The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival will expand to three days in April, but the bigger news is that the West Coast’s premier rock and dance event also will welcome a country cousin: The concert’s stages and tents will stay in place for an extra week to host a country music bonanza featuring George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Willie Nelson and Lucinda Williams.
Coachella promoter Paul Tollett said earlier this month that he’s not ready to announce the new venture’s name and entire lineup, but he did acknowledge that it will be staged May 5 and 6 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif., a site that has been home to the Coachella festival since 1999. Tickets are expected to go on sale in January.
The new country festival will devote its largest stage to mainstream stars such as Strait, Chesney and Sugarland while Nelson, Williams and alt-country stars will be featured on a secondary platform called the “Outlaw Stage.”
There also will be a bluegrass stage with Ricky Skaggs, Earl Scruggs and Nickel Creek. The latter booking takes on added intrigue with the Grammy-winning trio’s announcement that they will be going their separate ways after their 2007 tour, ending a run that began when the group formed in 1989 in Carlsbad, Calif.
There also will be tents devoted to cowboy poetry, rural Americana and storytelling. Red Steagall, host of the syndicated radio show “Cowboy Corner” and the 2006 poet laureate for the state of Texas, has been booked, as has Garrison Keillor of “A Prairie Home Companion” fame.
Another tent will have Riders in the Sky, the heritage music and comedy act that has reached the most ears through two Pixar productions, the hit film “Toy Story 2” and the Oscar-winning short “For the Birds.”
The foray in country music for Tollett is jolting – the career of the promoter and the company brand he is most associated with, Goldenvoice Productions, has long been defined by booking alt-rock acts in Los Angeles. Tollett and his partners gambled in 1999 by launching Coachella as a fan-friendly, European-style two-day festival of guitar heroes and dance- tent DJs, and after a few shaky years, the brand has become an award-winning template for major U.S. outdoor concerts.
The Coachella franchise, which even has spawned an all-star concert film, has put major rock moments on its stages, among them molten performances by Nine Inch Nails and the White Stripes, reunion-spirited sets by the Cure and Pixies and a curious (and quick) set by Madonna in a crowd-jammed dance tent.
There’s no word on the lineup for next year’s Coachella. It will be spread over three days for the first time, April 27 to 29.
The following week, the country-music newcomer will draw a clientele that almost certainly will skew older. Tollett said he has oral agreements with a number of other major country names to perform but declined to name them until the dotted lines are signed.
