Coachella music festival producer spills on art, Guns N' Roses
Don’t be surprised if the Coachella moment of 2016 has nothing to do with music.
Argentinian artists Rosario Marquardt and Robert Behar, now based in Miami, are creating a 35-foot-long, 28-foot tall piece of installation art for next week’s Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival -- a wall that says “Besame Mucho.”
That’s the name of one of the most popular bilingual songs in American pop culture. The Beatles recorded it in English. Diana Krall recorded it in Spanish. It was written in 1940 by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velazquez and became a huge hit in 1944 for Andrés Rábago, the first American recording artist to have hits in English and Spanish, although he had to Anglocize his name to Andy Russell.
It means “Kiss Me A Lot” and is intended to encourage people to do just that. Coachella art curator Paul Clemente thinks it will send a message that contrasts the one Donald Trump is sending with his idea for a "huge" wall.
Standing in a workshop area next to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, where “Besame Mucho” will be on display at the two upcoming Coachella weekends of April 15-17 and April 22-24, festival founder Paul Tollett notes that Mexico is the largest feeder of Coachella visitors from outside of the United States. Clemente adds, “We love Latino culture.”
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“I think there’s two or three different ways you can look at this piece,” Clemente says. “Primarily, I think there are probably going to be of lot selfies in front of this, girlfriends kissing their boyfriends, boyfriends kissing their girlfriends. This thing is going to be everywhere. There are going to be 100,000 silk flowers covering that. It’s going to be huge.”
As music festivals continue to proliferate throughout North America and beyond, the art component is becoming more and more important to the “feel” of Coachella. While bands like Rage Against the Machine, Daft Punk and Arcade Fire provided most of the “Coachella moments” in the first decade of its 17-year history, art exhibits such as The Astronaut, the mirrors reflecting images of the selfie generation, and last year’s caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly have been the iconic moments of Coachella’s second decade.
That’s not to minimize how memorable the combination of art and music was in 2012 with the performance of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg with a hologram of their late colleague, Tupac Shakur. But there’s little doubt that Coachella is at the interface of art, music and technology.
“They work together in terms of complementing each other,” Tollett says. “I am not jealous of the art side and he’s not jealous of the music side. We just both want to be better than last year.”
“We’ve looked at a lot of big moments we could try to pull off at the show,” said Clemente. “We were able to do that with the butterfly, we were able to do that with Tupac. We’ll continue to do that, whether it’s purely a sculptural thing or whether it’s more interactive or a big 3D moment.
“It doesn’t have to be every year, either,” adds Tollett. “We don’t want to get into a rut like, ‘What’s this year’s hologram?’ It’s not about that.”
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For Tollett, who produces Coachella with his company, Goldenvoice, and its umbrella corporation, AEG Live!, his go-to way to improve the festival or give it a boost is to add an exciting band.
“I love any time you can get, I don’t want to say a better (band), but a fresher one that hasn’t been around,” Tollett said in his house on a hill overlooking his Eldorado Polo Club in Indio. “It kind of moves into the reuniting topic. I just want bands that haven’t played in a while. If you just played last month, it’s not as exciting for me.”
This year’s festival has one of the biggest “reuniting” things he’s ever pulled off. After more than two years of trying, Tollett booked a reunion of Guns N’ Roses with frontman Axl Rose performing with original members Slash on lead guitar and Duff McKagan on bass for the first time since July 17, 1993.
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The festival, which has won the Pollstar award for Best Major Festival 10 of the past 11 years, also will include a reunion of LCD Soundsystem, which had announced their disbandment in 2011, and electronic artist Calvin Harris, who arguably drew Coachella’s biggest crowd in 2014 and who has received additional buzz recently as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
But the GNR reunion is one of those get-togethers few people could have imagined like The Eagles “Hell Freezes Over” Tour. In fact, after GNR announced their appearance at Coachella, they unveiled a “Not In This Life” tour.
Billboard has reported GNR has asked for as much as $3 million per show on that tour with “the Coachella payday likely significantly higher.” One site reported that GNR was getting $14 million for their two Coachella appearances, but Goldenvoice Vice President Skip Paige scoffed at that rumor, saying “Do the math.”
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With 170 bands booked and the total gross from last year’s festival eclipsing $84 million, excluding sponsorship deals, it’s not inconceivable to think GNR might get $5 million from Goldenvoice.
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Tollett doesn't talk numbers, but he did discuss the challenge of negotiating with all of the GNR parties, including the current GNR incarnation and Rose’s partners on the 1987 GNR album, “Appetite For Destruction,” which is still the best-selling U.S. debut album of all time.
“I made a list of 10 people I needed to get on our side to make this happen and just worked through the list,” Tollett said in a rare look into his behind-the-scenes workings. “Some I’m really close to, some I’m not so close to and some I didn’t know, and then the band members. So I had to work through all of that.”
The original GNR lineup featured Rose, Slash and McKagan, plus rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin and drummer Steven Adler. Adler was fired after violating an agreement to refrain from recording while high on drugs, which even Slash, a recovering heroin addict, admitted in his eponymous autobiography was “kind of ridiculous and excessively harsh.” Adler sued the band for improper termination and won a settlement of $2.25 million plus 15 percent of the royalties for his GNR recordings.
Stradlin quit after a 1991 European tour, leaving Rose, Slash and McKagan as band partners and the others as band employees. But Rose owned a higher percentage of the band than his partners and apparently interpreted that to mean he had more creative control. He hired a keyboard player, Dizzy Reed, despite Slash’s desire to be solely guitar-driven. Reed is now being supplemented by Chris Pittman on keys and Melissa Reese on synthesizer.
When Rose and a new GNR manager insisted on a new ownership agreement in 1995, Slash wrote that the inequity of the deal, combined with Rose’s habit of showing up late for gigs and rehearsals, or not showing up at all, prompted him to quit the band. McKagan quit the next year, leaving Rose with full ownership of the band’s name.
Stradlin, Adler and McKagan have performed with Rose’s GNR since 2006, but Rose refused to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame with them and Slash in 2012. He said in a letter to the Hall, “There’s a seemingly endless amount of revisionism and fantasies out there for the sake of self-promotion and business opportunities masking the actual realities.”
Tollett said he heard rumblings around 2013 that the original GNR might consider reuniting.
“It’s hard to say whose idea it was because I’ve been trying to get them for a long time,” he said. “A band’s got their own life. It’s got to be on their time schedule, not mine. And I’ve learned to really like that camp a lot. When I saw how many managers were involved and the potential soupy mess? But when I got in there, I saw it’s actually pretty well run. It’s been pretty mellow for me.”
Tollett shares a personal attorney with one of the GNR musicians and he’s worked with their booking agent for 25 years. So that, plus his professional relationship with them as a promoter, gave him an inside track to sign them for Coachella.
“We had a little leg up in that 30 years ago and, one month, we (Goldenvoice) promoted Johnny Thunders and Guns N’ Roses at Fender’s Ballroom (in Long Beach) and then we did them with Cheap Trick,” Tollett said. “They were our go-to band anytime we had anything rock related because we were doing mostly punk rock at the time. So, we’ve had a relationship all these years. But we wanted to make sure everyone in their camp believed in Coachella because there’s a lot of opportunity if a band is going to get back together.”
He went to see their preview show for less than 300 people last weekend at the Troubadour in Hollywood and any doubts he might have had about the band dissipated.
“It was phenomenal,” he said. “I forgot how great they were. It just seemed so right, maybe because we’ve seen them for so long. I remember the night they played ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ at Fender’s. I had actually seen them before that, opening for The Unforgiven at Stardust Ballroom. Everyone around us, it was like, ‘Wow, this is serious!’ Before they were signed, you could just see it. I saw it last (weekend). Slash plays guitar like a madman and Axl was hitting the button on the vocals. Together, they’re magic.”
Tollett doesn’t know the status of Ice Cube’s attempt to reunite the surviving members of NWA, including Dr. Dre and MC Ren, who lives about 30 minutes away in Palm Springs. Cube said on “The Talk” with Sharon Osbourne in January he was trying to reunite NWA, but Tollett said Goldenvoice hadn’t been alerted about who Cube might bring to the show.
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And Goldenvoice is informed of the “surprise” drop-ins because they have to make travel arrangements and provide passes to get the guests onto the polo grounds. On top of that, Tollett gives special guests their own trailers and has them custom decorated to reflect their personalities.
“But, if somebody tells me they have a surprise, I want to keep that a surprise,” he said. “I understand the element of surprise is part of the fun. So, if someone is going to have a special guest and they tell me, I keep it to myself. Or our staff keep it to themselves.”
But of the hundreds of surprise sit-ins at Coachella, Tollett can select one he considers the most memorable. It happened in the mid-size Mojave tent in 2002 when 1999 headliner Beck walked on stage with DJ Z-Trip and started singing “Where It’s At” while Z-Trip played -- what else -- two turntables and a microphone.
“That’s still my most memorable because it wasn’t really happening at that point – the special guest thing,” Tollett said. “We were just sitting watching a DJ and then Beck comes in with his song. I had talked to Beck about that one. He’s like, ‘I’m in town. Do you have any space?’ I go, ‘Actually, I don’t’ – and I can’t believe I’m saying that – ‘but, let me check with some people to see if they have something during their set.’ I threw it out to DJ Z-Trip, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s do something fun.’ I regret not filming it. We have really poor footage. We weren’t set up at that point to film those things. But, in person, it was so, so great.”
It’s rather ironic that Beck had his amplification cut off while performing that song in 2014 because his set was running long. Indio has a strict curfew where Goldenvoice must pay fines of $1,000 a minute after 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and midnight on Sundays. Paul McCartney was allowed to play 54 minutes past curfew in 2009, but many non-Beatles have had their sound cut off since then, including The Cure, CeeLo Green and Arcade Fire that night after Beck.
“It’s not about paying a fine,” Tollett said. “If it was just about paying a fine, we’d buy more minutes. We’d go all night if we could. But we made a commitment to the neighbors. They want us to stop and we said we will. So we’ve let all the artists know that there is a time to end.”
That goes for Axl Rose, too. Guns N’ Roses announced their Troubadour show would start after 11 p.m. and it didn’t start until after midnight. Tollett says he’s not worried about the band violating its 1 a.m. curfew on Saturday, but he has tentatively slotted them to start more than two hours in advance of it.
“Since we’ve worked with them before, I just told them once, ‘Here’s the curfew.’ I don’t have to say it twice. I’m sure they wrote it down,” he said.
Goldenvoice hasn’t made any significant changes to the festival operation this year. It has purchased about 50 additional acres, but he said it will only be used this year to improve customer service.
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The Goldenvoice president expects to set a record of 40,000 people arriving to Coachella by shuttle. It's permitted by the city of Indio to have 99,000 people on the field, but that includes workers, bands and their guests, which means roughly half of all the paying customers will arrive via shuttle. The additional acreage will be used to provide easier turn-arounds for the shuttles, taxis and Uber rides, plus parking. It won't be used, said Tollett, to accommodate the helicopter rides Uber is offering for $4,000 from Los Angeles.
"We don’t want anything unsafe around here," he said. "So, I don’t know where they’re going to land, but it won’t be around here. I’m not mad at anybody. It’s just that we’re not cooperating."
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Tollett and Empire Polo Club owner Alex Haagen III have been buying considerable land over the past decade to make the operation run smoother.
“The dream is to have someone come and never have a delay to get in,” he said. "That’s a dream, but we’re trying to move towards that. We had to stop a few things we had over at the record store -- signings with each band. It was fun, but it got to be a bummer because you’d walk over there and there were lines coming out of the tent. We’re trying to mitigate the lines.”
Down the road, perhaps as soon as 2017, Tollett expects to use the additional acreage to add a new stage and still be able to space out the tents more. He said last year he’d like to have a tent to present someone like operatic pop vocalist Josh Groban. He’s still trying to figure out the best fit for the new tent, but he said it will be for a quieter kind of music.
“Acoustic, singer-songwriter,” he said. “I’d like to have a smaller space so you wouldn’t have to draw a couple thousand people. It would be nice to have a place for 500 people – 600 or 700 people. More intimate.”
In the end, his goal for this year and beyond is the same goal he had for the first Coachella in 1999, and for the first Stagecoach in 2007.
He smiled. “A little bit for everybody.”
Bruce Fessier covers music, film and the creative scene for The Desert Sun. Reach him at Bruce.Fessier@DesertSun.com and on Twitter @BruceFessier