The Desert Trip music festival is not just for baby boomers.

The performers' average age is 72 - Paul McCartney and Neil Young took the stage on Saturday - and there may be a lot of gray hair in the audience, but millennials are in the mix as well.

Nineteen-year-old McKenna Haner says she was "raised on the Beatles" so she came to the festival to see McCartney.

"I'm a Beatles fanatic," she says.

Haner and her friend Seven Pappanastos, 17, say they were acutely aware they were among the youngest in the crowd. They don't mind, but say the older concertgoers are "very aggressive".

"They act like: 'We're older. We deserve this,'" she says.

Pappanastos says attending the show came with a cost - beyond the $199 single-day ticket price.

"I got invited to three parties this weekend," he says. "All their parents are out of town here."

Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones kicked off the festival on Friday night. Mick Jagger told the audience that, despite the legendary lineup of septuagenarians (including Roger Waters and the Who on Sunday), he wasn't going to "do a bunch of age jokes".

Then the 73-year-old Rolling Stones frontman referred to the three-day event as "the Palm Springs retirement home for genteel English musicians".

The Desert Trip festival is being held at Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, home to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival each spring. While Coachella is aimed at millennials, Desert Trip targets more affluent baby boomers who grew up with the festival's featured rockers.

"You guys are going to have a rocking, wild weekend in Palm Springs," Jagger says, adding coyly: "We're looking forward to seeing the dinosaur park."

There actually is a dinosaur exhibit in nearby Cabazon, California.

The Stones brought literal and figurative fireworks to the stage for their two-hour set. Jagger was his inimitably energetic self, skipping and shuffling across the stage and chatting warmly with the crowd.

The hit-packed performance included Wild Horses, Miss You, Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler and Sympathy for the Devil. When the band closed with Satisfaction, pyrotechnics lit up the desert sky.

Bob Dylan kicked off the festival just after sundown with an 80-minute performance.

Backed by a five-piece band, he performed selections from throughout his catalog, including Tangled Up in Blue and Make You Feel My Love. Dylan occasionally crept out from behind the piano to sing at a microphone center stage, pulling a harmonica from his pocket to play. He closed with Masters of War and silently left the stage.

The festival repeats next weekend.

(China Daily 10/10/2016 page20)