Coachella tones down with Jack Johnson set

When surfer-singer Jack Johnson took the stage to play his top-billed show late Friday night, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival experienced a precipitous decibel drop. After all, that same stage in recent years has hosted such headliners as Rage Against the Machine, Tool and Nine Inch Nails.

The elevation of the unassuming, popular Johnson to the position once held by these generators of monumentally loud and aggressive rock wasn’t the only instance of Coachella’s volume adjustment this year. Until Prince was added as a last-minute headliner for Saturday, the subtle, reclusive English trip-hop group Portishead was that night’s top-billed act.

Johnson, a former professional surfer whose musical approach reflects the laid-back ethos of that world, is as unlikely a recording star as he is a Coachella headliner. Low-key and earnest, he’s hard to dislike, and on Friday he was unfailingly humble and straightforward in manner.

He and his three-member band dispensed loose, shuffling grooves, and he sang about personal issues and global crises in a deep monotone that expressed little of the passion he presumably feels about those things.

A strange moment in Coachella lore, maybe, but although a headliner becomes emblematic of a particular year, it doesn’t determine the nature of the day. On Friday you could drift away from the main stage during Johnson’s set and step into an opposite world in the Mojave Tent, one where the Atlanta band the Black Lips thrashed out a sloppy, punky brand of garage rock, ending the day on a different note for its knot of fans.

This opening day of Coachella No. 9 filled in the stylistic range between those poles, delivered by an assortment of acts on the verge, genre stars, long-absent returnees (notably the Verve) and established cult artists getting a chance to impress nonmembers.

The inventive New York City art-rock band Les Savy Fav, for instance, was not going to let this opportunity slip through its fingers, showing a big crowd at the Outdoor Theatre why it has a reputation as an unpredictable live act.

Singer Tim Harrington eschewed the awe-struck tone that often overcomes performers faced with the vista of Coachella. Looking like a beer-truck driver on a break, the bald, bearded singer was refreshingly unimpressed with the surroundings as he complained about the heat and drenched his ample frame with water.

“It’s hot as. . . . And I need a hug,” he chanted, wading into the crowd and organizing a big group embrace before uncomfortably escalating his needs. Later, he climbed the stage scaffolding -- not just a little way as some singers have done in years past, but to the top. Looming some 30 feet above the ground like a Macy’s Parade balloon, he delivered the band’s Beastie Boys-like anthem “Who Rocks the Party?” Obviously, Les Savy Fav does.

Another New York entry, Vampire Weekend, arrived as the band with momentum, its self-titled debut album capturing critics and attracting an audience, but also generating some instant backlash. Critics have decried the act as overrated and facile in its adoption of African music.

The group’s set on the outdoor stage probably didn’t do anything to change that conversation, but its choppy, syncopated sound and enigmatic, intellectual lyrics were better served in this context, enhanced by singer Ezra Koenig’s unruffled manner.

If alternatives to the Johnson vibe could be found around the grounds (from seminal L.A. power-pop force Redd Kross to irreverent English rapper Scroobius Pip), you didn’t have to look far for the most potent. Just two slots before the headliner on the main stage, the Raconteurs offered a case study in the art of din.

The band is a collaboration between the White Stripes’ Jack White and singer-songwriter-guitarist Brendan Benson, but White dominated Friday’s performance with his unspoken but palpable insistence that every moment be alive and urgent.

He played as if something were at stake, and Benson and their bandmates followed that lead, pushing the limits of a conventional rock show into a dance on the edge of chaos.

They weren’t quite the headliner, but they brought enough noise to last.

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richard.cromelin@ latimes.com