Coachella in St. Louis: Make Your Own Spring Festival Without Leaving Home

Jason Stoff

Any excuse to run this photo, really.

The Coachella 2012 lineup is out, featuring the Black Keys, Radiohead, Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg and roughly half of Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011 list. But California is far away and three day passes (officially) cost your left eyeball and firstborn child. Fortunately, many of the Coachella highlights, including two of the three headliners, will be in St. Louis in the coming months. So, if you were to save the price of a pass and spend it on shows here in town, what exactly could that get you?

Currently, a three-day-pass will run you $285. Let's start with the things already on the books:

$49 to $69 Radiohead on March 9th at the Scottrade Center
$45 to $70* Black Keys on April 27th at the Chaifetz Arena
$22.50 M83 on May 2nd at the Pageant
$30 Andrew Bird on March 22nd at the Pageant
$36 to $51 Avicii on January 10 (today!) at the Pageant
$15 AWOLNATION on January 21 at Pop's Nightclub

That's a total of $197.50, leaving you almost $90 to spend on the club-level shows sure to be find their way here sometime in the next twelve months. You can find a list of the bands on this year's lineup that were here last year to get an idea. We'll say the average price of these sorts of shows (ones that will appear at the Firebird, Off Broadway, Old Rock House or the Luminary, for example) is $15. That gives you roughly six more to choose from.

Reactions to the lineup, as they always do for Coachella, did not fall in the middle. Coachella, like its massive festival brethren, swings hard for the fences -- huge ticket prices mean the lineups have to drop jaws. And whether this crop is jaw-dropping is a matter of opinion. We have to say we're impressed -- reunions by At the Drive-In and Refused, the creators of three of our favorite albums from last year in tUnE-yArDs, St. Vincent and M83 and plenty of eye-catching names toward the bottom of the bill.

But three day passes are $285 and they'll only get more expensive. Throw in fees, transportation, lodging and the rest and it's not hard to see why some people would be scoffing at anything less than a reanimation of the original lineup of the Beatles.

Coachella 2012 Bands that Came to St. Louis in 2011
Arctic Monkeys
Cat Power
The Black Angels
The Sheepdogs
Bon Iver
Destroyer
St. Vincent
Obderhofer
Florence & the Machine
Miike Snow
tUnE-yArDs
Borgore
araabMUZIK
The Black Lips
Fitz & the Tantrums

*Note: Prices based on tour average