Outside Lands Day One - Friday, August 22nd
Outside Lands Music Festival put on the first nighttime event Golden Gate Park has seen in over 30 years. The park is a pivotal site in rock n roll history and thankfully the festival helped prove that the park still knows how to party.
I started the festival off by checking out Carney – a poppy classic rock band from Los Angeles. They dressed like a bunch of gypsies, they all have long hair, all the boys are babes and the singer has a dreamy voice reminiscent of Robert Plant. The long guitar jams filled Golden Gate Park and resurrected all the old ghosts that died in the throws of intense acid trips, those ghosts from the 60’s generation that revolted against all things lame. You should get/buy their new EP “Nothing Without You.”
Black Mountain is named after the school that birthed “hip” and influenced artists such as William Burroughs, John Cale, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olsen, ect. Black Mountain delivered GUITARS!!!! The whole crowd was feeling it, everyone was jumping up and down and swaying to the jams – super whimsical!! I think any of the “Beat Generation” godfathers would have had a grin from ear to ear (if they could have made it) as they took sweet drugs like benzo’s and mushrooms and gazed upon the beautiful young starlets. The whole time I watched all I wanted to do was take the lovely, haunted, deranged, beautiful Amber Webber (singer) into a private room, preferably in Mexico, and put an apple on her head and shoot.
Beck went on at dusk which technically knocks Outside Lands claim that Radiohead is the first band to play a live nighttime show in Golden Gate Park to the curb, it’s cool, I don’t mean to bash Radiohead’s fame but The Black Keys and Lyrics Born also played at dusk. It was a tough call but I decided to go to Beck instead of the Black Keys at the last minute. The issue I had with the Beck show: Outside Lands put him on one of the smaller stages, bad idea, the speakers sucked and there weren’t any screens projecting what he was doing on-stage. I felt really bad for the people standing 500 yards away because all they probably saw was a black stick figure with really long gnarled brownish/blond hair.
Ok, so Radiohead is the first ever band to start a show after dark in Golden Gate Park – historic event, definitely needs to go down in history books, I was there! I feel like I should write my own LCD Soundsystem esq song about the event – NOT! During the second song the sound cut out. Thom Yorke kept singing on-stage, he danced like a maniac and seemingly remained oblivious to the 15,000 people gasping before him. Finally the sound came back on, after about a 30 second pause, then Thom stated “So the police pulled the plug?” After the interlude, he shifted into “There, There.” Anyway, Radiohead is great, every inch of ground surrounding the stage was packed with people, the music projected throughout the park and into nearby neighborhoods, everyone in attendance fell even deeper in love with them, alas, when they ended the show the mob was forced to slowly file out of the event, everyone definitely looked hungry for day two.
Shits, giggles and awesomeness!!
The Attack - Please Phil Spector
August 25th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Woah, good job on Outside Lands Pope!