Concert Review: Coachella – Amy Winehouse, Stephen Marley, Sonic Youth, Bjork

By S.P. MacIntyre Apr 28, 2007, 22:33 GMT

Amy Winehouse EPA/DANIEL DEME

You drive down Monroe street, all you see is police on every corner and you know that they’re here for you; just waiting for you to do anything they can arrest you for (and believe me, they want to arrest you).  It’s Friday, you’ve just driven for hours, and now you’re in Coachella.

I won’t bore you with the details of my trip, but we’ll just say that I left the Morongo Casino down most of the money I had set aside for the trip and drunk by eleven o’clock in the morning (due to the fact that I had lost all of that money).  I’m writing this now in a closet-sized room at a dingy Motel 6 in Palm Springs that I’m sharing with five other guys, one of who ate Carls Jr. last night and won’t stop farting and all of who keep trying to give me insightful blurbs about the bands they saw. 

I’ve been to Coachella before and this year they did things a little differently, some of which were good and some that were bad.  To start, this is the first time the festival has begun on Friday and gone for three days; this is the first time I haven’t seen anybody outside the concert handing out free sunscreen (which proved severely detrimental to the lack of a tan I’ve been nurturing); there was a second entrance this year, and it was nice to not feel like a cattle being led to slaughter for once; and, the one thing that annoyed the hell out of me, none of the bands started playing until two o’clock.  Normally there’s somebody playing almost immediately after the doors open at eleven, something I’ve always considered a very good thing.  If there were management to complain to about this, I’d do it.

So in the downtime before any concerts began, I checked out some of the other, less important things the festival has to offer.  The food is always good (terribly overpriced, but what are you going to do?), and this year they themed each eating-area American, European, and Pan Asian/South of the Border.  Some of the artworks and other random stuff were interesting: there was a stationary steam engine that whistled every hour, there were two tesla coils, and a place where people can borrow oddly-designed bicycles (a Coachella standard).  I’ll talk more about the artworks tomorrow when I get the chance to check more of them out.

The Comedians of Comedy was a nice start to the day if you had the opportunity to sit in the shade.  Patton Oswald was the only one I really had the chance to see and he was as hysterical as he was vulgar (I saw parents guiding their children away with their hands wrapped tightly around their kids’ ears).  He made one joke that stuck with me, saying as an analogy that the Star Wars prequels were to the original trilogy what John Voigt’s testicles are to Angelina Jolie.  I didn’t get to see him, but I was told that Zack G. (I can’t spell his last name to save my life) was hilarious.

I caught a little bit of Tokyo Police Club, which was just not impressive enough to hold my interest for very long.  I only saw the tail end of Nickel Creek, and they didn’t seem too bad.  Of Montreal was terrible.  And Brother Ali was…well…let me just say that I don’t have a problem with fat people or albinos, just fat albinos that rap poorly. 

On my way to see Charles Feelgood (who wasn’t exceptional, but spun a cool set that got a lot of people dancing), I ran into a friend I lost early in the festival.  “Where have you been?” I said.
“I just saw some British band.”
“Which band?”
“The Noisettes.”
“How were they?”
“Awful.”

I saw most of Gillian Welch’s set and I have to say that I was genuinely entertained.  She played folk/bluegrass and was accompanied by a male guitarist that played ridiculously well.  Some guy with an Irish accent behind me shouted out, “That fucker can play!”  I couldn’t agree more.  She ended her set playing the song “I’ll Fly Away,” which I recognized from the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack (I’ll admit, my exposure to folk/bluegrass is fairly limited).

After that I saw Amy Winehouse, the first set I saw from beginning to end.  A friend of mine had lent me her CD that I still haven’t listened to and I felt a little guilty about it, so I thought I’d check it out.  I’m sure a ton of critics have commented on how small she is compared to how much hair she has, so I will refrain (dear lord she was skinny and had a lot of hair!), but I will say that she literally permeated sensuality.  She’s very pretty, her vocals are sultry and lovely, and she has the volatility of a young Fiona Apple.  She needs a little work on her between-song banter, but that will come as she gains confidence as an artist.  I was very impressed with the show she put on.

I caught the tail end of Stephen Marley’s show.  I’m not all too familiar with reggae, but I recognized a lot of the songs he played as being either his father’s or standards of the genre.  He was pretty good.  Definitely worth further investigation on my part, I think.  Apparently his set went a little long, or the festival was having severe technical difficulties, but either way after Marley’s set every show on the Outdoor Theater was late.

If Amy Winehouse was sensual, Peaches was blatantly pornographic (exactly as it should be).  Ron Jeremy introduced her, and the show was essentially an extended strip-tease both on and off-stage (I’ve never seen a band make hundreds of people take off their shirts at once).  The show seemed a little reserved, however, and I saw a lot of people leaving throughout.  I am personally of the opinion that the concert organizers asked her to tone down.  Even though her songs are uncomplicated, she got a lot of people dancing, and the spectacle of her stage show was very entertaining.

Benny Benassi was probably the most impressive DJ I saw play in the tents that night (DJ Shadow didn’t play in the tents, hold your angry letters for something else), and did everything I think electronic dance music is supposed to: keep a fantastic beat and push the limits of human hearing with overwhelming volume and frequencies.  Very fun stuff.

While I was waiting for Sonic Youth, I caught a lot of Jarvis Cocker’s set.  I didn’t enjoy much of his music, but I have to say that he’s a charming guy.  He spent more time on stage talking to us than singing, and I have to say that he was entertaining even when he was doing that.  He also had a song that went somewhere along the lines of, “All the people in charge of the world are cunts” (I probably got this totally wrong), and I thought it was great.

I could only see the first three songs of Sonic Youth before I left to go get a good place for Gogol Bordello, but two of them were personal favorites and I thought they played very well live.  I heard, however, that after I left the guitarist missed a lot of cues and notes, but otherwise were all right.

While waiting for Gogol Bordello I saw the last bit of El-P, which I can only imagine as being music for people that don’t actually enjoy music.  It was really bad.

Gogol Bordello, though, is why you go to a concert.  They reminded me how spectacular live music can be.  Seriously, from the first note to the last and fiftieth repeat of the chorus of “Undestructable,” everybody was moving.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a band play with that much exuberance and keep the energy level in the room consistently high for the entire concert.  Their live set is just...impossible to describe, but I will just say that there were costumes and buckets and crowd surfing and broken strings and sheer insanity involved.  They seriously stole the show for me, and I still hurt from getting absolutely annihilated in the mosh pit.

That was the last band that I saw.  On my way to meet up with my friends I heard DJ Shadow playing “Rabbit in Your Headlights,” and I imagine he put on a good show (I have been informed by one of my fellow concert goers that: yes, yes he did).  I heard that the Arctic Monkeys and the Jesus and Mary Chain were really good while Interpol was atrociously bad.  A friend has also told me that Bjork was spectacular, but I already knew that from seeing her in 2002.  Let me just say, though, that Bjork is sit-down-get-comfortable-and-enjoy-a-lovely-performance music, not get-crushed-by-thirty-thousand-rabid-fans-while-she-delicately-prances-about-stage music (which is exactly what happened when I saw her).

It was a fun day, overall, and the beginning of what I imagine is going to be an amazing weekend.