portishead, prince and other miscellaneous stuff about coachella 2008

after a two year hiatus, we were back. and i had an awesome-good time.

seriously. i'm tired, though. i just woke up from a two hour nap. haha! TWO HOURS. dude. and i have no idea where my child and husband are. haha! they must've gone for a walk. or to the pool. it's a hot day out there today, yo.

this year we decided we'd take it easy. usually we're out of the house by 12 getting to the venue around 2. getting in no later than 3. what with mia and my dad and sis babysitting and stuff we just decided we'd take our time and we'd get there when we got there...

12:30PM - we pick my dad up.
1:00 - he proceeds to wake mia up. (fine, dad. it's your funeral. she's gonna be super cranky all day! heh.)
1:30 - we pick katie up.
2:00 - we hit some traffic. oh, hey, look, there's a little brushfire. and lots of firefighters. oh, you just KNOW that there was some douche who threw a cigarette out their window. i mean, COME ON. it's HOT. it's the DESERT. are you RETARDED? *rolls eyes* people are SO dumb.
3:00 - hit my parents' home. my dad mentioned something about going to costco. oh, why the heck not? we're in no rush.
3:30 - home, unpacked, and ready to hit coachella. wait. but i'm starving... not sure if i can make it to the food courts at coachella without getting hangry.
3:35 - decide to eat at Thai Smile. a thai place SUPER close to my parents' place that we like.
4:30 - after a delicious meal, back in the car to get to coachella. (apparently, the locals call it coachellafest. because there's an actual town called coachella. and apparently, it's not a good area. or something. whatever. the rest of the world just calls it coachella. so suck it, locals.)
5:00 - car's parked. but it's gonna take us at least 15 minutes to walk to the entrance. WHAT? i have short legs and it's kinduva big ass lot. luckily, we're not parked too far away.
5:15 - at security. she glances at my stuff and lets us through.
5:30 - walk in and check out the merch. sometime around here LE and i were texting about meeting up. i'm not sure when. i could check my text log, but i am too lazy for that.
5:45 - look for LE and her booooyfriend. realize cafe tacvba (or cafe tacUba. heh.) is on. huzzah! have i mentioned that i love rock en espanol? i'm not joking. i do. i have NO idea what they're saying. but 99% of the time they make me wanna dance.
6ish - meet up with LE and boy. chat a little. boy says something about how MGMT was so awesome, he could go home now. heh. we meet up with one of steve's friends (thank god for texting. how else would we ever ever ever meet up with people when there are like tens of thousands of people on a HUGE FIELD?) and we head over to one of the tents to see Hot Chip.

after this, the time's basically a blur. we hung out in the tent for a while, steve's friend didn't even stay for Hot Chip. they came on a little late and he had other things he wanted to check out. LE and boy stayed for a few. and we stayed for maybe another song or two.

then we walked around, checked out some of their freaky art installations. saw some freak show, went to a bunch of the other places to go shopping, check out video games, whatevah. i'll be honest, this coachella for me was actually less about the music. in the past, steve and i have gone hopping from stage to stage to tent to tent fitting in as much good music as possible. but this time i just wanted to relax and enjoy myself. so we did!

oooh, and they had a SingStar tent up. guess who ROCKED the mic? hehehe. that's right. ME. hehe. i got SingStar (the highest rank) and i basically totally ruled. ;P steve sang with me (since i picked duran duran's rio and he can rock those 80's songs like nobody's business). he was SO close to getting SingStar. i kicked everyone's asses. i was all competitive. haha! we got drink tickets for kicking ass. unfortunately, no one takes those drink tickets. oh well. i guess it's the thought that counts? heh.

hrm... what else... oh, we caught part of M.I.A. she was rockin' it, of course. she must feel good. just a few years ago she was in a smaller tent in the heat of the day and now she's in the biggest tent and in a pretty sweet nighttime slot. and there were just people POURING out of that tent. we just saw her in november so we just stayed for a few songs and left.

we hung out just a little more, traded in our empty bottles for free water! (why is it that free water tastes the best? hehe) and checked out the food court. oddly enough i wasn't hungry yet. and it was 9ish. on second thought, we should've just picked up some food even though i wasn't hungry because the next two sets were PORTISHEAD and PRINCE and i knew we wouldn't leave those sets for food... but i digress.

we met up with steve's friend at one of the freaky art installations and headed over to portishead. right when we hit the crowd everyone started screaming and cheering. beth gibbons had hit the stage. that woman is a goddess. she doesn't have much in the stage presence arena. HOWEVER, they sounded amazing. and her voice is beautiful and haunting. i'm fairly certain that while recording albums in the studio, she could probably lay down a track in one take. the portishead fans were pretty chill. we were able to secure a fairly good spot in the middle of the crowd where i had a great view of the screen.

my favorite song that she played was Wandering Star. OH MY GOSH. i totally got chills... it was just her and a guitar.

and dude, he totally played with a needle nosed plier. interesting.

if you love portishead, just do a search on youtube for portishead + coachella and you'll be able to find a bunch of their songs. SO worth it. i loved every minute of their set.

portishead and prince are two of the best concerts i've gone to. and i got to see them back to back. they were so different. beth gibbons doesn't interact with the crowd at ALL. she just sings. she might've said one or two things (along the lines of "good evening" and "thank you").

but prince sure knows how to rile up a crowd. he can get 50,000 people to get up and move. after portishead got off the stage, people started pushing to get closer to the stage. i get claustrophobic, but i figured i'd just go with it. i ended up getting stuck next to a nice kid. he said they'd been camping since thursday. holy cow. 5 days out in the desert heat would be enough to drive anyone crazy. young kids just have more stamina than i do. heh. i've done 2 days before, but i don't think i could do all 3. ufff.

ANYWAY, PRINCE! he was supposed to be on at 10:45. at 10:30 steve said something about it not happening. (i can't remember his exact words but he said something like, "mr. prince doesn't start when the set time says he should start. he starts when he FEELS like starting." haha!) i figured he'd be a little late, but i was afraid the set would get cut short because everything's supposed to be done by midnight. 10:45 hits and nothing. every minute is just DRAGGING. around 11:05 or 11:10 or so PRINCE comes on. and morris day and jerome are there doing Jungle Love and The Bird. and the crowd is chaos. and i'm dancing like a fool. heh. and he brings out Sheila E! and she performed The Glamorous Life and continued to back him up for a bit. and he played just a ton of stuff... little red corvette, controversy, cream, purple rain, let's go crazy, 1999, that's just a sampling. he was jamming away on his guitar... holy crap does he put on a good show. during one of his encores (or what i THOUGHT was an encore... heh.) he covered Radiohead's Creep. i don't even think Radiohead plays that at their own concerts. all i know is that it was awesome with a little extra Prince flair. heh.

oh my gosh, around 11:50 or so i start getting nervous because they're usually pretty anal about the midnight quit-time. so i showed my phone to steve and he knew i was nervous about them cutting the set short and he says as a bookend remark to prince's start time, "prince also ends when prince feels like ending." haha! i love steve. he makes me laugh so hard.

prince played for just about TWO HOURS. yes. a two-hour set by prince. we left around 1:00ish. i just had the best time. funny that the most opposite music can be playing back-to-back... that's one of the things i love about coachella. they have a pretty eclectic selection of music. and it's always a good time.

prince definitely knows how to work the crowd, but honestly, i can't get portishead's performance out of my head. we didn't check out much music this time around, but seeing prince and portishead more than made up for the $90 ticket price.

and in a new twist, we didn't have much trouble getting out of the parking lot due to some fancy maneuvering by steve. unfortunately i was starving and the ONLY place open was jack in the box. and there was a line about 5 cars deep. i didn't feel like waiting so we just went back to my parents and foraged for food there. and then i showered and stuff and then we peeked into the room where we were gonna sleep and mia's sleeping on the floor there and she looked so darn cute!

apparently, she was quite naughty and didn't go to bed until 10:30PM! it's cuz my dad's got a soft heart. mia would cry and say, "why do i go sleep?" (or something to that effect. basically, asking him why does she have to go to sleep.) and my dad just couldn't stand it so he kept going in to get her. thank god katie was there with him. hehe... and of course mia wakes up at 6:30 this morning. *grunt* hehe. poor thing. she woke up kinda confused, looking around, like, "where AM i?!" and then when she and i made eye contact she cried. i think it was a cry of relief. heh. poor thing.

i'm kinda glad we hit coachella on the late-ish side this year... it was nice not having to worry about the heat as much. and not having to use the portapotties. hehe... anyway, it was a fun weekend... tiring, but fun. and i think i'm babysitting mia's friend tomorrow... so i need to get rested up tonight!

*side note... dude, this post took almost 2 hours to finish! i kept getting interrupted! MAKE YOUR OWN DINNER, LITTLE GIRL! hehe. oh. also, they went to the pool. even though it was evening and steve kept her in the shade, she still got a tan. it's those quarter mexican genes, i think. hehehe.*

*EDIT - check out el bicho's recaps on each day. better than my recap...
day one
day two
day three