I’m about to make a very damning admission: I’ve never been to Coachella. Now, I’m not saying this is shameful because everyone should go to Coachella before they die or some other pretentious proclamation. I’m ashamed that I’ve never been because living in Los Angeles for a decade affords me such close proximity to Coachella’s Indio, California, location that I should have gone before I became so old that I was guaranteed to be miserable during the whole affair. I’ve zoomed past the age in which I can reasonably expect to appreciate the unique pleasures of the festival without needing my stomach pumped immediately afterwards.
I’m 31 years old, which is not the optimal time to be driving out to the desert to stand around in the sand all day while my back seizes up and I grind my feet into dust from walking all day. Festivals are a young person’s game, after all. The stamina required to schlep from stage to stage, swilling expensive booze, consuming various illicit substances and staying up all night to listen to ear-blasting music escapes those of advanced age. But the Coachella of never-ending raves and nubile flesh is giving way to another, far more lucrative experience: the nostalgia act.
Coachella 2014 featured Pet Shop Boys, Motorhead, Neutral Milk Hotel, Fatboy Slim, Bryan Ferry and Outkast amongst other performers who enjoyed their golden years some time before the invention of the iPhone ruined our attention spans. Last year’s festival went even further back, with sets from AC/DC and Steely Dan – artifacts of the Gerald Ford era. And previous years included appearances from baby boomer acts such as Paul McCartney and Sly Stone. But 2016 promises not one, but two highly anticipated, lucrative reunions from bands that represent very distinct generations: Guns N’ Roses and LCD Soundsystem. Both groups have performed packed warm-ups in small venues full of adoring fans, but it remains to be seen how well they will fare in the era of the candy-coated EDM laser show.
Axl Rose, lead singer of Guns N’ Roses – who headline Saturday night’s festivities – has already injured himself. Rose, 54 years old, fractured his fifth metatarsal in his left foot. I’m no doctor, but I’m certain the fifth metatarsal is a bone of some sort, probably necessary for not only hopping around and humping the mic stand, but also for simple tasks like walking to the bathroom to take a pee. Rose will wear a cast on his left foot during the two sets GNR will play at the festival on 16 and 23 April. This is not uncommon, as Pitchfork reported back in July of last year that Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters performed in a cast after fracturing his leg when he fell off a stage in Sweden. At that show, Grohl performed the entire night from a giant throne. That strikes me as a rather acceptable solution, since the man isn’t known for his acrobatic stagecraft. Grohl could be lying prostrate on the ground with gerbils crawling up and down his pant legs as long as he was mic’d up. Actually, that might make for a more engaging show. Imagine Grohl screaming into the ground while rodents gnawed at his undercarriage. Where do I buy tickets?
Grohl does not have the reputation of one Axl Rose – a barely restrained, histrionic reprobate whose name is infamously derived from an anagram of “oral sex”. Isn’t part of the appeal of seeing Guns N’ Roses witnessing Axl physically seducing the audience with all manner of overblown stagecraft? Axl Rose warbling his way through Live and Let Die or Welcome to the Jungle from a comfy barcalounger is akin to watching Mick Jagger sing Start Me Up from inside an iron lung or Miles Davis playing Freddie Freeloader while slowly sinking into a tub of mayonnaise. The Guardian’s own Bryan Armen Graham attended GNR’s warm-up show in Las Vegas and reported that Axl performed from the same throne that Grohl used after his injury. So, if you’ve ever wanted to see someone sing Paradise City while thumbing through a copy of Golf Digest and sipping an iced tea, you’re in luck.
And yet, this is what us tortured souls attending Coachella are about to witness this week. The emphasis placed on aging groups reuniting to cash a large paycheck means Coachella will never be just kids rolling in neon sunglasses and appropriated cultural garb lining up to see Rae Sremmurd or Sophie. It’s also late-stage millennials aging out of hipsterdom, plus a healthy sprinkling of moms and dads. Like, actual dads with mortgages and travel-size bottles of Rogaine in their overnight bags.
When Axl tweeted “This is what can happen when you do something you haven’t done in nearly over 23 years” in reference to his foot injury, he could have been preemptively speaking for all the middle-aged people primed to dive head-first into debauchery this weekend. If you are a father or mother out there planning to turn up at Coachella, remember that the college kid doing bumps next to you in the port-a-potty could be your kid. Or, God forbid, your grandkid. The period of recuperation following a night of recreational drug use gets longer as you get older. By 40, one cheeky rail at a concert might cost you an entire week of your life, and at your age, can you really spare a whole week?
Still, I understand why GNR fans would be in the mood to celebrate after enduring a decades-long hiatus that seemed as though it would never end. The devotees of the band were basically robbed of their idols’ prime years. When Guns N’ Roses broke up and Axl went into hiding in 1997, they had only produced five studio albums, and that is with a couple notable caveats. Their second “album”, Lies, only contained eight songs – four from a previously released EP and four recorded with only acoustic guitars. Their third and fourth albums are basically one double album – Use Your Illusion I and II. Their final album, The Spaghetti Incident?, is a bunch of crappy covers. This paucity of original material lends itself to the notion that Guns N’ Roses were a band that exploded onto the scene with violent intent and disappeared in similarly grandiose fashion.
LCD Soundsystem also disbanded after a relatively short amount of time in the public eye. Their three full-length studio albums were not massively popular in the way that GNR dominated radio and MTV in their time, but for a very particular sliver of the post-9/11 generation, their music mattered. Most of their New York City contemporaries – the Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs – put out disappointing records and lost much of their relevance. James Murphy, on the other hand, had the sense to walk away, to skip past the diminishing returns and broken promises of “returns to form” and fast-forward to the triumphant victory lap. Even if their next record is a 70-minute long collection of polka ballads, it won’t affect their canonical reputation as the rock band that “won” the first decade of the 21st century.
It doesn’t hurt that their myth exists independent of the lineup. This is not scientifically proven, but I would be confident in guessing that there’s a percentage of LCD fans who can sing along to North American Scum but couldn’t name anyone in the group or even pick James Murphy out of a lineup. If the whole lot of them wandered onto stage wearing goat masks and furry leggings, it’d be alright as long as they immediately started playing Losing My Edge.
But the personnel of Guns N’ Roses matters. The ill-fated Chinese Democracy album cycle in 2008 didn’t include Slash, Duff, Steven Adler or Izzy. Devotees debate what the true “classic” lineup actually is. Vague notions of purity abound when discussing Guns N’ Roses. Countless magazine covers, music videos and T-shirts bearing their faces made them recognizable. Outlandish stories of anti-social behavior made them living cartoon characters powered by whisky (and a few other substances). Bands in the Coachella era don’t really inspire the sort of devotion Guns N’ Roses enjoyed in their peak years. Solo acts do. Drake, Nicki, Kanye, Beyoncé, Taylor, Ri-Ri, and the rest of them command legions of fans, but the musicians banging and strumming behind them don’t really matter – if there are even musicians on stage to begin with. Sunday headliner Calvin Harris is a DJ, which means his stage presence consists of standing behind a console pressing buttons like he’s Mr Sulu from Star Trek. He might as well be sitting on a throne like Axl Rose.
Despite my current state of nervous trepidation, I’ll probably survive the weekend with little to no actual trauma, save for the crushing freeway traffic in and out of the Coachella Valley. There will be festivalgoers younger than me, but there will also be festivalgoers older than me. I’m in the squishy, invisible center. I’m the middle child of music festival culture – too young for Guns N’ Roses, but too old for Calvin Harris. I’m just now starting to develop a taste for nostalgia as anesthetizing narcotic. I might cease to be relevant to pop culture as my hair turns gray and falls out, but Coachella will endure because it can always count on new generations of people eager to reclaim their vitality and bands equally as eager to cash a fat check. The only way to get through these festivals when you’re past a certain age is to do like Saturday’s headliners and blindly grasp for whatever remaining shreds of youth you have left. You might break your foot or throw up your spleen from consuming too much drink, but at least for three days, you can comfortably forget how this whole life thing actually resolves itself.
