Coachella 2012: It’s back to the beat

INDIO, Calif. — Deep in California’s low desert, the sun would soon be up, not that anyone was keeping track anymore.

After two exhilarating days of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, most in the crowd of 85,000 had had enough. But for a small group of revelers, the party went on.

Fueled by a stew of youth, passion and substances unknown, they wore feathered headdresses and Zorro masks as a DJ spun bass spasms so powerful they could cure sciatica. The kids gyrated and leaped in unison — all in silence.

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Indio, the working-class cousin of nearby Palm Springs, has long welcomed the largesse of Coachella. It also bans amplified sound in the wee hours. So this year, organizers held a late-night silent dance party. They turned off the speakers, passed out headphones and created a vibrating dance floor on a repurposed roller rink so revelers heard the music and felt the beat, and danced the night away without a sound.

It was one of scores of painstaking calculations Coachella has undertaken to keep the event personal and tribal, and avoid losing its cool as it becomes, by many measures, the most successful music festival in the world.

This morning Coachella will launch a bold experiment. Faced with mounting concerns that an event long known for taste and taste-making was becoming overrun with crowds, scenesters, scalpers and gate-crashers, organizers settled on an unusual relief valve — Goldenvoice, its promoter, doubled the size of the festival.

Rather than one three-day event, it’s now two consecutive weekends of music, with an identical lineup of 143 acts. Any contention that Goldenvoice took a foolhardy gamble didn’t last long; $285 passes for this year’s festival — the 13th — sold out in three hours and organizers said they could have easily sold out a third weekend.

Goldenvoice remains keenly aware, however, that sheer scope will never be enough — that “something for everyone” can be a self-defeating marketing ploy, a fast lane to a loss of identity.

To remain relevant, promoters envisioned the desires of individual fans — be they thirtysomethings drawn to megabands like the Black Keys or younger indie rock fans drawn to more underground discoveries.

“We talk about: What would that person think right here? What would they feel? We strive to make it more personal,” said Paul Tollett, Coachella co-founder and Goldenvoice president.

“Not everyone is going to the same festival.”

It sounds too easy to say that Coachella began at the grass roots. But in this case, it’s quite literally true; the first substantive Times report on the festival, in 1999, noted the piles of horse manure — left over from a recent polo match — simmering in the Colorado Desert sun on the grounds where the festival is held.

The idea was to import a European model of a remote, multi-day, non-touring music festival offering a dizzying diversity of sound. It lost money its first two years, then began a meteoric ascent.

But by 2010 there were suggestions that Coachella was falling victim to its own success.

Rising ticket prices meant more than a bump in revenue; fans in faded Cure T-shirts were steadily supplanted by L.A. gentry clad in gladiator sandals and micro-shorts. Goldenvoice, which has its roots in L.A.’s early ‘80s punk scene, found itself fending off grumbles that it had become The Man — a tentacled, corporate monster akin to the Ticketmaster of concert promotion. Many of the bands booked to play both Coachella weekends, for instance, are contractually restricted from playing shows in the region between weekends other than those promoted by Goldenvoice.

Other festivals have struggled with age and growth. The Chicago festival Lollapalooza, another of the nation’s largest, released its lineup last week. Online chatter by fans was decidedly mixed, including talk that despite some intriguing acts, the bookings were predictable and uninteresting.

Today, however, some in the music industry see an opening in Coachella’s expanding girth.

The inaugural Desert Daze Festival is being held this month about a half-hour’s drive from Coachella. While Coachella can easily be a $1,000 weekend including accommodations, travel and supplies, entrance to Desert Daze is a “suggested” $5 donation. It’s a far smaller affair but still boasts more than 100 acts, including a host of buzzy L.A. bands, several of which are veterans of Coachella. Some attendees said they viewed it as the counterculture alternative to Coachella — which was, not so long ago, the counterculture.

“We’re the thing that the people who couldn’t afford a ticket to Coachella — or just weren’t interested in going this year — are going to,” said organizer Phil Pirrone.

Striving to connect with customers, Coachella offers champagne and Ahi tuna, particularly to those with coveted VIP bracelets. Unlike the mayhem that has marked some other festivals, Coachella’s lines are mostly manageable — and even the portable potties are relatively clean.

“They don’t want people to suffer,” said Paddy Aubrey, 37, an L.A. restaurateur who attended his fourth straight Coachella last weekend with friends. Aubrey was taking a break from the sun in an indoor, semi-permanent bar styled like a secretive speakeasy.

This year, even the tickets themselves were designed to foster a connection between fans and the show. Most concert tickets arrive in the mail as bland computer printouts; these arrived in a colorful cigar box that included maps, guides and a calendar.

The attempt to make Coachella more than just a big concert event seems to be working. Roughly half of the crowd at the festival’s first weekend camped — a proportion twice that of just five years ago. “It was truly special,” said Adam Fern, 23, of San Francisco, who boogied at the silence dance party until 4 a.m. the second night of the festival. “It was a great experience.”

In the end, of course, trappings aside, Coachella is about the artists.

Fans could choose, and were forced to choose, from a staggering array of acts — so much so that they routinely sprint across the grounds to catch the next act. On the main stage they could hear Radiohead, a headliner that has sold 30 million albums — or traipse to a side stage to see Childish Gambino, the rapper moniker of the actor-writer Donald Glover, whose first album came out a few months ago.

The most passionate fan response at Coachella this year has been found in the Sahara Tent — a secondary stage reserved for thrashing, machine-generated dance music, with bass tones so powerful they suffused the grounds and stepped on the toes of more delicate musicians playing at the other stages.

Here, fans wore body paint and ski goggles, tutus and bikini tops (men), and fake mustaches (women). Some of the most noted DJs on the planet, such as David Guetta and Martin Solveig, were in the pilot’s seat, often raising their arms, gospel-like, with each peak of the rhythm. The result was a crowd that fans said was twice the size of last year’s.

“Words can’t describe what it’s like in there. It’s high-energy combat. Your body has to be prepared for war,” said Gregory Paul, 26, of San Diego.” It’s triple digits. You get dehydrated and every second somebody’s hitting you,” Paul said. “It’s exhilarating.”

Not for everyone. Amy Meisner, a Detroit native who now lives in Los Angeles, was attending her first Coachella. She said she did not anticipate feeling, for the first time, old. Meisner was born in 1983.

“It’s wrong for Coachella to be so heavily electronically based,” she said. “I felt like Coachella was about the scene — and being seen. There were all these 17- and 18-year-olds. People will go regardless. I don’t know if I will.”

And then, just when it felt impossible for the festival to thread the needle of taste, along came a moment of Coachella genius — the last of 41 hours of music, and the first moment, arguably, when every person inside the gates turned, captivated, to witness the same performance by West Coast hip-hop godfathers Dr. Dreand Snoop Dogg.

Young and old, hipster and raver, rapper and rocker, a sing-along erupted as the melodic opening notes of “California Love,” the iconic 1995 smash, caromed across the polo field: “California knows how to party. We keep it rocking. We keep it rocking.”

“How many things do you get to look forward to every year? Even Christmas gets a little old sometimes,” Aubrey said. “This just works. It just works.”

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scott.gold@latimes.com

Staff writers Jessica Gelt and Gerrick D. Kennedy contributed to this report.