Jim Ladd Comments On Desert Trip

11 May Jim Ladd Comments On Desert Trip

Read the whole article at the LA Times.

“It sounds like an extraordinary, historic event,” veteran classic-rock deejay Jim Ladd told The Times this week.

The participants also won’t be competing for concertgoers’ attention with 30 or 40 other bands that characteristically fill the lineups at daylong festival marathons. All performances would begin after sundown.

The proposed schedule has Dylan opening the event on Oct. 7, to be followed by the Rolling Stones. Neil Young & the Promise of the Real, the young band that’s been touring with him since 2014, would play on Oct. 8, followed by McCartney and his long-running touring band. The festival would conclude on Oct. 9 with sets by the Who, followed by Waters.

A key aim of the October concert is to focus on acts that still tour and/or record regularly, rather than to broker reunions, such as an appearance by Led Zeppelin, as many fans have inquired about since word of the concert surfaced last week, the source said.

After entering a long-term arrangement in 2013 to stage Coachella and Stagecoach at the Empire Polo Field through 2030, Goldenvoice officials were granted the right to have up to five events per year at the site. The twin Coachella weekends and Stagecoach account for three of those slots annually.

Jam band Phish played a weekend in Indio in October 2009 as part of the group’s Festival 8 tour.

In 2011, Goldenvoice gathered four of the biggest heavy metal bands in the world to top a Big Four hard-rock bill sandwiched between Coachella and Stagecoach.

Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax wooed fans of head-banger music to Indio for the single-day event, scheduled in part that year because Easter Sunday fell on the weekend immediately after Coachella. That normally would have been taken by Stagecoach, but Goldenvoice opted not to stage a full weekend festival in the region on that holiday.

Additionally, the firm experimented in 2012 with a pair of cruises dubbed S.S. Coachella, one to the Bahamas, the other to Jamaica. Some 2,800 fans cruised the Caribbean for three days highlighted by performances from Pulp, Hot Chip, Sleigh Bells, Girl Talk and other Coachella-worthy acts. The overhead cost of the cruise ship, however, made the venture unprofitable and talk of annual cruises was shelved.

Twitter: @RandyLewis2

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Copyright © 2016, Los Angeles Times
A version of this article appeared in print on April 20, 2016, in the Entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Remarkable evolution of Goldenvoice – How a punk upstart morphed into the mega promoter behind a three-night classic-rock blowout.” — Today’s paper |Subscribe