Indio, California, which for 13 years has hosted the famous Coachella Valley Music and Arts Annual Festival, where The Pixies, Pulp, Rage Against the Machine and Pavement all hosted their reunion shows, may lose the festival because the city asked for an $18 ticket tax for 2014. As with most if not all California cities, Indio needs every bit of cash it can get.

Paul Tollett, the president of Goldenvoice, the company that produced the festival said, “If the tax initiative of putting $4 million to $6 million onto Coachella gets on the ballot we’re going to take off 2014; 2015 we’ll be at a new facility outside of Indio.”

Tollett also said that the ticket purchase tax was “outrageous for all the things we’ve done with Indio” and threatened to also move the Stagecoach Festival, another major event, out of Indio.

The festival annually brings in $800,000 from ticket sales, all the money accrued from the sales tax on $9 million in food and beverage sales, and another $800,000 tax derived from taxing transient occupancy.

With the fig leaf of watered-down austerity measures offered by Governor Jerry Brown unlikely to confront the basic problems of the Californian economy, and the prospect of another four years of Barack Obama’s evisceration of the private sector, there may well be other lyrics more apt for California’s future:

Once I built a railroad, made it run

Made it race against time

Once I built a railroad, now it’s done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Photo credit: @DaveBullock / über ARCHIVES