Bruce Fessier

The Desert Sun

Paul Tollett calls getting Lady Gaga to replace Beyoncé at Coachella next week “almost in the miracle bucket.”

Tollett, the managing owner-operator of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Desert Trip in Indio, described last year's coming together of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who to play Desert Trip in a small window between the excessive heat of September and the start of the Empire Polo Club season in November as “a miracle.”

FALL MIRACLE: How Desert Trip came about

Desert Trip went on to break Coachella’s concert box office record and supplant Coachella as the number one-rated music festival in North America by the concert industry watchdog, Pollstar.

Now, Lady Gaga will fill the Saturday headline slot at Coachella, with Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar topping the opening and closing nights April 14-16 and April 21-23 at the Empire Polo Club.

Gaga's presence was necessitated by Beyoncé's announcement that her family would be growing. Times two. She posted on social media on Feb. 1 that she and her husband, rap superstar Jay-Z, were expecting twins.

The reaction befitted Queen B's status as recording royalty. Her posts set an Instagram record with 8 million likes and spawned half a million tweets in just 45 minutes.

“We heard about it on Instagram, like everybody else,” Tollett said in an interview at a Goldenvoice home on the festival grounds. “At first we just felt like, no need to do anything. If there’s a change, her representatives will call. If someone’s pregnant, there’s no call to action from a promoter.

"Then you hear ‘twins’ and it’s a whole different thing.”

Beyoncé was just the second female headliner in the 18-year history of Coachella. The other was Icelandic chanteuse Bjork, who headlined in 2002 and 2007, and performed while pregnant in 2002.

Beyoncé had flirted with Coachella for years. She and Jay-Z performed together at the 2010 Coachella, when Jay-Z headlined and the couple walked through the grounds together, greeting fans. They made separate appearances at the 2014 festival, when Beyoncé sang with her sister, Solange, and Jay-Z made a guest appearance with fellow rapper, Nas.

Tollett watched Beyoncé perform seemingly without restraint at the Feb. 12 Grammy Awards. But he remained cautious, telling friends, “Well, April’s a long ways away.”

On Feb. 23, Beyoncé announced she was pulling out of Coachella on the advice of her doctor.

“When there was a change, her camp told us before it was public,” Tollett said. “That was nice of them. That gave us a chance to get a plan. They announced she wasn’t playing, so we decided to look for somebody.”

It wasn’t the first time a headliner had backed out of Coachella after the lineup had been set. In 2012, the British rock band, Black Sabbath, withdrew just one business day before Goldenvoice was scheduled to announce its lineup. Tollett had to go to his Plan B, hip-hop legend Dr. Dre, and admit he was not in a position to quibble over money.

THE HOLOGRAM: How Dr. Dre brought Tupac back to life

As a result, Dre not only agreed to headline, he assembled a lineup of rap all-stars, including Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Warren G and Wiz Khalifa, and he manufactured a hologram of the late Tupac Shakur. It wound up being one of the most memorable sets in Coachella history.

“We said we were announcing on Monday morning,” Tollett recalled of that experience. “So, on Friday afternoon, when Black Sabbath pulled out, we only had 48 hours to find a headliner. That was the weird thing that year. We said, ‘We’re making the announcement Monday,’ which we never do. We don’t really say when we’re announcing. And, as soon as we did it, boom! I learned my lesson.”

When Beyoncé withdrew, Goldenvoice announced that she would be a headliner in 2018. But they didn’t announce who would replace her.

“We didn’t feel we had to immediately,” Tollett said. “We would rather get it right than get it done quickly on that one. Tickets were sold. People knew we were going to find something.”

There would be no offers of refunds to people who said they only bought passes to Coachella to see Beyonce. Goldenvoice has long been clear on its no refund policy. People buy passes rain or shine.

Tollett said they didn’t even think about trying to get someone like Beyoncé as a replacement.

“You can’t look at it that way,” he said. “Artists are so different. The same artist, when you think it’s the same fan base, the artist could be so different. You just want to entertain everyone. Get someone great and you’ll be fine.”

Nevertheless, one of the first artists he sought to replace Beyoncé was Lady Gaga, a pop star who had never played Coachella and had hits such as “Poker Face,” “Born This Way” and “Million Reasons." Tollett said he didn’t feel a mandate to find another female artist to headline, but Lady Gaga was hot, too. She had just wowed a national audience with her Feb. 5 Super Bowl halftime show.

But Lady Gaga was committed in April.

She was following in the footsteps of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland and Janet Gaynor to star in the fourth film version of “A Star Is Born,” opposite Bradley Cooper, who also is writing and directing the movie. So Tollett began looking elsewhere.

GAGA MOVIE: Locals will participate

“Then we heard, ‘Oh, she’s making a movie in the Coachella Valley,” Tollett recalled. “‘Oh, wow! There’s a plan to be had there. Let’s look at that schedule.’ When we heard, ‘It’s out there,’ (it was,) ‘Let’s regroup.’”

Gaga and Cooper moved some things around in their schedules. It only took a few days to sign Gaga since she wouldn't have to travel far and she knew Beyoncé couldn’t do the gig.

“It was pretty well known,” Tollett said. “The whole world was talking about it. So, we didn’t have to explain what was going on too much, and those two are friends. That really helped.”

It’s an added bonus that Beyoncé has become the first artist in Coachella history to be announced as a headliner more than a year in advance. Fans of Queen B are already looking forward to 2018.

“It’s a different dynamic than we’ve ever experienced,” Tollett said. “Before this one even plays off, you know who’s playing next year. I think the story, under the circumstances, is interesting. I’m glad we announced. I guess we could have said, ‘Let’s cut the deal and not announce.’ But we wanted everyone to understand that everything’s working out.”