Maybe it was the fog that looked like a smoke machine rising into the air from the concert stages surrounded by sweet-scented eucalyptus trees. Maybe it was the substances that had pupils fat and eyes slanted. Maybe it was the music. Last weekend, the Outside Lands festival premiered in San Francisco to become an outlet for rebellion and chaos among more than 100,000 fans.
The tickets were $225.50 for three days, though some snuck in by jumping the fences that spanned 80 acres, encasing the fest's six stages. Another Planet spent $14 million and three years planning it. White tents and baby blue signs imbued the place with that San Francisco cuteness normally manifested in pastel multi-colored houses and streets that glitter at night. The first day welcomed Steel Pulse, Howlin Rain, The Dynamites, Black Mountain, Manu Chao, Lyrics Born, The Black Keys, Benevento/Russo Duo, Carney, The Felice Brothers, Beck, and Radiohead. It was a mixture of designer hipsters, heads, yuppies, industry figures, college kids, freaks.
Such was the overlapping that Cold War Kids is, a California band that became popular about two years ago with the release 2006 release of their LP, Robbers & Cowards. It was still worthwhile just to see them play songs like “Hospital Beds,” “Hang Me Up To Dry,” and “Saint John.” Lead singer Nathan Willett has a distinct and nasally voice that carried itself through the expansive air of Golden Gate Park. I knew that they would play Hospital Beds the moment before they did. The message is abstract, with Willett lines like “We are now fish and chips/ Italian opera,” and “Nothing’s suffing/ Doctors in tour/ Somewhere in India.” But the feeling is not abstract: this song is about malaise. It is about being sick and tense. This sort of esoteric expression is exactly what makes CWK so attractive to music fetishists. That, and the way they dance — barreling into one another like electrocuted chickens to the sound of a bluesy piano punctuated by jerky punk energy. The other highlights of the show were also from Robbers & Cowards, including “Hang Me Out To Dry” and “St. John.” I waited in Lindley Meadow for Beck to come onstage.
Beck knows how to put the Modern into Guilt, and you know this. These days, he’s sourcing his relevance from the geek-out glitch era we live in. “Nausea” from The Information peaked with a buzzy, synthy fallout towards the end. "Devil’s Haircut" and "Hell Yes" were notable for the sampling, a precursor to when the whole band had a sample machine jam that recalled video games and fried neurons. Beck played songs dominating airwaves a decade ago and longer, songs like “Loser,” “Lost Cause,” and “Where It’s At.” It wasn’t a nostalgia set, but it did feel pretty classic — especially to the backdrop of the park’s frosty bark, misty hills, and heather.
Once Beck finished his set, everyone started out towards Polo Field. Some people cut through the woods. Hundreds followed. “Storm the hill!” came the cry, as we rushed through wet brown leaves and fallen branches like gnarled hands that scratched our ankles. We got to the metal fence that enclosed the field. A row of people a dozen thick started to climb it. My tights tore on the metal twine at the top, and I fell to the ground and ran as people in yellow security jackets looked towards the debacle with their mouths gaping open, talking into their radios.
The crowd was 60,000 deep. I got about halfway through. I was alone and mostly sober. Oversaturated purples and alien-greens blinded by strobe monitors thrashed into the fog. If you have ever been to San Francisco, you should know that the fog is not a backdrop but a rolling and dominant presence. A literal cloud of gray and white unfurls like a great blanket. This close to the ocean, you sometimes can’t see three feet in front of you. To witness this fog cut by laser lights was utterly disorienting. It looked like a massive smoke machine.
Radiohead started with In Rainbows’ “15 Step,” a beat-boxy, nervy song with an erratic beat that recalls the sensation of moths. "Reckoner" showcased Thom Yorke’s pretty, wailing falsetto. His voice is more than a voice; it is an instrument. The sound went out even though you could see from the monitors juxtaposing the stage that they were still playing. “Do you think they’re pulling a John Cage?” I asked the girl behind me.
“Probably,” she said. “Otherwise, I never would have met you.”
Her eyes were pennies.
The sound came on, and Yorke sang that line from “There There” that goes “Just cause you feel it/ Doesn’t mean it’s there.” His voice looped over itself to form a wave, which was joined by thousands of voices. I had a religious feeling. Then they got sexy with "Talk Show Host." His voice teased out and was joined by a jumbling, off-kilter beat. There eeked out a creaking reverb, a single tendril of sound that twined over the funky bass and the one guitar hook so prominent along the ’90s soundscape of college dorms and Walkman headphones. Red neon lights scrambled up and down the monitors. A guy next to me lifted a crystal into the air and said, “This is how memories happen.”
Yorke played a grand piano solo to open “Videotape.” Then Phil Selway started in with pattered hand drumming like threaded wood falling open. Yorke sang slowly and emphatically that “today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen.” A couple in front of me kissed like it was their wedding night. And he was feeling it, too — during “Karma Police,” his face opened up into an ecstatic smile. Needles of moisture from the fog felt like rain on my neck.
"Jigsaw Falling Into Place" ushered forward that popular line, “You do it to yourself.” This song has more of that ’90s rock sound you can dance to. When it ended, a hairy, troll-like guy started screaming like a zombie. He wouldn’t stop. Then, something weird happened. Everyone else started moaning with him. Some kid who looked like a frat boy said, “Dude, you’re tripping balls.” They embraced.
The sound went out again and they kept playing. I wondered whether they were doing it as some kind intellectual acid trip. But then Thom Yorke said, “Sorry for the technical problems... It’s all about the music, really.”
The monitor depicted a huge zoomed-in view of his eyeball during “Paranoid Android,” a creepy and abstract subconscious expression, all subliminal with lines like “God loves his children” and “ambition makes you look pretty ugly.” It finished with an outburst of tribal drumming.
I sent a text: “im dreaming of a fake plastic trees encore.”
Then "Fake Plastic Trees" started, and I texted, “dreams do come true.”
After the last song of the night, which was Kid A’s "Everything In Its Right Place," thousands of confused people funneled out of the park. We mashed into a 38-Geary bus, where a hipster girl kind of passed out on me and someone else started smoking weed. At each stop, tons of people tried to get on. The doors wouldn’t close. Hair was disheveled. Innocent civilians grasped a little more tightly to the handrails. We barreled back into the city, and the driver blew through 10 or 12 stops without stopping, as people screamed for him to. I woke up the next morning in a funk of dirt and sweat with my sparkly neon press bracelet chaffing my wrist.
