One great aspect of music festivals is the smorgasbord factor. Few California country fans have had the opportunity to see many of the support acts, and today there’ve been two breakouts already.

Jypsi, a Nashville-based family group, simply sizzled in the midday sun. Sisters Lillie Mae, Scarlett and Amber Dawn Rische and their guitarist brother Frank have charisma, and instrumental and vocal chops to spare. Lillie Mae especially is a star waiting to happen. Their elastic bluegrass-inflected harmonies are a wonder to behold.

Across the festival grounds at the Palomino stage, Texan Hayes Carll fully delivered on the promise of his new major-label debut album before an attentive, if modest, crowd. Such smarts in songwriting are always in short supply, and Carll, who’s also a wittily easygoing performer, goes a long way toward helping balance the deficit.

– Randy Lewis

Photo by Michael Buckner / Getty Images

Given the generally homogeneous nature of the country music community, it’s exciting to see how eclectic Stagecoach officials have been in assembling this year’s lineup, reaching out to Tex-Mex singer Star de Azlan and African American vocalist Rissi Palmer, who both performed yesterday.

Right now Canadian Ojibwa tribe singer and songwriter Crystal Shawanda is demonstrating how the music of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn appealed to her as a girl. And her tastes are broad enough to include covers of recent hits from Pink and Fergie — the melting pot in action.

Too bad she’s cut off from most of the early-arriving fans by the VIP/reserved seating setup, which has a couple thousand seats in front of the Tundra Mane Stage sold for premium prices. Apparently it’s a necessary evil to help Stagecoach pay the bills. But it makes for some literally distant performances.

Hopefully it’ll be fine-tuned at future editions of this admirably catholic event.

– Randy Lewis

Photo courtesy myspace.com/crystalshawanda

I have very, very soft spots for California country-rock (Gram Parsons went to a rival high school of mine in Florida way back when) and giant stadium-shred blowouts. So I came into The Eagles‘ Friday headlining set ready to be convinced as to why they’ve earned their recent “Long Road Out of Eden”-fueled victory lap as the vanguards of a crystalline desert rock sound best approximated, in my opinion, by the image of a tax attorney running over CSNY with his Audi in the backwoods of Laurel Canyon. Heck, at this point it’s more contrarian to think Glenn, Don, Joe and Timothy tapped into a ’70s California zeitgeist that defined an era people still remember fondly.

‘Twas not to be, kids. Yes, the harmonies were huge and cascading, and I have never seen so much drunken air guitar in an audience as I did during the solo break in “Hotel California.” But there’s a big, empty hole where the crossover point with Stagecoach should be. Their peers and collaborators in the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds, et al, always had some kind of esoteric hook to grab onto, be it a frontman’s skewed personality, a ramshackle sonic quality or a tune you just can’t shake. Instead, the Eagles embodied what Nashville would become: a glistening, over-oiled engine of pop-craft rendered “country” by the occasional addition of a pedal steel or mandolin.

One can never wish a “Long Night in Wrong Beach” on any band, but still, a little volatility onstage or in the arrangements could have gone a long way. The Eagles are one of those bands that function so cohesively as a unit and as a cultural reference that, to modern sensibilities at least, they seem less a band than classic-rock civil servants. They meet your functional needs for their touchstone hits and disappear just as quickly into the desert night. Heck, even Don Henley’s solo jams had more resonance. The Eagles will be there when the boys of summer are gone, but that doesn’t mean the flings weren’t more fun.

– August Brown

Photo of Glenn Frey, left, and Don Henley by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

10:27: The Eagles have landed. Hearing those exquisitely blended voices in “Lyin’ Eyes” amid the craggy mountains and graceful desert palms of the Stagecoach setting drives home the feeling that the group’s signature songs and sound are as much a defining component of the California landscape as any of its topography.

It is, however, yet another example of California-surreal to watch images of palms, clouds and the moon projected onto the giant video screen behind the band when you could crane your neck around the screen and see the real deal.

But if the Eagles are about anything, it’s not taking a chance on real life intruding on perfection.

– Randy Lewis

Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

While we unfortnately missed it in person, the strangest cover of the night apparently happened on Glen Campbell’s watch at the Palomino Stage, where he performed the Foo Fighters‘ “Times Like These” to an adoring throng (who didn’t seem to mind that he read all his lyrics off a teleprompter). Maybe Dave can return the favor with a screamy “Rhinestone Cowboy” one day?

-August Brown

Photo by Dan Steinberg / AP

Among the Dad-rock titans who’ve come out as left-leaning activists (The Boss first and foremost), John Fogerty’s blue-collar bayou M.O. might be the most persuasive. For all of Springsteen’s Asbury Park cred, “Nebraska” starkness and deep sips from Americana union songs (his “Seeger Sessions” album is fantastic), there’s still a sizable chunk of his audience able to write it off as a fetish. I saw him on the Vote For Change tour (word, John Kerry!) and there were plenty of people there who openly disagreed with the suggested “Change” but were still stoked on seeing “Born to Run” in the flesh. Cognitive dissonance, et al, etc.

Fogerty’s leftism is more subtle and complicated. Being “born on the bayou” has less political baggage than being “Born in the U.S.A.,” but that lets him get away with asides like “This reminds me of Woodstock…except when it rained, a half-million people got naked.” He’s a liberal hippie at heart, but even “Fortunate Son” is grounded in a pretty universal sentiment: Why should a “millionaire’s son” get a pass from the business of war? 

I was really happy he played it, as the issue of sending kids to war probably weighs heavy on a few Stagecoach minds. But it hit the Stagecoach crowd like any CCR standard and Fogerty didn’t make a fuss about its message before ripping into “Proud Mary.” I don’t know if that’s for the best or not, but it did remind me that beneath his goofy ambling across stage, there’s some righteous anger boiling in that bayou.

– August Brown

Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Why don’t more country acts cover John Fogerty songs? Is there a catchier, meatier, more country-steeped songbook than his? During his fiery version of the Creedence hit “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” he sang the line “Dinosaur Victrola/Listenin’ to Buck Owens” and threw off a right-hand salute out to the man whose spirit hovers mightily over the Stagecoach grounds.

– Randy Lewis

Photo of Creedance Clearwater Revival by Jim Marshall

Where on earth did Michelle Branch get a Southern accent? Her second-act country group, the Wreckers, is a pretty enjoyable bit of crossover Nashville pop, and kudos for successfully following the Bon Jovi/Sheryl Crow trail with that group. Her solo set in the Mustang stage was perfectly fine hippie-folk via Music Row songsmith savvy (save her gnarly Santana collaboration “Game of Love”), but I’m having a hard time believing that the young lady responsible for “Everywhere,” a spritely bit of early-aughts coffeehouse emo, is actually drawling these days.

– August Brown  

Photo by Karl Walter / Getty

“You might have heard this song while driving west on the 10 Freeway to the Pomona swap meet to buy hot rod parts” said Mike Ness on the Palomino Stage, just before kicking out a loose, swinging version of his Social Distortion standard “Ball and Chain.”

That’s a pretty great situation in which to hear that tune (albeit, one that forbids me from keeping a flask of George Dickel nearby). But at this year’s Stagecoach, it was especially welcome. This year’s lineup is missing a bit of last year’s outlaw venom: no Drive By Truckers, no Alejandro Escovedo, not even Kris Kristofferson (though it did have Shooter Jennings, and I’m kicking myself for missing him while stuck in apocalyptic traffic on Avenue 50). So we’ll take whiskey and fisticuffs when we can get them, and Ness’ cover-heavy set (”Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “I Fought The Law”) was just the shot in the arm the afternoon needed. I almost like him better in his cowpunk digs — it takes the edge off his bleat and lets him get a little dirgier than Social D. allows. Fingers crossed that Fogerty plays “Fortunate Son,” as that’s as outlaw an anthem as it comes.

– August Brown 

Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

With the temp around 85 degrees and a light breeze wafting across the Coachella Valley, it’s an unreasonably beautiful afternoon. Shelby Lynne gazes out at a sea of largely empty VIP seats immediately before her at the Tundra stage.

Crowd or no crowd, she mostly bypasses the Dusty Springfield songbook from her latest album, “Just a Little Lovin.’ ” Instead, it’s rock ‘n’ soul that soars into a gorgeously dark place when she takes on Tony Joe White’s “Willie and Laura Mae Jones.”

Lynne’s sinewy version takes it not just to the swamp but to the deep recesses of the bayou, then to the Mississippi backwoods, thanks to guitarist John Jackson’s wicked dobro playing.

And to think it’s not even sundown on Day 1 yet.

– Randy Lewis

Photo by Dan Steinberg / AP