The sixth Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif., boasted nearly 100 acts and drew something in the neighborhood of 50,000 fans a day. Featured acts on the festival's five stages included chart-toppers like Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, Wilco and New Order.
To say that it requires a hands-on management style to tighten all the nuts and bolts on a spectacle like this is kind of like saying Bill Gates has a little cash. While the term "micromanagement" is often used as a pejorative these days, it's practically a requirement of a production manager's job for an event like this. That task fell to Kevan Wilkins, with L.A.-based concert promoters Goldenvoice. This year marked his fifth turn at the wheel, and as always, the challenges are many and enormous.
"Too many that you could write down, that's for sure," he said as final festival preparations were underway. "I called a meeting in our office probably six weeks ago, and I brought in the sound companies, the generator company and the production company. Without these people in the room, we don't have a show. They're the most important elements of our show, because if the power breaks or the sound goes down, we're stuck."
Starting the ball rolling six weeks in advance represents a mere heartbeat in terms of staging a show of this magnitude. After all, as he pointed out, "We're building a city out here. We will build a city for 50,000 to 60,000 paid attendants, and I estimate somewhere in the region of 10,000 to 15,000 people backstage."
Wilkins oversaw a small army of some 500 people in a variety of trades. "There are probably about a hundred stage hands, and then there are the peripheral workers–there's 40 or 50 tenting guys, about a dozen fence guys and there's groundsmen that are constantly going around flagging this or that so we don't bust through pipes or electrical cables. There's quite a few."
After going on the road in England at the ripe old age of 16 with his own lighting and staging company, and working more than 20 years in the business, he eventually became production manager and tour manager for Perry Farrell (formerly with Jane's Addiction). That was his gig when he landed at the first Coachella festival. As such, he's seen the festival from the other side of the coin, that of the artist.
Tired of the road, Wilkins had just about decided to get out of the business and start a gardening company when he got a call from the late Rick Van Santen, former head of Goldenvoice. "He calls me up and says, 'Kevan, do some shows for us. Come on and try being the production manager for us.'
"So I went and I started in April, and by the end of May, I was full time and on a salary with medical benefits and things that I'd never had, that I didn't even know existed because I've always been a freelancer," Wilkins said.
"So that's how it started, and that was about six years ago."
Life on the road proved a good teacher for his current position. "I was on the artist's side, and I got to see a lot of stuff; I got to see things that were working, things that weren't and things that I would change," he said.
Those things include the mighty and the miniscule. While motioning around the backstage area, he pointed out, "The stage was just here on the first one, and the dressing rooms were all here along this fence. They'd put plywood on the grass, and all the plywood, because of the moisture, had curled up at the corners. Everywhere you went, you'd trip over the plywood.
"It's a big picture, but I got to witness the first Coachella from a band point-of-view, from a production band point-of-view."
Choosing the right vendors represents a major part of that big picture. Here is where experience really counts. "Over the years, I've used lots of different sound and lighting companies, video production companies, and I think now I have favorites and lesser favorites, but I think they're all good. I look for things that they do," Wilkins said.
"During the year, I do a lot of arena shows. I'm doing Elton John at Arrowhead Pond. So I look at all these companies, and I'm constantly eyeballing what they do, what equipment they use."
This year, those companies included sound by Rat Sound and U.S. Audio & Lighting, lighting by PRG, Visions, Felix Lighting and RKDE and staging from Kleege Industries, All Access and Duplex.
In any concert situation, top-drawer sound is the main goal. Wilkins called on Dave Rat of Rat Sound to supply sound for the festival's three largest stages.
"We have Dave Rat, who's a sound consultant to us this year," Wilkins continued. "Dave Rat and I get on great together. By far, they are my favorite company; they're the first company that I make a phone call to. I can get things for what I ask for. They've never ever let me down."
Again, experience and know-how can save the day, as Wilkins relates a story about a near-disaster at a previous show. "Dave, two or three years ago, really pulled me out of trouble when I hired a small mom-and-pop sound company, and they wired up all their equipment wrong. It stopped the show for 40 minutes. But we got to the problem in about 15 minutes with Dave and the team, and they rebuilt it in about 20 minutes, and after 40 minutes, we were up and running again."
Whenever you have multiple acts on various stages and different vendors all striving to put on a show, cooperation is crucial. Dave Rat can attest to the ups and downs of running sound at a festival like Coachella. "Doing a multi-stage festival, there's a level of cooperation that is so imperative for the success of the festival as a whole, and which adds a new layer, a new dynamic," he said. "It's not just doing the best show you can for that stage, but you're also doing the best presentation you can for the festival as a whole. Sometimes those two things conflict."
However, if all parties are up to the task, Rat said that there are upsides to working with multiple providers.
"The good side of that is that here, it's unique, because we're not the only vendors. We do three of the stages and U.S. Audio does two of them. The two companies work together very well. We share resources when needed and we communicate among each other and ensure that the various stages and their sound engineers are cooperative."
Naturally, choosing the right system is critical. Rat said, "For the main stage this year, we're using V-DOSC, which tends to be across the board, the most popular among all the acts. You present a V-DOSC system and you get almost no resistance no matter the act, no matter how large or small."
Wilkins agreed. "The V-DOSC system, there's a reason for it. It really does work. I've used it every year because it's a directional P.A. So that's important to me. At a festival, there has to be some sort of control over the sound," he said.
With different acts playing simultaneously in close proximity, it can be a challenge to keep them from stepping on each other's toes sound-wise. Rat said, "For the Mojave tent, which is placed in between the Sahara and Gobi, it's kind of a unique situation. In an attempt to reduce sonic interaction, we're putting in a new Turbo Aspect system, which unlike the typical line arrays, has control over the horizontal
dispersion as well.
"We believe, and from our testing we're finding, that we're keeping more sound off the tent walls, and in this application, it has some significant advantages over a typical line array. Not only in reducing the sound bouncing off the tent walls, but also, in reducing the amount of bleed from the Mojave to the other two adjoining tents."
Satisfying artists' requirements while putting together a seamless package is another challenge. Rat said, "In a festival situation, you kind of do the best you can between rider requirements and hope that it will make everybody happy. So we kind of do an overkill and get just the best of what is out there and make everyone happy."
Varying consoles can be an area of contention, but Rat said it hasn't been a problem. "Jon, at our shop, works directly with the artists. He says, 'This is the house console,' and makes sure that everyone is happy with it. Generally, we don't have a lot of resistance. Most of the acts that
are super particular will bring in their own consoles for continuity with the rest of them.
"The mainstay of what we're supplying is Midas H-3000s front and back, with some variation, but that tends to be the universal console of the day."
Rat says that versatility and an ability to roll with the punches are vital to presenting a show like Coachella. "Our attitude as a company is not 'we have the best system in the world' or 'you should use this type of speaker.' Our attitude is, 'what do you want?' We have the ability to present and match the system to the application to the best of our ability, and we're versatile in that manner, which I think is kind of unique among sound vendors."
