Mastodon, Mars Volta Bring Much-Needed Vitality to Outside Lands

As detailed by this reporter in a long-winded rant last September, the inaugural version of San Francisco’s Outside Lands Festival left a lot to be desired, marred as it was by a number of gaffes at the base organizational level. These included (but were not limited to) sound trouble during the headliners, poor security, bad scheduling of the acts, and non-existent attention paid to the needs of transporting tens of thousands of people to and from Golden Gate Park, a beautiful but unwieldy venue. Y’know… the small stuff.

I confess I did not hold out much hope for a revised incarnation, either, especially after the festival lost one of its headliners, Beastie Boys, to Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis. Put in an admittedly tight spot, organizers replaced the Beasties with comedy rockers Tenacious D. While I loved The D. back in ’01 like every other twenty-something in America, they were not then, are not now, and never will be festival-headlining material.

I’m happy to report, then, that despite the setbacks, I saw marked improvements in almost every aspect of the overall festival experience during my visit this second time around. Dare I say, I even had a smidge of fun.

However, there is still something crucial missing from Outside Lands that perhaps only time can provide:  it lacks a musical identity. It’s still too large, and it’s still trying to appeal to too many kinds of audiences; any lineup that features both Tom Jones and Mastodon is really reaching. I think this fundamental flaw will continue to be a problem for it as it tries to establish a permanent foothold on the summer music scene.

As before, I was not able to secure press credentials (go figure), so I paid my own way and went as an average concertgoer. Also as before, I went for only a single day. I chose Saturday the 29^th, a day that boasted a strong lineup of alternative superstars with names like T.V. On the Radio and The Mars Volta.

What follows is my journal for the day.

1:00

I park at Fort Mason in the city’s tony Marina District, several miles from the venue. This is one of four stops for the festival’s fledgling shuttle service. I’m pleased Outside Lands went to the trouble of introducing shuttles to the proceedings… however, the service is not included in the price of the ticket, and you’re still subject to the fees of whatever facility you’re parking at. Plus, they apparently have only one shuttle running per stop so far, and that is clearly not enough. I’m the very last person allowed onto the bus, while the remaining throng of concertgoers is stranded for another half-hour. I stand for the entire bumpy trip. It beats Muni, but not by much.

1:20

As I enter the park, I’m handed the festival guide, and am pleased to find that it has been pared down considerably from the overcooked encyclopedia I received last year. It is a well-designed, purely functional fold-out document, featuring only the schedule of performers and a map of the festival grounds. The weather is spectacular, with clear blue skies and warm temperatures that do not feel oppressive or muggy.

So far, so good.

My first order of business is to use the portable toilets while they’re still relatively clean and lineless.  The one I enter has the aromatic aftermath of a recent bowl-loading (not the toilet, if you get my meaning), and someone has already seen fit to scrawl a message on the wall above the urinal. The bottom bit is a command I will dutifully follow in a few hours.

The grounds are still too large, and it feels like days getting from one end of the festival to the other. However, signage and navigation have improved noticeably over last year’s event. Also, there are fewer people – a lot fewer. This might be due to a lineup many perceive as a downgrade from the Radiohead-powered lineup of ’08, but my gut feeling is that others had the same trepidation about returning to a poorly-run festival that I did.

Either way, I have virtually no trouble standing at the front rail for all of the acts I want to see. While it might not bode well for the bottom line, the accessibility is quite nice compared to most of the big festivals I’ve been to.

Whereas I spent all of my time at the main (Land’s End) stage last year, this year I’ll be spending the lion’s share of my time at the amusingly-named Twin Peaks stage.  For ’09, the organizers have smartly chosen to schedule the stages with music catering to certain audiences; so, while the pop crowd souses to their Jason Mraz and Black-Eyed Peas at Land’s End, the rest of us can enjoy the good stuff over at Twin Peaks without being bothered.

Such segregation does bring up an important question, though:  who, exactly, is this festival really for?

2:20

Darth Vader’s theme from The Empire Strikes Back blasts from the P.A., announcing the arrival of Tom Morello’s latest side project, Street Sweeper Social Club. It’s a great cue, but an obvious one, and kind of a mixed message:  are they fighting the Evil Empire or aligning themselves with it?

Morello’s position in that fight is more ambiguous than it might seem. While Rage Against the Machine’s lyrical content was/is a mouthpiece for Zack de la Rocha’s extremist Libertarian fire and brimstone, the band’s music – led by Morello’s distinctive guitar heroics – was embraced with astonishing ease by mainstream mooks, and inadvertently helped spawn the unholy nu metal movement of the late ’90′s that nearly destroyed rock.

Lead singer Raymond “Boots” Riley has always been squarely on the subversive side of the coin.  As frontman for Bay Area funk-rappers The Coup, Riley has put out a series of criminally underappreciated, uncompromising, and  politically-charged records over the past several years, including 1998′s seminal Steal This Album.

Considering the pedigree, Street Sweeper Social Club sounds disappointingly conventional.  While the band members wear spiffy matching black duds that play up the notion of militant revolution, the music itself is de-fanged Rage, all crunchy riffs and rat-a-tat string calisthenics.  Riley is a better rapper than De La Rocha, but you wouldn’t really know from the lyrics he’s working with here, which trade more in hands-in-the-air jingoism than actual substance.  If ever a revolution were to be suddenly neutered by populist theatrics, this is the sound it would make.

Still, it’s hard to deny that the band is fun to watch and listen to live.  Morello seems in a great mood as he unloads his bag of tricks, and the modestly-populated crowd eats it up.  Riley – who clearly hasn’t had much time to develop between-song banter – regularly informs the crowd, “We’re Street Sweeper Social Club.  We’re more than a band, we’re a social club.”  Later, he identifies himself as a Bay Area native playing with guys who are mostly from L.A., and jokingly refers to his hometown of Oakland as “six hours better”.  It’s one of my favorite lines of the day.

Ironically, the songs that come off best are the two excellent covers: L.L. Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”.  Perhaps this is the best indication that the band is a work in progress, and that its material just needs to catch up to its potential.

3:10

During a long break between acts at Twin Peaks, I wander to the nearby Panhandle Stage and catch a bit of Portugal. The Man. I’m not a fan of the band’s pretentious moniker or their earlier albums, but I’m digging their jammy stage presence and more accessible new tracks; if they were a bigger act, they’d be a great lead-in to fellow proggers The Mars Volta.

As the name would indicate, Panhandle is the festival’s thriftiest stage, tucked away into a corner and powered entirely by solar panels.  Portugal have managed a pretty good crowd there, but the stage’s P.A. is not nearly loud enough for the number of people, and the band’s energy feels pointedly muted from my spot behind the soundboard.

As I migrate back to Twin Peaks, I have several minutes to stand back and people-watch.

Interestingly, the act that has the biggest t-shirt support from the crowd is none other than the festival itself.  I’m shocked at how many people are willing to shill for an event they’re already at by wearing colorful t-shirts emblazoned with the line-up on their backs.  It appears the denizens of the Bay are genuinely, unironically thrilled to finally have their own Bonnaroo, Coachella, or – as several in the S.F. press have insisted on comparing it – Woodstock in their midst.

For the record I don’t see any transcendental cultural revolution going on, but whatever.

3:55

While airplanes buzz through the sky, incongruously hawking episodes of the new Melrose Place on the CW, the Twin Peaks stage roars back to life with something heretofore missing from the Outside Lands experience:  BASS. Revered thrash-rockers Mastodon are by far the heaviest band of the festival’s short history, and as they take the stage, the bass stacks vibrate with a bowels-unplugging throb that rivals Loma Prieta.  Behind me, someone appreciatively growls “METALLLLL!”

Well… not exactly, dude.  Mastodon’s latest, Crack the Skye, is their most progressive record yet – closer in tone and spirit to Dream Theater than As I Lay Dying – and only occasionally breaking into the bouts of Cookie Monster screams and technical guitar runs that punctuated prior records like Blood Mountain.  This might offend the band’s more purist fans.  I, however, loves me some prog, and consequently Crack the Skye is by far my favorite Mastodon record yet.

Lucky for me, the set is heavily reliant on material from the new album.  They’ve maxed the amps out so much that most of the intricacies of the music are lost to the sheer power of the noise, but the technical acumen of the musicians is still on full display.  As twin mosh pits break out at center crowd, members of The Mars Volta can be seen nodding their heads at the side of the stage.  Singer/bassist/large-beard-enthusiast Troy Sanders bangs his chest appreciatively, the crowd dutifully throws up its horns, and eardrums bleed the Devil’s song.

I’ll take this over Jason Mraz any day.

5:00

Reunited Brazillian psychedelic rockers Os Mutantes are playing, but sadly, they’ve been scheduled on the far-off Sutro Stage, meaning I’d spend almost their entire allotted set time just walking over to try and see them.  Instead, I plant and wait for New York rockers T.V. On the Radio.

5:40

T.V. on the Radio have been on the road for a bit – almost a year, in point of fact – and it shows on their faces.  Everyone, especially guitarist Kyp Malone, looks exhausted, and lead vocalist Tunde Adabimpe mentions that this will be their last show for “quite a while”.  (He has since formally announced the band will take a one-year hiatus.)

It is a testament to their talent and virtuosity as a band that, even with so little gas in the tank, the band gives a typically ferocious and ebullient performance.  Opening with “Love Dog” off of their universally-adored 2008 effort Dear Science, the setlist freewheels through their whole catalog all the way back to the Liars EP.  Antibalas saxophonist Martin Perna seems the liveliest of the bunch, accentuating the guitars and loops with beautifully layered honks over at stage left.  Malone gives shout-outs to fellow performers The Dirtbombs, Mastodon, and The Mars Volta, while Adabimpe chimes in with my favorite speech of the day: “Look to your left.  Now look to your right.  You’re surrounded by beautiful people on a beautiful day.  You’ve got it better than about 95 percent of the rest of the world.  So, y’know… suck it up.”

Point taken, sir.

7:30

Ambient punksters Deerhunter are tantalizingly close on the Panhandle Stage… but I don’t want to give up my spot for Twin Peaks Stage headliners The Mars Volta.  They are one of my favorite bands – certainly one of my favorite live bands – and this is my first time getting to see them in nearly two years.

Opening with the heavy Zeppelinesque stomp of “Goliath”, lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala gets to work right away, pulling down a cheesy festival sign bearing the band’s name, then proceeding to both destroy and make love to it at the same time.  The point is clear:  Volta fans know who the Hell they’re seeing.  It is the first of many bouts of microphone-kicking, spider-crawling, and general molestation of anything in sight Bixler-Zavala will perform throughout the evening.

In the Voltaverse, this is normal, healthy behavior.

The live band – smaller in size and more abrasive in tone than prior incarnations – matches Bixler-Zavala’s energy antic for antic.  Though there are still jams here and there – both “Viscera Eyes” (from 2006′s Amputechture) and new track “Luciforms” get epic guitar workouts – the band is not nearly as freeform as it has been on prior tours.  Older tracks like “Drunkship of Lanterns” – which, in the past, might stretch to upwards of thirty minutes – have been brought back down to more manageable proportions.  This is perhaps in keeping with the more song-oriented aesthetic of Octahedron, and it suits the band equally well.

I’m rather surprised to find there aren’t more enthusiasts of the band’s older material on the front rail; these folks seem more responsive to the material off of the later records.  It’s a wonderful sign for the band – especially considering those albums were the lowest-selling of their career – but still bewildering for a relative old-timer like me.  So much so, in fact, that I get a bit embarrassed when I’m the only one to let out an appreciative howl when guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez strums the opening bars of “Eunuch Provocateur”.

The standout track from the band’s debut E.P., Tremulant, “Eunuch” has only been played live a couple times in the past six years.  Getting to hear it at all – much less during a festival set – is a big treat, and the band digs its claws in with a primal urgency befitting their early days as drug-addled schizo trailblazers.  Rodriguez-Lopez’s spiraling upward guitar runs duke it out with stop-start lunges from the rest of the band, while a bank of strobes bathe the crowd in hallucinogenic flashes to punctuate all the rampant badassery.  The performance is by far the highlight of the day for me.

As the crowd dissipates into the afterglow, I look to the other flashing lights lining the trees at the far end of the park; it’s festival headliners Dave Matthews Band, who will be playing for another hour.  I wouldn’t mind hearing some of their set, but I know better than to attempt exiting with the rest of the mob, and opt instead to head for the shuttle buses.  I walk through the exit tunnel to, appropriately enough, the strains of “Ants Marching”.  As the sound fades on the second year of Outside Lands, I hear a scorching mid-song solo from violinist Boyd Tinsley, and the 50,000-strong crowd erupting in cheers that would rival a Giants playoff game.

Against all odds, it’s been a nice day.  I might feel differently later, but for now, it seems this festival maybe – just maybe – might have a future after all.  -Words and Photographs by Luke Pimentel, Editor

For more information on Outside Lands, please visit www.sfoutsidelands.com.