Coachella: Paul Tollett says fall desert festival is doable

As more than 100,000 visitors prepare to descend upon the Coachella Valley for the first of the two Coachella weekends, the question of how many festivals are too many still hasn’t been addressed.

A website devoted to covering festivals, Fest300, recently noted in a story headlined, “Why have so many music festivals canceled in 2016?” that at least nine U.S. festivals have folded so far this year.

The reasons cited include finances (with artists charging more per performance), poor locations (affected by traffic congestion, city and landlord problems), and festival saturation.

Goldenvoice and its Coachella partner, AEG Live, have canceled two festivals this year but they also just announced an Arroyo Seco Music and Arts Festival for June 2017 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. That’s in addition to their rapidly growing FYF Fest at Los Angeles Exposition Park Aug. 27-28.

Goldenvoice president Paul Tollett isn’t shying away from Indio’s desire to have a fall festival at the Empire Polo Club. It won’t happen this year, but Tollett says Goldenvoice wants to mount an original event, as opposed to partnering with a traveling festival, like a Van’s Warped Tour or Lilith Fair, which the sister group, Haim, has discussed reviving.

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“I don’t think a touring one would be big enough,” he said in a recent three-hour interview at his Indio home at his Eldorado Polo Club. “If you don’t do 40,000 or 50,000 here, you’re going to go home broke. Even owning Eldorado, I still think twice about doing a show there. It’s expensive.”

Europe has two festivals called Desert Fest – one in London and one in Berlin – often featuring local desert rock musicians. It would seem a natural extension to add a third Desert Fest to the real home of desert rock. But Tollett doesn’t want to partner with any other festivals in Indio.

“For us, we’d rather start from scratch, we’d like to create something,” Tollett said. “The reason we need to be running it is we have so many commitments with the city, the neighbors. We can’t have someone in the mix who has an agenda that runs against them.”

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There’s obviously room for another weekend of Coachella. Goldenvoice Vice President Skip Paige recently told the Indio City Council they could do four or five more Coachellas. But, even though a recent economic impact report on the Goldenvoice festivals by the Development Management Group didn’t study the effect of too many festivals in the valley, it’s apparent this desert has reached the saturation point. It needs another festival in April like America needs another Republican debate.

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The question is, does adding another festival to the Coachella Valley in October make sense if festivals have reached critical mass in America?

Valley leaders want a fall festival because the tourist season is at its tipping point. Like the TV hospital in “Code Black,” we’re at the point where we have more people to take care of than resources. The valley’s hotels are full, roads are jammed and first responders are as hard to find as equipment rentals. You can’t just add resources because you have to budget for year-round demand. So we have to add an event in an unsaturated part of the year to boost year-round demand. That can only be in the fall, unless Tollett decides to do a summer festival with the French promoters of Hellfest.

Tollett has reservations about starting any kind of festival in this new era.

“I’m very worried because we lost a lot of money at Coachella and Stagecoach in the early days,” he said. “In the first Coachella, we lost a little under $1 million -- $850,000, which seemed like a million. Now you could lose $10 million and that’s devastating. The bands are getting more expensive. The shows are grander. I can’t think of a festival that pays less for talent than previous years.

“One of the problems we find here is we’ve gone to a certain level of comfort for the shows we do. We can’t cut back on amenities. If we do another festival here, we can’t say, ‘Let’s go low budget.’ People have thought of this place as not really low budget.

“You also have to think of the cost of the traffic, the security, the bands and the stages. They say, ‘Oh, you have to lose for a few years and then you’ll be fine.’ But, while you’re going through it, it’s really hard to remind yourself of that. Luckily, the human body forgets pain.”

Tollett and AEG didn’t fold the Big Barrel country music festival in Dover, Delaware, this year because of financial pain. The feel of the festival is as important to him as the early box office figures.

“If they don’t work, you should get rid of them,” he said. “Almost every single festival we’ve had has lost money in the beginning – for two, three, five years. But, sometimes you start a festival and it just doesn’t have any magic. So it needs to go away.”

Tollett doesn’t think the proliferation of festivals nationwide will prevent a fall festival in the Coachella Valley from becoming successful. “A good festival always works,” he says, so he’s trying to think of how to create a magical fall festival.

“We’re looking for something,” he said. “Don’t know what it is yet. I don’t really understand Latin music so much, so that would be hard for me to book, but it seems like a natural. That seems big.”

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My two cents

A Latino festival would be a natural because there’s so much diverse music and art from Mexico and diversity is a Goldenvoice trademark. Tollett has booked Baja California vocalist Carla Morrison at Coachella and she’s vastly different from such past Mexican artists at the festival as Kinky, Café Tacuba and Manu Chao, who put on one of the most exciting shows I’ve seen at Coachella.

When you think of how those kind of artists could mix with historic, diverse older bands in the tents like Los Lobos, Little Joe y La Familia and Palm Springs’ own Trini Lopez (who sang “La Bamba” before Ritchie Valens), you can see how Latino music could fit the Goldenvoice tradition.

And let’s not forget that Mexico is the land of mystery. It’s where Timothy Leary and Ram Dass had their first hallucinogenic experience. It’s where the late James Gurley of Big Brother and the Holding Company and his wife, Nancy, discovered a primitive culture where people sang across great ravines because spoken words didn’t carry. They returned to the Haight-Ashbury from Mexico with flowers in their hair, influencing Janis Joplin and helping to shape a new hippie culture.

And do I need to note that women wear flowers in their hair at Coachella? Gurley also moved to Palm Desert and helped start the punk scene in the desert in the early 1980s. It’s a perfect fit.