.Inaugural Outside Lands Lives up to Its Potential

Not that there weren't some technical difficulties.

It’s safe to say that there were a lot of expectation for the first-ever Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival. For the most part, the festival did live up to its potential; at times there were simply stunning moments and the venue itself was quite a scene to behold. And yet, there were, quite naturally, a few snags too, such as the bottleneck crowd trying to get to the Beck stage, which eventually resorted to mowing down the chain-link fences. Or when the sound cut off — completely — during Radiohead’s highly anticipated performance, which happened not just once, but twice. Yet the technical difficulties were also a blunt reminder of the fact that the massive event was being staged by a company with a staff size not much bigger than a picnic-blanket of fans, for the first-ever nighttime performance at Golden Gate Park. In that regard, it was quite a feat.

Despite the overcast weather, the mood was joyous and anticipatory for reggae group Steel Pulse, who opened the show at the massive Lands End stage. As expected at any outdoor festival worth its salt, there was dancing, pot brownies, and groups of friends having picnics. On the opposite end of the elongated eighty-acre festival site, Oakland psych-rock band Howlin’ Rain welcomed a small but enthusiastic crowd with a blisteringly loud half-hour set.

The second round of staggered sets included performances by indie rock groups Black Mountain and the Cold War Kids, as well as classy, gospel-inflected funk/soul outfit the Dynamites. But the biggest surprise of the day came when Barcelona-based Manu Chao and his excellent band set the Polo Field on fire with an endlessly interesting patchwork of Latin pop, reggae, rock, and more. The band’s ten-minute opener featured the rousing refrain “Yo vengo de yo yo yo!,” whipping the crowd into a frenzy. “Me Gustas Tú,” another highlight, started with a commanding reggae groove only to shift on a dime into a driving, distorted punk section for about thirty seconds, and then back to reggae, and again all over again. It was jarring, but incredibly powerful.

With all the walking and overlapped sets, it was impossible to catch even half the performances, but Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born, Ohio blues duo the Black Keys, and Beck all drew massive crowds. Dressed in a black suit and fedora, his long shoulder-length blond hair cascading down, Beck led a four-piece band through a set that included old favorites (“Devil’s Haircut”) and newer hits (“Modern Guilt”). At one point, all the members of the band got up front with 808 drum machines to concoct a bombastic electronic mix before breaking into “Hell Yes.” “My beat is correct,” Beck deadpanned. “604 equals make-out.” While Beck tried to organically translate the weird, eccentric funk master he embodies on record, his attempt fell flat. It was his bluesy slide-guitar intro and “Loser” that got the crowd most excited, launching them into fist-pumping and some middle-age, fanny-pack-wearing women into booty-shaking.

The fog was downright damp by 8 p.m., when Radiohead plugged in for Golden Gate Park’s first-ever night concert. And it seemed the whole darn crowd was there to watch.

One of the strengths of Radiohead’s live show is its ability to successfully translate its recorded material. But perhaps no tour has created such a complete auditory and visual experience. Two video screens flanked the stage on either side, which projected, in changing monochromatic colors, four changing camera angles simultaneously, including Thom Yorke’s face from below, Johnny Greenwood’s effects pedals, Colin Greenwood shifting in and out of view, Yorke’s profile, Phil Selway’s drum set. While some fans lamented that this denied them a full view of what the band was doing, it conveyed one of the band’s reoccurring themes — the use of technology to achieve intimacy. The light show helped further this notion. Skinny LED lights behind and above the band were designed like a stage curtain, and the shifting patterns and colors they created complimented the tones and hues of the music, as well as the increasingly digital breakdown of the video screens (blinking, striations, white noise, etc.).

Coinciding with the music, the presentation created not a vivid portrait, but something more akin to a mesmerizing abstract painting. Songs like opener “15 Step,” from In Rainbows, had multiple layers for the listener to absorb: delicate guitar, the ghostly Ondes Martenot, glitchy beats, Colin’s melodic bass line, and Yorke’s hazy vocals. From the time-signature shifting of “Paranoid Android” to the low-intensity rave beat of set closer “Everything in Its Right Place,” Radiohead was flawless and in full spectacle mode throughout. Yorke hammed it up, doing spastic dance moves during “Idioteque” and goofy-eyeing a camera. Though the band fulfilled its duty as perhaps the biggest art-rock band of its time, the reception was surprisingly subdued. Admittedly, two technical failures during “Airbag” and “All I Need” in which the sound cut to absolute silence for nearly a minute, temporarily severed the band’s spell. But that didn’t explain the pathetically weak call for an encore from such a massive crowd.

Saturday started less frenetically at 1 p.m., with a noticeably smaller crowd now that Radiohead was out of the way. A number of local acts kicked off the day, including Oakland R&B singer Goapele, San Francisco Latin fusion collective Rupa & the April Fishes, Oakland hip-hop act the Coup, San Jose rock group Dredg, and freak-folk icon Devendra Banhart, who’s now based in LA. Banhart’s set was mellow, fun, and funky — the perfect recipe for an outdoor performance in the park. He had an endearing on-stage personality, and the crowd responded enthusiastically — especially to his cover of Mungo Jerry’s 1970 hit “In the Summertime.”

On the other end of the festival grounds, Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco and his group opened up with an excellent performance of “Kick Push.” A massive crowd was already assembled, filling Speedway Meadow to the brim. Lupe’s raps were clear and powerful, but his six-member backing band seemed almost incidental: their instruments (bass, drums, turntables, and keyboards) were overpowered by a backing track and turned down so low that it hardly mattered if they played at all. Still, the performance looked and sounded awesome and emanated good energy. A few minutes’ walk away, one reveler perhaps wasn’t feeling it. “Doesn’t it just seem like the end of the world?” she announced to her friend with complete seriousness but not much concern. The friend pulled out his video camera and, hands flailing in the air, she proceeded to play-act her version of Armageddon hysteria. Yet in the midst of a massive, flowing crowd, no one seemed to notice.

Later in the afternoon, when people were still streaming into the park in large numbers, local duo Two Gallants put on a solid show for a tiny crowd. “Welcome to San Francisco,” said frontman Adam Stephens. “I think I know half of you.” The set wasn’t as intense as they have been known to do, but an interesting twist came when drummer Tyson Vogel got out from behind his kit and joined Stephens on acoustic guitar for a song.

Forty-five minutes later, quirky rock group Cake gave another of the weekend’s finest performances. Front man John McCrea was in top form, once leading the crowd in a huge chant of “Sheep go to heaven, goats to hell,” from the band’s 1998 song “Sheep Go to Heaven.” McCrea was the picture of cool, and his band sounded crisp and peppy while Cake ran through its first hit, 1994’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” and later a cover Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” Even McCrea’s stage banter, comprised of subtle social commentary, was enthralling.

By the time headliner Tom Petty came on, the crowd had thinned considerably, but his first few songs warmed the chilly night right up. For the initial part of his set he seemed to be trotting out the hits, but as he proved at last year’s Super Bowl halftime show, he does this as well and as passionately as anyone. “Free Fallin'” sounded great, with Petty’s voice spot-on and his band looking relaxed and smooth. Predictably, the number prompted a massive sing-along. “Last Dance with Mary Jane” was equally good, but a take on “End of the Line” by one-time side-project the Traveling Wilburys fell a little flat.

Most glaringly, the headlining set was again marred by a technical difficulty: about thirty minutes in, Petty announced he’d have to stop playing for five minutes, or else the PA was going to blow. When he returned, he explained there was an issue with a generator, and it must’ve been the same problem Radiohead had experienced the night before. Many people took the opportunity to leave early, but those who stuck around were treated to an appearance by Steve Winwood, a ten-minute version of “Breakdown,” and a solid performance of “Learning to Fly.”

By Sunday afternoon, Golden Gate Park’s Speedway Meadow more or less resembled the pastoral Garden of Eden that Gregg Perloff might have envisioned when he first dreamed up the Outside Lands Festival. Sunlight leaked through the trees and oiled the stage awnings. The presumably affluent, but fashionably uncouth festival-goers doddered from stage to stage eating deluxe salads with nut-and-seed pate; reddening themselves in the sun’s pervasive UV rays; gazing at the Drive-By Truckers with the same expression that a customer uses when appraising furniture. And they did the hippie dance — a floaty, improvisational, arm-flinging thing that requires the body to colonize as much space as possible. At Outside Lands, such movements seemed apropos. Well, mostly.

There were, admittedly, several performers worth getting barefoot and flinging your arms to. San Francisco-raised singer-songwriter Vienna Teng, who took the Avenues stage at around 3 p.m., wooed audiences with melodic rock songs that had a real folk base, both in terms of the instrumentation (cello, violin, sparse percussion, and Teng playing dense, classical-ish piano) and the libretti. On “One Bedroom, One Bath” — a song about trying to find the perfect one-bedroom apartment in some overpriced coastal city — Teng pounded the top of the piano as though it were a hand drum, while violinist Dina Macabee strummed her violin strings with a pick to imitate the sound of a mandolin. During “City Hall” — a song that many people might have gotten married to, said Teng — a lesbian couple with tie-dyed Outside Lands T-shirts swayed blissfully in the audience.

Teng seemed completely at ease with the Outside Lands crowd, in contrast to less-folksy acts like the Cool Kids, an indie hip-hop duo that’s supplanted Wolf Pack and the Clipse as Pitchfork’s new-hot-crossover-group-du jour. In just a half hour set the Cool Kids made quite an impression, mixing humorous raps with lean, visceral boom-bap. The Outside Lands crowd loved every minute of it, even though the rappers on stage seemed to be mocking their audience the whole time. “Now I want you to put your hands up in the air. Yeah, you too, iPhone guy,” said emcee Mikey Rocks. When the crowd started clapping — kind of kumbaya-ish, campfire-style clap — rapper Chuck Inglish just about lost it. As he doubled over laughing, Rocks tried to make excuses: “Yo, this dude was mesmerized by the claps.”

Sunday’s show included many highlights. Little Brother emcee Phonte drummed his Adam’s Apple to mimic the sound of T-Pain — with uncanny results. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings delivered what looked like a knock-out performance from the video screens. Venezuelan outfit Los Amigos Invisibles played jam-band rock with hypnotic funk vamps. But Mexican guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela was the afternoon’s real payoff. They played an hour-long set of hard-edged flamenco-style rock, using their guitars as percussion instruments. Gabriela scraped her guitar strings and rapped her knuckles against the soundboard, turning a melodic instrument into a drum.

By 8 p.m., the show had begun to wind down. One crowd of barefoot hippies was packed cheek-by-jowl into Speedway Meadow, dancing to Wilco. Another crowd had made its exodus across the Polo Field to see Jack Johnson descend on the Lands End stage. Hundreds of people were spilling out of the gates and sauntering toward Muni. On their way out, a few festival-goers argued vociferously about whether or not Jack Johnson sounds too much like the soundtrack for Curious George. “Dude, he can’t help that he wrote a song for Curious George,” said one Johnson sympathizer. “I mean, Phil Collins did the soundtrack for Tarzan. Elton John did most of The Lion King. Are you gonna hate on them, too?”

This debate was interrupted by an adorably clueless drug dealer who was obviously new to the game. “Mushrooms?” “Mushrooms, anyone?” he asked.

“Uh, dude, I think you hit this crowd about two minutes too late for mushrooms,” snapped one concertgoer. But he consulted his crew anyway. “What do you say guys? Quarter pound? Close the night out?”

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