Coachella Fesitval: Saturday May 1st

It came as no small irony during Beck’s set list at Coachella when the folk singer hummed out the line “there’s too many people” before a group numbering in the hundreds. As he held on to that lyric, I glanced around to see the hundreds of bodies crowded around a tent that was probably only intended to hold 150 people. The Coachella festival was packed.
Reviews and articles that flooded the media after the festival have reported the attendance to be a record high nearing 50’000 people during both days of the festival. And if those numbers seem ludicrous to read, believe me, they didn’t seem ludicrous at all come Saturday afternoon when Gabe, myself and Marco arrived at the Empire Polo grounds.
Our first day at the festival started off a little shaky. Before Beck’s disappointing appearance we caught some of the “…Trail of the Dead” at the outdoor theater. In hindsight we probably should have stayed there and watched the whole damned thing, because right after Beck we came back to the theater to watch Death Cab for Cutie.
The languid Beck performance had seriously dampened my spirits, and even though the Death Cab and Trail of the Dead sets were both well played, they also put a dent in my personal armor. Groups like Trail of the Dead and Death Cab were great, but it wasn’t like they were bands I couldn’t normally see in Phoenix (at a better ticket price no less). We were baking in the sun and paying marked up prices for lukewarm bottles of water and frozen lemonade. People were lying all around us getting high and t-shirt vendors littered the field. It was at that moment that I considered that I had made a mistake in coming to the festival.

And then the Pixies played.

Pixies
Although I was fairly down on myself before their performance, the Pixies uplifted my spirits and made the entire weekend worthwhile. No band at that festival, save for the Cure has a reputation quite like the Pixies. The Pixies even has the better of the doubt in the case of the Cure, for while some fans either hate or like the Cure’s newer material, most every Pixies fan feels their newer and older works to be equally respectable. Simply put, they’re legends. I’ve seen hype before though, and more often then not the hype isn’t lived up to. But the Pixies lived up to their hype; they excelled to a plain beyond the hype. Their performance Saturday night was so good that every band I saw that day, including my favorite, Radiohead, all palled in comparison.
Tell your friends that the Pixies live and that they conquered that festival like no other.

Radiohead - Day 1 headliner
Radiohead’s performance was brilliant as well, but after such a tremendous showing it was hard to say that they were the best band there that day. Clearly the Pixies were victorious in that regard, but Radiohead’s set was worthy proof that they were the best choice for Saturday’s headliners. Thom Yorke’s voice was riddled with laryngitis, but he still jittered and convulsed across the stage to angular pieces like Myxamatosis and crooned during quieter moments like Exit Music.
The real highlight of the night came though with the band’s encore performance of Creep. In this entire tour I think they’ve played Creep once, maybe twice. But they broke it out Saturday night “for the Pixies”. “Back in college, Pixies and R.E.M. changed my life” Yorke earnestly stated to the multitudes.