Billie Eilish looks like she’s about to lose her mind from the excitement. It’s the opening weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, and the singer is standing behind the stage at Do LaB, wearing a light blue basketball jersey and loose shorts, bouncing to the rhythm of a DJ set. In just a few moments, Eilish will come out to dance and party on a stage filled with her friends and at least 15,000 fans spread out on the grass in front of her.
His brother and key collaborator, Finneas, is there too, wearing sunglasses as the sun sets behind the desert mountains. And their mother, Maggie Baird, takes photos from her phone. With a crowd of friends and artists, little girls and several photographers, Eilish takes the stage as a DJ plays classic G-funk from Dr. Dre, then Rage Against the Machine and Eminem before getting to the main event – listening to songs from Eilish’s upcoming album, Hit me hard and softincluding the unreleased tracks “Lunch”, “L’Amour De Ma Vie” and “Chihiro”.
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Eilish isn’t here to sing, however. She spends her hour on stage mainly dancing happily to the music and interacting with fans. At one point, Eilish grabs a vintage video camera and films the smiling faces looking up at her in the crowd. It’s the kind of surprise appearance that has become commonplace on the Do LaB stage, which last weekend also saw Diplo, Katy Perry and Anderson .Paak.
While Eilish’s appearance — announced via social media an hour before — has become another high-profile event at Coachella, the Do LaB scene is less about the big names and more about the mission of bringing a bit of underground culture to Indio . Since its first year in 2005, Do LaB has offered a weekend-long celebration of art and music, drawing on its roots with Burning Man, the artistic gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Do LaB was founded by brothers Jesse, Josh and Dede Flemming, who also run the annual Lightning in a Bottle festival in Central California. (May’s LiB festival will feature a cross-generational lineup of artists, including Skrillex, Labrinth, Lane 8, James Blake, MIA, ISOxo and Fatboy Slim.).
At Coachella, the Do LaB stage is meant to be “a mix between art and architecture,” Josh says, with a shaded location this year under curtains of red, blue, white and orange fabric blowing in the wind. And there’s always room on stage for a crowd of people besides the performer, further blurring the line between stage and audience.
It’s now a well-established attraction at Coachella, with its core audience of fans spending quality time over the weekend at Do LaB.
During its first year, music was barely part of the Do LaB experience. The Flemming brothers installed a 60-foot geodesic dome, a water wall and several pieces of art. It was designed as a visual and sensory escape from the rest of Coachella. A few friends were there as DJs.
“It was so hot that people started coming in and just rinsing their heads and trying to drink it. Like, don’t drink that water! Jesse remembers with a laugh. “Then we were like, oh, people just really want to get wet. So we grabbed the hose, connected it to a pump and a 55 gallon barrel of water and started spraying people with the hose. That was kind of the beginning: Oh, this is our thing.
Fans were often drawn to the water, but the Do LaB scene as a musical backdrop also grew. While the physical stage has evolved in wildly diverse directions over nearly two decades in Indio, Do LaB remains a vital part of the fan experience at Coachella, founded in 1999 by Los Angeles promoter Goldenvoice Productions.
“Goldenvoice started as punk rock and we are breaking every rule imaginable and pushing the boundaries,” Dede explains. “They give us an inch and we take a mile. Before, we had to go around the field late at night, when everyone wasn’t working, and remove the heavy equipment. So we had more resources to do what we wanted to do. We always do it.
“Creatively, we try to push the boundaries,” adds Josh, who is Jesse’s twin brother. “What we do is very unorthodox, unconventional. It takes a lot more time and a lot of work. It’s a challenge. We try to be true to our vision and just take it to the next level.
Hours before Eilish’s appearance, the three brothers climb into a vintage black limousine parked behind the stage. A shiny lightning bolt is attached to the hood ornament, but the car’s days as a luxury vehicle are in the past. He also sat in the desert heat all day and the anemic air conditioning doesn’t help much.
The Flemmings sit side by side in the back, on the leather seat, while a DJ set blares outside. It’s stuffy inside the car.
“We wanted to get an old Donald Trump-style limousine and we found it in Oakland. It was five thousand dollars,” Jesse remembers. “We’re like, we can’t not buy this for five thousand dollars. He is in top form. » He grabs the drinks machine and turns on a light.
“Last night I went to camp…and we were slowly doing loops around our area and a group of security guards came running out and asked, ‘Who are you?’ » What is this limousine doing here? » he adds with a laugh, describing the general “renegade” attitude of the three brothers. “We still do it. We just can’t help it.
The Flemmings grew up in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, a small rural town with a population of 1,400 per hour outside of Philadelphia. This is Amish country, with cornfields and pastures for cows, horses and buggies. And the Flemings had to leave to find themselves as a creative force.
“We just left town because there wasn’t enough stimulation for us,” says Jesse, who was the first to head west in late 1998, followed a few years later by the two brothers. “We had a lot of problems. We were probably going to get arrested too, but we moved to LA and fell into the rave scene and started throwing parties right off the bat.
Their first visits to Burning Man introduced them to a culture of art and freedom that would remain the foundation of their work with Do LaB and Lightning in a Bottle. They discovered a different path that had not occurred to them before.
“We went to Burning Man and it really blew our minds,” says Jesse. “We were following this path in life and then all of a sudden it’s a sharp left turn. We went home, quit our jobs, and were just making art.
The name Do LaB comes from their downtown Los Angeles loft, which they were told was once a meth lab.
“There really was no idea or master plan,” Jesse says. “We started having parties and building art and people started asking us to come and decorate their parties and we needed to be able to collect checks to get payments. So we had to start a business to open a bank account. The only reason it exists is just so we can build art, do our thing.
Each brother has a specific role in the organization: Josh designs the physical locations, Jesse books the music, and Dede directs the production. Each leads a team of workers who create the Do LaB stage, working non-stop in the days leading up to the doors opening at Coachella, then joining the party crowd to celebrate their creation.
“We want it to look completely chaotic – like it’s out of control even though it was completely under control the whole time,” says Jesse. “We’re just kids from Pennsylvania. Of all the people in the world, how can we have our own stage at Coachella? We built it from the ground up and they come back to us every year. For some reason they let everyone go and left, but they kept us.
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