WHAT HAPPEN IF SOMEONE MAKES A CRIME

I HEARING SOMETIME THAT IN AMERICAN THINGS OCCUR LIKE MAYBE A GUYS WITH NEEDLES WITH AIDS ON THE NEEDLES STAB PPL WHILE THEY DANCING SO FAST. I WOULD HATE TO GET A NEEDLE WITH AIDS STABBING ME SO PLZ NO ONE PLZ STAB ME WITH AIDS NEEDLES.

It's an old Coachella joke...if you don't get it, just move on.

Ooooooooh man...alright, I'm going to try to make this quick because I'm sitting in our tech room on set and I don't see this down time lasting too long.
I might get interrupted by having to eat chips and do nothing.

Alright, so I think last I left off the big doin's in my life were going to be
-Coachella
-Job on "America's Next Producer"
-Waiting to hear about the job in Japan.

Coachella happened.
I'm working on Next Producer.
I got accepted for the job in Japan.

Yeeeeup! They sent me a letter saying they wanted to hire me (for some reason), but also requested that I follow-up with a background check. So I went to some shady-ass site, paid for a background check, and apparently the case of "New York State vs. Derek Heck for: Beastiatity Acts Involving a Toy Chihuahua and a Kodiac Bear" were cleared.
'wipes brow'

Thank god that shit is legal in Japan.

But with more tentacles...I would imagine.

This is the companies mascot:

It's a bunny with a beak.

Um...somehow it symbolizes hearing...and...communicating? Jesus Christ...I CAN'T wait to go to fucking Japan!

Alright, I'm going to shift gears for a minute (...sometimes I feel like I sound a little too much like a high school physics teacher trying to keep his class interested in thermal dynamics) and attempt to cover the fiasco that is/was...

COACHELLA.

So the night before I was going to leave (which I believe was the day I came back from my interview in San Fran) I had a genius idea of filling our cooler with frozen water bottles instead of ice. That way we could drink the "ice" that melted.

Emphasis on "ice." As if I created some new form of it...because it's contained in a bottle.


Come on, you have to admit that was a pretty fucking good idea. SOMEONE was wearing his genius cape.
'points at self with thumbs'

So we trucked out to get there Thursday night. When we got there it was basically a couple of hours of standing in lines to have our bags and coolers checked for illegal things, followed with an attempt to pitch a tent in the dark.

'chuckle'

Followed with everyone in their tents randomly screaming "Wooooooo!!!!!!!" for the hell of it. Just waves of people yelling "Woooo!!!!" for no reason at all.
Fucking hippies.


DAY 1
--------


This is our tent. In the day time.


These are our neighbors. They are all dirty hippies.


This would be the stage grounds in the early noon, well before the big crowds start to form. Basically every day was about 100 degrees with a cloudless sunny-ass sky.
A sunny-ass sky that stood no chance against my SPF 60 sun block lotion. The fucking chain mail of sun block lotions.


Coachella is known for having weird art placed around the whole festival grounds. Obviously among my favorites was this piece, which as far as I could gather was a giant piece of rusty metal that shot huge fucking fireballs everywhere for no reason in particular.
Art fags.


And then Coachella was attacked by the giant spider robots from Johnny Quest.


For being in the middle of the dessert there is lots of grass and palm trees. (Also note that the whole place is surrounded by mountains, it's actually pretty cool...)


This is the beloved Heineken tent. Basically, it's the only enclosed tent in the entire festival/camp grounds, it's heavily air conditioned, there are about 10 plasma tv's around the perimeter that are playing live stage footage, and merch girls in super short shorts and tiny tight shirts handing out free stuff.
Of course you have to be 21 to enjoy these luxuries. Everyone under 21 can suck Heineken's dick and die from heat stroke.


There's couches in it too, as well as really trippy stuff projected onto the ceiling.


Grass.


More art. Basically strings of hundreds of light bulbs in a cube shape...um...definitely more interesting at night (pictured later).

Finally the good bands started playing around 2 o' clock-ish. The following is my critique of Day 1 line-up using the international acoustic rating scale of "Rawk!" to "Get off the staaaage!"

Hmmm...on second hand, why don't I just stick with a scale of 1 to 5:
5- fUckINg GReaT!!!
4- Pretty good. <--said in an English accent.
3- Meh. I'll sit here and bob my head.
2- It's a good thing I'm high right now.
1- I'm only bearing with you because I'm waiting for Rage.


"Tokyo Police Club": 4


"Silversun Pickups": 3


This is your typical "I'm sitting down." point of view.


"Arctic Monkeys": 4


More "Artic Monkeys". Now would be a good time to note that there are 5 different stages for this festival, 2 of which are outdoors, 3 of which are tented.


I couldn't afford a helicopter shot so I just stood up on my tippy toes.


"Peaches" drum set. It was very pink.


Uhhh...more pink drum set?


"Peaches": 5


"Peaches", my fellow Buffalo-nian home-girl, appears to enjoy many of the same activities as me, one of which is climbing things you shouldn't.


Long is the day that I interned at Squeaky Wheel (in Buffalo) when "Peaches" was doing an artist residency, creating her first album on the computer next to me.


Coachella at night.


More Coachella at night.


This is another art installation. I like to call it "Firey Death Train of Fire With Very Loud Whistle."


"Benny Benassi": 4


Wooo rave-in-a-tent!


One pill of "E": $15
One bottle of water: $2
Stupid fucking candy raver without enough money for water: Priceless.

I have videos "Benny" but YouTube won't let me host them.


"Interpol": 5


Shuffling through the crowd to get closer...


Ahh, this spot is much better.


Oh "Interpol", how you swoon me so.


'pokes air'
'bobs head'


Remember that string light bulb cube thingy? This is it lit up at night.


"Gogol Bordello": 6


Everybody parrrrty!


The violinist if THE MAN.


If it's not abundantly clear through the pictures, I was indeed front row for Gogol. I would have it no other way.


Kids were snackling! Monkeys Clapping! Annnnd the girls were cutting loose!


It's tough to take good pictures when everyone around you is jumping up and down. I was like, "Yo guys, can we settle down for a second? You're making it really hard to focus." And they were all like "START WEARING PURPLE WEARING PURPLE!!!" And I was like "What? That doesn't even make sense."


And then the jumping and swaying got ten times worse.

Fucking hippies.

I have videos of "Gogol" but YouTube won't let me put them up...no idea why.


An artist's self proclaimed "Largest Tesla Coils in the World." I've yet to see any that are bigger, so I suppose they are.


They were pretty fucking cool, and made a really loud and creepy 'snap'/'pop' noise when the lightning arced out towards the crowd.


DAY 2
--------


I picture Danzig's child having one of these.


This was a performance art piece.

Imagine

combined with

and you would get


Basically it was a burlesque show with SUPER cute girls with hoses hidden under their skirts, and such, that would spray the crowd with water.
Let me fucking tell you:
When you are in the middle of the fucking dessert with a hundred degree, dry, stagnant air and a sun BEATING relentlessly down on you- gorgeous half naked girls prancing around with hoses and jiggly boobs...is indescribably amazing.


But not as amazing as whoever created that clown skull.


"The Cribs": 3


"Fountains Of Wayne": 3

Honestly, I love "Fountains," but they had NO stage presence what-so-ever. Granted, it was early, and it was definitely the hottest day of the weekend, so the crowd was just too hot to move around. But I feel like the band just admitted defeat and never really tried to rile the people up.
I still love them though.


"The Decemberists": 5


Talk about a talented freaking band. I've always loved their music, but I didn't expect them to be NEARLY as entertaining as they were. MAN can they fucking play.


They were really good at getting the crowd into it too. "Fountains" I'm looking at you.
'stern look'


So that was really really good, until a giant puppet whale ate the entire band...


"The Arcade Fire": 4


"Arcade Fire" was also a bit of a surprise. I really liked their first album, I felt like the second album sounded way too similar, but when they played live all of their songs sounded VERY diverse.
It was interesting to hear them play right after the "Decemberists" because both bands have a ton of members, and all of said members can play multiple instruments and are professionally AMAZING at doing such.
Hearing those two bands back-to-back made me feel like my life will never amount to something as amazing as to what they can do.

Then I was like, "Pffff, art fags."


More "Arcade." I would say they are one of very few bands that actually sound better live than on record.


"Red Hot Chili Peppers": 2


The "Peppers" still intro-ing into their set.


Annnnd the "Peppers" finally rocking out. The stage (obviously) was impressive as all hell, the music was pretty damn good, but the vocals were so SO horrid, it really canceled out all of the above. Holy SHIT do the vocals sound bad live.
Apparently he's notorious for that though, and can only muster up a decent singing voice when he's in a studio.


Another picture as I walk further away to go lay down and listen to "LCD Soundsystem" and "The Rapture."
Both of which I took I never bothered to take pictures of. Yet both of which were really really good.

"LCD Soundsystem": 4
"The Rapture": 4.5

DAY 3
--------


"Tapes 'N Tapes": 3


"The Kooks": 3


"Junior Boys": 3
I love listening to "Junior Boys" when I'm packing for trips and the like. They're just super mellow and the music just keeps rolling and rolling, the tracks never collide with each other. Unfortunately when they performed live it sounded like someone stuck their cd in a boom box and played it through the tent's speakers.
It was impressive that they could so identically recreate their record...but I was hoping to hear the added benefits of a live performance.


"CSS": 4
The full name of the band is "Cansei de Ser Sexy." It's a great Brazilian band. You should check them out.


"Willie Nelson": 4
These guys were surprisingly entertaining. Unsurprisingly, Willie had lots to say about weed. His son played "Texas Flood," which was fucking amazing. And at one point Willie's guitar even lost a chunk while he was playing.


(Not a picture I took)
For those of you that don't know, Willie Nelson only owns/plays one guitar- "Trigger." So watching a chunk fly off of it was like watching another piece of that guitars eventual demise.
Random Facts:
-Bruce Springsteen has only played the same Fender Telecaster, since his album "Born to Run."
-Jerry Garcia only played two guitars, "Rosebud" and "Tiger."

The whole reason I was at the main stage to see Willie Nelson was because it was 5 hours prior to Rage Against the Machine, about the amount of time I figured it would take to shimmy my skinny white ass to the front of the crowd.


At the end of Willie's set this was the crowd behind me, I was about 50 feet from the main stage.


50 VERY dense feet.


"Crowded House": 1
The only people that were sticking around for this mess were the ones that were shimmying through dense forests of flesh to get closer to the soon to be sacred alter of Rage's rock.


"Manu Chao": ???
I'd love to give these guys a rating but by the time they started their set, I was 3 rows from the very front.


Mid-way through "Manu Chao" I finally made it to front fucking row. I'm not sure I possess a vocabulary capable of describing this experience. (The railing you see in the picture is actually a second railing that the media/press would stand behind. In-between the two rails is where the security personnel stood. The big black box in the background...that's the stage that is 10 feet away from me.)

Imagine 6 people standing against you as hard as they can, with absolutely no room for movement what-so-ever. Their bodies are extremely hot and sweaty, and they also happen to be enormously muscular bald-headed men.

Now imagine 20,000 people shoving those guys into you even HARDER.

I shit you not, the crowd count was estimated to be at least 50,000. We'll assume a couple thousand of theses people weren't interesting in Rage...because they are losers.
We can also assume about 10,000 probably weren't shoving to move forward, but sat happily content in the grass or perhaps just stood around with some breathing room.
We'll cancel people that weren't directly related to the force that was pushing into me, I would imagine this would be roughly 15,000 people.
So in my honest opinion, I easily had a collective 20,000 bodies somehow contributing to the immense force against me.

There was a moment where I actually had a few inches breathing room, and jumped up to get into the wave of fresh air (and copious amounts of water that the security personnel were kind enough to douse us in). While in mid-jump the crowd would push back, taking my precious inches of free real estate, ultimately SUSPENDING ME a good half foot off the ground.

For at least 10 minutes.

I took advantage of this interesting physical position by taking a picture of my perspective. This would ultimately be the last time I was able to reach the camera in my shorts pockets, once I fell back down onto the ground my pockets would be, in lack of better wording, IMPOSSIBLE to reach.


Derek's-Eye-View while floating above the crowd. (The people in front of me are all the crowd surfers that are getting dumped off at the end of their ride.)

By the time Rage actually started playing my shorts were a solid few inches lower than they should have been, but I LITERALLY could not get my arms down to waist level. I tried a couple times, and I'm pretty fucking strong (for my size at least) and I COULD NOT do it.

Essentially I was just STUCK where I was. My arms pinned against me chest, in a crossed position- to keep the metal gate from forcing it's way into my diaphragm any harder than it already was.

When crowd surfers would inevitable go over my head I couldn't even move my arms upwards to protect my head, making my scalp somewhat of a platform to rest their sweaty fucking ass on.

The only other part of the experience I want to go into detail about is how much water was involved. Because it was so hot, a lot of people were passing out- so the security dudes had bottles of water, hoses, pesticide sprayers filled with water, and literal "buckets of water," that they just kept DUMPING on us.
I was not opposed to this. By the time Rage was into their 4th song I was starting to black out from exhaustion.

Rewind for a second:
So I was standing in front row...the whole stage is dark. It's been 4 hours (or more) since the antics of Willie Nelson. It's been at least 40 minutes since "Manu Chao" was even playing.
The sky was dark. All I could hear was a screaming crowd (only visible to me from the projection screens on the sides of the stage) and the yelps of people around me that were getting trampled.
The only smell was sweat, and the hot dank air radiating from the bodies around me, with an extremely occasional whiff of fresh air.
My clothes are soaked, my white tshirt literally see-through except for the splotches of dirt and blood.
I wonder who's blood that was...
I was dehydrated. Hungry. Exhausted. Muscles limp and useless from all the fighting. My vision fading and seeing stars started to seem normal...

It was the longest 40 minutes of my life.

A giant red star on a black drape is being lifted backstage.

Slowly a hum starts over the speakers.

Within, what seemed, a sudden 10 seconds- every member of the band comes out, single file, they pick up their assigned instruments and instantly began playing "Testify."

I swear to god it felt like someone injected me with 1,000cc's of adrenaline. All of the sudden I was awake again, no longer in a dreamy state (in retrospect, an extremely dangerous dreamy state).
The crowd was jumping up and down. I was too...except I wasn't even trying. The weight of the force that was against me was strong enough that it just lifted my body up and down.

How convenient.

Zach looked at me. If I was a chick I would have blew him a kiss.

Instead I'm pretty sure I just blew a shit load of sweat off my nose that was dripping towards my mouth...

All of the sudden they were playing "Bulls On Parade," huh...the time seemed to be going by pretty quick at this point.

Then "People Of the Sun" and then...the END of "Bombtrack"?

It had then occurred to me that I was literally blacking out for portions of songs. Alright, I guess it's time to try and get out.
So I literally just nonchalantly said to the guard in front of me (at this point they had armed police helping out too) if he wouldn't mind helping lift me out.
He grabbed me by my head, and start to shimmy me upwards until I could get an arm around his neck.
It took him about 3 minutes to pluck me out, I could feel the vacuum of flesh falling filling in every inch I was leaving behind.
Even though he was pulling me out at an extremely slow rate, when my feet actually came loose both he and I toppled over as if somehow had just cut us from a rope.
My first instinct...not so much instinct because it was premeditated...was to grab my camera and start rolling with the footage.
Police were screaming at me, and everyone else falling into the pit of security, to get fucking moving. My camera was DRIPPING with water...better not turn it on.

By the time I worked my way around the crowd to reposition myself in front of the stage I was in the very, very, VERY back.

"Guerilla Radio" was playing, and I was frantically shaking out my camera, phone and wallet. I guess it only took me two songs to get all the way back here (I stopped to buy 2 waters on the way).


Huh...so this is what it looks like to be a LOSER who can't wait in front row for 5 hours.


Damn...some good air back here.


Some old hippie dude, about 60, was smoking a joint next to me commenting on how amazing they were playing, especially considering they haven't been a band in 7 years. He asked what happened to me, told him "Front row."
He started to ramble about being front row for NIN a couple years ago, I dunno I wasn't really paying attention to him.


Right on hippie dude. Right on.

So that is all I care to comment about for right now. It's my day off from shooting and it's time to go get some pizza and catch up on Lost and Heroes.