Outside Lands
This past weekend, I had the privilege of going to the Outside Lands music and arts festival in Golden Gate park, in San Francisco. It was a blast and I got to see a ton of great bands in the process.
Before I get into some of the bands, I should mention that San Francisco had some real logistical problems supporting this festival. Usually you can camp at a festival of this size (excepting Lollapalooza), but you cannot camp in San Francisco city limits. I’m not sure how camping is different from sleeping on the streets, which thousands of bums do nightly, but it’s not allowed. Due to these restrictions, people had to figure out how to get to from one side of the city to the other.
There was very little parking available and on Friday there were not enough trains or busses running to meet the demand. The cabbies had a field day, and it took many people many hours to get back to where they came from. The festival did not have enough will call lines set up on Friday either, so it took over an hour from finally getting to the festival to getting in the gates. This was especially troubling for me, since my train broke down on the way to the festival and I was very late in getting to the will call line. In the end, all I saw on Friday was Radiohead, the headliner.
In addition to transportation bandwidth issues, there were also cell tower bandwidth issues. There are hardly ever that many people on that side of the city, and the cell towers could not handle the load. I rarely could get through to anybody I wanted to call, and texts were often returned to me undelivered. An interesting phenomenon I had yet to experience, and I’m not sure if cell companies can do anything to help the problem. Does anybody know if it’s possible to temporarily increase cell capacity to a locality?
All of those things aside, the music was brilliant. I am going to do a series of entries describing the awesome artists everybody should be checking out. I think I’ll split it up Headliners, the Others parts 1 and 2, and the Side Stage shows. Stay tuned!
Tags: Festivals, Music, Outside Lands