By Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times (MCT)
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 -
LOS ANGELES -- Rapper Dr. Dre will close the 2012 edition of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, to be held for the first time over two consecutive weeks in mid-April. Headliners for the multi-weekend, six-day affair include rock acts the Black Keys, Radiohead and the Shins, as well hip-hop and dance acts Snoop Dogg, the Swedish House Mafia and Kaskade, among others.
The festival will host a number of artists on the reunion circuit. Brit-pop band Pulp, hard-core Swedish punk band Refused, Mike Watt’s post-Minutemen band fIREHOSE and experimental Texas rockers At the Drive-In are among those on the comeback trail.
Sunday night headliner Dr. Dre is something of a revival act himself. Though he’s stayed in the public eye via his branding efforts and production work, the Compton, Calif.-raised artist has not released an album since 1999 and has spent much of the last decade working on his long-rumored "Detox."
Coachella, run by AEG-owned concert promoter Goldenvoice, will be held over two consecutive weekends, the first on April 13-15 and the second on April 20-22. Each weekend is a separate ticket, priced at $285 and on sale Friday. Paul Tollett, who heads Goldenvoice and has organized the festival since its 1999 inception, said last year that the expansion was in reaction to the increased demand for tickets.
"The thought of this selling out super quick, and the only people who get to go are the people who bought the first minute or bought tickets for more than they sold for, that didn’t seem great to us," Tollett said. "We didn’t want to go with more people and ruin the experience. We can’t add a midnight show, and we didn’t want to add another city or raise the ticket price. So we decided to add another weekend."
The lineup was unveiled Monday on the Goldenvoice and Coachella Facebook pages. Tickets were initially sold for the 2012 festival nearly a year in advance of the event. In previous years, tickets were not sold until the lineup had been revealed, and were sold via Ticketmaster. Tickets were once again priced at $269, not including service fees. Coachella will close with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on the two Sunday evenings, while rock acts will get top billing the other nights. The Black Keys will anchor a Friday that will also feature singer-songwriter Cat Power, reggae legend Jimmy Cliff and psychedelic electronic act M83. Radiohead will close the festival’s Saturday evenings, with indie star Bon Iver and reclusive rocker Jeff Mangum also on the bill.
Coachella is coming off its second-consecutive sell-out year, hosting approximately 90,000 people per day. The event, held at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, Calif., is considered the unofficial kickoff to the summer festival season.
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