I’m waking up to a workout (I took last week off) and simple breakfast of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice from a friend’s tree with a bit of toast with peanut butter and strawberry jam. Before I go much further I need to mention this jam. It is a specialty jam that I ended up getting yesterday. It’s strawberry jam with rosemary in it. Very very tasty. It’s made by New Forest. A local company in Sherman Oaks. I’m reflecting on the events of the past 48 hours.
Some of it is still a blur. But I know that it involved some music, some exercise, and some food. Saturday was more work going on this library CD thing that never seems to end. Then there was a bike ride in Santa Monica where lots of people were out and about. Why shouldn’t they be, it was an amazing day in Los Angeles, sunny and warm. Then came dinner at a seafood joint off of PCH in Malibu, that was a great capper to the day.
Yesterday though was a bit different. As I mentioned on Single of the Day yesterday, I had been invited to two separate events by two different friends. One was a Renaissance Faire and the other was Coachella. At first I figured heck it will have to be one or the other. But as it turned out the faire was on the way to Coachella and the Coachella time frame was for the late afternoon. So off to the faire I went to hang with Joni. She was helping a friend of hers man a booth at the faire (the one who makes the amazing jam). We walked around the faire and looked at the goods and she introduced me to a bunch of people she knew (again with that this is Jody, he’s a rockstar thing if you remember a post from a few days back). It was fun. Plus you can’t beat the idea of watching people dress up in clothing and squeezing themselves in weird ways (ahem, you know what I mean).
After walking the entire faire and grabbing a bite to eat, I booted out to Temecula to meet my friend Elizabeth. She was offering me a chance to hit Coachella which was extremely nice of her. She showed me around her house which I had not yet seen since she bought it. From there it was off to the desert near La Quinta and Palm Desert. We stopped for a bite eat and some ice cream before heading into the show.
You’d think that as a full time musician I would have been to a music festival. However, it was my first full blown music festival. Massive area covered in cars, grass, stages, art, food courts, and thousands of people. I went more for the experience than anything. We ended up seeing X, Paul Weller, The Cure and Groove Armada. We did a lot of walking. Took in the heat, the music, the people, and the sites. I’m still wondering about Groove Armada. I was near the front of the stage for that for a little bit. It was overwhelming from a sound standpoint. I’ve never felt bass so moving. Literally. The bass was so deep that two weird things happened as I bobbing around in the throng of people. One, my ears even with my earplugs were getting abused, I had to cover it with my fingers just to stop the feeling it was creating. Second, the amount of air moving from the subs was so intense that it literally made it hard to breath. Eventually I had to move away from the front in order to regain my composure. But WOW.
On the way out Elizabeth spotted a girl who was probably 6′ tall or maybe 6’1″ in bare feet bouncing around. So she walked over to her and asked she would take a picture with me. Talk about a funny thing, this girl comes over to me confused and stands next to me to take a picture. I asked her, what exactly did Elizabeth ask and she looks at me like a deer in headlights and says, I don’t know she wanted me to take a picture with you. Ha ha ha. It was about that time when we booted out.
The odd moment of the show was likely Paul Weller, in the middle of his set his was informed of his set time. He seemed rather irked about it. Which is odd considering that one would think an artist would be very aware of their set time at a big event like Coachella. Thus I’m going to point out a song I heard by him during the set. It was quite cool. I know that Paul has been around for quite some time, but he’s never really been on my radar. So now I’m passing him along to you.
He was really cool to watch. Very obvious that he’s a season performer and sings very well. Elizabeth was telling me that Paul has some 30 years of music behind his career, thus his 40 minute set was rather short for the amount of music he has under his belt.
The concept of live music has not been lost! Go support your live music venues!