Ian Mackaye

This weekend's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio offers so many tempting musical choices that it's both glorious and maddening. With more than 75 acts on competing stages over two days (plus art and film components), resign yourself to not being able to see everything. Don't fret. The endless choices are part of the fun. Even if you work out a schedule that allows you to catch most of your favorites, be prepared for last-minute changes of mind.

Back in July, the Long Beach-based soul-punk quartet Cold War Kids played a semi-secret show at R Bar, a windowless, nautically themed club in Koreatown. The young and besotted crowd climbed over tables, chairs and the bar in hopes of getting a better view of the band bobbing on the floor. Singer Nathan Willett held court with righteous wails, while behind him bassist Matt Maust, drummer Matthew Aveiro and guitarist Jonathan Russell prowled the floor as if looking for a fistfight.

When Tim Armstrong's brother Greg first returned from military service in Iraq, the Rancid frontman knew something was wrong. After all he'd seen in the war, Greg couldn't relate to his family and friends the way he used to, and Armstrong could tell that the pain of re-integrating into civilian life had created a gulf between them.

WE GOT THE NEUTRON BOMB: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, By Marc Spitz with Brendan Mullen, Three Rivers Press: 296 pp., $13 paper DANCE OF DAYS: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, By Mark Andersen At the art school where I teach, the kids still wear purple mohawks. They practice extreme piercing and happily regard themselves as anarchists. They are, in brief, punks. Punk--the music, the fashion, the philosophy, the attitude--is surprisingly central to our era.

Ian MacKaye bounced a black rubber ball on the asphalt parking lot outside the Hollywood Palladium, where in a few hours his band Fugazi would headline a sold-out abortion-rights benefit concert. They'd stay in town to pack the place again the following night. In the bright afternoon sun, MacKaye explained that he found the ball the night Fugazi played its first show at a small community hall in Washington, D.C., in 1987, and he's carried it around ever since. Is it for good luck?

When directors of a certain type of hip noir movie want to demonstrate that their protagonists have penetrated the heart of the nightlife underground, a show by "industrial" rock 'n' roll band Nine Inch Nails might be the kind of thing they have in mind. Nine Inch Nails' slick, alienating spectacle is kind of flashy in spite of itself, and it leavens the usual gloomy thudding with hooks, choruses, melodies and other bourgeois stuff like that.

The scar in Rich Webb's back is dark pink and puckered, a souvenir of the night in 1995 he was attacked by a crowd of Straight Edgers. They carved an X, the movement's signature, just above Webb's waist. The doctor said a knife must have been used to slice his flesh so cleanly. They cut him for smoking pot. Straight Edge could be every frightened parent's dream.

There's just one place to be at 9 p.m. Saturday: watching Radiohead's only U.S. appearance this year (God and Thom Yorke's voice willing). But what about 2 p.m.? How does even a savvy rock fan choose among Sahara Hotnights, the Evens, the Stills and Kinky? And what about 5 p.m.? Do you line up for the (International) Noise Conspiracy or Black Keys or Death Cab for Cutie or Savath & Savalas? Relax.