Author: Max Hammer

The festival, now officially the All Points West Festival (Aug. 8-10), just released the lineup – including Radiohead , Underworld, Cat Power, Jack Johnson, Black Kids, CSS, Animal Collective (shown below), Andrew Bird, Metric, The Go! Team, Rodrigo Y Gabriel, The New Pornographers, Kings of Leon and many others.

Some festival fans in the New York City metro area (which includes the venue location of Jersey City – just across the river from lower Manhattan – with amazing views of the city and Statue of Liberty) are calling a coup of the historically annual Vineyard Festival.

Vineyard has been cancelled because it was Coachella’d from Liberty State Park (photo; bottom left) until 2009.

From a money-making and fan-demand perspective, it only makes sense to create a “Coachella East” based on the enormous success of the famous west coast, three-day outdoor camping Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the desert of Indio, California (read the latest on Coachella lineup, tickets and breaking news), which has attracted some of the biggest names of indie and mainstream rock for the past half decade.

Apparently, the announcement of ‘Coachella East’ by Goldenvoice/AEG Live effectively forced Vineyard promoters Festival Republic and C3 Productions (who also produce Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, Glastonbury and others) to cancel the Vineyard Music Festival for 2008.

Perhaps more telling is the fact that ‘Coachella East’ was in the works for months now, and through the online rumor mill was scheduled a couple of months ago – deliberately or not – on the very same dates as Vineyard, August 8 to August 10.

Among many speculators, Rolling Stone magazine recently reported – incorrectly – the dates of the Vineyard Music Festival, or ‘Coachella East’ would be August 10-12, 2008.

“We had to get our egos in check and say, ‘Let’s do [sic] the smart decision, get off these dates and go for an isolated (date) so we can build this thing without having to look over our shoulders,”‘ C3 partner Charles Attal said.

“We don’t want to be compared to all the other festivals and who’s playing where. We want to build this thing right, organically from the ground up.”

Organically? Ticket prices for a single day pass are $89 a pop. Three-day passes sell at a hefty $258, plus Ticketmaster’s ridiculous fees (but they are the sole distributor of the tickets; Coachella organizers, along with Goldenvoice/AEG Live, must have a deal with Ticketmaster on both coasts it appears.

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But there’s hope, if you’re willing to throw it down.

For folks only interested in single-day tickets, competitive bidding is underway on eBay, and for sale on Craigslist. Of course you can expect people to hold out in posting for sale their tickets until closer to the festival opening day (April 24).

Even in a recession, people will decide to go at the last minute and shell out for the so-called ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experience of Coachella (even though logic says it’ll be around for years to come).

If you simply cannot find, or do not want to pay the inflated prices for single tickets, I strongly recommend getting a three-day pass now before they sell out. It is a pisser that the three-day passes are a ridiculous $269 each.

Nevertheless, once they are gone for the official price, they will be much more valuable in the next couple of months.

Also, when you are buying the three-day pass from the official website, you have the option to add the flat fee of $55 for a three-day camp site, if they are still available. Campsites, because they are reasonably priced (but have many restrictions and security), also usually sell out quickly.

A big part for this is because the average hotel room in the area, if you can find one at this point goes for almost $300 a night right now. As the scalpers do, hotels will take advantage of ‘last minuters’ and block out a set of rooms so that in the days leading up to the opening of the festival they can sell them for twice as much.

Here’s Coachella 2008’s complete line-up of confirmed artists. Check out the line-up, dates and poster.

Head’s up: Rooms in the Indio area are almost gone. See map of town with accommodations listed and a map of the region.

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