Hella Coachella

You’d think Saturday night would be a hard act to follow, but Roger Waters was miles away from any sort of let down on the main stage Sunday night. The Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter played a full set that night that featured many of his solo works and several hits from Pink Floyd favorites like The Wall and Wish You Were Here. I hear they also released a gigantic flying pig covered in political graffiti, that somehow managed to disappear! After about an hour, Waters and his band disappeared for a set change and returned twenty minutes later to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Yes, that’s right, they re-created Pink Floyd’s entire 43-minute classic rock trip under the stars in the middle of the Indio desert. And they did it quite well, utilizing the gigantic Coachella main stage surround sound to its full functionality with all the album’s original voice-overs and sound effects coming from all directions. The entire set was also accompanied by some pretty cool visuals captured by one audience member over at Vicarious Music. All-in-all it was a great initiation into Pink Floyd’s music for me, and for other listeners outside of that generation I’m sure. Waters played for nearly three hours, as the audience just couldn’t get enough on the last night of this festival, doing an encore with “Comfortably Numb.”

Nicole and I stayed for the very last act of the festival, the French DJ duo Justice, who waited respectfully for Waters to finish out his set before they started mixing their signature thumping techno/dance music at about 12:30 AM. These guys really have energy; you can tell they really have fun with it, bobbing their heads to the beat while they mix up blaring electronica with a heavy rock flavor. The two perform on turntables and laptops alongside a giant lighted cross, and their up-tempo beats were the perfect thing to give the audience one last rush of energy before getting on the road back home.