Outside Lands – Final Thoughts

I didn’t make it out to Day 3 of Outside Lands (Jack Johnson is my personal antimatter) but I felt that days 1&2 gave me a pretty decent perspective on the overall festival experience.

First of all, I’m sure many of you have read about the festival’s problems – the sound brownouts during Radiohead and Manu Chao; the exit issues eventually resulting in several fences/barricades being turned over; the overlapping (and sometimes confusingly placed) artist sets. And these are valid gripes all. The Radiohead sound outages were very distracting, but certainly it can’t be the first time a festival has had to deal with sound problems. I felt they were resolved with haste, with no more than a minute or so passing without music (though in live performance time, it was admittedly an eternity).

I would agree that the exit/crowd control issues were a problem. After Radiohead’s set concluded, it took us at least 35 minutes to actually exit the Polo Grounds (not even the park itself). Where the exits actually were at that point was a bit confusing, and there were definitely too few of them for 60,000+ people. In fact, after we finally came to the other side of the tunnel through the exit, the crowd literally cheered and clapped in relief. But again – overcrowding at a festival? Gee, never heard that one before.

I was far more disappointed with the individuals in the crowd that couldn’t bother to sort their garbage before tossing it into the bins (since every recycle station had huge graphics explaning what sort of refuse went where, there was simply no excuse in my finding plastic beer cups in the bin marked ‘Composting’) given the fact that a huge – and unavoidable – part of the festival was about environmental awareness.

Any time you make a first attempt at something, there are going to be some rough patches. I think that for the most part, the festival was an unquestionable success, if for no other reason than I and roughly 100,000+ people were able to gather in Golden Gate Park and listen to our favorite musicians. Would I have changed around the schedule as well who played what stage? Sure, but I also recognize the difficulty in scheduling all those bands in a fair and reasonable way. Most everyone working at the festival was friendly and helpful, and there was a considerable effort to lessen the typical negative effects of a concert on the park and surrounding community, even if some of the attendees didn’t see fit to respect those efforts.

I also heard numerous complaints about the weather. What do I have to say about that? Try walking around in 120° where everytime you exit your car or a building you feel like you’re being boiled alive, then come back and talk to me about a little fog and some moisture here and there. Seriously.

So most importantly – would I go back next year? You can bet I will! In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this year’s issues were sorted by then, with a whole new set of issues to deal with. But hey, isn’t that half the fun of the experience anyway?

Tags: Festivals, outside lands