Roger Waters closed Coachella with a trademark polished and bombastic show full of visual fury accompanying the musical artistry -- a set of Pink Floyd numbers like "Mother," "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," "Wish You Were Here" and "The Final Cut" -- then performed the legendary 1973 album "Dark Side of the Moon" all the way through. While you can't envy guitarist David Kilminster's assigned task -- replicating David Gilmore's celebrated and tricky licks -- he served the material admirably, and Waters is in amazingly good shape and of strong voice.

On the Coachella Stage's jumbo TeeVee, Roger Waters, during the song "In The Flesh," points out someone in the crowd who is smoking marijuana. As if that was some tough task.

And, of course, for "Pigs," out came the amazing airborne swine to circle the crowd.

Fireballs erupted at the finale of the first set, and the pig (intentionally or not) was set free, wafting out into the desert night. The porcine fellow reportedly drifted to Temeculah, where it found a job as a house tent for a termite extermination company.

Earlier in the evening, My Morning Jacket played a set of its eclectic psycheldelic-indie-Southern rock on the same stage, while ...

... over on the Outdoor Stage, Love & Rockets vied for the same audience with a driving set that featured a generous amount of its early material.

Sean Penn appeared twice on Sunday, here just before My Morning Jacket. He did not have very nice words to say about our government. In fact, they basically boiled down to two words: "F@%& you." He implored festival attendees to play hooky for another week and join him on The Dirty Hands Caravan, which headed off to New Orleans this afternoon, hoping to spur political activism along the way and then take in the close of the New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just what you want after a weekend of blistering temperatures and a glut of smelly, sweaty people: more of the same.

These druids worship the letter F and strive to make it the shiniest letter of the alphabet. They have made many converts during the Coachella festival after explaining to them some of the words that begin with the letter.

More druids: In the very center of the photograph, a shaman in a leather vest dangles two virgins (or as close as his followers get) upside-down as he prepares to sacrifice them to the Norse deity Spanky for a new CW reality series.

Yet more druids, sacrificing their feet to the water god Osiris. Osiris then asked them to wash them first.

I believe these two were rocking out to a plaintive cover of Leonard Cohen's "The Butcher." I could be wrong about this, though. The photo's not blurry -- they were born that way.

Roger Waters brought his pet pig along for his performance later tonight.

This is called the Copper Droopscape. It "engage(s) the wind and transfigure(s) sunlight" and represents a "tight integration of design, digital computation and fabrication." On the other hand, a festival goer on his cell explaining his location described it as "orange dangly sh!t."

Misbehaving children were placed inside these razor-sharp orbs and participated in robo-death matches for celebrity attendees, out of purview of the general audiences, a few of whom may have taken offense to such fin de siècle decadence.

By day, this installation looks like a prosaic if obsessive assortment of ping pong balls. By night, however ...

It becomes a place of worship for the chemically altered, as its dazzling light show mesmerizes those whose brain pans have been reduced to responding to shiny objects.

The band's name is "I'm From Barcelona," and that's a lie - they're from Sweden. They boast 29 members playing an eclectic mix of instruments, but that's a lie - there are only 17 people onstage (and a couple of them might be Norwegians). Despite (or perhaps because of) their prevarications, they are an inordinately cheery group, and they like pelting their audience with confetti and/or medicine balls. A Red Cross tent is set outside each performance by the group to cope with the copious paper cuts. "I'm addicted to confetti," the group's founder and lead singer Emanuel Lundgren declared, just before mainlining some.

My dog, reacting to the fact that Coachella has a strict "no pets" rule: "You're going to be gone how long?

This woman found a way to circumnavigate the "no pets" rule and snuck her twin schnauzers onto the Festival grounds.

My dog is suddenly crazy-relieved I didn't bring him to Coachella.

We learned a couple of things last night at Coachella. One: They sold as many tickets to the VIP section as they did for general admission. (During Portishead's set in anticipation of Prince, and early through Prince's performance, one pined for the elbow room inside a sardine tin: A fire marshal would've shut the place down.) Two: The VIPs were not so VI that they merited a coherent sound mix.

Let's make this clear that this is not on Prince, unless he insisted his sound guy take over for the usual Coachella staffer and, unfamiliar with the system, botched it utterly. Because: The only speakers functioning correctly were those onstage, which produced a bit of a flat sound - and that's the good news.

Should you have been near malfunctioning speakers, such as those closest to the VIP section, which not only were perversely selective about which noises they would present from the production mix (an occasional squawk of guitar or tinkle of keyboards) but were sorely out of sync from the stage speakers, what you experienced was something akin to music as a jigsaw puzzles with pieces both missing and in the wrong locations. (Sound for Portishead's moodily dreamlike show on the same stage an hour earlier was absolutely pristine.) At least the lousy sound inspired a mass exodus from the VIP section.

Prince opened the show with a stroll down memory lane, allowing Morris Day and Shiela E. to perform past hits (though the sound was so garbled where I was it was hard for me and those around me to tell which Time song or songs Day was doing; Shiela E. sang "U Got the Look"). Prince then took over, with a searing guitar solo that not even the bad sound could completely defeat. He played hits like "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" but things got interesting in the encore, when he covered Radiohead's "Creep" with an extended guitar solo more haunted that his usual fare. He then allowed his backing singers to transform Sarah McLachlan's "Angels" into a gospel number, then merged the Beatles' "Come Together" with an anti-war chant with the crowd's assistance.

Final, requisite encores - "Purple Rain" and "Let's Go Crazy" - kept fans around till 1 a.m., far later (for apparently legal reasons) than Coachella shows tend to last, and through sheer charisma, genius and force of will he was able to win just about all of the audience over, despite the sound debacle. Still, to consider how amazing the show could have been had the sound engineer been as a smidgen proficient as Prince himself, you have to chalk this up to an opportunity lost.

The Raconteurs remain the best overall show I've seen after two days.

(As for that photo: Hey, I took it with an iPhone. As I did with all the others, and some of them came out OK. So I'm entitled to a dud or two.)

White - unfashionably coifed, even by his standards - ensured the show would be memorable with blues-on-the-verge-of-hysteria guitar work and occasional keyboards. Swapping vocals with Benson, they played their hit, "Steady As She Goes," and just about everything from "Consoler of the Lonely," including the title track along with "Salute Your Solution," "Many Shades of Black," "You Don't Understand Me," "Old Enough" and "Rich Kid Blues." It was pretty much all you'd want from a rock show, crunch and punch from very loud guitars.

Other stuff from Day One:

The Breeders were giving a pleasant enough set on the main stage in the middle of the afternoon when, during their cover of the Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun," the audience departed en masse. They weren't Beatles purists or gun-control advocates, but were off to the Outdoor Theatre to check out Vampire Weekend, the band with some of the biggest buzz entering the weekend.

Yeah, well: Sound problems (You could hear not only the Breeders but also Mum from the Mohave Stage while trying to listen to Vampire Weekend) drained some of that buzz away. The band came off as amiable; playing some perky pop with inflections of the sort of thin, tinny sound of Afropop or reggae from the '60s and '70s.

Perhaps the Outdoor Theatre is just jinxed. Later that night, the Swell Season (featuring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the Oscar-winning songwriting duo responsible for "Once's" "Falling Slowly") played the venue, and even though I was about 10 feet from the stage, the sound was still overwhelmed by an annoyingly booming and repetitive rhythm track emanating from a nearby art installation that hardly enhanced the Irish ensemble's folksy ways.

Introducing the journey the sweetly, modestly affecting "Falling Slowly" has taken, Hansard compared it to a soccer ball. At first, he said, his response was, "Oh my God, did I kick the ball that far," but after a while, he began to feel, "I want my f@%&ing ball back." Lest anyone think the Swell Season is all about being, well, swell, Hansard and Irglova proved they could get down and dirty dueting on a raucous cover of the Pixie's "Cactus." Mainly, though, their was a charm initiative that was thoroughly successful.

Big news late was the reunion of The Verve, presenting a set that was rich in atmosphere and brooding yet capable of exploding at any moment. Richard Ashcroft's strong, evocative vocals and a light show that felt like a warm bath enriched songs like "The Drugs Don't Work," a new number called "Sit and Wonder and, of course, an extended version of "Bitter Sweet Symphony."

So we ended the evening with a trip to the Sahara stage for a session with Fatboy Slim. Show started a half-hour late, but with pounding basslines that you feel pulsing from the surface of your skin down to the marrow of your bones and a hyperkinetic lightshow and other visuals, this is pretty much as visceral and music can get.

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I would've seen more on Day One, but no one on the entire Coachella site knew where the press tent was - except the people at its (poorly marked) entrance. Many staff members I asked looked at me dumbly, as if they had never heard of this exotic thing you call "media." They made the Keystone Cops look like Delta Force.

For example, a guy at one secure entrance to the left of the main stage sent me to the corner on the other side of the grounds. There, a police officer told me I must be getting close, because a lot of people had been asking him the same thing. But then, I got that a lot no matter where on the site I was asking.

It took 90 minutes and some 30 queries before I more or less stumbled on it on my own - about 25 yards from that first guy next to the main stage.

Special insult-to-injury department: Once I found the cramped little area (which makes the Grammy pressroom seem opulent), its WiFi had crapped out.

So it goes.

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And further apologies for not posting sooner, but I'm staying at a rented condo in Palm Desert, a town known basically for its retirees, who may have heard of the Internets and might even be interested in seeing them if they ever get on the TeeVee. They also apparently don't have much use for cell phones, because just about everyone's coverage sucks in this area (but mine most of all - did you know when AT&T says they have more bars in more places, they're lying through their teeth? Doesn't that make you just a smidgen disillusioned?) so I couldn't even use my phone to track down a coffeeshop with WiFi.

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Ad in the local weekly with a friendly warning for Coachella attendees:

THIS IS NOT SAN FRANCISCO. The police really will arrest you for marijuana. Just ask Andy Dick (Riverside Case Number 1NM147261).

SHARING IS THE SAME AS SELLING. At past festivals, undercover police in the audience - often attractive young women - have asked concert-goers for drugs. Giving away even a small amount of drugs is legally the same as selling in California. Generosity can get you into a world of trouble.

SHUT UP. Don't not try to talk your way out of a drug arrest. It will not work.

So, the guy placing the ad actually kind of hopes you don't take his advice anyway, so he can represent you in court. Just make sure you have a copy of the weekly on you when you get busted.

And anyway, his warning doesn't seemed to have affected any social change, as it seems you couldn't walk far on the grounds without encountering the aroma of everything from what smelled like really strong stuff to the crappiest, why-bother skunkweed in the world. And then at night, they all gather to have their minds blown by the Quad Cubatron, a 20-foot-by-20-foot-by-20-foot box of exploding light patterns between the Mohave and Sahara stages. People even applaud this inanimate object after a particularly inspired round of colorful bursts.

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There are other art installations spread throughout the grounds, including the one that tried to botch the Swell Season's set (it's called The Do Lab; at that moment, calling it The Doo Lab would've been the kindest way to address it). The coolest (and biggest) is Big Rig Jig, two 18-wheeler tanker trucks curling into one another in the air, vaguely forming the letter S or looking like giant, industrialized insects mating mid-air.

We're told this "references a global oil industry at the nexus of our world's political, social and environmental systems." We just find it a poignant portrait of two semi's cuddling.