As the summer rolls around, bands around the world and across the country begin gearing up for the height of touring season. For many musical acts, the highlight of these next few months will be the major, multi-day music festivals, at which groups and individuals from every imaginable genre play together — if not on the same stage, then at least in the same vicinity. To better understand this cultural phenomenon, the Daily took an in-depth look at the evolution of gigantic musical festivals and the Tufts students who attend them.
Coachella Music and Arts Festival: Springtime in Indio
One of the season's earliest major music festivals, commonly referred to simply as "Coachella" by its attendees, occurred this past weekend at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif. Starting in 1999 as a two-day event that featured Beck, Rage Against the Machine and Tool as co-headliners, Coachella grew in popularity each year, changing to its current three-day format in 2007.
Senior psychology major Scott Brinkman, who attended Coachella annually from 2004 to 2006, described the festival as an incredible spectacle.
"It was really overwhelming for me," Brinkman said. "I had never been to a music festival … and there were what looked like 100,000 people in this huge polo field, and five stages, each with a different theme. There was also an enormous tent, techno-themed, that was just out of control."
Coachella has traditionally retained a reputation as a festival for the "raver" subculture — which revolves around dance music and Ecstasy use. According to Brinkman, however, there was a wide range of musical genres represented during the years he attended.
"It's so easy to get such great exposure to so many types of music," Brinkman said. "I saw acts from Mogwai to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Franz Ferdinand, really pop-y stuff, but I also saw some more obscure rock acts, like Beck."
There are, however, some major drawbacks to an unsheltered venue at the edge of the Southern Californian desert in early spring. "It's grueling at times," Brinkman said, "Because you're standing for hours on end in the sun and heat, not to mention how loud it is if you're close to the stage."
This year was the first year that Coachella stopped selling single-day passes, insisting that each attendee pay $272 for a three-day ticket. But Brinkman isn't discouraged: "The only reason I haven't been there the past few years was the timing — but I'll absolutely be back next year."
Bonnaroo: Woodstock of the South
Perhaps the largest and most famous festival east of the Mississippi River, the ninth annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival takes place June 10 through 13 this year at a 700-acre farm near Manchester, Tenn. This year, some 170 music and comedy acts will be performing on the festival's two main outdoor stages and four major tents around the clock.
Bonnaroo began in 2002 as a festival more oriented toward rock and jam bands; the headlining acts in the early years included Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Widespread Panic, The Allman Brothers Band, Gov't Mule and Trey Anastasio, of Phish. The line-up has gradually grown to include a larger billing of diverse acts — this year's headliners include Kings of Leon, Stevie Wonder, Jay-Z, Damian Marley and Nas.
Senior Jessica Meyers, who attended Bonnaroo in 2007 and 2008, believes that the four-day event fosters a sense of temporary community. "It's a great experience, because everyone is really, really nice to each other, even in the 90-degree heat," Meyers said.
Ben Waldron, also a senior, agreed: "If you drive there, you end up waiting five hours just to get to the gate, but even though it's hot, people are getting out of their cars, meeting each other and making friends. And any time anyone bumps into you at the festival, it's always just apologies all around very quickly. It's all good."
With so many options, choosing which bands to see can be difficult, but visitors also get the opportunity to experience new types of music.
"The thing that I love about a huge festival like Bonnaroo is that you get to see acts from all over the spectrum," senior Jonathan Wiener said. "I go for bands like Phish or Oysterhead, but I get to see bands that I wouldn't normally see, like Nine Inch Nails or The Mars Volta."
Lollapalooza: Day-Tripping in Chicago
Unlike Coachella and many other music festivals, Lollapalooza is a non-camping festival. It takes place in Grant Park, in the heart of Chicago. The location and organization of the festival can have both its upsides and downsides, as Tufts alumna Elizabeth Friedman (LA '09), who attended the festival in 2008, noted: "You have the advantages of public transportation and the ability to explore the city if you are visiting … The disadvantage is that there is a much bigger police presence. I didn't feel as safe as I did at All Good, an outdoor camping festival that I went to last year."
Because of the location and the lack of campgrounds, an urban festival, such as Lollapalooza or Austin, Texas' South By Southwest, adds additional costs for concertgoers. "Luckily, I live outside Chicago," Friedman said. "But I'm not sure where I would have stayed at night without having to pay for a hotel, if I came from far away."
Friedman also noticed a difference in the sense of community between Lollapalooza in 2008 and All Good in 2009. "I'm sure it also had to do with the difference in musical tastes at the two events, but at Lollapalooza, people stuck to their own group, and there were a lot of suburbanites, hipsters and yuppies," Friedman said. "At All Good, I felt a much stronger sense of community, especially in the camping area."
Festival Evolution: From Niche Markets Toward the Mainstream
Most music festivals begin with the goal of creating a venue for a particular niche of music. Lollapalooza, for example, began in 1991 as the brain-child of Jane's Addiction front-man Perry Farrell, and featured only alternative acts, predominantly from the punk rock and metal genres. Throughout the 1990s, Lollapalooza was a touring festival, but high ticket and concession prices gradually drove fans away. Resurrected as a destination two-day concert in Grant Park, Lollapalooza now features a wide variety of acts from both inside and outside the mainstream; this year's headliners will include Green Day, Lady Gaga, The Strokes, Social Distortion, MGMT, Hot Chip, Blues Traveler and others.
What causes a festival's line-up to veer toward the mainstream? Tufts Department of Music Professor Stephan Pennington, who teaches History of Rock this semester, believes that the change stems from an event's success.
"A lot of these festivals start off with a specific mission," Pennington said. "But then, once the festival gets successful, and is able to make the experience better, it becomes more attractive [to mainstream acts]. To put it another way, these festivals become ways to celebrate a genre as a community … but there exists this sort of tension between being successful and remaining small and ‘real,' staying accessible to the original community that supported the genre."
Regardless of which way the organizers of a festival steer their event, the effects on the community will be determined at the event itself. "What's interesting about music festivals is that it's this hot-house environment where all of the issues at stake in a community are pushed together, and a spotlight is put on them," Pennington added.
As a consequence, the constituency of the festival community changes, a phenomenon that Brinkman witnessed firsthand at Coachella over time.
"Coachella gained more notoriety each year," Brinkman said. "As more big-name, main-stream acts came, the people coming got more mainstream too. But with so many acts over the course of two or three days, there's bound to be something for everyone."
