Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival

Two of Saturday's big attention-getters at the opening day of the sixth Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were the return to action of Weezer and a generous infusion of hip-hop into the event's bloodstream for the first time. Sage Francis masked oddball MF Doom, feisty female rapper Jean Grae, and Toronto's K-Os, who delivered his sometimes Caribbean-flavored pieces in the Gobi Tent with a live band, were among the hip-hop acts, most of the underground variety.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is held on the lush expanse of the Empire Polo Field, but it's no walk in the park. Some tips for surviving: The jam Indio is not a big town. Coachella draws a lot of people, and they usually arrive in cars. No matter how you add up those factors, the result is traffic snarls. This year the promoters and venue worked with local officials to find some relief.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has been praised to the desert skies for redefining the American rock festival, but on Sunday the affair also tweaked the meaning of "record heat." When the DJ called Luckyiam capped a midday performance by flipping his vinyl into the crowd like ebony Frisbees, it was a gesture of frustration. "Why not toss them? They all melted -- they warped right on the turntable," he said of his set with the group Atmosphere. "I've never seen anything like it.

The sun was well on its way into the sky, the mercury was creeping toward triple digits -- and Coachella's campers were stirring. It was the morning of Day Two at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and Courtney Michael and Roni Whipple were trudging along the dusty, arid paths of this temporary city, lugging two prized commodities: a case of water and a bag of ice. Beads of sweat on Michael's brow were threatening to turn into a steady trickle.

IT was around 1 Saturday morning and the crowd, designer-denim clad and sporting the latest asymmetrical haircuts, was 500 strong. These revelers had made the cut to get into one of the hottest parties going. Shuttled to a remote spot in the desert near the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, they spent hours dancing to thunderous electronica and drinking free liquor beside an artificial lagoon.

If you need proof that the generational divide that has defined American pop since the rock era is vanishing along with the rock era itself, look no further than the top of the bill for this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival: Paul McCartney headlines the main stage Friday, April 17. (The other listed name likely to cause maximum excitement belongs to Leonard Cohen, the 74-year-old Zen grandpa of the singer-songwriter clan.

There is something that moves under My Morning Jacket's music -- and it is not just the reverb that singer Jim James has been accused of abusing, though the reverb can draw it out. It's the holy spirit of a great rock 'n' roll band, a tattered, strutting, insatiable relative to the Holy Spirit of Christianity. The Louisville, Ky., quintet perform rock 'n' roll in its most idealistic, preternatural state: fiery torch guitar, submerged reggae, battered country soliloquies, even a little '80s-inspired paranoia.

For about three seconds, Booker T. Jones' new album, "Potato Hole," is exactly what you'd expect. "Pound It Out," the opening track, begins with the unaccompanied notes of a Hammond organ, an instrument whose quavering sound was integral to the records Jones made in the 1960s, both as part of Booker T & the MGs and as part of the Stax Records house band that backed Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, among many others. Recorded in a converted movie theater in Memphis, Tenn.

IT'S a gross generality to say that kids today have an inborn sense of privilege. Disapproving (bitter?) elders say that privileged young people expect it all -- lifelong comfort, satisfaction without much effort, drive-through food and instant Internet access. Such judgments are silly.

You could say she was like a virgin when it comes to playing festivals, but Madonna acted as if she owned the place on Sunday in her much-anticipated, much-debated appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Haughty and swaggering (in a good way), the pop star made her first appearance at a music festival, and Coachella hosted its first bona fide pop star. For Madonna it was just another notch on her career belt, but for Coachella it was the dawning of a new era.