First Time Is A Charm
HEAVE ventures to the first ever Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival.
The first-ever Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, which took place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from August 22-24, wasn’t perfect. Sound problems sabotaged sets by headliners Radiohead and Tom Petty and senseless scheduling forced fans to choose between The Black Keys and Beck on Friday and Primus and Cake on Saturday. With those small problems aside, though, the festival was well worth the cash and the commute from the Midwest to the West Coast. Keep reading for a day-by-day recap.
Friday, August 22
The music didn’t start until 5 P.M. on Friday. Steel Pulse’s reggae was cool, but Black Mountain summoned from the opposite end of the park. The Canadian group produces songs with enough 60’s psychedelia to make your head spin but enough 70’s classic rock to make you headbang. Most impressive was part-time vocalist and instrumentalist Amber Webber, who has perfected classic rock’s wailing vocals to a chilling effect. Black Mountain stormed through the riff-heavy “Don’t Run Our Hearts Around” and then showcased the strongest tracks from their most recent full-length, In The Future, like the hypnotic “Wucan” and the yearning “Queens Will Play.” You can catch Black Mountain at the 12th Annual Hideout Block Party on Saturday, September 20.
A blown amp and power supply problems plagued the Benevento-Russo Duo’s set, but Marco handled it with a sense of humor and Joe took swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Equal parts rock, jazz and electronic experimentation, the Duo’s set was one of the best of the festival as it was simply amazing that only two people could create such a massive mosaic of sound. The funky “Becky,” the meditative “Play Pause Stop” and the upbeat “Echo Park (90026)” were the best.
Being forced to choose between The Black Keys and Beck was just cruel, but I fooled myself a second time in thinking I might be able to watch half of one and half of the other. The Black Keys sounded tight but incredibly quiet, especially in comparison to the Benevento-Russo Duo, so I headed towards the opposite end of the park where Beck was already underway. The trail that led to Beck’s semi-hidden stage was way too narrow; the festival organizers erred in believing that thousands of people could squeeze through to see Beck and then exit in an orderly fashion to watch Radiohead just 10 minutes later. As crowds of people pushed over flimsy fences and blazed their own trails in the brush, I was maybe 50 yards from the main stage, having sacrificed Beck for a relatively good spot for Radiohead.
A mixture of San Franciscan fog and West Coast weed smoke hung over the crowd of 60,000 as Radiohead took to the stage, following an intro of electronic blips that drummer Phil Selway built into the bodacious beat of “15 Step.” The set was nearly perfect except for two sound dropouts during “Airbag” and “All I Need,” neither of which lasted for more than 30-45 seconds but felt like an eternity. Light poles suspended from the ceiling displayed visualizations of the music, but they weren’t on the whole time and were less effective than at Lollapalooza because it wasn’t as dark. The funniest moment of the performance went to singer Thom Yorke, who spent the first part of “You And Whose Army?” staring freakishly down the lens of the camera mounted on his piano. When multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood struck a foul note, Yorke slammed his hands across the keys and let out a sinister laugh but then finished the song as if nothing had happened. Not surprisingly, the band played eight of ten tracks from In Rainbows, but it was awesome to hear “ Talk Show Host,” “Karma Police,” “Just,” “Exit Music (For A Film)” and “Pyramid Song.” Radiohead wrapped up the first-ever nighttime performance in Golden Gate Park with “Everything In Its Right Place,” which they let ring out and recirculate through effects pedals while the word “Everything” passed across the light poles.
Saturday, August 23
Public transportation was packed on Saturday morning, so I arrived at Devendra Banhart’s stage a few minutes into the set. Though I was further back than I would’ve liked, the founding father of freak folk was entertaining but not essential. True, the 70’s-style jam towards the end of “Seahorse” sounded great and “Shabop Shalom” won over the crowd with its 50’s feel and its humorous lyrics, but I left for the next stage five minutes early wishing I’d just seen Devendra Banhart at The Chicago Theatre and not tucked between trees with thousands of other people.
Liars put on one of the best performances of the festival, even if lead singer Angus Andrew’s low-cut jeans showed off more of his hairy happy trail than fans were looking for. Not content with being confined by any particular genre, Liars have over the course of four full-lengths drifted from post-punk pandemonium to whims of witchcraft and from nebulous noise rock to something in between the first and the third. Accordingly, the band exhibited a song or two from each phase, with the fuzzed-up guitars in “Freak Out” sounding as garage rock as all get out and the elemental drumbeat and ethereal atmosphere in “Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!” echoing “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Liars returned us to the witch’s woods with “We Fenced Other Houses With The Bones of Our Own” and then tore the whole thing down with the wrangling, whiny “Plaster Casts of Everything.”
A half-hour wait for flatbread pizza later, I caught the tail end of Lupe Fiasco’s performance. Having missed Lupe at Lollapalooza because of another senseless act of scheduling, it was cool to see a Chicagoan draw thousands of fans to his stage and be received as only a “Superstar” could. I’m not sure live hip-hop will ever impress me as much as live rock, but Lupe deserves credit for having actual musicians performing at his side. With drums, guitar, bass, keyboards and back-up vocals—in addition to a DJ and a “hype man”—Lupe’s resulting sound is more organic and all the more musical than hip-hop performers who rely exclusively on a DJ. The back-up band paid off most on the world-touring, envy-inducing “Paris, Tokyo,” which sounded much larger than the laid-back version on The Cool. “Superstar” sounded good, too, but Lupe couldn’t resist complaining about wanting to play one more but being told by festival organizers that his time was up. He closed with an awkward exitlude that did more to string us along into thinking there was another song than concluding what was otherwise an entertaining set.
The Walkmen’s forty-minute set was chocked full with most of the best songs from their new album You & Me. It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to open with “New Country,” a slow-moving track with a beautiful guitar riff, but the New York-based band immediately picked things up with “On The Water” and “In The New Year.” Unfortunately, The Walkmen’s set was so loud that it took away from what otherwise would have been a solid performance. Singer Hamilton Leithauser’s vocals were so loud that the screams in “In The New Year” and “The Blue Route” came through as distorted as the fuzzy guitars for which the band is known and loved. The loudness wasn’t as much of a problem in laid-back tracks like “Red Moon” and “Canadian Girl,” but a handful of enthusiastic, early bird fans towards the front moved further back with their hands over their ears. At the same time, though, the smaller stage and less-than-stellar sound created a more intimate, amateur vibe, like The Walkmen playing at that basement show you went to back in high school. Back then, as now, you walked away with noticeable hearing loss, but having seen one of your favorite bands up close and personal, you were more than satisfied.
Tom Petty is pretty much a god of rock, so when he hit the stage with The Heartbreakers in tow it was sure to be two hours of enjoyable, entertaining music. Petty spent as much time touching the back of his head and holding his arms out like wings as he did actually playing his guitar, but when you’re 58, you’ve been touring since late May and your two hour set plays like a greatest hits CD, you can slack on your guitar duties all you want. In the midst of fan favorites like “American Girl,” “Free Fallin’,” and “Learning to Fly,” Petty played rockers like “Breakdown” and “Runnin’ Down A Dream.” Every living, breathing being within a five mile radius of Golden Gate Park got stoned during “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” There was no avoiding it. Even passengers in low-flying planes reported contact buzzes. Petty also cracked out The Traveling Wilburys’ “End of the Line” and found time to invite fellow festival artist Steve Winwood on stage for two songs, including The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’.” Fans grew agitated when the sound went out four times for just a few seconds apiece, but the trouble passed quickly, and in the middle of a Tom Petty concert, you couldn’t help but smile and sing along.
Sunday, August 24
Stars took to the stage Sunday with the bass-heavy intro to 2007’s In Our Bedroom After The War booming and immediately began throwing white flowers out to the crowd. As it happened, most of the petals were lost in the hefty heave, leaving long-armed audience members with just the stems. It was fitting for a band that writes electro-indie-pop ballads that are unmistakably and unabashedly about love, in both its beauty and its bitterness. The Canadian band, whose starlets Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan and Evan Cranley contribute to Broken Social Scene, breezed through recent fan favorites like “My Favourite Book” and “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” but also played the beautiful “Elevator Love Letter” from 2003’s Heart. Amy Millan’s sweet-as-pie vocals were simply breathtaking on “Midnight Coward” and “Window Bird.” Stars closed out the set with the rock-friendly “Take Me To The Riot,” with Campbell belting out the chorus like an overly-enthusiastic choirboy.
Singer-songwriter Justin Vernon delivered my absolute favorite performance of the entire festival as Bon Iver, the stage name for Vernon and the three musicians he’s currently touring with. The name is an intentional misspelling of the French phrase “bon hiver,” which means good winter. The winter months of late 2006 and early 2007 were indeed good to Vernon, if not at the time then for how they’ve paid off since. The circumstances surrounding those winter months seem to have entered the realm of folklore, but most versions of the story state that Vernon’s band broke up so he spent some time writing and recording songs in a Wisconsin cabin. The result was last year’s For Emma, Forever Ago, which was picked up by Jagjaguwar and received positive reviews from Pitchfork and The New York Times, to name a few. I’m putting my foot down here, but it is doubtlessly one of the best albums of last year and may well be one of the best singer-songwriter albums ever.
Though it was sunny and seventy degrees in San Francisco, Bon Iver was tucked into the woods on a semi-hidden stage surrounded by trees, so the setting lent credence to the rich, natural sounds on the album. “Flume” was first in concert as on the album, but Vernon’s falsetto was much more prominent live. The band added a minute’s worth of what came across as improvisation in the break, with creaking strings and plucked notes, much like the version from their Daytrotter session. “Lump Sum” was next, its intro with vocal melodies as spot-on as The Beatles or The Beach Boys but sad and introspective. The absolute best moment of the performance was “The Wolves (Act I and II),” when Vernon asked for a sing-along during the break and the crowd just nailed it. A surprisingly large crowd sang “what might have been lost” and kept singing it louder and louder and louder until the point at which Vernon asked us to scream. It was one of those hair-raising, goosebump-producing, tear-jerking moments where you can’t believe someone could make something so beautiful and that so many people could get to be a part of it. In addition to debuting a new song entitled “The Blood Bank,” Bon Iver enhanced “Skinny Love” by adding three percussion parts played in unison with the guitar rhythm.
After Bon Iver’s absolutely amazing performance, it was hard to get into Broken Social Scene, especially after having seen them front row at The Metro for a Lollapalooza aftershow. At the same time, it was great to hear the rockin’ “KC Accidental” and the jammin’ “Pacific Theme” from 2002’s You Forgot It In People. Amy Millan from Stars and Elizabeth Powell from Land Of Talk sang on a surprising “7/4 (Shoreline),” but Powell didn’t live up to the standard Feist set for the song. Millan also sang on “Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” The collective, which at times had as many as 10 performers on stage, played some of the stronger tracks from their Broken Social Scene Presents albums, such as Kevin Drew’s “Farewell To The Pressure Kids” and Brendan Canning’s “Love Is New.”
Rodrigo y Gabriela was intended to prep the crowd for Jack Johnson, but they risked stealing the show from the headliner himself. The duo, who met in Mexico City but reside in Dublin, played some of the most intricate guitar work one could ever imagine. The interplay between the two—equally cooperative and combative—was entertaining, but the intricacy of the guitar work left fans awestruck. Alternately strumming, picking and slapping the strings and thumping on the body of the guitar, Rodrigo y Gabriela created lightning-fast music that was both melodically and rhythmically mind-blowing.
That made for a tough act to follow, but Jack Johnson accomplished exactly what festival organizers had in mind: wrap up the weekend with a nice, relaxing, enjoyable and entertaining performance. Johnson played all the obvious hits like “Good People,” “Banana Pancakes,” “Better Together,” “Sitting Waiting Wishing” and “Upside Down,” but not before a little green spider startled him while perched on his microphone. Highlights in the performance included a two-song set with Hawaiian ukulele player and singer Paula Fuga, whose voice was bigger than Christina Aguilera’s. Fellow band member Zach Gill debuted his new single “Family” and Zach Rogue of Rogue Wave came on stage for a cover of Cat Stevens' "Where Do The Children Play."
Jack Johnson’s set wrapped up three days of music in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that featured 65 bands and drew as many as 150,000 fans. For next year, if there is a next year, Outside Lands organizers should think about earlier start times each day so bands can play longer sets and fans can have 10-15 minutes in between time blocks to walk from stage to stage. Transportation to and from the park was easy, affordable and understandably crowded; food and beverages were a little pricey but were high-end for festival food and came from local vendors so it didn’t hurt as much. Portable toilets were omnipresent but could have been kept better; the commitment to recycling and composting was much appreciated; water stations should be added so fans can refill water containers instead of buying multiple plastic bottles. I hope there is a 2nd Annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August 2009: the first attempt was too good not to try again.
Posted by Ben Wadington on Sep 09, 2008 @ 7:00 am
