Only Slightly Weirder Fishes
August 9th, 2008
After my Bonnaroo experience in 2007 (posts here, photos here), I passed this year because not enough of the bands I like were playing. And our lives were chaos. And it was in the middle of our Florida trip. However, I learned about Outside Lands, a similar festival in San Francisco put on by the same group that does Bonnaroo and a bunch of other festivals. Outside Lands is also produced by Another Planet.
If you haven’t seen the lineup for Outside Lands, it’s stellar.
Heather and I are going. And we are stoked. That doesn’t even describe it. We are beyond stoked. We never went to Coachella when we lived in LA (Heather did in 2001, but we were on luxury lockdown in 2002) and so we haven’t done a big event like this together. I feel like I’ve got a small grasp based on my time at Bonnaroo, but I’m guessing the San Francisco element will make it a little less shorts and chill and a lot more polar fleece and hipster fundamentalism.
In 2007, the Bonnaroo site didn’t really have a community aspect to it, aside from being able to submit photos after the fact. This year, they built out a bunch of stuff, including their own space as well as a presence on Facebook, Myspace and imeem. Outside Lands has partnered with Microsoft to do a community site called Crowdfire. I’ll be cross-posting stuff there, here and on flickr. Crowdfire asked for my mobile number. Hopefully I can upload photos from my iPhone. Not sure that’s going to happen as the iPhone doesn’t support MMS and as of yet, I can’t see a way to email photos to Crowdfire.
I haven’t seen Beck live in twelve years. It’s been 5 years since we last saw Radiohead. I’ve never seen Stars, Bon Iver, Broken Social Scene, The Walkmen, Devendra Banhart, M. Ward, Black Mountain or Manu Chao (sadly I missed this set at Bonnaroo ‘07).
We probably won’t get to see all of these bands, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll see enough to have a musical cleanse and recharge.
Now, if only San Francisco MUNI cooperates. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Bleah. o
Tags: bonnaroo, music, music festival, outside lands 2008, personal, san francisco, wookiee fest
Amazing lineup. American festivals are finally starting to rival the European ones. If your schedule works out, put Liars on your agenda. They’re a fantastic live act.
You might consider using Tumblr. They give you a unique email address that you can send your photos to from your iPhone, and they show up fairly quickly. They also have a pretty comprehensive API that you can tap into to display your photos on your own blog…
http://www.tumblr.com/api
i was at coachella this year and will be hitting up outside lands to get my second festival fix. maybe i’ll see you guys there
should be a good time…
Sweet lineup. Thanks for the post about this! My husband and I will be in SF when this festival is going on and we had no idea about it. I think we will definitely have to check it out.
Stars are pretty awesome live. They usually have flowers all over everything and chuck them out into the crowd. And then there’s the light suit donned for “The Ghost Of Geneva Heights”.
Fantastic lineup – if I was closer, I’d be willing to shell out for that!
Stars is very cool live. Lots of trombone and trumpet action, at least when I saw them before DeathCab 3 years ago.
Holy Crap! What a line up!! Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Regina Spector, and Grace Potter! Shut up!! that IS Steller!!!
I just saw Radiohead Friday night at the All Point West Music & Arts festival here at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. I hadn’t seen them in five years, either. They were AMAZING. They played for two straight hours and gave us a four-song encore. I totally heart Thom York and those guys. Other headliners were the New Pornographers, Underworld, Andrew Bird, and Mates of State. There were a lot more bands that I didn’t get to see.
Anyway, have a fantastic time soaking in all that fantastic music!
Take the Fulton 5 bus, better than trying to use coins for the light rail (N-judah). Also, try to check out Jackie Greene on Sunday afternoon – he’s a great musician and performer and Phil Lesh has been known to stop by his sets and play.
Hopefully you’ll have a better experience than I did this year at Lollapalooza. Some of Radioheads songs were drowned out quite a bit by crowd noise. btw Bonnaroo was the usual drunken, hedonistic festival we’re use to.
Dooooooood!! I’m so jealous! Radiohead! Beck! Cake! That’s my top three!
You should check out Rodrigo y Gabriela- they’re so fun!
Grace Potter and The Nocturnals are AMAZING live. Just saw them last week in Virginia. Grace is an amazing live singer. The whole band (incl. GP) also did this huge insturmental piece where they all played on the same drumset. Not to be missed.
DO NOT MISS STARS!!!!!! I saw them play at the Orpheum in LA and it was one of the best performances I have ever seen.
I’m seeing Radiohead at the H. Bowl this month!!!
Bonnaroo 2008 was awesome – No the first tier bands were not all that outstanding but the lesser known bands made up for it! Also – there is a Bonnaroo community that is much better then any official Bonnaroo site. Inforoo.com is the place to go for any questions you may have – we even manage each year to locate leaked lineups and figure out a good part of the schedule.
half of me wants to indignantly defend my city’s public transportation system (hey, it’s by far the best in California, probably even on the whole West Coast!), and half of me wants to say yeah, MUNI…i hear ya. anyway, have fun!
p.s. – the 38 Geary is the fastest and most frequently-running aboveground bus line in the city, and it’s what i’d recommend if you don’t mind walking the 4 blocks to the park. it also of course depends on where you’re coming from…
From a random stranger who happens to live two blocks from the concert site: you can definitely count on this being more “polar fleece/hipster” than not. But I’d bring a pair of shorts, just in case – we’ve had some freakishly summer-like weather around here. ha!
Have fun at the festival! I’ll be out of town and missing the masses (d’oh on my part for bad planning!)
And I’m with the Valerie – go with the 38 Geary. Other options: 5 Fulton bus which runs along the park on the North side or the N-Judah muni train which runs parallel to the park two blocks to its south side. Just watch out for teh crazies.