Paul Tollett, the C.E.O. of Goldenvoice and the founder of Coachella, at Desert Trip music festival in Indio, California. October 2016. Photograph courtesy Danny Clinch / Goldenvoice
On the final evening of Desert Trip, a classic-rock extravaganza Paul Tollett staged on two weekends last October, the impresario was sitting in the Who’s friends-and-family area, an acre-size V.I.P. tent on the grounds of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, near Indio, California. The mountains on both sides of the valley were visible through the clear side panels in the spotless white canvas, their peaks turning purple as the sun went down and showtime approached. Outside, it was still very hot, but the tent was air-conditioned, and there was soft grass underfoot, partly covered with throw rugs; in the winter months, polo is played on the turf. The allure of the musical paradise that Tollett has conjured in the desert helped him sell almost two hundred thousand tickets to last year’s Coachella, over two weekends, grossing ninety-five million dollars. Now, with Desert Trip—“Oldchella”—Tollett had pulled off a twin-weekend festival with a staggering hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar gross, the largest ever music-festival box office.
Music, we may assume, began outside. Even in our time, rock was a mass phenomenon at outdoor festivals before the indoor market kicked in. But, while the opportunity to listen to music in the great wide open awakens primal urges, audiences have been made soft by a couple of millennia of plumbing and roofs, dating at least as far back as the Pantheon, in Rome. With Coachella, and now with Desert Trip, Tollett has provided an outdoor musical experience with indoor amenities, including real bathrooms, crisp sound, and gourmet food and drinks.
Tollett, fifty-one, is the C.E.O. of Goldenvoice, a Los Angeles-based promoter owned by the entertainment conglomerate A.E.G. In the tent, he explained how he had wrangled the biggest classic-rock acts on the indoor touring circuit—the Who, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, and Roger Waters—into an outdoor-festival format, presenting them like jam bands.
Dressed like a roadie, in jeans and a work shirt and his ever-present baseball cap, with an L.A. Dodgers logo, Tollett was typically understated about his historic feat of rock promotion. It began, he said, with a six-thousand-mile flight, L.A. to Buenos Aires, where the Stones were performing, to pitch the concept, because, “if you get them when the paparazzi aren’t around you can talk to them.” The situation was delicate, because while the Stones had made no secret of their wish to play Coachella, the date had yet to materialize.
The meeting, in Mick Jagger’s dressing room backstage at La Plata Stadium, lasted all of twelve minutes.
“Is this a period piece?” Jagger asked.
“No,” Tollett replied. “The Zombies aren’t invited.”
“Don’t make the story the ticket price,” Jagger advised.
“He didn’t say yes, but it seemed like yes,” Tollett said. He caught the show and flew home.
After Jagger, Tollett asked Paul McCartney, who likes playing festivals. (“Makes him feel alive,” Marc Geiger, a top booking agent with the William Morris Endeavor, or W.M.E., agency, told me.) “I’d done Paul at Coachella,” Tollett said. “And I knew Marsha Vlasic,” Neil Young’s longtime booking agent. “Roger Waters had played Coachella. I could piece it together.” Artist fees of between three and five million dollars helped. In addition, each act got its own tented friends-and-family acre for the entire two weeks. The Stones’ area included a forty-yard-long air-conditioned running track on which Jagger could sprint back and forth to warm up.
Leaving the Who’s compound, Tollett reluctantly agreed to venture out onstage for a photographer before the show began. Goldenvoice’s production team had created a pop-up, thirty-five-thousand-seat arena on the polo fields for the occasion, complete with sky boxes; after tonight, they would take it all apart. Tollett, an engineer at heart, thrives on solving the kinds of problems that bringing close to a hundred thousand people, about a third of them campers, to the desert for three days can generate.
The seven-hundred-acre grounds are owned in part by Tollett and A.E.G. (they jointly bought two hundred and eighty acres in 2012) and partly by Tollett’s unlikely Max Yasgur—the Empire Polo Club’s Alexander Haagen III, a white-mustachioed polo-playing mall developer based in L.A., who installed the classical statuary and erected the whitewashed stone walls lined with bougainvillea that give the grounds its Hotel California character. A bridge modelled on the one in Monet’s “Water Lilies” is a recent addition. (“Absolute, all-time favorite painting!”) In the winter months, some of the world’s top polo players compete on Haagen’s fields. When I visited in January, the Kennel Club of Palm Springs’ annual dog show was under way.
Because it hardly ever rains here (the property is irrigated by underground aquifers), it’s not mud, the curse of Eastern festivals, but heat that Tollett has to worry about. The big enclosed tents are air-conditioned, and there are misting stations outside, as well as tanks of free water. Gate-crashing, a common plague for promoters of sixties-era festivals, was eliminated by Paul’s older brother Perry, an upholsterer by trade, whose crew built the ten-foot-high white fence that surrounds much of the perimeter, a three-year job. (They also built the three hundred and forty-five permanent on-site restrooms.) Still, there was a scary moment, in 2010, when the entrance wristbands were counterfeited and, as Tollett put it, “we lost control of the gate.” R.F.I.D. chips embedded in the wristbands, along with copyproof holograms in the tickets, have eliminated that concern, for now.
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An earlier version of this article misstated the city in which Lollapalooza was launched.
This article appears in other versions of the April 17, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Immaculate Lineup.”
By John Seabrook: John Seabrook has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1989 and became a staff writer in 1993.
Read the rest of the article here. Long but very informative and interesting article.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-mastermind-behind-coachella
[Thank you to Alex Teitz, http://www.femmusic.com, for contributing this article.]