While the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival flowers anew each spring, like so many fresh desert blossoms popping up around Indio's Empire Polo Club, huge music festivals, as an art form, go back a few years.
The multiday, multi-band sound spectacular, that outsized, often outlandish performance-based event with many adjacent moving parts, was famously shaped in the late 1960s and early '70s.
This was the storied era that saw Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and The Who and Neil Young rise to pop culture prominence. But the notion of rock titans uniting for a modern classic-packed festival, one to rival, or complement, if you prefer, the likes of Coachella and its contemporary ilk, has remained just a daydream.
It's not just a notion, however, that a "new" version of Coachella may spring up at Empire Polo Field in the fall of 2016. This festival would be a sibling, of sorts, to the spring festival (it won't replace it, let it be known, but rather offer a different slate of programming).
The aforementioned acts, from Mr. McCartney to Mr. Young, are all in play as possible performers at the weekend-long three-nighter, which may potentially unfurl over the second weekend in October, per the LA Times.
Goldenvoice, the company behind Coachella, is busily putting the starry scenario together.
There has been no set list, no times, nor any official bold-name announcement on the promoter's site as of this typing, but the proverbial phone lines are hotly lit up, with music mavens discussing what a titan-packed festival could/would mean.
U.S. & World
It would mean this, surely: A lot of fans would be over-the-top excited. Cancel-absolutely-everything excited. Change-important-plans excited. Let's-book-a-hotel-room excited.
Super excited.
Much hay will likely be made over the relatively youthful scene at the springtime Coachella, as opposed to those longtime fans looking to enjoy their idol's performance in a powerhouse festival setting.
Some may even want to make it a generational showdown, spring vs. fall, electronic dance music vs. '60s folk/'70s prog rock, simply to stir up a desert-style dust devil.
Let's let those dust devils alone, the better to honor the spirit of festival-style good feelings. Copacetic? Cool.
Instead, here's hoping that everyone embraces the timeless motto of "come together," which worked pretty well back in the day, and still has the inspirational chops nearly a half-century later.
For "come together" is a solid idea, one that deftly points out what all music lovers already know: Tunes are good, performers are awesome, festivals can deliver a lot of soul-emboldening music all at once, and the songs that connect us to one another, and the important times in our lives, can unify.
So get excited, fans, and stay close to the phone lines: A classic rock festival is on the wind.
(To check out Goldenvoice's other large-scale festivals, from Stagecoach to FYF, click.)
