After nearly a month of speculation, it’s official.
East Coast jam band Phish will perform a highly anticipated three-day festival over Halloween weekend at Empire Polo Club in Indio.
Tickets for the festival, which will take place Oct. 30-Nov. 1 at the same site as the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals, will go on sale at 10 a.m. Monday. A three-day pass will be $199 plus service charges.
Daily parking is free, but campers will be charged $15 per car and $125 per RV.
Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based promoter of the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals at Empire, said the event is expected to draw similar crowds to their spring festivals.
That means up to 50,000 people per day could come to see a single band that has never had a hit single.
A Goldenvoice official said it had been trying to book Phish to perform at Empire for “a couple months,” but only learned Wednesday it has apparently beaten out the Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas for the rights.
Local hotels have been booked since late June in anticipation of the festival, the group’s first since their Coventry, Vt., festival after an announced breakup in 2004.
Heather Guthrie, regional manager for the Indio Travelodge, hadn’t heard of Phish before fans started calling. “I love them now,” she said, “because they sold out my hotel.”
Phish has been known as the world’s biggest jam band since the 1995 breakup of the Grateful Dead because of their long improvisations. Their Millennium Celebration at the Big Cypress Indian Reservation in the Florida Everglades drew 85,000 people — more than concerts by Sting and Barbra Streisand — and featured a seven-and-a-half 7-hour set from midnight to sunrise.
Formed out of the University of Vermont in 1983 by guitarists Trey Anastasio and Jeff Holdsworth, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman, their first gig was a Halloween dance in the basement of the ROTC dormitory.
They developed a cult following before releasing a major label album and became one of the first bands to create a Usenet newsgroup in 1991.
Their first two-day festival, The Clifford Ball at a decommissioned Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y., drew more than 70,000 people in 1996 and established a tradition of using installation art to create movie backlot-type scenes.
They began a tradition in 1994 of celebrating Halloween in a “musical costume” by playing another band’s album in its entirety.
They’ve performed The Beatles “White Album,” Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” The Who’s “Quadrophenia,” The Velvet Underground’s “Loaded” and Talking Heads’ “Remain In The Light.”
A Goldenvoice official who didn’t want to be quoted said Phish will bring its huge props to this Halloween party, and there has been online speculation the band might perform Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
Monica Torline contributed to this report.
