http://popwatch.ew.com/po...esert.html

What a difference a day makes. Friday, Coachella had probably the weakest-drawing headliner in its nine-year history, in the form of Jack Johnson. Given the sparse turnout, you started to fear for the future of the festival. Saturday, they had, in Prince, the most potent show-closer the festival has had or likely ever will have. And suddenly, he didn’t look like the only genius around; so, too, did the person who booked him.

Prince and Johnson were both calculated risks, artists with huge fan bases who nonetheless wouldn’t seem to immediately fit in with Coachella’s indie-rock ethos. The big difference: One of them is indisputably one of the great performers of our shared lifetimes, a galvanizing presence with a deep catalog and history of leaving awe in his wake, and arguably even—if you look at the full scope of 20th and 21st century musicianship—the Last of the Great Entertainers. And the other, um, isn’t. (After the jump, get the full scoop on Prince's performance -- and his "no requests" policy.)


Not that there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm right at the front of the stage for Johnson’s climactic performance, where there were a few thousand extremely enthusiastic fans packed tight and, when the overhead screens caught sight of them, cheering wildly; it was just behind them that you saw the kind of wide open spaces that once made the American West so inviting to European immigrants.

Now, it’s altogether likely that these few thousand diehard Johnson fans were people who wouldn’t have otherwise bought a three-day pass to Coachella, given the lack of any other similar band among the 100-plus scheduled acts, so maybe his booking wasn’t a total bust. And you really can’t blame organizers for putting him on the bill…well, you can, given what an utterly lackluster performer he is, but I mean commercially speaking. The guy has sold more albums than anybody this year, and to the extent that he’s seen as kind of a poor man’s Dave Matthews, it’d be easy to assume that Johnson would be the one reliable stadium-filler to come along in rock in the last 20 years. But it’s not clear what Johnson’s ultimate business legacy will be, beyond having given SNL a legitimate reason to keep Andy Samberg employed. He’s an amiable presence who doesn’t deserve a lot of hate, but who's destined to seem underwhelming in anything bigger or less chemically fueled than a smoke-filled 2,500-seat venue. Well, now we all know, right?

Lesson No. 2: If you bill Prince, they will come. But until about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, even this seemingly self-evident lesson was in doubt. Because up through the late-afternoon set by Death Cab for Cutie, who had the last sunlit mainstage performance of the day, things were still looking a little spooky out there. And after sitting through the okay but ultimately enervating Death Cab set in 100-degree-plus heat (what did anybody ever see in these guys, again? I’m still waiting to have it explained to me), I couldn’t blame anybody who’d bought a three-day pass but decided to just show up around sundown on Saturday.

Once Kraftwerk took the stage at dusk, however, the mainstage crowd instantly swelled to at least three times what it’d been for any other act in the preceding day and a half of music, and any fears that there wouldn’t be a Coachella 2009 immediately subsided. Even Rilo Kiley and Mark Ronson, on the secondary outdoor stage, and Hot Chip and M.I.A. in one of the tents, were suddenly maxing out their limited viewing areas with crowds that looked bigger than the previous mainstage audiences. Portishead, following Kraftwerk, brought still more attendees who sucked in all the angst that Prince would soon wash away. And then, at last, it was time for…the Time!

Yes, Prince’s show actually began with a “Prince’s protégés” mini-set, with two songs by the semi-reunited the Time and one more by Sheila E. Then, with Sheila still on percussion, Prince launched into a cover of Santana's instrumental "Soul Sacrifice." At about this point, attendees may have been considering the implications of Prince’s opening remarks, when he promised that he would get a party underway “under one condition: that you let me pick the music.” (You would think that the millions of dollars he’s rumored to have gotten for the gig would be condition enough for a party, without any additional concessions demanded of the audience.) Other than literally letting the kids in the front row know that he wouldn’t be taking requests, did he mean to establish that he’d be doing one of his jam-oriented shows, light on the oldies, as opposed to one of his greatest-hits shows? Because Lord knows, and fans do too, that you don’t always know which you’re going to get.

But, happily, this ended up being a pretty crowd-pleasing combination of both kinds of Prince-concert prototypes, with a set list that managed to sate both first-timers and TAFKAP-aholics, if not send them home delirious. After that aforementioned instrumental, Prince launched into “1999” and followed it up with partial or full versions of “I Feel for U,” “Controversy,” “U Got the Look,” “Cream,” the great “Anotherloverholenyohead” (along with “Shhh,” one of only a couple halfway-obscure album tracks), and “Musicology” (the only selection from one of this decade’s Prince albums).

“Little Red Corvette” was a particular highlight, in an extended rendition that had the verses slowed down nearly to an R&B crawl before picking up with the expected tempo for the choruses. Weirdly, he covered Radiohead’s “Creep” but changed the words in ways that weren’t always audible. For much of the song, Prince altered the lyrics to shift them away from the first-person, singing them as “You wish you were special…” instead of “I wish…” And this made a certain amount of sense: Could as renowned an egotist as Prince really sing about feeling insecure or having feelings of self-loathing, right after he interrupted “Cream” to give us an amusingly self-aggrandizing aside about how “I wrote this song while I was looking in the mirror”? But toward the end of “Creep,” he generously changed the pronoun usage again, to make it “we” instead of “you.” Ah, Prince, you shouldn’t have. Then came another extended cover: Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” done up as a gospel number, sung entirely by a backup singer that we later learned was Ledisi, the fairly obscure R&B stylist who rose to greater fame when she was nominated for a best new artist Grammy this year. Like the song or not, she killed on it.

Then it was back to Prince—back in canary yellow after a costume change—for a “Seven” that led right into the Beatles’ “Come Together,” followed by the only predictable part of the night: encores of “Purple Rain” and “Let’s Go Crazy.”

One complaint I have at festivals is how little evidence there is among some of the performers that they know they’re at a festival; the bigger the headliner, the more they’re apt to just plow through their usual touring show, without any concessions for the uniqueness of the night. But Prince took advantage of the fact that he was at a “rock festival” to show off his rock & roll guitar prowess at the kind of length I’ve never seen him do before, at least outside of an all-instrumental club set. (The last time I saw Prince, I was standing eight feet away from him at Hollywood’s Hotel Roosevelt as he finished up a jazz-fusion set at about 6 in the morning for the 30 or so of us who remained. This time, there were about 50,000 people between me and him, but I wouldn’t trade either experience.) If the guy had done nothing in his life but aspire to be the lead guitarist in a band, he’d be a Hall of Famer, but there are so many other aspects to his genius that that’s not always the one he favors. But on Saturday night, he didn’t bogart the Stratocaster, interrupting nearly every song—except for the most truncated or medley-ized ones—for an impressive workout, even showing off a couple of times by soloing just with his left hand on the neck while he waved the right around in the air freely, mock-conducting his own virtuosity.

Was it the perfect Prince set? There may be no such thing, since his catalog and capabilities are so vast that diehard fans are likely to come away just a little disappointed by some song or strain he doesn’t get to. If I were to nitpick, I’d say the “Come Together” cover, which sounds ideal on paper, went on a bit too long in its crowd-participatory elements, and was a wan closer for the main part of the set. Also, unlike perhaps 99.9% of the crowd (I'm guessing), I'd rather hear something less rote than “The Best of Purple Rain” for the encore segment.

In the end, though, the only serious drawback was the sound—or lack of it. Just a few hours earlier, we’d marveled at the magnificence of the audio setup during Kraftwerk’s performance, a true showcase of how good the sound can be in this large a setup, and a teaser for how spectacular Roger Waters was likely to sound in his Sunday-night slot. But when Prince came on, the volume seemed diminished by half, and I had to go plant myself right in front of a bank of speakers to feel like I was at a rock show. I doubt that Coachella’s producers meant to deliberately punish us. Prince was scheduled to go on at 10:45, and didn’t actually take the stage till 11:10—which, I can tell you from experience, is awfully punctual by his royal standards. But, supposedly, there’s a midnight curfew for the mainstage. Since some of the acts in the dance tents go on till 2 or 2:30 in the morning, it’s reasonable to surmise that any such curfew has more to do with not tormenting the sleeping residents of Indio rather than following union regulations.

My guess is that, rather than cut the volume at the stroke of 12 and have tens of thousands of people go “What the…,” the festival preemptively turned Prince down from the very beginning. For anyone up close, it ultimately didn’t matter, but the folks who usually watch headlining sets from a distance needed to overcome their claustrophobia and get into the thick of it to have any hope of enjoying the show.

And then it was onto Sunday, and some of us felt just a little ruined, for the moment, for more indie-rock, because it's tough to watch Prince and then see just about anybody else and feel like the musical bar hasn't been set awfully low. But then again, as we said, what a difference a day makes, or the forgetfulness that comes with a night of sleep...

All right, Prince completists. Here’s the full set list (and no, he didn’t perform the dirty new song he’d premiered on Leno just the night before):

The Bird (sung by Morris Day)
Jungle Love (sung by Day)
The Glamorous Life (sung by Sheila E.)
Soul Sacrifice (Santana cover)
1999
I Feel For U
Controversy
Housequake (brief excerpt)
Little Red Corvette
Musicology
Cream
U Got the Look
Shh (from The Gold Experience—yes, I had to look it up)
Anotherloverholenyohead
Creep (Radiohead cover)
Angel (Sarah McLachlan cover, sung by Ledisi)
7
Come Together (Beatles cover)
Purple Rain
Let's Go Crazy