Coachella: thousands of fans and getting hotter every year

No one can question Kevin Willock’s pure determination to rock. Earlier this week under the slate-gray skies of a village called Burscough in western England, Willock and his friends set out on a pilgrimage. In Manchester they caught a flight to Boston, then another to Los Angeles. There was a few hours’ sleep at a seedy motel before Friday morning, when the bleary group piled into a rental car and headed east into the furnace heat of the low desert.

As did Anthony Maldonado. The 17-year-old from Long Beach saved his allowance and joined his handyman father on the job to pay a scalper $100 for a one-day pass.

Pavel Malina, 33, and Daniel McLachlan, 24, drove in from Colorado, where they spent the winter as ski instructors. Their last-minute tickets were found on Ebay for $300 and $350.

All this just for a concert or, more accurately, the concert -- the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. “When we first heard about it, we just knew we had to come,” the 23-year-old Willock said.

Willock, Maldonado and the rest joined thousands of music fans hailing from all 50 states and two dozen countries, some paying scalpers $1,000 for a 3-day pass with a face value of $250, some hitchhiking their way across interstate highways -- all to reach this small desert city that, just for this weekend, is the most important place in the world for rock music fans.

The festival began Friday, and will draw 60,000 people per day to the site for more than 30 hours of music from 122 bands as diverse as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arcade Fire, Bjork and Arctic Monkeys.

With two outdoor stages and three tents, it ends in the wee hours Monday with the much-anticipated reunion of Rage Against the Machine. It’s a huge crowd, but the number could easily have been twice that, according to promoters, who capped sales weeks ago. “We could have sold 120,000, easily,” said festival founder Paul Tollett.

The 41-year-old Tollett started in the concert business in the 1980s, handing out fliers for an independent L.A. promoter called Goldenvoice; by 1991 he was co-owner and a major figure in the local punk and alt-rock scene.

Coachella, the dream project he launched in 1999, lost money the first two years but then became a major success, with grosses this year expected to top $15 million.

As Perry Farrell, former Jane’s Addiction singer and Lollapalooza co-founder, said Friday after a mainstage performance with his new band, Satellite Party: “Coachella is the place music fans look to now for community and a sense of what is important. And when you talk about the West Coast, you’re talking Coachella.”

Huge concerts are hardly rare, of course, but the scene playing out this weekend 125 miles east of Los Angeles is a singular one. What began as a huge gamble is now a touchstone of the West Coast music scene, and the Coachella name enjoys loyalty in an era when the recording industry can’t seem to count on much consumer love.

The success has been noticed: AEG Live, the concert industry powerhouse that bought Goldenvoice in 2001, bought half of the Coachella Festival in 2004. The festival itself has won a mountain of awards, and this year journalists have flown in from Europe and South America, while national publications such as Rolling Stone and Spin devoted pages of coverage to a festival that they largely ignored in the early days.

A 2006 documentary now serves as a primer for new fans, and posters from previous years sell steadily on the Internet. As with Woodstock in a different era, the number of people who say they saw Radiohead or the White Stripes at Coachella far outstrips the number who actually passed through the turnstiles.

This year, if you want to know who made it into the show at the Empire Polo Field, you can check sunburns as well as ticket stubs. The hot topic (literally) on Friday was just how hot it would actually get this weekend. Tempers ran high too, with a nasty bottleneck at the will-call tables, where fans who bought their ducats through Ticketmaster had waits of up to three hours.

“I’m already starting to look a little rosy,” said Rory MacDonald, one of Willock’s friends, somewhat concerned about what the intense desert sun would do to his fair skin.

Although concert organizers were preparing for intense action at the first-aid tent, plenty of festival-goers will be cooling off in the pools of local hotels -- which often triple their rates for the duration of the event.

But the true Coachella experience is at the dusty and relentlessly hot campground adjacent to the concert grounds.

About 16,000 people are expected to pitch tents and sleep beneath the stars, creating a mad scramble Thursday and Friday for camping spots. By Friday, the campgrounds were filled with scenes of rock-show roughing-it: European flags were flying, drum circles gathered, joints were handed around and teens wearing fairy wings and body paint whirled beneath the sun.

“It’s a hipster refugee camp,” said Colin Burwahl, 24, seated in a lounge chair outside of the tent he is sharing with a friend, sporting a perfectly ripped T-shirt and aviator sunglasses. The pair made the nine-hour drive from Santa Rosa.

Aaron Smith, 25, who spent $400 for his ticket and $500 on airfare from Montreal, was thrilled he “got a $60 tent.” Smith, who teaches French, had half a dozen empty water bottles cradled in his arms; at the festival, campers could turn in 10 empties to get a free bottle of water, a litter-curbing campaign. “I don’t have much money left, so I’m cleaning up,” he said.

Despite the Woodstock comparisons, the true template for Tollett’s desert show was Britain’s Glastonbury, the gloriously mad and inevitably muddy festival that draws fans from around the world. That’s where the promoter got the concept of staging a massive show in a rural setting with the attitude of music connoisseurship.

Tollett is the hands-on shaper of Coachella, plucking out the names of new DJ stars, avant hip-hop acts and the next-big-thing indie band from the U.K. When he goes with safe and established stars, such as the Peppers, he actually takes heat from fans expecting “their” Coachella to have a safari spirit.

The site of Coachella has become as memorable as the acts booked. Ringed by craggy mountains in the low desert, the Empire Polo Field has immaculate white tents that are framed by the lush green lawns and purple skies at sunset. Tollett reduced the number of sponsorships in recent years as a bow to alt-rock kids weary of seeing banners and signs pitching products. Though the ticket prices haven’t increased in three years, revenue should be up, with the festival expanding from two days to three for the first time this year.

The ethos of Coachella led to its biggest booking in years: Rage, a band notorious for strident activism and high political principles, agreed to play even before a specific money figure was negotiated.

“It is a great festival, and this is the right time and right place for us,” guitarist Tom Morello said of the band’s decision to play its first show since 2000, although he declined to say more. The group has been turning down interview requests and is expected to save its talking for the stage, which has only added to the stir of international interest. The bill also features three other notable reunions: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Crowded House and Happy Mondays.

“It’s incredible. We plan our year around it -- I use my vacation days,” said Burwahl, who works in a paint retail store. “Do you know how many bands you get to see in these three days? You couldn’t see this many in a year.”

Many of the international travelers said that Coachella now carried potent name recognition abroad.

“It’s amazing how many people here are from Canada,” said shag-haired Matt MacDonald, a 24-year-old from Ontario who prowled the VIP area with his homeland’s maple leaf flag draped on his shoulder like a cape. “We even ran into a Newfoundlander, which is about as far as you come from on this continent.”

The scene also brings the stars out; Drew Barrymore, Jack Black, Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow have been here in past years. Among those on the guest list this year: Barrymore, Diaz, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson and Danny DeVito. On Friday, in his backstage trailer, Tollett had Kelly Osbourne on the phone when Rosanna Arquette came up to hug him.

Over the last three years, more than a dozen festivals have sprung up all around the country using the Coachella model in part or whole, most notably Bonnaroo (in Tennessee) and Vegoose (in Las Vegas). That has made it harder for Tollett and company to book a show that looks decidedly different. Rage took care of this year nicely, but the pressure is already on for next year, with Tollett opening negotiations with agents and managers as the festival rages around him.

Coachella also is expected to have its largest audience watching from the shade of cyberspace. After some poor reviews of its webcast last year, AT&T; Blue Room came to this year’s festival with a crew of 95, 18 high-definition cameras and programming plans to capture 30 hours of music that can be seen at www.attblueroom.com.

“We never dreamed it could become what it is now,” said Tollett. “For a lot of people here, this is a moment in their lives they’ll never forget. The festival belongs to them now.”

geoff.boucher@latimes.com

joel.rubin@latimes.com