Check out the photo gallery, featuring candids of Katy Perry, Penn Badgley and more, as well as shots from all the onstage action. Photography by Myles Pettengill III.

Coachella. High Holiday in Indie Rock Revivalism. Infamous bacchanalia. A grand celebration of creativity and narcissism. Career-maker and career-facelifter. Large, Hot, Pop Music, Etc. And here's the thing. This is your humble correspondent's first time at the Coachella Arts and Music Festival. He is not really much of a large festival guy. In fact, he has a mild case of self-diagnosed agoraphobia, for which he is taking medication. However, taking to heart his photographer's exuberant proclamation that “this will be the best and worst weekend of your life!”, he is resolved to forge ahead with an open heart, shaded eyes, and plenty of fluids. Also, with all of the driving and parking issues, I imagine this is the single worst thing for the environment I will ever take part in, unless I get to go on the space shuttle or something, so, sorry. I bet Woodstock was worse. Before we get started, let's define a few terms that will be cropping up throughout this experience.

THE BOVINE SHUFFLE: A method of group locomotion wherein a large, packed herd of people are attempting a journey of at least 100 yards. Anything shorter can safely be called a “line” or perhaps “an amorphous clusterfuck.” Average speed for the Bovine Shuffle is about ¼ to ½ mph. Sometimes participants will hold onto each other, or hold some kind of placard aloft, in order to remain together. When sub-groups travel amidst the larger herd in this manner, it can be disruptive, as the shorter members can easily loose sight of their placard. This tends to makes them become frantic and pushy.

THE THROB: A socio-acoustical phenomenon of sonic reverberation hitting thousands of warm bodies. Take the present participles "oozing" and "pulsing," mix in the infinitive phrase "to wash over," shake them together at 90-110 bpm, and bake them in a warm, open place for a couple minutes.

THE LURCH: Pretty familiar to veterans of dance floors everywhere; this is what happens when large crowds of people are all trying to dance in one place. Imagine a less synchronized version of that bouncy dance that trees and houses are always doing in the background of old cartoons. It usually stops short of moshing, and, depending on how polite/intoxicated the crowd is, you might even receive a brief touch of apology if somebody steps on your feet.

WRANGLING: The act of finding, photographing, and questioning artists for nebulous PR purposes. This happens by the Press Tent and tends to be woefully disorganized, as artists often have to play a set across the fields soon, before or after they are supposed to perform junket duties. Although the Press Tent is relatively congenial, there is a certain amount of poaching that goes on, wherein your faithful correspondent will gently intimate that perhaps the fellow from V magazine is passed out under a bush somewhere, and would they perhaps like to talk to Blackbook while they wait for him?

FRIDAY

The festival opens with what turns out to be a rather mild Bovine Shuffle. The crowd around us as we enter around one o'clock is quite youthful, and occasionally ticketless; Mr. Pettengill (my photographer) and I are each offered a thousand dollars for our tickets, the turning down of which may well be the journalistic high point of this whole endeavor. There is a palpable sense of jittery excitement as the crowd spills through the gates onto the massive Polo fields. Our own excitement is quickly crushed under the thumb of confused dread as we realize we are late for a Wrangling appointment at the Press Tent that we cannot find.

Later, Wrangling accomplished, it is time to turn to the business of experiencing live music, which turns out to only occasionally overlap with the experience of negotiating a 21st-century Bacchanalia the size of a small city. First up is Aeroplane, a duo consisting of two terribly polite Belgians who play a sunny disco-pop set from behind a DJ booth in the Sahara Tent. Of the three tents, the Sahara is the largest and most southerly. It also wins prizes for most youthful and most dancey, which means that there are a lot of kids in neon sunglasses lurching a little self-consciously to four-on-the-floor beats and some italo-disco-y sounding vocal samples. Next door, 100 yards away in the Mojave tent, Ra Ra Riot deploy a four-on-the-floor beat to markedly different ends, combining it with strings and plangent vocals to bang out a sort of more urgent, less arch, chamber pop. This is also, apparently, the path to Teen Make Out City, which occurs almost as soon as Ra Ra Riot starts playing.

Rushing over to catch The Specials on the main stage turns out to be well worth it. The twenty-some years off seem to have done The Specials good; they are tight and energetic, and their sharp suits are no impediment to breaking out their dance moves under the afternoon sun. Instead of the band, it is the audience that slowly gets comfortable with itself. Next on the schedule is Grizzly Bear back at the Mojave tent. It is now dark and rather foggy with pot smoke. The affection for the band in this tent is palpable, the Throb is a distant murmur, and I find myself less than completely absorbed in the music. It is at this point that I run into a friend of mine by the entrance to the photo pit, the odds of which happening are approximately 12 in 75,000.

We head out to wander around with a few of her friends, losing them almost immediately in the process. Hunger sets in. Hot dogs and beer are consumed. Impressions start piling on impressions and over the next hour all I catch is a glimpse of a slightly drunk seeming Ian “Echo” McCulloch and his Bunnymen on a video screen, singing what I hear as “meet me in the bathroom of love,” which seems wildly appropriate for the setting. Somewhere a giant pixelated James Murphy is chugging champagne under a sickly green light. He looks like he's having a good time. He probably needs all that champagne to deal with the face-melting irony of playing songs like "Drunk Girls" and "Losing My Edge" in front of their subjects/target audience.

Jay-Z's show is polished, his band is tight, and his segue-way freestyles are highly competent sound bites of self-aggrandizement. The sound is acceptable, though walking up from further back, his voice is muffled and almost indecipherable in the wind. The whole show, which turns out to be rather lengthy, has a valedictory feel to it. Beyoncé comes out to sing "Forever Young," and the crowd of kids who were 5 years old when The Blueprint came out start making the Hova symbol with their hands. When the fireworks come, the inexorable weight of Celebrity feels almost crushing. For our taste the concurrent Fever Ray show at the Mojave tent was the show to catch on Friday. The Throb was in full effect, the costumes were fantastic, and although the photo pit was grumbling about the preponderance of fog machines and low lighting, there was no denying the powerfully affecting atmosphere on stage. Remember the highly irresponsible junior high game wherein you press on somebody's chest to give them a head rush? Yeah, it was kind of like that. Where some band's percussionists can feel like the equivalent of spoilers on a Chrysler Lebaron, Fever Ray's percussion is the high-torque engine that drives the whole spooky mechanism.

Friday ends with a nighttime Bovine Shuffle of massive proportions, both to the parking lot and then and resuming in automotive form on the nearby roads.

SATURDAY

I don't see very much on Saturday, to be honest. Some of the day is spent exploring the baked charms of Palm Springs, some is spent in the Great Bovine Shuffle, and some in sweaty Wrangling. As it happens, the actual first band I see is The Old Crow Medicine Show, playing themselves, in a non-impromptu impromptu show at the press tent. I think of myself, perhaps falsely, as someone who can appreciate old-timey string music, and I can tell these guys are pretty good at it. That said, I feel a little like an uncomfortable restaurant patron who has a string band wander up to his table unasked for. Some photographers are drawn to them, insect-like, and I can't help but feel like their onlooking (smiling, friendly-looking) PR person seems to be playing the role of an animal trainer. I wonder if the whip comes out later.

I spend some of the afternoon wandering aimlessly around the festival grounds. A strange feature of the crowds I see at the two outdoor stages is that 90% of them have their eyes glued to the large video monitors on either side of the stage. It leads to an especially rapt and slightly zombified crowd. The crowds in the tents feel engaged in a slightly more vital, albeit more distracted way.

On the second outdoor stage, Alex “Edward Sharpe” Ebert begins his show by accidentally kicking his microphone stand onto a photographer in the press pit. The photographer starts gushing blood out of his forehead, and Ebert spends a minute or two messianicly comforting the man and bandaging his head with a shirt. You can feel a big “Awwww” spread throughout the crowd. When Ebert gets up, he has the crowd in the palm of his hand. The happy, spacey, bubblegummy psychedelic is a hit in the afternoon sun, and the pot-smoking, arrhythmic dancing and woven blankets are everywhere.

The next band I see is Hot Chip. You get the feeling that the crowd, especially up front, is ready to dance ecstatically to blissed-out disco bangers, which they start doing almost immediately. The Lurch quickly breaks out, but there is little of the panicked near-mosh I have seen from afar in the Sahara tent. Perhaps this is due to Hot Chip's rather breezy stage presence. The crowd doesn't seem to mind that the singer, clad in giant baggy pants and maracas, doesn't engage in any gymnastics, or the lack of windmills and guitar-face across the stage.

After Hot Chip, we leave early, scared of a massive Bovine Shuffle and the possible disappointment of Devo's show. Desert Parties ensue.

SUNDAY

Sunday feels a little more subdued than the previous days. The air is suffused with feelings of sunburn and hangover. Gone is the giddy excitement of teenagers sprinting into the festival as soon as they pass through the gates. Upon arriving at around 3pm, I find the seeping of patrons into the festival grounds more closely resembles pulmonary bleeding than arterial bleeding. To extend the metaphor, the Heineken-branded beer garden seems to be the bandage of choice for many concert-goers here. After some Wrangling, I attempt a nap in the shade behind the press tent, where there's only me and someone interviewing Perry Farrell at great length. Their folding plastic chairs moved close together so that their knees are almost touching. Instead of falling asleep though, I listen to Yo La Tengo close out their set on the nearby main stage with a 20-minute version of “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind.” A repeating, hypnotic four-note bass line, driving drums, plenty of maracas, and very occasional vocals rub up against an almost-continuous feedback-drenched guitar freakout. It looks like this is shaping up to be a very serious Throb day. Next up on the main stage is Spoon. They play at sunset to a crowd that is mostly seated out past thirty yards or so. Britt Daniels and Co. seem a little rusty at first, miffing a beginning on the second song, and the cowboy hat and black leather jacket he is wearing seem just a trifle affected. But the band warms up around the third song, and he eventually takes the hat off. The acoustics at Coachella, especially for the outdoor stages, are especially kind to music with plenty of negative space, and this holds true for Spoon. With the slow tempos and slinky grooves, the Throb is soon in full effect, undulating slowly across the crowd, which includes a few toddlers wearing giant earmuff-looking things. After a few songs, Bradford Cox of Deerhunter comes out to add another guitar to “Who Makes Your Money,” which sounds much better than it does on record -- weirder and more psychedelic. Getting from the Spoon show on the main Coachella stage to see Phoenix on the other outdoor stage takes some serious Bovine Shuffling. In fact, I'd posit that the crowd for Phoenix is the biggest single crowd of the entire festival. They start with “Lisztomania,” and it is quickly apparent that this will be more of a Lurch situation than a Throb situation. The crowd is varied and very engaged for the most part. The guy behind me who looks like he plays on the O-line for his high school football team is singing along to all the words, and to my left I see a relatively well-known LA party promoter out among the hoi polloi, nodding his head to the beat. The busier music, smaller stage, and larger crowd all conspire to test the limits of the Coachella audio system a bit, but overall the feeling is of a band that has grabbed the reigns of the magic hour and run with them. The ineffable, fleeting, sublime, and wonderfully false moment of Everybody Having a Good Time makes an appearance as darkness falls, and isn't that what everybody's looking for here? Later, back at the main stage, Pavement plays a slightly lackadaisical set, but that's to be expected, right? I'm actually a moderately big Pavement fan, but I can't really get behind this set tonight. Acts on the main stage have suffered a strange malaise throughout the weekend. Perhaps it is due to the weird VIP fence effect. This is where the crowd thins out as it goes towards stage right until it reaches a fenced off VIP area, where it becomes packed with the patricians who want to both see the show, but also be in a special area at the same time. It's a weird vibe. It does warm my heart to see high-school girls dancing with glowsticks to “Father to a Sister of Thought,” as I never, ever, saw this happen while I was in high school. Along with never having been to Coachella, I've also never really paid much attention to Gorillaz. Maybe it was because of that kid in summer camp, who sang “I got my head jacked, by an aeroplane” so often that it made you think he just might actually have had his head jacked by one, or certainly jacked by something. The crowd is a decent size, but the band's stage presence is still caught somewhere between giant 2-D cartoons and ant-size human members on a huge stage. “Hey, I kind of like Gorillaz” is what I think to myself about a minute into the first song. To be fair, my crush is fleeting and capricious, but I am briefly and completely thrilled that wonderfully facile, accessible pop music can be consumed in such a large and efficient manner, out in some goddamn desert.