Coachella: thousands of fans and getting hotter every year

INDIO — No one can question Kevin Willock's pure determination to rock. Earlier this week under the slate-gray skies of a village called Burscough in western England, Willock and his friends set out on a pilgrimage. In Manchester they caught a flight to Boston, then another to Los Angeles. There was a few hours' sleep at a seedy motel before Friday morning, when the bleary group piled into a rental car and headed east into the furnace heat of the low desert.

As did Anthony Maldonado. The 17-year-old from Long Beach saved his allowance and joined his handyman father on the job to pay a scalper $100 for a one-day pass.

Pavel Malina, 33, and Daniel McLachlan, 24, drove in from Colorado, where they spent the winter as ski instructors. Their last-minute tickets were found on Ebay for $300 and $350.

All this just for a concert or, more accurately\o7,\f7\o7 the\f7 concert -- the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. "When we first heard about it, we just knew we had to come," the 23-year-old Willock said.

Willock, Maldonado and the rest joined thousands of music fans hailing from all 50 states and two dozen countries, some paying scalpers $1,000 for a 3-day pass with a face value of $250, some hitchhiking their way across interstate highways -- all to reach this small desert city that, just for this weekend, is the most important place in the world for rock music fans.

The festival began Friday, and will draw 60,000 people per day to the site for more than 30 hours of music from 122 bands as diverse as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arcade Fire, Bjork and Arctic Monkeys.

With two outdoor stages and three tents, it ends in the wee hours Monday with the much-anticipated reunion of Rage Against the Machine. It's a huge crowd, but the number could easily have been twice that, according to promoters, who capped sales weeks ago. "We could have sold 120,000, easily," said festival founder Paul Tollett.

The 41-year-old Tollett started in the concert business in the 1980s, handing out fliers for an independent L.A. promoter called Goldenvoice; by 1991 he was co-owner and a major figure in the local punk and alt-rock scene.

Coachella, the dream project he launched in 1999, lost money the first two years but then became a major success, with grosses this year expected to top $15 million.