Someday, you’ll all have to come to Indio for Coachella, and stay the following weekend for Stagecoach. Even if you’re not a huge country music fan, it’s worth it just to witness the transformation the Empire Polo Fields undergo, something akin to what I guess it would feel like if you had the chance to go back into one of your old apartments and see someone else’s furniture. It’s the same, yet bizarro, and disorienting: The stage where I witnessed magical sets from Fleet Foxes and Antony and the Johnsons, for example, has been dismantled and replaced by a barbecue cookoff. Hay bales now serve as security barricades. Dozens of fences and chutes have been erected elsewhere to corral the herds. Lawn chairs are encouraged, beer is allowed to escape the gardens, no one seems to mind that all the space up front at the mainstage goes to rich people who very rarely sit in their pricey seats. The crazy avant-garde sculpture is still spitting fire, but people tend to think it’s “weird” instead of “far out.” And nearly everyone is wearing a cowboy hat, with zero irony. I don’t know if this is something people put conscious thought into — I must dress up for the country and western music! where is my Stetson? — or if the folks attracted to this weekend would also be wearing them at the grocery store or laundromat back home. Either way, it’s impressive, when it’s not slightly unsettling. P.S. Flying a rebel flag off your RV in 2009? SO classy.
Also impressive/unsettling were the crowds at this, Day One of the two-day fest: There ain’t no recession happening here. Due to a last minute interview in L.A. — fans of Friday Night Lights/Wolverine star Taylor Kitsch should stay tuned to this magazine’s print edition for more — I didn’t roll in until 8 p.m. or thereabouts, and found myself parked in approximately Phoenix, Arizona… and people were still rolling in behind me. Scuttlebutt said I missed an excellent Darius Rucker set earlier in the day and a Kevin Costner performance that was very well-attended (by women intent upon ogling); by the time I made the grounds, Reba McEntire was well into “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” and was working the exceedingly windy stage with customary grace. As the chilly breeze tickled the lighting rig and muddied the sound, she told the crowd of her big break as a “girl singer” (“That’s what we were called back then. I hated that”) and shared how “blessed, fortunate, and lucky” she feels to have enjoyed such a long career. “I have never taken it for granted,” she said. Across the field, in what used to be the dance tent (now sporting a giant chandelier made of antlers), Charlie Daniels was also down in Georgia, fiddling like the devil. Towards the end of his set, he, too, thanked us for everything, then barrelled into his biggest hit; the whistles from the crowd sounded like a 747 taking off.
After the jump, tonight’s headliner, Brad Paisley. Note to future festival toppers: It’s nice to say you’re gonna keep going until curfew, but unless you plan to pull a Cure and play until they cut your power, don’t bother with the empty promises. We’re quite content to listen to your pre-planned list of songs and then take our lawn chairs back to our pickup trucks and sit in traffic for an hour trying to get out of the parking lot. Unless we have to take our “Ditch the Bitch and Let’s Go Muddin’!” t-shirt back to our rebel flag-sporting RV, which is being towed by our jacked-up truck whose license plate informs the world that we raised the vehicle because “fat chicks can’t jump.” Oh, America. You are incorrigible.
It’s been five years since the Pixies 
