I Only Went to Coachella Once
a.k.a. A look back at an oddly unmemorable weekend, and the outsized role that Air and their 2004 album 'Talkie Walkie' played in it.
As much as I gripe about social media and the many ways it’s screwing up the music industry (among other things), I have to admit that even the cesspool that is Twitter can still provide some genuine entertainment, especially when tweets like this one do the rounds:
In recent days, thousands of people have chimed in with anecdotes, some more genuinely indie than others, and while I rarely participate in these sorts of things, I have to admit that this lighthearted prompt did get me thinking. I’m honestly not quite sure what my indiest moment was—there’s a good chance it involved either iconic San Francisco venue Bottom of the Hill or some long-forgotten Oakland warehouse. But if I think about “indie” within the framework of how that term was co-opted and basically transformed into a marketing buzzword in the post-Strokes landscape of the early 2000s, my mind immediately points to one particular weekend I experienced nearly 20 years ago.
Back in 2004, I went to Coachella for the first and only time. Radiohead played. The Pixies, who had just reunited, played. The Cure played. So did a lot of other bands.
I was 24 years old, and Coachella was by far the biggest festival I’d ever attended at that point in my life. In retrospect, this particular edition has become somewhat legendary, and I’d like to say that I had an amazing time, but even then, I knew that this sort of massive event wasn’t really my scene. The most fun I had that weekend involved hanging out at a nearby house that some older, wealthier friends had rented for us to stay in. It had a pool, it was on a golf course and I was far more dazzled by that tiny slice of luxury than I was by Coachella itself, despite the fact that the festival in those days hadn’t yet become the bloated corporate behemoth and vapid influencer magnet it is today.
So how exactly did this qualify as one of the indiest moments of my life? I suppose it’s because my friends and I made sure that Coachella was only one component of an epic long weekend, one that was strongly “indie” coded and also made me feel exceptionally (and, let’s be honest, undeservedly) cool at the time. It began on Thursday at a club night called Popscene, where I was a resident DJ and would satiate the crowd of mostly college kids and young twenty-somethings with a variety of indie, Britpop, new wave, etc. (Fun fact: Popscene, which literally began in the mid ’90s, is incredibly still going strong today.) My little Coachella crew spent the whole night at the club, then hit the road for the Southern California desert around 4 a.m. (For some reason, I agreed to be behind the wheel for the entire eight-hour drive, and the only thing I vividly remember about the trip is that I spent much of the journey battling a strong urge to sleep. It’s a minor miracle that we made it to our destination unscathed.)
Popscene + Coachella should have been enough. But rather than taking it easy on Monday morning after a few days of partying in the desert, we instead piled into the car and rushed back to the Bay Area, because we wanted to see Air—who had literally played the day before at the festival—perform a headlining show at the historic Paramount Theatre in Oakland. I’d like to say that it was worth it, but my memory of the concert is fuzzy at best. I do remember that one of my friends started crying during the show, but she may have just been exhausted. I’m pretty sure that I fell asleep at one point.
Was it worth it? I don’t know. All of this makes for a fun story now, even if those youthful hijinks were only “indie” in the most shallow sense of the word. (Did I mention that I got free tickets to Coachella because was working at an alt-rock radio station called Live 105 at the time? This wasn’t exactly a “DIY or die” excursion.) But as I’ve thought about that long-ago weekend during the past few days, I’ve surprisingly found myself pondering one detail in particular:
Why were were so adamant about seeing Air? Twice? In 2004?
The French duo had played San Francisco twice before, once in 1998 and again in 2001. That second gig—which I think(?) I attended—had been part of a tour supporting the group’s 2001 sophomore album, 10 000 Hz Legend, which had been met with fairly lukewarm reviews at the time of its release. While that response hadn’t erased all of the goodwill they’d generated with their breakout 1998 debut LP, Moon Safari, and their subsequent work on the soundtrack for trendy indie film The Virgin Suicides, it’s fair to say that by the time May of 2004 rolled around, Air was no longer a “hot new thing” in most music circles. They had recently released their third album, Talkie Walkie, and though it had been met with generally positive reviews (more on that later), it wasn’t matching the crossover success of the group’s early work. Within the electronic music sphere, the LP was more warmly received, and it even landed on a few year-end lists, but it also didn’t really line up with the sounds (e.g. electroclash, dance punk, minimal techno, grime and the early days of dubstep) that most tastemakers were most excited about.
Two decades later, Air still has plenty of fans, but talk of the duo’s legacy usually focuses on Moon Safari, which continues to be their defining record. In fact, the pair is currently revisiting the LP with an expansive global tour celebrating the album’s 25th anniversary. That makes sense in the context of a music industry which increasingly relies on nostalgia to drive ticket sales, but it does conveniently sweep aside the bulk of the Air catalog—including Talkie Walkie, an album that seemingly inspired my friends and I to make a bleary-eyed drive across California back in 2004. Was it really that good? And if so, how has it held up?
Having not listened to the record in many years, I wasn’t quite sure, so I put it on and started investigating.