There’s no way getting around it: Coachella ain’t cheap.

A three-day pass alone will set you back $375. Add in the costs of getting to and from Indio, after-concert Uber pickups, hotel rooms, vittles and other incidentals, and we’re already near $1,000. VIPs, trustafarians and other one-percenters can easily spend three, four or five times that. Even the grungiest, tattooed bro camping in a tattered tent and subsisting on booze, dope, cigarettes and dust can expect to spend around $500.

Compare that to Woodstock. In August 1969, advanced tickets to “3 Days of Peace & Music” cost $18, the equivalent of $120 in 2014 dollars. Not a bad deal to see The Who, Sly & The Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix all in their primes, especially since most concertgoers got in for free.

And the Woodstock Generation came to Max Yasgur’s farm clad in the counterculture uniform of jeans, beads and T-shirts — or nothing at all. Turns out it cost a lot less to be an actual hippie than a wannabe playing dress-up at Coachella.

– Marc Ballon, “How the Hell Do People Afford Coachella?” Westword, April 13, 2015

(This is my obligatory annual I-don’t-get-hipsters post, roughly coinciding with Coachella.)