Hanging with Giant Drag at Coachella
By JEFF MILLER | May 12, 2006
FUN IN THE SUN: “It’s beautiful, smelling the shit of 100 bands,” Annie Hardy jokes.
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There was a time, not that long ago, when the two-or-three-day rock-festival experience was reserved for the Brits, who slogged through countless Glastonbury and Reading festivals while we Yanks were treated to traveling shows like the original Lollapaloozas every summer. When the Coachella festival — a multi-stage, alternative-leaning, two-day event that the booking agency Goldenrod brings to the Empire Polo Field in Indio, California, every May — was founded eight years ago, the idea seemed a bit risky, especially in light of the disaster that same year of Woodstock ’99. But Coachella, whose 2006 incarnation wrapped up last weekend, has now become an institution. And other festivals — like Bonnaroo, which this year scored Radiohead, and a three-day Lollapalooza in Chicago — have been springing up all over the country, using the Coachella model (inexpensive water, a veritable iPod-on-shuffle mix of artists). Coachella itself underwent a serious change this year. In the past, the festival has amounted to a who’s-where assessment of not-quite mainstream music — a launching pad for buzz bands like the Arcade Fire, who were the stars in 2005, or for the re-formation of groups like the Pixies, who helped sell 50,000 tickets and establish the festival as a juggernaut in 2004. This year’s edition dabbled in the mainstream through a risky appearance by Madonna, who played her first festival show to a throng of true believers and thousands of disappointed curiosity seekers. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined in 2003, critics complained they were too mainstream; now, the event’s promoters admit that no one is too big for Coachella.
But any festival goer knows it’s not the top line that counts but what’s underneath. And this year’s Coachella had its share of breakthrough bands. The Cee-Lo/Danger Mouse collaboration Gnarls Barkley, for one, and My Morning Jacket, who hit the second stage while Kanye West was on the main one. Still farther down the bill were Giant Drag, an LA two-piece whose debut CD, Hearts and Unicorns (Kickball), set the blogger world on fire earlier this year, thanks to everything from the gritty guitars to a glamorous sort of melancholy, not to mention song titles like “Kevin Is Gay” and “You Fuck like My Dad.” Waifish indie-rock dreamgirl Annie Hardy took the Coachella stage bra-less and wearing a pleated, barely-thigh-covering plaid skirt and proceeded to stammer off sexual non sequiturs that would make a porn star blush. “I wrote this song when I was eight,” she said, dedicating it to her first love. “He broke my heart, and he broke my hymen.” Audible gasps from the audience, followed by a gritty interpretation of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” — a track that’s been added to a 2006 major-label reissue of Hearts and Unicorns (Interscope).
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