San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival wrapped up its fourth iteration last weekend, transforming the photo-ready Golden Gate Park into a vibrant hub for feather-sporting teens and toddler-toting ‘hip’ parents alike. The sold-out three-day extravaganza had over 180,000 attendees gorging on the freshest music and food around – the largest attendance for the festival yet. With a lineup bolstered by indie-powerhouses and an impressive grab-bag of genres, organizers can put a check in the win column for 2011.
Reinstating the fest’s third day this year, producers Another Planet Entertainment rolled out a headlining roster stacked with formidable performers. There was the recent Grammy-winning club: Canadians Arcade Fire, hot on a major festival headlining spree; The Black Keys, bringing blues rock to the fore; and Brit astro-rockers Muse, whose music is pitch-perfect for laser shows and apparently, the “Twilight” series’ soundtracks. Oh, and of course the requisite throwback band Phish, for whom organizers booked for a three-and-a-half-hour slot on Friday evening.
The safe choices in big-budget acts seemed to pay off. Through the weekend, the Polo Field was livened by the swaying sea of arms and a respectable mosh pit or two. The only knock on the fest was the at-capacity crowd, which seemed particularly throng-like in the sunshine of days two and three. With the expansive backdrop of the Polo Field and Speedway Meadow, the bodies themselves weren’t the problem. Instead, it was the overtaxed cell networks that seemed determined to peeve friends hustling from one end of the venue to the other. Considering the fervor to see off-the-main-stage acts Foster the People and Major Lazer, video screens on the three lesser stages would have been much appreciated.
While the echoing bass of MGMT and Deadmau5 may be merely a memory to Golden Gate Park’s neighbors, read below for the highlights of the weekend. Sit back and reminisce.
Biggest Brouhaha
The story of Friday was the no-show of rapper Big Boi, who kept fans milling on the Sutro Stage for an hour before a haggard comedian Dave Chappelle tried to calm the crowd. Although Chappelle pulled out a two-minute bit on beach balls, fans weren’t exactly understanding when it was announced that Big Boi had pulled out entirely.
Big Boi’s Twitter trail blames the DJ for getting lost. The rapper refused to do a “half-ass show” in the abbreviated slot he was given, and thus didn’t perform at all. Circumstances are still fuzzy.
The absence of the highly-billed rapper overshadowed anything the school of Phish or The Shins could come up with and threw off the evening’s scheduling. R&B singer Erykah Badu’s set on the same stage was pushed back by more than half an hour, though those who did stay were treated to some of the finest jazz flute shredding to back the Queen of Neo-Soul. For people avoiding the Phish love-fest at all costs, the gap in programming just left people cold and confused.
Best Use of a Stanford Degree
By the time K.Flay hit the stage on Friday afternoon, those who were hoping for warmer weather knew it wasn’t going to arrive. Instead, fans huddled close to the stage as the Stanford grad tossed out lines as cool as the incoming fog and pumped out beats from her laptop (which boasted a sticker that said “Reading is sexy.”).
Backed up only by a drummer, she ran across the stage, throwing shout outs to her roommates in the audience and peppering the set with background stories to several songs — “Elle Fanning” inspired by a photo of the actress in her bathroom, another inspired by the Lucky Supermarket on Fulton. Her chops, though, stole the show: on a Busta-inspired rap that inched ever-so-slightly in speed from slow to whoa to holy shit, K.Flay proved to her few-in-number but ardent-in-heart fans on Friday that girl’s got skills.
Best Rock Star Move
The Joy Formidable may have been on their last show before returning to their native North Wales, but the rock trio’s megawatt smiles could still be seen from the Sutro Stage’s entrance. No tour exhaustion here. The unpretentious Brits and their synth-dabbling arena rock turned the backwater Sutro Stage into a grass amphitheater, never mind that it was early afternoon on Friday.
The clear voice of lead singer Ritzy Bryan brought their aptly-named “The Big Roar” to uplifting heights. Bryan won the biggest baller award of Day One after repeatedly throwing her guitar to the ground after anthemic closer “Whirring,” ending the set on her knees with bassist-guitarist Rhydian Dafydd. In her bright red dress and blond bob, she didn’t do much damage to the instrument, but the rockstar feeling was there.
The Dirty Handbell
It shouldn’t be surprising that OK Go, the kings of the viral video drew such a large crowd at the Lands End stage on Saturday afternoon. The set was an equal mix of their three LPs and it was the type of fun-loving crowd that would cheer whenever the grandma in the front row appeared on the big-screen. Singer Damian Kulash, making electric blue sexy, descended into the crowd of “fucking dirty sinners” for a solo rendition of “Last Autumn Leaf,” and the band even invited their original guitarist, Andy Duncan, now presumably a dad, on the stage for oldie “Get Over It.”
In their most endearing moment, the four Crayola-colored dudes donned white gloves and clacked their way through “Return” on the “instrument that god himself invented – the handbell,” Kulash announced. A mic stand may have been knocked over and the melody was indecipherable, but people laughed along anyways.
That’s So San Francisco
Organizers have always been committed to their “Eco Lands” mission. From the solar-powered Panhandle stage to the on-site farmers market to the free valet bike parking, Outside Lands smacks of the Bay Area. But this year’s bourgeois move was the addition of a food truck hide-away in the treed hills between the two largest stages. Presumably going for realism, the trucks were aligned along a horse path reeking of manure.
Biggest Dance Party
It’s complicated to call Girl Talk‘s set on Saturday night a performance: Gregg Gillis’s premade set rang forth over the crowd’s heads for over an hour last night as he acted as kind of hype man up on stage surrounded by 50-plus people on stage.
Lights flashed, toilet paper rolls of streamers were thrown out over the crowd, audience members set off floating lanterns and sparklers as the set went through selections from previous albums as well as mashups incorporating newer radio hits like Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” and Adele’s ubiquitous “Rolling in the Deep.”
The ever-pleasing combination of poppy background chords over Rick Ross-like rap kept the party rolling as crowds sang along to snippets of hits from over the years — and gladly went “little bit softer now” and “little bit louder now” to a culmination over a mashup with the Isley Brother’s “Shout.”
The Next Big Thing
The accordion was the instrument du jour of Sunday, when one act after another rocked the squeezebox. The folk stylings of Beirut and The Decemberists (also suffering from the worst genre double-booking of the fest), picked up with the distinct and piercing wheeze of the accordion. And on the female front, Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne turned the comical instrument into an arena weapon while Mexican pop-starlet Julieta Venegas proved that it had in fact migrated south of the border. Watch out, ukulele: your days are numbered.
Canadian Civil War
Closing night became the battle of the frozen North, between Deadmau5 and Arcade Fire on opposite ends of the park. On one side was glowstick-laced head-banging; on the other was collective humming.
Unlike the soft-rock of Junip earlier in the day, the stage setup for the Canadian DJ DeadMau5 included a huge rising platform upon which he perched and watched (mostly through mau5-mask eyes) the crowd below. Dubstep-inspired drops turned the entire setup into a light show, with background flashes as well as the platform — and even the signature mask — casting the audience’s faces in white glow. At one point it appeared that Zimmerman may have hurt himself onstage, but he rallied to the end: even out beyond the packed crowd, exhausted festivalgoers stopped and stared for the vast closer “Moar Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff.”
Meanwhile, on the main stage, Arcade Fire gave a pitch-and-everything-perfect show to bring Outside Lands 2011 to a harmonious finish. As a warm up, Arcade Fire singer Win Butler had jumped on stage with gospel singer Mavis Staples earlier in the day to help cover “The Weight.” By nighttime, Butler was ready to show the expectant crowd just why the band had earned its Grammy.
The show kicked off with a marquee mini-movie calling up suburban-satanic imagery, with karaoke-esque visuals playing behind the band, dressed for an 80s prom afterparty. Accordion-punk classic “No Cars Go,” off 2007’s Neon Bible, was the first to get the crowd jerking, whereas the high-energy double-dose of “Month of May” and “Rebellion (Lies)” burned off the foggy chill. The encore “Wake Up” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” lacked some of the pizzazz and flair from the band’s inflatable-ball cascade at Coachella this year, but the sprawling park grounds didn’t need any more decoration.
A version of this review appeared at treeswingers.com on Saturday, August 13; Sunday, August 14; and Monday, August 15.