“One thing led to another, and here I am,” says Crawford, who just began a mini-tour with Firehouse in the run-up to the festival. Clearly, getting the band back together for Coachella has become the thing to do.
The South Bay has occasionally felt the ripples of Coachella’s influence before. The Pixies played the San Jose Civic on a subsequent tour after reuniting for Coachella. Jesus and March Chain, who reunited for the festival in 2005, stayed together long enough to play Shoreline a couple of years later.
But there’s been nothing like this year, when Radiohead added West Coast tour dates based on its booking at Coachella. Thanks at least in part to being along the band’s path from Seattle to Santa Barbara on the run-up to Coachella, HP Pavilion will host Thom Yorke and company this week.
No such luck in 2004, the last time Radiohead played Coachella. In fact, the Bay Area hasn’t always had a lot of luck with the band, considering the technical glitches and bizarrely short set that marred their last appearance here, at Outside Lands in 2008. I was there, and can testify that most of the problems were with the festival (which to be fair, was in its first year) and not the band. The sight of hundreds of people knocking down fences to get from Beck’s set to the main stage–where Radiohead was the only scheduled last performance for a festival that had drawn 80,000 people–was not a pretty one.
.Radiohead at HP Pavilion Shows Cultural Reach of Coachella
