Outside Lands 2012

[starlady]

epershand and I went to Outside Lands 2012 last Sunday. It was really awesome! My standards for music festivals are low (i.e., have fun and don't get assaulted), but I think Outside Lands may be an asymptotically perfect music fest. It's certainly the most San Francisco music fest possible, that's for sure.

We got there at 12:35, after some hilarity with transportation, and went straight to the main stage to wait for fun., who we saw live in March at a sold-out venue with lots of drunken obnoxious sorority girls and who are one of those rare bands who are so much better live than the recordings that the recordings are an active disappointment even though they're great. We were able to get up really close to the stage and their set was awesome, awesome, awesome.

In general, the Jumbotron camera work was really good, and so we were able to get a really good experience of the Franz Ferdinand set that was next, even though we spent the first third of it chowing down on food because we were starving. (The food in general was pretty darn good.) Franz Ferdinand were also really good live! I have never seen them before and they played some new songs as well as old material and they are really dynamic, too.

Regina Spektor was next, and epershand and I speculated that she was actually scheduled on the main stage to clear out the crowds. Although both of us like Regina Spektor, we were sort of nonplussed by her set choices. It just wasn't a festival set, and we wound up wandering around during it, since the odds that she was going to play "Us" were slim. (And, in fact, she didn't.)

Bloc Party were one of the draws of the festival for me, because they are probably one of my favorite bands whom I've never seen, and indeed, until last year they were broken up and I thought I would never get to see them. But they have a new album and they played some songs from it and we got to the stage really, really, early, early enough to get up pretty darn close, and they were awesome! I was so happy.

Stevie Wonder was the last performer on the main stage - we arrived back there in time to hear him covering Michael Jackson, and we never even got close enough to the front to see the people crowd-surfing. Stevie Wonder is great, and all of his hits that he played were great, although it got a little awkward when it became obvious that he'd forgotten that he was supposed to go until 9:30. We wound up cutting out a little bit before then, and left to the strains of him covering The Beatles. It was, all in all, a fantastic day.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Ooh, I love Regina Spektor. (She sings Biblefics! How could I resist?)