Saturday I had to leave the sports bar after half-time of the Buckeyes game. Why would I ever leave in the middle of a game? Because I was trying to make it downtown in time to see Of Montreal’s set at the LA Weekly DeTour festival. Aaron called me at halftime to let me know the band would come on at 3:45. LA Weekly had been lax for months about putting the set list information online. So finally, hours before the show, they released that vital information.
After hearing this I hopped in the car and sat in the parking lot AKA 101 South. There were not one but two accidents in the short five mile stretch that took me a half hour. So, I took the nearest exit and sped down Burbank blvd. I received a phone call on my way stating that I should take the red metro line to downtown instead of driving. I made it to the metro station in time to take the next subway after Garen and Aaron left.
When I started walking towards the gated off area of downtown I could hear Of Montreal already playing. I ran towards the fence only to be stopped by a security guard telling me I had to go three blocks up and around the perimeter and enter on the other side of the festival area. Thus effectively missing most of the Of Montreal set.
The festival was an interesting use of downtown. It was all set up adjacent to the lawn in front of the town hall between 1st and 2nd streets on Main. There were two large stages, a smaller stage, and a church with techno/electronic acts. The whole thing was obviously sponsored by Heineken and Monster (energy drinks) as their products were everywhere. Every vendor also had water though – at not too hefty a price tag ($2 per bottle – keep in mind we were paying $4 a bottle at Woodstock seven years ago). Blonde Redhead played an uninspired set of (what we all agreed) was not their best songs. We were mostly unfamiliar with Basement Jaxx and after listening for a few minutes it became obvious that at some point the group had transitioned into making techno music for chicks and gay men. We exited and headed towards the smaller stage which was featuring Nortec Collective (put that in the search bar if you want to review my other Nortec show – also from downtown Los Angeles). Aaron and Caleb were put in a trance and Caleb stated later that Nortec was the best band of the day. I was quickly bored though and began to wander – playing around with the varying shutter speeds in manual mode on my camera (a few results of this can be seen in the zip file).
We eventually wandered back over to the main stage to watch Beck. Beck’s gimmick this time was to have a box on stage with marionettes of the entire band duplicating exactly what they were doing on the stage. The video screen behind them would show the marionettes playing 90% of the time and not the real band. He played a mix of old and new (as in brand new from the album that isn’t out yet) songs, but before long we knew we had to start the trek to the other main stage if we were to get good spots for Queens of the Stone Age. As we walked away Beck launched into a solo acoustic version of Golden Age.
I had a fantastic spot for Queens of the Stone Age. The rest of the crew did not as they decided to go to the car for awhile (I’ll leave it at that and you can use your own jump-to-conclusions-mat to determine what they were doing). I’ve seen QOTSA three times now and they’ve always put on a good show. They played their “radio hits” (even saying “okay, now that’s out of the way” after one) but also a lot of old songs that I wasn’t even familiar with. Perhaps this was Kyuss material. As the night stretched past 11pm a police presence was visible on the side of the stage. Eventually Josh Homme was summoned to the side and when he returned announced that they could only play one more song. The song was a barn-burner with many trick spots that sounded like endings…but kept going. By the time the song was really over there were three police officers on stage seconds away from pulling the plug. I’m not sure what the big deal was, the whole event was blocks away from any residential areas, but perhaps Los Angeles has a downtown noise curfew.
As with every large show there was the usual assortment of bohemian wannabes and ubernerds (a few examples are in the zip). I’m not sure when poor hygiene and $200 jeans designed to look like thrift store rejects became fashionable – but the sooner this trend blows over the better. At one point before Blonde Redhead a girl wandered by with pants and a t-shirt that looked borrowed from her mother – but a big Louis Vuitton purse. Of course every girl was also sporting the 1970s Paris Hilton bug-eye oversized lens sunglasses. What runs through these women’s minds when they look at themselves in the mirror before leaving the house?
The whole experience was only $35 before Ticketmaster’s usual 40% markup “convenience” charges (convenient for them obviously, not for us), which is about what I paid last December to see QOTSA alone.
For photo documentation click here.
