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.
