While looking at past Coachella coverage in The Desert Sun archives Friday night, I spotted a byline on stories about the first festival in 1999 that rang a bell.

I knew Mark Armstrong was a Desert Sun alum. He mentioned that when I sought his help recently in making a colleague’s longform story available on Read it Later, now Pocket. What I didn’t realize is that he was among the first to score what is perhaps TDS’ ultimate plum assignment — covering Coachella.

Since I had his Twitter handle handy, I dropped Armstrong a line about his Coachella 1999 stories, and we chatted a bit today about that first Coachella:

@BriNews Flashback! I was city hall reporter for Indio. First wrote about Coachella when permits filed with city for “alt. rock concert.”

— Mark Armstrong (@markarms) April 21, 2012

• Polo club requesting permit for fall music fest (July 12, 1999)
• Alternative music gig slated for Indio in fall (July 17, 1999)

@BriNews I knew Goldenvoice (which requested permits) was big, but I underestimated scale of what they had in mind for “Indio rock concert”

— Mark Armstrong (@markarms) April 21, 2012

@BriNews Pre-concert lineup announcement, I probably thought: “Could this be bigger than the Date Festival???”

— Mark Armstrong (@markarms) April 21, 2012

That year, the 10-day Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival attracted a record crowd of 273,244.

Coachella’s first Sunday beat the fair’s daily average by bringing about 30,000 people to the polo grounds, though it didn’t reach the single-day attendance record the Date Festival had set that year, 45,704.