Outside Lands Kicks Off In Golden Gate Park pt. 2

Review By Jennifer Maerz

Tyler Callister hit a number of the important points in his wrap up of last night's Outside Lands kickoff. Indeed, it was pretty crowded on the event grounds. But thankfully the clusterfuck feeling came and went in waves, and at numerous points in the evening you actually had space to move your body sideways.

Beck was the one show, however, where personal space was at a premium. The stage he played on, Sutro, is at the bottom of a meadow that slopes downwards. It's an awkward spot because it means that most of the crowd, which stands at the top of the hill, can only see the top of stage -- hence the gigantic squish as the grass tilted down. Luckily, one constant I witnessed from the Outside Lands crowd was friendliness. Yes, we were squished in there, but we were all in this together, and eventually a bit of room would open up. One suggestion for next time, though, is to create walkways so that there aren't so many people streaming in and out of kamikazi exits.(Actually two suggestions: The split-screen videos lining Radiohead's stage offered crystal-clear views of the band from bar back. It would've been nice to have the same sorta thing when Beck was on stage).

The one other bummer was the sound at Radiohead. Twice over the course of their two-hour set, the sound just cut out completely, killing some of their best songs (like "All I Need") with silence. But at least the mistakes produced some stage banter from Thom Yorke, whose few words of the evening included "What happened? Who stepped on the plug?" and "I don't know what the fuck that was, sorry."

But while the glitches are important to point out, overall Outside Lands was an impressive event. There was a sense among all the people I spoke with that we were part of something special, from the chance to walk through long stretches of the park in misty darkness (as packs of bikers cycled by) at the end of the night, to the colored lights shining up against the trees bordering the stages, to the way that for a 60,000 strong crowd, no crush was totally unbearable (well, the beer lines were a little annoying). Plus, well, the headliners both released their best albums in years within the past year, so all that new material sounded pretty awesome live.

The scene also felt very San Francisco. Yeah, that mean Burning Man costumes (fuzzy headpieces, glow-sticking ravers) and far too many dudes in man-flops. But it also meant that while headliners like Beck and Radiohead could be performing anywhere, they won't be in another setting that's so picturesque: tree-lined and fog filled, surrounded by stage paneling designed by famous artists (I noticed one stage dressing done by Twist). The setting felt very specialized to the city, not only because of Golden Gate Park itself, but also because Another Planet, which co-produced the event, selected food on the healthier side of festival fare (Vietnamese sandwiches, for example), and people from Another Planet, like VP Allan Scott, actually stood at crowd intersections, listening in to the chatter to make sure people were having a good time.

And as I said, the crowd was pretty well behaved. That might've been in part because they didn't have a whole lot of time to get sauced: for the whole of Outside Lands, last call is at 9p.m. But that just meant that folks were thirsty at the end of the show.

We went drinking on Haight Street once Radiohead ended, and from the looks of things the Park emptied out down the block. The line for Escape From New York Pizza was out the door for hours (but man did that slice taste good when it arrived). We settled into Murio's, where the slammed bartenders took a moment to stop the crowd for an important announcement. The main bartender told the festival revelers that last night was his buddy's (Sameer?) birthday, and that he'd come in to help out in a jam. So the entire bar sang happy birthday to the dude, a happy ending to a night that was all about witnessing things that felt kinda one in a million, mistakes, and all.

Celebrity citing: Supermodel Jessica Stam took in Outside Lands last night, dressed down in simple gray jeans. Today there's a possibility of a Natalie Portman sighting, as her man Devendra Banhart takes the stage this afternoon at 2:15.