My Morning Jacket's Jim James / Photo by Mark C. Austin

There may be people who only attended the third session of the 2008 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, but as a wise man once observed about his questionably unclothed behavior on a famed bathroom floor, "It Wasn't Me." So the remains of Days 1 and 2 -- The French Fry Diet, crap sleep, SPF 45 caked on like Steven Tyler's mascara, temperatures reportedly reaching a singeing 112 degrees, feeble showering, lost glasses/cell phone/dignity -- inevitably mar any memory of what occurred on Day 3. This is no grievance, since I was giddy at the flurry of activity all weekend, but eventally your physical shell slows to a crawl, turns on you with a tense glint, and shuts the whole charade down.

"Forget it, [your name here]. It's Coachella."

That moment happened for me when I hopped on a golf cart headed to the Sahara Tent with a couple of other stragglers -- one of whom was straggling a bit less because she'd just gulped a mysterious green capsule and was commenting on how the muddy road looked like a glowing, beautifully textured tapestry, or some shit. As we dodged what looked like members of Gogol Bordello (scarfs, mustaches, heavily accented cries of "Fuuuck!"), I glanced to my right and saw an enormous creature parked backstage, with "Fear Builds Walls" crudely scrawled on its side. It looked like an oversize piggy bank (is that where they're keeping Prince's $4 million?), but peering through the haze, I realized it was, of course, Roger Waters' infamous inflated porker.

Now I could've experienced a sense of wonder, like a child watching the Macy's parade balloons get blown up for the first time on Manhattan's Upper West Side the night before Thanksgiving. But for some reason -- a mix of fatigue, hunger, and a general loathing for Pink Floyd's never-ending bombastic trough-feeding -- the pig came to represent everything that Coachella shouldn't be, yet could easily become. The bloat. The greed. The baby-boomer rehash. The "anti-capitalist" rhetoric and imagery via monied hacks. The pointlessly boorish political theater (Waters hired a plane to drop thousands of flyers urging locals to vote for Barack Obama; and Coachella had to hire a crew to remove the litter from the yards and gardens of the lavish vacation homes that ring the site).

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In a desire to always top themselves and never ever sell any fewer tickets than the year before, the organizers have to keep upping the ante. Seek out a buffoonish, wannabe-activist movie star like Sean Penn and indulge his crackpot, pseudo-Merry Prankster, bio-diesel, cross-country caravan of 300 "young people" to New Orleans "to do whatever they feel inspired to do." And give him a main-stage platform to pat himself on the back. And set the festival adrift on Waters' massive quadraphonic, surround-sound, greatest-hits video barge, with the politicized pig supposedly tearing away from its tethers by mistake (and ultimately landing in nearby La Quinta's Hideaway Golf Club, in "crumpled heaps of shredded, spray-painted plastic," according to report by The Desert Sun). Of course, it's difficult to believe that the whole wayward-swine incident wasn't just a planned publicity stunt, since the pig has a suspicious history of evading its moorings, even back in 1976 during a photo shoot for Pink Floyd's Animals album, when it caused flights at London's Heathrow Airport to be delayed and police helicopters were sent up to retrieve it.

But as the golf car puttered on down the service road, past the endless rows of palm trees, I decided to put all that tsoris behind, relax, and try to get lost in the sparkly fantasia of lights that my 'shroomy sidekick was rapturing on about. "It's like Christmas and New Year's and Mardi Gras all at once, like colors exploding..."

Eyes. Closed. Breathe.

OK, let's proceed.