For the next two weekends – April 11-13 and April 18-20 – a crowd of 99,000 music fans will gather on a polo field in the Southern California city of Indio for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
In its 15th year, the festival will host OutKast”s first show in almost a decade on Friday night, with Muse headlining on Saturday and Arcade Fire on Sunday. Over two weekends and across five stages, 166 acts will play. Check out the complete 2014 lineup here.
The festival”s humble beginnings started with two days in 1999 and a crowd of 10,000 attendees. The inaugural lineup boasted festival-favorite the Chemical Brothers, plus Beck, Tool, Morrissey and Rage Against the Machine. But despite initial buzz, organizers lost money and had to skip the next year.
The Chemical Brothers returned in 2001, along with Jane's Addiction, Paul Oakenfold, Weezer, Fatboy Slim – a lineup that showed the festival was early in embracing electronic music headliners.
By 2002, Coachella included the option of on-site camping and, in 2003, started ramping up the large-scale visual art that it is now revered for. In 2004 – with the help of the newly-reunited Pixies – the event sold out for the first time. Coachella continued to sell out most years, leading organizers to expand the event to two identical weekends starting in 2012.
Too many big names have graced the Coachella stage to list them all here, but below we”ve captured the festival”s most massive moments to date. Did your favorite make the list?