Image via Pranav Trewn
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
I’ve attended Outside Lands almost every year since 2013. My first time, me and a half dozen high school friends drove down from our hometown and set up camp at a family friend’s empty apartment, crashing on the floor in sleeping bags and taking an hour-long bus ride each way to Golden Gate Park. I got food poisoning before the festival began, got crushed in the crowd for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and got stranded on the curb multiple nights in a row by unsympathetic bus drivers in the pre-Uber era.
It was one of the best weekends of my life.
I attended subsequent iterations as a college student in the East Bay. First, as a volunteer for the VIP “cabanas” by way of an early music industry connection, shirking responsibilities to sneak glances at Wilco and Tame Impala’s sets from the vantage of the big wigs. The next year I procured my inaugural media pass via the first publication I wrote for (RIP The Bay Bridged). I came back as a journalist most years thereafter, even during summers living in DC, New York, and Chicago, and can’t imagine letting up the tradition anytime soon now that I live walking distance from the grounds. Outside Lands is such a deeply rooted annual routine with friends and loved ones that the line has fully blurred between my personal and professional relationship with the festival.
The extent to which Outside Lands is so dependable in my life has made me, over the years, underestimate the festival – the largest independently promoted festival in the country – relative to those in other cities. I have written extensively about the way festival lineups increasingly reflect how much tech platforms have degraded cultural tastes, and that has made most flyers this summer feel interchangeable to me: each one a unique shell of marketing choices housing the same varieties of flash in the pan streaming magnets, workhorse pop headliners, and legacy acts coasting off past IP and brand recognition.
Yet what matters beyond any string of names on a flyer is the actual, on-the-ground experience, and Outside Lands has quietly come to differentiate itself from the pack as a premiere heavyweight contender. Event organizers Another Planet Entertainment and Superfly have drilled down on enhancing a few key elements of the weekend, which made my time earlier this month feel less like retreading into a nostalgic tradition than upgrading to a whole new operating system. The promoters of Lollapalooza, Governor’s Ball, Austin City Limits, and the rest of their mass appeal, major city-based ilk would do well to start mimicking three key lessons from Outside Lands ASAP.
Touring is a monster, one that demands an intensive volume of staff, equipment, and carbon emissions to manifest the some 40 minutes on average of performance time each artist is granted over a festival weekend. Helping to offset the investment, many residential-bound festivals with sound curfews offer smaller artists the opportunity to perform additional ticketed shows at the end of each night. Outside Lands also hosts these night shows, but this year they went one step further by giving several artists multiple performance slots during the festival itself.
Most prominently advertised were a pair of Vampire Weekend sets, one to open the Twin Peaks stage during the day, followed by another one to close it out at night. As a major enthusiast for that band’s live show, this was one of my primary drivers to attend, and the dual performances allowed Ezra and co to both dig deeper into their catalog and sprawl out further for each song, vamping more loosely than they typically get to for a festival. For fans, that meant receiving a holistic offering uncompromised from that of their standalone gigs, including their inspired bit of running through on-the-spot audience requests.
But Outside Lands also offered something beyond the typical Vampire Weekend show, letting the band express themselves differently for each time slot in their stage design choices and the structure of their setlists. The early birds got several of the band’s most buoyant early singles, a couple of folksier Father of the Bride cuts, and their excellent rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman”; the night crowd received moodier new album classics like “Capricorn” and “Mary Boone” and anthemic sing-alongs like “Unbelievers” and “Walcott.” The dedicated were lucky enough to enjoy both.
While Vampire Weekend was given the most prominent promotion as a two-time performer, many other artists were able to double dip due to OSL’s unique side stages. Duboce Triangle – a revamp of earlier era offerings like the acoustic-focused Toyota Den – gave performers as varied as Nourished By Time, Kate Ballinger, and DJ Mandy another time slot to perform, but on a smaller scale in a more intimate grotto. Some artists used that second chance to try out a different type of set from the usual festival fare they brought to the primary stages.
For folks like Inji and Mayer Hawthorne, that meant DJ sets where they had more room than in their live shows to pay homage to their influences. The South Asian sample-based DJs Baalti, coming right off of an all-encompassing 90-minute set at the SOMA stage, treated their tight 30 on Duboce as a chance to showcase an entirely different, higher energy slice of their sound. Similarly, the Dolores stage hosted not only drag performances and queer club energy all weekend, but folks like Fcukers and Big Freedia stopped by to throw a dance party distinct from what they have been offering on the road. Rebecca Black earned the stage’s biggest crowd of the weekend when she performed a delightfully brash and bratty DJ set shortly after her equally chaotically choreographed live performance.
The rest of OSL’s schedule was as full as ever, so none of the repeat programming detracted from the value proposition of a ticket. In many ways it improved it, easing the more painful scheduling conflicts by giving festival-goers second chances to catch artists they had to miss earlier in the day. When I couldn’t get out of my Friday morning commitments in time for Baalti’s noon set, I was relieved to still be able to make it to the “Part II” of their Outside Lands appearance.
Even for artists I did see the first time, the one-two punch offered a more fulfilling live experience. Rebecca Black hasn’t yet announced a tour where she serves as both headliner and DJ, but she should consider doing so; having the opportunity to see both sides of her at Outside Lands felt like a rare innovation in an industry usually allergic to trying something new.
The major headline for locals this year was that Another Planet Entertainment would be building even further on their previous partnership with the city to host three weekends of music in Golden Gate Park’s Polo Fields. The weekend prior to OSL, Dead & Company returned to San Francisco in honor of the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary. The trio of shows worked as a music festival of their own, with ticket prices on par with Outside Lands and a curated lineup of openers including Sturgill Simpson, Trey Anastasio, and Billy Strings. Living right by the park, I watched a parade of shaggy, skull and lightning-adorned boomers exit the MUNI on their pilgrimage to the park, temporarily shifting the demographic make-up of the city more noticeably than Outside Lands ever has.
The Dead & Co shows were incredibly high profile for San Francisco, and part of a civic effort to rebrand and revive tourist investment after the “doom loop” narrative suffocated the discourse around the city’s post-pandemic recovery. It followed previous years’ smaller scale attempts at making use of Outside Lands’ staging and infrastructure for additional shows, including a nu-metal day headlined by System of a Down in 2024 that shook my windows for a few hours. A similar concept took place last weekend on what was a week prior Outside Lands’ main stage, with Zach Bryan, Kings of Leon, and a few other rustic rockers giving a full day’s worth of music in the park for a couple hundred dollars a pop.
There are legitimate concerns about how much public infrastructure local leaders are offering promoters at the expense of resident access, as Leor Galil pointedly noted in his critique of his own city’s Lollapalooza. Residents surely feel a number of ways about Another Planet’s use of the park, in addition to other promoters like EMPIRE and Noise Pop’s use of spaces like Civic Center Plaza and Crane Cove Park. However, from a music fans perspective, there are few nicer settings to see a show than San Francisco’s temperate and beautiful outdoors, and the programming has largely been thoughtful and creative, bringing events at both a scale and inspiration that couldn’t otherwise take place in the Bay Area’s usual indoor venues and amphitheaters.
The one-weekend-only, mini-city’s worth of concert infrastructure is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, closing down sections of the park weeks on either end of the festival. If these events are going to take place, then more should be derived from that effort. Through its footprint in Golden Gate Park, Another Planet was able to not only realize one weekend of musical joy, but three, bringing in more visitors, partnerships, and revenue for the city as a result. That feels less wasteful than staging a three day music festival usually does, and in an ideal world is a concept that can be expanded upon further for the benefit of taxpayers by making free some of the shows taking over public space.
Lollapalooza took place the weekend before Outside Lands, and posed a dark warning for how much worse of a three day festival could exist in San Francisco under lesser stewardship. As Leor expanded upon in his appearance on journalist Ben Joravsky’s podcast, Lollapalooza is so heavily and unabashedly commercialized that for Chicago’s grandest event of the sumer, it reflects so little of Chicago. Few local artists are ever offered prominent slots one the lineup, and the main stages are literally named “Bud Light” and “T-Mobile” (I support making a creative living however you can, but I hope no artist feels proud performing on the “Tito’s Handmake Vodka” stage). Outside of the skyline that surrounds Grant Park, there is nothing at Lollapalooza that would remind an attendee of the city it’s located.
At Outside Lands, on the other hand, every single stage is named after one of San Francisco’s beloved neighborhoods and landmarks, adorning them with aesthetic touches that reflect their namesakes (I especially appreciated the Sutro stage’s forest framed video screens). Bay Area artists, while still not as widely represented as they should be, are treated with genuine respect that in turn motivates them to make the most of their homecoming show.
Take Vallejo rap entrepreneur LaRussell, who brought out a full band, choir, and even harpist for his early afternoon Lands End set and probably set a record for time off stage dapping up and dancing with the audience. Still Woozy does nothing for me personally, but the man is an East Bay native and was given a homecoming designation on the schedule accordingly. Even non-residents made a point to put shine on locals at the festival, including Beck playing alongside the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Big Freedia being backed by the SF Gay Men’s Chorus, and Anderson Paak. bringing out the legend E-40 during his closing set (now book him properly on next year’s lineup you cowards).
You can enjoy all of these Bay-exclusive musical moments while eating and sipping on a massive selection of beverages and food from local brewers, wineries, and restaurants. I ate at many of my favorite SF spots over the weekend, such as Palmetto Superfoods and Reem’s. Each offered a menu of dishes that I felt much happier paying the exorbitant festival markup for compared to the mediocre slices of pizza and chicken tenders I make do with at other events. I also discovered new kitchens I’m eager to visit outside of the fest, and the sense that I was still engaging with my city while within the festival grounds was refreshing. That’s unfortunately a rarity for most music fans, since even events with as much of a point of view as Primavera Sound and Pitchfork (RIP) hold food offerings almost completely devoid of connection to the regions they are hosted in.
That might feel like a minor detail relative to the booking quality that most attendees base their decision on, but it represents the difference between a promoter that is simply throwing a show versus one that is creating an environment. At their best, a festival should embody what makes the city the organizers are drawing from so rich, and give back to the businesses, musicians, and audiences a real return on their investment into the event. While on any given year I may feel more or less excited about the names on the poster, Outside Lands always follows through on making me feel grateful to live in the Bay.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
