Nochella 2015

After wavering for a couple of years, my friend Brian Siers and I decided to finally make the trip out west in 2004 to a festival called Coachella, about a half-hour east of Palm Springs in a sleepy dessicated burg called Indio. At the time, it was a two-day weekend festival -- the first night featured Radiohead and The Pixies, while The Cure headlined the second night. (I remember lots of things from that weekend, but I still chuckle when I think about Dick Valentine from the band Electric Six thanking Radiohead for being their opening act.)

On that first adventure, we didn’t really know what we were doing -- we drove from San Diego instead of Los Angeles, we had no OTC painkillers, we stayed far away from the festival, we were stuck in traffic for hours, and so on -- but we still had a great time. As we came back year after year, our Coachella game got better and better, as we fine-tuned each and every aspect of our adventures. And while the music remained compelling, the trip became more about the hang and the trip inside the trip -- driving from and to Los Angeles, flying from and to Chicago, late nights and dank desert dust and Del Taco.

In many ways, our Coachella trips were life markers, flash points for yearly inventories and singular moments. Brian met his current significant other on the polo fields of Coachella, and my now-wife and I experienced the hottest Coachella on record in 2012’s second weekend. But this year, when we didn’t get tickets in the pre-sale, and with our companions scattered to the winds, both Brian and I decided to take a year off from the Coachella experience. And while our bank accounts were happy, and while the music wasn’t as compelling this year, it still felt like something big was missing this year. Coachella was always the first blast of heat that shook off the winter for good, and it was also the only time all year that Brian and I would have extended bro time. Although that dynamic changed over the years as the number of companions grew and shifted, the underlying framework was always there, rain or shine, year after year, like a fifth season.

Now the dust has finally settled on Coachella 2015, and the pre-sale for Coachella 2016 will pop up in the next month. I’m not sure if I’ll be going in 2016 -- while the wallet is willing, the body (specifically my left hip) is weak -- and while going out on a high note in 2014 after eleven straight years was nice, it would be a sad end of an era were I to never return to Palm Springs and run through the ritual. It would be another line of evidence in the ever-expanding story of me getting old as fuck, and that’s a story I’d like to never read and never live through.