To rock or to read?

Call it the Southern California yin and yang.

Two annual April pilgrimages this weekend are propelling tens of thousands of people hungering for culture onto the freeways and into the crowds, weighted down with knapsacks, water bottles and sunscreen.

In the eastern desert, the ninth annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is in full swing, a sprawling, pulsing, over-the-top outdoor rock concert featuring more than 100 bands, including such marquee names as Prince, Portishead and Roger Waters. The crowd -- estimated to be about 160,000 over three days -- is largely youthful, virile, edgy, given to dancing under the stars.

At UCLA 145 miles to the west, the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books would seem a tamer rite of spring, less raucous than erudite. Headliners Maxine Hong Kingston, Gay Talese and Julie Andrews as well as other writers are expected to draw a two-day crowd of 140,000. Here, bestselling novelists exchange notes with scruffy young bloggers and parents pushing baby strollers stuffed with shiny new hardbacks.

In Westwood, you can catch the whiff of barbecue sauce blocks away from the grill at Dickson Plaza. At Coachella, marijuana scents the air.

Still, the vibrancy of these twin tent cities says a lot about the artistic intensity that is building in this regional crazy quilt of cultures.

After all, only the most obsessed arts lovers would stand in line, shoulder to shoulder, sweating, chugging water -- why is this weekend always a scorcher? -- all to claim a book with a favorite author’s signature or to hear their favorite guitarist’s riffs.

Forged in the late 1990s, both mega-events swiftly became wildly popular and internationally known. The Festival of Books is the largest public literary festival in the nation. Coachella is the premier West Coast outdoor concert event.

And today, another mega-event could bring 100,000 people to downtown Los Angeles -- Fiesta Broadway, billed as the nation’s largest Latino event.

But on Saturday, it was a one-two punch: literature and smashed guitars.

Coachella

British “big beat” producer and disc jockey Fatboy Slim ascended the dance tent stage late Friday night and sent a capacity crowd into paroxysms of disco bliss with his bombastic, bass-heavy sounds.

The throng -- several thousand festivalgoers deep -- melded into a single boisterous entity, writhing and pogo-ing and waving frenzied arms in the air in time to DJ Slim’s pummeling electronic beats.

Laser lights flashed, smoke machines billowed, beach balls bounced chaotically through the crowd. The musician grew so excited, he took off his headphones and twirled them over his head like a lasso.

Nearby, the Georgia country-punk band Black Lips was raging through the final moments of its set when two guitarists lived up to rock-star cliches by smashing their guitars on stage and hurling the broken pieces into the audience.

UCLA

Gay Talese wore a gray suit, black-ribboned hat and red shoes. Tommy Lasorda came in shirt sleeves. Together, the two titans stole the show Saturday morning on separate stages in Westwood.

Talese talked about his years in the mid-century newsroom of the New York Times. Born into a family of Italian tailors, he had this tip for would-be reporters: “If you show up in a three-piece suit with a hat, and you look like you might have taken a bath recently, they don’t kick you out as fast.”

Lasorda, now 80, the former Dodgers manager, won a standing ovation from an audience laden with Dodger hats and T-shirts. He told old stories, recalling the time announcer Vin Scully interviewed him as he was moving from third-base coach to manager. Was he worried about replacing the legendary Walter Alston, Scully asked. Lasorda’s response: He was more worried about the person replacing him as the third-base coach.

Coachella

In an era of slumping music sales, when many industry observers feel the album as a retail sales unit is in its final days, Coachella has been disproving the conventional wisdom.

Here, CDs and vinyl LPs have been selling at a furious pace.

A Virgin Megastore outlet has been doing brisk business selling long player albums (as opposed to single song digital downloads -- the more ubiquitous, youth-skewed music purchase of choice these days). From midday to midnight, the store has been awash with customers who stood in twisting lines to buy CDs.

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Judi Fradkin, 46, and Laura Ellison, 45, shopped for an upcoming European trip at the Distant Lands Travel Bookstore tent.

“I’ll just invest in all these,” said Fradkin, holding three travel books on London. “Why not?”

Ellison pointed to a soft cover titled, “A Woman’s Passion for Travel”

“I think I bought that last year, but I still haven’t read it,” she said.

“And I have that one -- ‘The Gutsy Women,’ because it has the word gutsy in it,” said Fradkin, a stay-at-home mom from Redondo Beach who expected to spend at least a few hundred dollars stocking her shelves.

Ellison, a Superior Court judge from Rancho Palos Verdes, estimated that she and Fradkin have amassed 20 books for their trip.

“We don’t want to miss a thing,” she said, “especially the shopping.”

Coachella

As the temperature soared into triple digits Saturday, concertgoers got creative.

There were safari hats, cowboy hats, porkpie hats and straw fedoras, but surprisingly few baseball caps. There was a Technicolor panoply of parasols and umbrellas, largely used by women, but also by a few flamboyantly decked-out guys.

Mostly, people huddled in whatever shade was available with hand-held mist-spraying guns and battery-powered fans and wet T-shirts. Few felt any compunction about walking around shoeless or in bikinis.

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Laurie Smith heard the promotion for next chef up on the Culinary Stage and knew she had come to the right place: Barbecue guru. No. 1 barbecue author of all time. Television host. Author of “The Barbecue Bible.” And best of all, king of the grill.

“Who owns a grill?” Steven Raichlen asked as he took the stage.

Smith raised her hand.

“Who owns two grills?” he asked.

Smith raised her hand again. But she acknowledged that she had only grilled once -- in 12 years.

“I need to learn how to cook on it,” she said.

Today’s menu included honey sesame shrimp, marinated T-bone steak, grilled corn with Shadon Beni butter and grilled pineapple with a cinnamon lime sugar.

“Corn? That sounds good,” Smith, 42, said to her son, Delsen Finley, 5, who said he wants to be a chef and open a restaurant.

Raichlen cooked the meal, explaining every step of the process, and even told the crowd how to get the perfect grill marks, what he called “the hallmark of master grillsmanship.”

He has the best job in the world, he said, because his job description is “to travel and eat barbecue.”

Coachella

By 3 p.m. Saturday, a baroque-style tent village was arguably the coolest place to be at Coachella. There, water cannons, mist-spraying spouts and sprinklers helped keep revelers hydrated. Some found relief watching a troupe of elaborately costumed dancers do a water show atop a pond-like stage.

“It may be hot at Coachella,” said Alex Carson, 20, of Cayucos, Calif., who has been to the festival three times. “But look on the bright side: You know it’s not going to rain.”

Fewer cases of heat exhaustion were reported Saturday than in previous years, and 52 people had been arrested as of Saturday night, most on drug or alcohol-related charges.

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Chris Henze, 42, and his wife, Veronica, 32, attended the Coachella music festival two years ago. They decided on the book festival this year, spending most of their time in the children’s area, where kids could make their own books and meet authors. They planned to look for books for their children -- Elmo books for Hogan and anything about astronauts for Wilson.

“It’s a different scene” from Coachella, said Henze, who lives in Encino. “Instead of teenagers dancing to music, it’s 2-year-olds dancing. But there is still a mini-mosh pit.”

And the food?

“Cotton candy and snow cones are a good substitute for beer and hot dogs,” he said.

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Times staff writer Chris Lee reported from Coachella and Times staff writer Anna Gorman from Westwood. Times staff writer Joshua Sandoval and Times blogger George Ducker also reported from Westwood.