9 min readTHE THING I THINK I HATE:
Music festivals
WHY:
Long lines for everything; wristbands; stinky toilets; shuttle buses; parking two states away; $19 beers; crappy food trucks; walking nine miles between stages; never knowing who’s performing when or on which stage, so I end up missing the one band I really wanted to see; being so far away that you just end up watching the video screen anyway; lack of chairs or seating that you didn’t lug in yourself; and the drunk person throwing up in the trash can over there.
TESTING GROUNDS:
Stagecoach Music Festival, Indio, California
THE INVESTIGATION
Lyle Lovett, a personal hero, was a little too slow for my son. But that’s—for some—the allure of music festivals: there’s always someone else playing.
Day 1
I was lost.
That might not be the right word. I don’t know if a father can be considered “lost” when he’s roaming the crowded music festival looking for his grown son who is off having a blast. But that was the situation. I felt lost.
Things had been going so well, too—especially considering I didn’t even really want to be there in the first place. Why didn’t I want to be there? Do I not enjoy music? Do I not enjoy fun? I do. I enjoy both. But I also enjoy indoor plumbing, reasonably priced beer, and, once in a while, sitting down. But there I was in a desert town twenty miles east of Palm Springs—and yes, things had been going well. I did get a little nervous when the hotel shuttle bus—see, right away, there’s something in life I try to avoid: shuttle buses—when the hotel shuttle bus deposited us in the middle of a dusty field, but it turned out to be only fifty yards from the front gate, which was fine. We got our tickets through T-Mobile, which is not only the leading sponsor of the Stagecoach Music Festival, but also bring some amenities. We entered through the special line for T-Mobile customers and sailed through with our electronic wristbands, which made the lights on a Simon Says-looking device turn green.
My son John and I walked straight to the Palomino Stage. All the stages had horse-adjacent names, including the main stage, which was called the Mane Stage. On the Palomino, one of my favorite country artists, Lyle Lovett, appeared with his Large Band and I was happy. Lyle was a little slow for John, who checked the lineups on his phone and realized that OH MY GOD! something or someone called BigXThaPlug was starting in fifteen minutes on the Mustang Stage! He actually jumped up and down, gave me a quick hug, and turned to leave in the middle of “If I Had a Boat.”
And—here was my first rookie mistake—I said, “I’ll find you there! Have fun!”
I’ll find you there. Ha!
Within minutes after Lyle finished performing, the freewheeling vibes vanished and I was traipsing through a field among men wearing cowboy hats and women wearing as little as possible. I didn’t know where the Mustang Stage was. There were no signs. I had no internet connection, no wifi, and no cell service, so I couldn’t even pull up a map of the venue on the Stagecoach website, nor could I download its app, nor could I call or text my son. I asked a Stagecoach worker, and he didn’t know where the Mustang Stage was. I picked a direction and started walking, then doglegged, directed by nothing but a dumb hunch, which turned out to be wrong. In a sea of happy people, I was seething and saying to myself, See! This is why you don’t come to these things!, as I tried pathetically and repeatedly to refresh my phone, which had gone from one bar to “SOS.”
My son ditched me to see BigXThaPlug (left), a rapper whose presence at a country music festival initially mystified me. My son had no qualms.
I found the Mustang Stage just in time for BigXThaPlug’s (it’s a person) last two songs, but I didn’t find John because there were 9,000 people standing in front of the Mustang Stage, singing along and being on each other’s shoulders and wearing overalls and having a terrific time and I hated all of them.
Mere seconds after ThaPlug’s closing rap faded into the desert sky, the 9,000 rowdy fans had scattered for other stages, leaving a quiet landscape of trampled dirt and plastic cups and beer cans and cardboard tubs of gnawed wings, like the day after Woodstock but without the cultural revolution. That’s when I saw, behind the mid-field sound booth, my son talking to a girl wearing cutoff jeans and a cowboy hat. I talked to the mom and the little brother, and we all moved up closer because the Counting Crows were coming on soon. John was like, Who are the Counting Crows? And by the end he was like, These guys are great! The girl handed him her phone to put his number in.
I was tired—not sleepy tired, but legs tired—so I walked what seemed like thirty-five miles back to the Mane Stage area to sit down. My destination was Club Magenta, which is a bar/living room/viewing platform that T-Mobile had set up, open to all T-Mobile customers for free. You have to buy the drinks, but there’s never a line, and you can sit on comfortable sofas with your feet up, or dance, or just mill around. The sightline to the stage is clear and direct, although the actual performers look tiny.
If you like to be way up by the stage moshing around in beer-mud to Post Malone while getting sweated on, go for it. I was happy in Club Magenta. I sat. I had a beer. I had recovered from my earlier tantrum and was kind of having fun—the Counting Crows helped—but I didn’t want to push it. One must pace oneself at a music festival, especially when one doesn’t really like music festivals but is giving them a chance and has another whole day tomorrow.
Ten o’clock shuttle. Bed.
Bush played a set just before the desert winds became a gale, temporarily canceling the festival and permanently canceling a performance by the band I most wanted to see on the festival’s second day, Journey.
Day 2
Stagecoach is a three-day festival: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The plan was to leave midday on Sunday, because flying back east would eat up much of the day, and we didn’t particularly care about most of the Sunday-night acts. Because I’m a middle-aged dad, I was bummed to be missing Hootie and the Blowfish on Sunday, but mostly I cared about seeing Journey on Saturday night (and getting home at a sensible hour on Sunday). Why Journey was playing a country music festival I didn’t know.
This was something I was learning about music festivals, the more I studied the Stagecoach lineup and those of other festivals: Not only does there seem to be a festival for everyone, there seems to be something for everyone within each festival. I like country but mostly older stuff, and at Stagecoach I could see Lovett and Brooks and Dunn—but also acts I like that arguably are not country at all: Counting Crows, the Wallflowers, Hootie, Bush, and Journey. Similarly, the lineup for this year’s Newport Folk Festival includes Lauryn Hill as well as the actor Michael Shannon doing his R.E.M. tribute. Cool! Are they folk? Whatever!
Late Saturday afternoon we were in Club Magenta as the festival grinded on. Teddy Swims was on the Mane Stage, and I recognized a song. Then, ladies and gentlemen!
…he brought out
…special guest
…David Lee Roth!!
Huh.
This, I was told by a veteran Stagecoach fan, was one of those awesome festival moments when a special guest comes out. I wasn’t too familiar with Teddy Swims, but I knew enough to know that David Lee Roth was about the last name I thought he was going to say after “Ladies and gentlemen…”. And yet as these two great misfits from generations apart sang “Jump” together, with the band playing a crackling note-for-note rendition, I understood that it was the kind of moment that could probably only happen at a music festival. It didn’t make a ton of sense, it didn’t mark a high point in human evolution or even in the evolution of rock (or country), but it made people smile, and here I am writing about it even now, happy I experienced it.
We saw Bush and they were okay. The women in our group said Gavin Rossdale was still hot and they couldn’t believe he was 60, and a cool desert wind blew his cool, longish hair. Rossdale said the desert wind was strange and beautiful, “just like music.” After, as we walked across an open field to grab drinks before the big Journey set, the strange, beautiful desert wind strengthened to a gale, whipping dirt into my eyes and grass into my hair. Cowboy hats were flying everywhere. A few minutes later the massive video screens on either side of the Mane Stage went solid red, with white block lettering: “EMERGENCY EVACUATION. The festival has been postponed until further notice. Please move quickly and calmly to the nearest exit.” A man’s voice repeated this message through loudspeakers.
Now. One might think that this scene would qualify as a worst nightmare for the festival-averse. A weather emergency. Mass hysteria. Drunk people running for the doors. But as tens of thousands of people walked safely toward the bottlenecked exits, letting people go in front of them and saying to strangers how surreal it all was, the emergency evacuation became almost endearing.
The hotel shuttle turned into a kind of party bus, and when we got back a group of us ordered Domino’s and drank champagne until late, and it was a different kind of fun. The festival ended up resuming an hour after it was postponed, but we didn’t go back.
The only act that was completely canceled because of the wind was Journey.
Brooks & Dunn survey the Stagecoach crowd on the last night of the festival.
Day 3
When I had agreed to come on this trip, I assumed that by Sunday morning I would be beyond ready to leave, and had booked our flight accordingly. But the windstorm, while exciting, had stolen a whole night. I had traveled to the desert reluctantly, but once I was there, I wanted it all.
And so…we stayed. We got our flights changed and, after cleaning last night’s grit out of our tear ducts, we were back at the polo grounds Sunday early afternoon. We saw Hootie and the Blowfish, who put on the best set of the weekend, and a few songs by the great Brooks and Dunn. John went to the Honkytonk, a nonstop DJ rave in a massive tent, with the youngfolk and had the time of his life, which was, in truth, the thing I cared about most.
THE ASSESSMENT
Did I like it? Well, we stayed an extra night—and it was my idea. That is the assessment.
So, yeah, it was fun. You’d have to try pretty hard not to have fun at a festival—and I was trying pretty hard at first. What I learned at Stagecoach:
The food and drink situation is not terrible. The lines for the good pizza were always long, but I waited once and it was indeed good pizza. I also had a decent taco bowl thing, and P.J. from Twenty-Six, the dynamo PR firm working with T-Mobile, said the barbecue place was above average. (I did not try the sushi being served in the middle of a desert from a portable tent, but to each his or her own.) Amid the many lite-beer bars I found a single, small hut set up by Golden Road Brewing from Anaheim selling their excellent IPA. Prices are high for all of this, but that’s any ballgame or concert.I don’t know why I was worried about walking. I like walking. And when you’re drinking beer and eating not-health food, it’s probably a good thing that the next concert is a half mile away. Walk it off.There’s music! Of course there is, but I was thinking about it all wrong, in that I wasn’t even thinking about the music. I don’t know how many of the Stagecoach 2026 artists I would purchase a ticket to see on their own, but to have that much talent entertaining the shit out of you with a five-minute walk between them for hours on end all day—and little IPA and barbecue stations scattered among them? I’m in.
Note: I’m not sure I would have come to Stagecoach—meaning I know I wouldn’t have—without an invitation from T-Mobile to see both their technology and their fan experiences. But I made no promises to write about anything, and once I got there, the only special treatment they gave me was helping me figure out rebooking my flights. Club Magenta was open to any T-Mobile customer attending the festival.
SCORECARD
RATING:
HATE
TOLERATE
LIKE
LOVE
WILL DO IT AGAIN?
YES
NO