Sure, there were a few glitches, but organizers from Goldenvoice—the concert company behind Coachella—avoided other major catastrophes by looking at all the mistakes made at Woodstock II in 1994. Conditions there were so poor that dirty and dehydrated fans rioted by the end of the festival. “If you treat people like animals, they’ll act like animals,” says Kevin Lyman, who ran this year’s campground. Coachella has offered camping on its grounds for the past three years of the five-year-old festival. “I don’t even think they provided showers for them.” Today’s concert campers—a generation raised on antibacterial soap and safe-sex PSAs—are afforded 160 toilets, 90 showers and a general store that sells everything from condoms to blow-up mattresses to, oh yes, hand sanitizer.
Campers from all over the country and Europe cavorted outside neat rows of tents (each was pitched within “personal space markers” set by the local fire marshal) or watched movies on a giant blow-up screen provided by promoters. There was the occasional smell of pot smoke in the air, but very little alcohol in sight. “That’s one of the rules, no alcohol,” said 19-year-old Cameron Bird, who came from Toronto. “There’s also a 2 a.m. curfew. Some people were playing tribal drums pretty late, but most everybody else was listening to music or watching shows on their iPods, so it was pretty easy to sleep.”
That’s not to say there was no rebellion. Web sites dedicated to getting around campground rules popped up weeks before the festival, and some campers figured out ways to smuggle forbidden open bottles—of water—into the festival itself. There was a police station set up on the perimeter of the campground, but it dealt mainly with the theft of laptops from the campers’ cars. “There were some Rage Against the Machine revolutionaries in the campgrounds who wanted to oppose the system,” says Lyman. “I’d tell them to get their tent behind the markers, and they’d say, ‘You Nazi! You can’t make me stay in the lanes, man!’ I said, ‘Go be a martyr somewhere else, because no one here is going to fight your battle.’ And no one did.”
