Photos by Marco Torres

Pachanga Fest Latino Music Festival
Feat. Los Lobos, Celso Piña, Intocable, 3BallMTY, y más
Fiesta Gardens, Austin
May 10 & 11, 2013

Since 2008, the annual, family-friendly Pachanga Fest Latino Music Festival has showcased the vibrant blend of Latino-created music and art and its impact on American culture. That includes rock, alternative, Tejano, mariachi, cumbia, salsa, electronic, funk, hip-hop, and their many blends and mash-ups. A portion of the proceeds benefited FuturoFund, a collective effort to engage the Austin community through philanthropy and leadership.

My journey to this year's festival was long and wet. What normally takes a bit over two hours took almost four due to traffic and a string of strong thunderstorms that blew over Texas that day. The show was postponed for about an hour on Friday night due to the heavy rains, which made for an interesting and very fun dance party under the covered pavilion near the main stage as the show continued with a strong performance by DJ trio 3BallMTY.

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Photo by B. Breaux

Lousiana's Thistle! encounters a little van trouble.

The sheriff department's officer was standing on my doorstep, still trembling with excitement. The red and blue lights from the patrol car flashed over his face, which was incredulous at the site of the person who opened the door at three in the morning - me, a middle-aged, gray-haired man in Nick & Nora PJs with horsies on them.

"We had to take your friend to jail because he was banging on someone's door with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a full-handled axe in the other," he said.

He was trying hard not to let the trace of a smile materialize over his proud face. In this neighborhood, nothing interesting ever happens, so flatfoots in patrol units aren't likely to become gun-pulling guardians of sleeping innocents.

"I almost shot him!," he said with a kind of glee not totally appropriate for such an admission.

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Ed. Note: Austin Psych Fest brought the weirdos to the state capitol this weekend for sets by big legends like The Moving Sidewalks and small ones like Silver Apples. Our friends at DC9 at Night in Dallas, writer Jesse Hughey and photographer Tracie Louck, were there to brave the mud and reverb to bring you these dispatches.

Photos by Tracie Louck

Friday
The sun setting over the Saharan desert music of Tinariwen marked for me the first moment that Austin Psych Fest truly felt like we were somewhere else completely. Tie-dyed kids, a guy in a curious mirror-and-disco-ball-bedazzled pink getup and the usual festival dirtbags in black concert tees swayed and spun to the hypnotic Malian African blues unwinding from the band's hand drums and acoustic guitars.

Before that, Besnard Lakes and Vietnam had both built up the kind of droning, reverberating rhythmic grooves that set the mood for getting a good buzz on in beautiful Texas weather. Now it felt like we were somewhere else completely.

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Ed. Note: This is the final post of our piggyback Coachella 2013 coverage, with an eternal debt to our friends at LA Weekly and OC Weekly.

Photo by LP Hastings

Butterfly?!

The Visual Stimulations for People Who Were High
Coachella's art installations -- the ones designed to impress you while you're high, aka all of them -- were particularly impressive this year. There was the tesla coil, the crane that was formerly a flower but now a praying mantis, the giant florescent snail, the golf cart that looks like a jellyfish, as well as remote controlled sharks and butterflys (above).

There was also a structure designed to look like a mid-century, Palm Springs modernist mansion, called the Mirage. Projections onto the house created the illusion of a swimming pool, and a swinging cocktail party. Then there was the "Coachella Power Station," at which guys in hippo masks and white lab coats stood in a glassed room, like mad scientists, playing around with computer, video, and stereo equipment.

Occasionally, they danced to Ricky Martin. BEN WESTHOFF

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Ed. Note: Brought to you by our tired, dusty and very tolerant friends at LA Weekly and OC Weekly.

Photo by Timothy Norris

Here's everything that bothered us about Coachella's second weekend. Hey, at least there was no dust storm!

Native American Headdresses
These have still not gone away. In fact, one particularly irritating woman (not pictured) wore a towering feather Mohawk weave, a sartorial statement that combined racism with rave gaudiness. On Friday, she pushed her way in front of us, obstructing our and everyone else's view of the show. Congratulations, lady, you're Coachella's worst person! ANDREA DOMANICK

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Ed. Note: This is part of our sister papers LA Weekly and OC Weekly's coverage of the Coachella festival's just-concluded second weekend.

Creative Commons

We told you earlier about the ways folks try to sneak drugs into Coachella. Also, we told you about how to avoid trouble with the police. But what if, despite your best efforts, you're arrested? Or even taken to Coachella jail? Yes, it is a real place.

We got the story on it from a guy we'll call Derek, who was arrested for possession of pot and cocaine in 2009. It went down like this:

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Ed. Note: This article comes to us from West Coast Sound, and was co-written by Mary Carreon.

We've spent a lot of time this Coachella talking about the magnificent bros in attendance, but how about the fair and talented ladies?

Per usual, they were everywhere, doing their thing like it wasn't a chicken wing, or something. In any case, here are the hottest dancing girls this year -- in GIF form.

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Ed. Note: Can't have a Best of Coachella without a worst, right? Thanks to our (tired) Southern California friends at West Coast Sound and Heard Mentality.

Screenshot of the Daft Punk commercial at the Main Stage

The Daft Punk Fake-Out
Friday and Saturday, all anyone could talk about was if Daft Punk was going to show up during Phoenix's set. Why? Because we were fucking teased. On the main stage before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a long commercial for their new album played, and then we found out that members of the duo were in attendance.

Yeah, sure, the group denied they would perform this year, but it seemed at the time to be one of those winking denials. Now it just seems like they were trying to hype their album. As our pal Andrea Domanick put it: "Shouting Daft Punk at Coachella is like shouting fire in a crowded movie theater." DANIEL KOHN

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Ed. Note: Rocks Off proudly presents to our readers coverage of Coachella's first weekend courtesy of our sister papers LA Weekly and OC Weekly.

Photo by Christopher Victorio

Karen O

Karen O's Outfit
Karen O's wardrobe on Friday night was bad-ass. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman appeared on the main stage in a technicolor cape draped over a suit that looked like it was made of mercury. The vibrant collage was topped with a headpiece that Liberace might have worn had he ever been elected pope.

The eccentric layers slowly peeled off as she swung the microphone like a lasso and shoved it down her pants. She eventually donned at leather jacket with "KO" studded into the back, which might have as well have stood for "knock out." KAI FLANDERS

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Photo by Oliver Scherillo

New Order

New Order
Coachella
April 13,2013

While over at the main stage the bulk of the Coachella crowd was enduring Phoenix with the hope that Daft Punk would come out -- they instead got R. Kelly -- a smaller but perhaps more enthusiastic crowd got a first-rate greatest hits set from New Order Saturday night.

Bernard Sumner, the group's front man, apologized immediately for their infrequent live appearances. They prefer to spend their time relaxing and enjoying life, rather than working, he noted, which is perhaps not the world's most rock and roll sentiment, but echoes a theme of "Regret," which they performed in a familiar way.

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