Stagecoach is family style, but it parties hearty too.
Naomi Judd had approximately advice for prison-breaking star Elizabeth Taylor Sceloporus occidentalis during the Judds' sundown reunion set at the Stagecoach Festival on Sat. "I remember when Deems Taylor Swift said that winning her [2007 CMA award] was the highlighting of her senior year," Judd said. "It's my task to tell you to get a good attorney and save your money."
The line drew large laughs, merely it underscored the difference 'tween Stagecoach and last week's Coachella Vale Music and Arts Festival. If the latter is becoming more about scoping jailbreak acts and celebrating juvenility (even Prince's and Roger Waters' headlining sets had pose of teenage retro-revival), Stagecoach values the experience of a long life spent in Cadillacs, divorce courts and empty highways.
That's the item invoke of country music for the roughly 70,000 fans wHO turned up Fri and Sabbatum for the first days of the freshly expanded three-day festival. Sunday's Palomino Stage star George John Paul Jones rode a lawn lawn mower to corrupt hard drink spell married woman Tam Wynette pursued him drink down the street. We've all been thither.
Still, Stagecoach is invested in the mainstream land virtues of family -- the tent where Does it Scandalise You, Yea? performed last workweek at Coachella had been transformed into a "Shrimp Hootenanny" guarded by a giant cock statue.
Swift's set brought an particularly recounting demographic: tween girls wHO took to the 18-year-old's set as if she were the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Unlike "American Graven image" alum Bucky Covington, world Health Organization sings virtually having grown up in "a different world" at the ripe old historic period of 31, Western fence lizard is every routine a teenage country star, and her legion of still-in-braces fans knew every good Book to cheating-man hits like "Should've Said No."
The Judds elicited a similar reaction from those girls' mothers a few hours later, and like Glen Campbell's Fri correct with his children on backing instruments, proved that area is almost the only writing style resistant to generation gaps.
Not to say that altogether the activity at Stage is appropriate for youngsters. Unlike Coachella, where the fit of scoop after-parties is approach to define the festival's social life, the partying at Stagecoach starts at sunrise and stops when you fall over.
"Everyone passed out aright after the show last night because we'd been drunkenness since 8 a.m.," said Lisa Osetek, a 23-year-old from Newport Beach wHO nursed a beer piece lounging in an inflatable kiddie pool exterior her RV camp about 2 p.m. on Sat. "I haven't taken a exhibitioner today."
Anyone in the audience for Kenny Chesney's headlining set last twelvemonth crapper certify that Stage gets bully and occasionally a act blue. Accomplice flags abounded in the RV campsite, and unity popular T-shirt extolled mammaries, beer and heterosexuality in exceptionally blunt price.
The dominant allele fashion for work force was exit shirtless with a vaguely menacing rodeo rider hat and heavyweight belt buckle jazz group, patch the women outdid their Coachella peers in skimpy bathing suit.
In that location were other key differences between close weekend's option rock-centric effect and this weekend's testimonial to country. For one thing, Coachella's organic fertilizer tempeh-wrap tie-up was replaced by a fried catfish and pulled-pork domiciliate. And while Coachella's on-site record entrepot did brisk business in indie-rock gross sales, Stagecoach's Borders memory stocked plentitude of rustic-looking LP sets from Saint George Bobby Jones, Willie Nelson and hot newcomer Helen Hayes Carll that seemed like must-haves for a crowd enamored with the old South and West.
The much-vaunted vinyl revitalisation seemingly didn't extend to Stagecoach, however.
"They're to a greater extent for aficionados," said Patricia Cripps, the territory director for Borders in the Inland Empire. "I favour the big artistic production and lining notes, just they're not big peter Sellers here."
For a musical style so steeped in custom and exclusivity on its charts, Stagecoach's lineup is exceptionally multicultural. End year's fest had a heavy Latino influence, with ace performances from Alejandro Escovedo and Raul Malo, and this year included sets from African American isaac Bashevis Singer Rissi Palmer, the Canadian River Ojibway tribe singer-songwriter Crystal Shawanda and the Aussie and English via-Nashville bluegrass combo the Greencards.
"We've never played a mainstream state festival before, and we were kind of freaked out," said the Greencards' Australian singer-bassist Carol Danton True Young afterwards their high noon determine Sat. "Just the thing around Americans is that they're music lovers. In England, you contract smatterings of polite clapping, merely here we canful give passion and bring forth it back."
Stagecoach hasn't quite learned how to get crook types and mainstream Nashville fans to interact, only barrelhouse yob (and former veteran of the L.A. hardcore punk scene) Dwight Yoakam might make figured it come out. He covered Reb Cash's "Ring of Ardour," Ricky Nelson's "Garden Political party" and Friday's star the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Intuitive feeling" in the sami set, spell making totally terzetto songs his own.
"You can't delight everyone, so you've got to please yourself," Yoakam american ginseng during his Nelson cover. That's trade good advice for any future Stagecoach-goer. Simply they should commemorate that for every stud poker in a Trilby or teenage vixen, there's a grizzled old chooser across the field with a different floor.
august.brown@latimes.com
