had devised a way to hold your hand up and signal, but when the crowd is bouncing with their hands in the air, it didn't work. They could have been 6 people away and we would never have known because all you could see was the stage and the people around you. But there in "The Pit" as afrojack was at the peak of a long teasing build up, "TAKE OVER CONTROL" dropped like the New Years Eve ball on our ears and that's exactly what happened. I lost complete control. The crowd erupted into a human powered volcano spewing the spirit like magma turned audio-lava. I bounced and screamed at the top of my lungs with the crowd like one cohesive entity swinging my arm back and forth like a hatchet! That is the drug I am referring to. I was lost in the music, in the moment between the crowd and the artist, bouncing to the same frequency as the crowd, feeling it like some form of energy that was simultaneously inside and outside of my body all around me. My excitement was magnified by the artist, contibuting to the crowd, and the artists energy was magified by us the crowd and spit back at us and so on in an endless cycle of spiritual feedback. Trying to intellectualize it does it no justice. All I can say is it was addicting and once we had a taste of that feeling, we were hooked. I was high on live music.
Trying to explain what we were witnessing made us get creative with our descriptions. And if you weren't at Coachella and didn't witness what we were trying to describe, then we sound "high". For Example, Jarran had explained that after one of the songs, a lot of people left and it was like "All this pressure just released. Like it just kept building up and people got too hot and too squished and the tent just popped like a pimple and expelled like a thousand overheated people. Then all of a sudden you could move again." When trying to find our friends in the middle of The Black Keys, it was like "Dude we gotta hurry. It's like collapsing. It's about to get super dense and we won't be able to move. Once it reaches a certain density were gonna get stuck. So do you think we can make it to them before it collapses or should we just stay out here?" We weren't even drunk yet. The point is that Coachella is so different from the outside world that trying to describe normal Coachella activities sober makes you sound like you're high.
So hopefully you can understand what I mean when I say that each show had a completely different energy. Both literally as in the amount of electricity, lights, and sound pumping into the show and more metaphysically as in the kind of spiritual aura around the crowd's actions. I was amused by how crazy the Sahara tent was. Thousands of people were converting food calories into simultaneous kinetic motion. You were so close together in that tent that you had to move with the group to avoid getting crushed. So much more than the other stages you really were vibrating your body to the same frequency. But the people singing along with Kings of Leon were vibrating to the same frequency as well. It was just a frequency that wasn't loud enough to manifest as jumping bodies. You might get some hands reaching into the sky or some swaying here and there, but mostly I witnessed groups of people hugging each other. Couples and friends embracing. There was a lot less screaming and a lot more singing along to individual words. All the other shows were somewhere in the middle in between those ends of the spectrum but with their own completely unique sense of spiritual energy. So that's what we did for all 3 days. You picked a vibe, an energy, or a sound that you wanted to experience and you sought after friends who wanted to go experience it with you. "Okay, so if you're down to see Steve Angello then go with them... and if you want to watch Arcade Fire, go with them. Meet back here or at the big U-shaped building in front of the Pretzel stand afterwards." Coachella wasn't about being cool or exlusive at all. It was about experiencing a show and the way it made you feel with your friends.
After Kings of Leon and the first day of revelry was over, we went to after parties. Chasing them around, getting directions, and getting friends in started to not feel like Coachella. It started to feel more like Hollywood again and it seemed to only separate our group. We opted not to go and to save it for the next day. The Second day we planned on hitting all the parties during the day so we went to Oasis, Lacoste, and Trousdale. Our group split up and not all of us made it to everything, nor did we go at the same time, but overall our group thought they were cool. They were cool and fun, in the sense that they would have been cool or fun if we were in LA or would have been cool or fun if we hadn't been high the night before on Boyz Noise. In fact the consensus started to become, every second we were away from actual Coachella was a sobering reminder of the reality we had been trying to escape. The parties were dope as fuck and were full of hot people and celebrities and hot celebrities, but "Laidback Luke goes on in 30minutes and we're missing Two Door Cinema Club guys". We had a good time going and partying, driving around and losing part of our group only to re-unite, but overall we just wanted to get back to Coachella.
By day 2 our group was huge. Depending on the time of day we ranged anywhere from 20-30 or more people. For whatever reason, our social gravity just kept pulling new recruits into the group and wouldn't let them escape. One person would meet up with a friend, and introduce them to the group. Hey guys, this is my friend "Michelle". By the end of that show, the new recruits were like, "Where are you guys going after this" and our group just grew by 2 people permanently. At coachella, when navigating a sea of 200 thousand people, the larger your group is, the harder it is to stay together and the harder it is to do anything. After every show, somebody had to go to the bathroom or needed some water or had to go find a friend. We would be set forth with the task of full-filling the needs of the group while trying not to lose anyone. This was a stressful and taxing but necessary activity that seemed to only pull us closer together. I pointed out that it was interesting how many times per week you look to your friends for help, with dating advice, personal problem or a ride home, or whatever. By contrast at Coachella, needing help was more frequent. Every 5 minutes you were looking for a lost friend, looking for water, trying to solve a problem and asking someone to risk getting lost from the group to go with you. Quickly you knew who was really connected to you because they would go with you without hesitation. You would build bonds with people quickly because you depended on them to not get lost or they pulled through for you when you were in a shitty situation.
I first got seriously lost during Arcade Fire. The entire group voted on Steve Angello. And right before the group left, I asked Brittany and Bri to come with me to get my camera battery from the Charging station. Happily they agreed, but as we started to get farther and farther away, they got nervous. "How far is this place?" they would say, looking back at the group as though we were setting sail and the group sitting in the grass, was our mainland port that we were leaving behind. Their fear grew and grew until Brittany was like, "I'm sorry Markus, this is too far! Good luck!" They turned around and ran back to the group and I watched them go, fully aware of the fact that if I didn't get back before the herd moved, it might be a long time(in Coachella time) before I saw them again. I went to get my battery and spent a lot of time texting the group for directions and updates to their locations. In that time, because I was alone, I started paying a lot more attention to everyone else around me. What did groups look like. What were they doing? I started thinking about how Coachella was kind of a little microcosm for life in general. You set a goal, like going to the bathroom or going to a show that makes you feel a certain way and you need people to go with you because otherwise there's nobody to share it with and you can easily just get lost wandering around without direction. I started to think about a conversation we had had earlier at IHOP. Jarran had said, it's so crazy that the greatest punishment other than death that we can give to a person is making them sit in a cell by themself with nobody else around. We had also talked about some guy at the lacoste party who was wearing a beard and a borat one piece thong bathing suit. I had said, "Why would you want so much negative attention". The group answered, because negative attention is better than not existing. This paired with the sight of the people around me and the feeling of being alone made it clear how much it sucks to be alone and how much we need other people, in general, not just at Coachella. I got back to the groups location and they were indeed gone. I was still alone but Arcade Fire started to play.
Throughout the show I was texting friends. I was trying to find a friend that was watching Arcade Fire and I was trying to find out where the group went. Who cared that I was missing enough to respond to my texts in the middle of the other show? Who was trying to help me? Who cared enough to take the time to miss a few seconds of Steve Angello to stare at their phone and try to describe where to find them. The interesting thing was realizing that through my text messages, I was reaching out. I didn't want to witness this music alone. I didn't want to be singing alone. I wanted that feeling of being a part of the group that I had had for all the other shows. Then looking around at the groups of happy people singing along made me realize that that's life. Everyone just wants to feel connected. What don't we do to get people's attention? The way we dress, what we choose as an occupation, what music we like, how we spend our time, all in some way or another involve connecting to people, wanting to be connected to people. It happened right in the middle of "Wake Up" ironically or coincidentally or poignantly I felt compelled to write these thoughts down.
I haven't mentioned yet that I had been filming a documentary of the entire trip. At that moment, using my flip camera, I started recording myself writing a blog while holding the phone up so that you could see arcade fire performing in the background. Then Arcade Fire released hundreds of giant glowing globes into the crowd. I started thinking about how fitting it was. How much like glowing globes bouncing around space we are. Crashing into eachother as individuals. clustering into groups. Sharing the same energy. All these people were singing because they were connected to this song. It meant something to them and their life. They were all sharing that meaning together. I was alone but surrounded by thousands of people thinking about how we're all connected but feeling all alone. I started writing this blog that you're reading at that moment, filming myself as I typed it, listening to arcade fire, singing along. I will share the contents of what I wrote at that moment shortly.
After Arcade Fire I rejoined the herd. I was slightly awkward because of my solitary experience and didn't know what to say for a while. My conversations were short and felt forced. It took me a good 30minutes to decompress from the ocean depths that I had explored. We after partied and I got home when the sun was already up.
Day 3 was much of the same. Our group had a blast. We were energetic and light spirited. Chromeo and the Strokes being the most fun. By the third day, we were much better at staying together. Our systems of navigating and communicating were more refined. Much more time was spent in play then going to the bathroom or getting water. We skipped because it was fun. We took our shoes off because it felt good for our sore dancing feet. Nobody was really serious or stressed about anything anymore. That is until Brandon came forth with a mission. Turns out it was one of our guy's birthday at midnight. His name is Mike. I didn't even know Mike before the week started, but we had a lot of great talks. Brandon asked me how to get a cake and 20 glow sticks instead of candles. I told him he could easily find some sort of cake in the food court but 20 glow sticks would be really hard to come by. He and Omar went to the food court and discovered that the pizza place made cookies. He had them make a giant cookie. They only had plates so he bought one of their pans. He had them spell happy birthday Mike in chocolate. Then they ran around stealing glow sticks and picking them up off the ground until they had enough. I knew Mike was waiting to sing along to "All of the Lights" during Kanye West and we were waiting for midnight. Out of pure chance, just before when midnight struck, Kanye performed All of the Lights. We got in a circle around Mike holding up our glow-stick-candles. As soon as the song finished, right at the stroke of midnight, we sang him happy birthday.
Then the meaning of the weekend came together in one coherent idea. I started writing the end of my documentary into my phone as a continuation of the blog I had written earlier. Here is what I wrote that started during arcade fire and finished after we sang happy birthday:
"So here is what I learned at Coachella, so far. We all exist in metaphysical space. Surrounded by the swirling flow of energy. It is us that pull it together. The beings that turn energy into kinetic temporal motion. By doing so shaping the ripples of time. And in that pool of life we mix our ripples together. Into herds, packs, families. We over lap each other. We are all connected.
We experience the sharing of existence in time as a single unit. We reach out to each other trying not to feel singular at all. With a look. A smile. A touch. We share our precious time on earth, dividing up our attention. Hoping for affection. Because the truth of it all is that we need each other.
Coachella is but one thing that helps us pull together. To feel connected, loved, and not alone.
There is so much energy in this place. So much life. So much joy. I'm not sure I can properly answer why we love music so much, but I can say that sharing it is wonderful. It kinda helps us vibrate to similar frequencies.
Put more simply I hardly knew some of these people when the weekend started. We came from different places. We wanted to see different shows. Some how we ended up compromising to stay together. We helped each other find our way back to the group when we got lost. We shared our supplies. We danced like poets. We sang like superstar icons. And we left it on the field like champions. Then during the final performance under a full moon, at the stroke of midnight, we howled a happy birthday to one of our pack in celebration of life. We were right there, all together. We loved all these songs together. We loved these artists together. Sharing that love helped us discover what we had in common. We were connected. Even if just for a weekend. Whether we stay friends after that weekend or drift apart, we will always know that everything that happened at Coachella 2011 was real. And in that way we will be connected, forever."
My favorite song and moment of all of Coachella was actually during Empire of the sun. And my friends who witnessed it know that it was the moment that I lost my mind and danced like I was possessed. I didn't talk about it so far because the meaning of the song is more appropriate here.
Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun is what I learned at Coachella.
walking on a dream
how can i explain
talking to myself
will i see again?
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
thought i'd never see
the love you found in me
now it's changing all the time
living in a rythm where the minute's working over time
we are always running for the thrill of it, thrill of it
always pushing up the hill, searching for the thrill of it
on and on and on we walk calling out, out again
never looking down im just in awe in whats infront of me
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
catch me im falling down
catch me im falling down
don't stop just keep going on
im your shoulder, lean upon
So come on deliver from inside
All we got is tonight that is right till first light
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
is it real now
when two people become one
i can feel it
when two people become one
Walking on a Dream,
-MM
