Live at the Real Coachella 2006

Sweat is a bookmark for memorable experiences

"When you grind through an important job interview, sweat is there. The best sex of your life—you probably sweat.

When I think of my best nights at The Trunk Space sweat is just about always part of it. It’s not at all a cliche to the heat in PHX AZ is unbearable and will cause you to ooze buckets of water. However when you run a business in the wild side of town about half of it comes from the daily fear that you won’t make rent, that a noise complaint will shut you down, the speakers will explode, a piece of art’ll get wrecked, or some idiot will start sh*t and punch you out.

The other gallon of sweat comes from being packed in a too-small room with all your scene brothers/sisters/others sharing an experience that no one else will ever get and may not even understand if they were there.

Like a lot of ideas cooked up by The Good Shows, The Real Coachella was a kind of snarky gag, just trying to take the air out of overdone, elite bullsh*t like a $1,000 concert in the middle of nowhere. Coachella in the desert--that other Coachella--is a worldwide destination owned by right-wing scumbags who spend millions to make billions*. The Real Coachella was a big nothing that for a decade became an absolute highpoint of the AZ DIY scene.

My first thought is to say that the joke of The Real Coachella just got lucky and landed right. The truth is though The Good Shows put a lot of work into it. It wasn’t JUST a snarky gag, but also an elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine where all the parts have to work PERFECTLY to transcend their cobbled together beginnings and become greater than the sum of their parts. And more often than not The Real Coachella was that. If you were capable of withstanding the whole day event chances are you’d have your transcendent experience, both personal and shared.

Maybe you’d just have a good time, and that’s enough too—never underestimate the greatness of just enjoying yourself. You wind up going home purged of anxieties with fun memories in their place, tired, covered in dust, stinking of sweat. Good times."

~JRC, co-founder The Trunk Space

*Please do not ever go to Coachella.