Coachella festival is a hot ticket

INDIO, Calif. -- Time-pressed lovers of alternative rock would have done well to attend the Coachella festival over the weekend. Live performances by nearly 100 artists were packed into two freakily hot days in the desert, where the smart men wore skirts, the water vendors padded their kids' college funds, and the Pixies stole the show.

The seminal Boston band, recently reunited after an acrimonious split 12 years ago, capped two weeks of club dates (including an unpublicized and incendiary set Friday night at the Glass House in Pomona) with a triumphant concert Saturday for a crowd of 50,000 -- which broke Coachella attendance records by 15,000. Both days were sold out.

"I made a joke, someone took it seriously, so then we thought we should just do it if everyone wants us to," frontman Frank Black said a couple of hours before the band took the stage.

As the sun went down and a massive ring of searchlights lit the darkening sky, the Pixies tore through their early catalog during a 70-minute show that included "Bone Machine," "Wave of Mutilation," "Caribou," " Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Debaser," "Nimrod's Son," and "Here Comes Your Man." The wild-eyed, ecstatically grinning swarm of fans received them like an alt-rock Second Coming, and the Pixies reconstructed their legend with a familiar absence of fuss and a palpable, powerful sense of release.

Radiohead may be the only band on earth that had a prayer of following this act. The band had canceled a show earlier in the week because of singer Thom Yorke's severe throat infection, and rumors had been circulating for days that Radiohead might pull the plug on Coachella. Hardly. In its only US appearance of the year, Radiohead cobbled a stunning landscape of shifting, complex moods that was hypnotic one moment and ferocious the next. The sound of 50,000 voices crooning "Karma Police" (Radiohead's one shot at a singalong and a rarity in its set lists) into the blessedly cool desert night was unforgettable.

For the most part Saturday's event was a model of thoughtful planning and creative booking. Large-scale art installations were scattered about the vast grounds, which sported two outdoor and three tented performance stages and a constant loop of screenings in the Coachella Independent Film Festival tent. Good food was plentiful, covered palapas provided escape from the sun, and if Kinky's exuberant Mexican tech-rock or Sweden's raucous and tragically leather-clad (International) Noise Conspiracy didn't get your blood flowing, there was the Bike Rodeo, a miniature amusement park filled with an odd assortment of pedal-powered rides.

Hometown hero Josh Homme, from Queens of the Stone Age, brought 12 musicians and singers from his side project Desert Sessions to the Outdoor Theater for a set of hard, serpentine meditations. One could have easily spent all day in the Mojave Tent, where the lineup included Sahara Hotnights, Junior Senior (with surprise guest Fred Schneider of the B-52s), stellastarr*, Black Keys, Stereolab, and Electric Six. But that would have meant missing the Stills, the Rapture, Death Cab for Cutie, and Kool Keith in the Outdoor Theater, Dutch DJ Sander Kleinenberg and Kraftwerk in the Sahara Tent, and Phantom Planet and Beck in the small Gobi Tent.

Overflow from Beck's acoustic set caused pedestrian gridlock; a festival official said that as a last-minute addition to the lineup, Beck couldn't be booked onto a larger stage.

It was a minor aberration during this most civilized and notable of rock festivals. Fans began arriving at 11 a.m. yesterday for what promised to be another scorching day of music to match. Among the hotly anticipated artists on the Sunday lineup were the Cure, the Flaming Lips, AIR, Belle and Sebastian, Basement Jaxx, Bright Eyes, the Crystal Method, and Danger Mouse.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.