Sir Paul McCartney performs onstage during Desert Trip at the Empire Polo Field on Oct 8, in Indio, California. (AFP)

INDIO, Calif, Oct 9, (Agencies):The Desert Trip music festival is not just for baby boomers. The performers’ average age is 72 — Paul McCartney and Neil Young were set to take the stage 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 said she was “raised on the Beatles” so she came to the festival to see McCartney.

“I’m a Beatles fanatic,” she said.

Haner and her friend Seven Pappanastos, 17, said they were acutely aware they were among the youngest in the crowd. They didn’t mind, but said the older concertgoers are “very aggressive.”

“They act like, ‘We’re older. We deserve this,’” she said.

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

“I got invited to three parties this weekend,” he said. “All their parents are out of town here.”

Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones kicked off the festival 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 front man referred to the three-day event as “the Palm Springs retirement home for genteel English musicians.”

Targets

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. But where 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 said, 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.” They even covered the Beatles’ “Come Together.” 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. Wearing a black suit with a white hat, the 75-year-old rocker took the stage without fanfare and sat behind the piano. He did not address the audience or say anything between songs.

Backed by a five-piece band, he performed selections from throughout his catalog, including “Tangled Up in Blue,” ‘’Ballad of a Thin Man” 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.

For many rock fans in the 1960s, the choice seemed binary: Is their band The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? But opening a mega-festival of rock legends, the Stones pulled a surprise — an homage to their supposed rivals.

Attention

Mick Jagger, who commanded the attention of a 75,000-strong crowd over two hours to inaugurate California’s Desert Trip festival Friday night, told the audience the band wanted to do a “strange thing” — a cover of a song by “a big band.”

The Stones then ripped into “Come Together,” bringing in Keith Richards’ defining hard-edged blues guitar as well as Jagger’s harmonica to the opening track off The Beatles’ penultimate album “Abbey Road.”

The Stones displayed phenomenal energy, with Jagger tirelessly working the crowd with his signature dance style of quick-flowing body jerking, but the 73-year-old also showed good humor over the sight of graying fans watching aging rockers.

Jagger’s jokes aside, the Stones have shown new productivity. The band on Dec 2 will release its first album in more than a decade, “Blue and Lonesome,” a collection of blues covers.

The Stones played one track off the album for Desert Trip — “Ride ‘Em On Down,” late guitarist Eddie Taylor take on a blues standard.

But the Stones — backed by the deep, rich bass of Darryl Jones — focused on the crowd-pleasing hits, culminating in “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” set to a firework show in the desert sky.

The choice of 1969’s “Come Together” was especially striking as Richards last year made headlines by denouncing, in typically colorful language, The Beatles’ output after 1966 when the Fab Four stopped touring and sought spiritual enrichment in India.

“I would like to thank Bob Dylan for opening.” Such were the words uttered on stage by Jagger and unlikely to have been heard in years by Dylan.

But with such top talent at Desert Trip, the folk rock icon was pushed to the early part of the lineup.

Dylan, who in recent years has kept his stage and media presence to a minimum, stayed hidden in full view, with no live footage on the screens which instead showed black-and-white film reels of New York luncheonettes and other spaces of American life.

Yet even if he was unseen, Dylan was heard and powerfully so, with the guitar legend mostly taking to the piano to lead his band in a charging rock set.

He opened with “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” whose classic refrain line — “Everybody must get stoned” — speaks to many a festival goer, even if marijuana was less omnipresent at Desert Trip that at younger events.

Dylan, who steadfastly resists pressure to play only best-known hits in concert, reached darker as he progressed through the set.

His gravely voice taking on a new solemnity, Dylan closed with “Masters of War,” his intense 1963 song questioning the Cold War military buildup.

The Stones — masterful businessmen besides musicians — are the top-grossing among the acts and seen as the most difficult to book for festivals.

“We’ve all been playing music for more than 50 years for you,” Jagger said of the event’s performers. “We think it’s pretty amazing that you’re still coming out to see us.”

The grounds have been outfitted with extra seating and shade structures to keep an older audience comfortable, and the festival porta-potties were replaced with air-conditioned bathroom trailers.