Chapter 00 of 15 · about 6 min read · updated October 2026

00Prologue: a polo field and a boycott

The festival exists because a band would not pay Ticketmaster's service charges. On November 5, 1993, Pearl Jam played a polo field in Indio, two hours east of Los Angeles, to about 25,000 people.¹² The promoter was Goldenvoice, a punk company from LA, and it was its first show on the grounds.³ Paul Tollett, one of the two men running it, has said that night showed him what the site could hold.⁴

He did not do anything about it for six years. But this is where the story starts: a grunge band in a fight, a promoter willing to drive, and a field that had never held a rock show.²

The fight

Pearl Jam wanted its tickets cheap, and the fight over that went fully public the following spring. In a memo to the Justice Department dated May 6, 1994, the band accused Ticketmaster of being a monopoly, and the department opened an investigation.⁵ On June 30, 1994, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament testified to a House subcommittee about "the imposition of excessive service charges."⁶ They told Congress the band wanted tickets capped at $18 and service charges at 10%, printed separately from the price.⁶ Pearl Jam ended up cancelling its 1994 summer tour.⁵

The Indio show came seven months before the testimony, while the campaign was already under way.³ Ticketmaster's deals covered the big Southern California venues, so band management went looking for somewhere outside them. They picked a site Wikipedia's account of the tour describes as "untested and under-developed."² NPR's version is simpler: Goldenvoice helped Pearl Jam find other places to play during the boycott, and one of them was the Empire Polo Club.⁴

The Ringer quotes Eddie Vedder on the move into the desert:

"You gotta run pretty far to get some space for yourself these days."³

The night itself

It was not a smooth gig. Five Horizons, the fan archive that logs every Pearl Jam show, notes cold weather and parking trouble, and a show that had first been planned for the LA area.¹ The openers were Weapon of Choice, Eleven and American Music Club.¹

The crowd threw shoes. They started during the openers. One hit Jack Irons' bass drum during Eleven's set, and he stopped the song.¹ By the headline set the band was playing from behind its own amps to stay out of range.¹²

The man who founded Goldenvoice was not there. Gary Tovar had been arrested in March 1991 and was in prison by 1993, on marijuana charges.⁸ The company was being run by the two people he had handed it to: Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen.³ Palm Springs Life credits the pair with making the deal for the show.⁹ The next chapter is about them.

The polo club

The Empire Polo Club was six years old in 1993. Alexander "Al" Haagen III founded it in 1987. He had taken up polo in 1983, and he was the patron, the player who owns and pays for a team, of the Empire team for 30 years.¹⁰ Under him the club hosted the first 40-goal tournament in the US, the top level of the sport, and the first US Women's Open.¹⁰

The money behind it was shopping centers. Haagen was vice chairman of Alexander Haagen Properties, the family's shopping-center developer, which built its first center in Rosemead in 1963.¹¹ Palm Springs Life says the club was built as "a home for his favorite sport," with a dozen grass fields, two exercise tracks and stables.⁹ The Museum of Polo counts 11 fields.¹⁰ Polo people count fields differently depending on who is asking. Chapter 3 has the full tally.

Two details from the club's old life are still there every April. One is the rose garden along the south side of Field 3, the main Sunday polo field. The club's own site put it at about 8,000 bushes in 107 varieties, with a life-size bronze called She Gave Her Best by Rich Roenisch.¹² The other is the grass. Polo needs it, and the club watered the fields 11 months a year. Goldenvoice took over the watering in April.¹³ Haagen explained the priority in 2015:

"Polo ponies run on grass. They don't run on dirt."¹³

That is the deal in one line. The festival happens on grass because horses need grass. Rock shows on dirt lots are a different, dustier business.

Tollett has never hidden how much the arrangement mattered. In 2021, when Goldenvoice took over the club year-round, he said "Goldenvoice has had a unique relationship with Empire Polo Club for over twenty-five years," and "It's immeasurable how much we've learned from Al Haagen."¹⁴ Twenty-five years back from 2021 is roughly the Pearl Jam show.

The name is a typo

The festival is called Coachella. It is not in Coachella.

The name started as a mistake. In 1901, a railroad worker named Jason Rector, who had cleared the trees at a spot known as Woodspur, proposed calling the new townsite "Conchilla," Spanish for "little shell," after the fossil shells in the ground.⁴ The developers sent the name off to be printed in their prospectus. It came back as "Coachella." Rather than hold up the announcement, they kept it.⁴ The town did not become a city until 1946.⁴

The historian Jeff Crider puts it plainly to NPR:

"'Coachella' was a mistake."⁴

The valley took the name, and the festival took it from the valley. Its full name is the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and it has been held in Indio, the next city over, since 1999.⁴ The city of Coachella is next door. Chapter 14 goes there.

Why Indio

Put the pieces together and the choice makes sense, even if nobody planned it.

• It was outside the system. Pearl Jam needed a site that was not a Ticketmaster venue, and a private polo club was not one.²⁴
• It was already a big lawn. A dozen irrigated grass fields is a lot of room, and the grass gets watered whether there is a concert or not.⁹¹³
• It had an owner who said yes. The festival has been on Haagen's land since its first year, and Stagecoach since 2007.¹⁴
• It had proof. About 25,000 people drove into the desert in November for one band.¹ That was the number Tollett carried around for six years.

He was not counting on the heat, or on how few of them would come back the first time. That is the next chapter.

Still open

• The original 1993 LA Times review (Steve Hochman, "Pearl Jam Blossoms in Desert," Nov 8, 1993) is behind a wall this project couldn't get past. If you have a copy, the attendance figure and any word on ticket prices would help.
• Who first called Goldenvoice about the polo field, the band's management or Tollett? The sources credit both.