As I walked through the festival gates during the last couple songs in the Murs set, I was greeted by some warm sun and lots of white people out picnicking and listening to Hip Hop. Which set the tone for the early part of day one on Treasure Island. Walking past the tunnel stage, Federico Aubele seemed to have a big crowd lined up already. Which made sense because his Spanish tunes seemed a little more appropriate for a picnic on an island. (Or maybe all those people were just really early for Dan Deacon’s gonzo DJ set.) One of the nice things about the festival is that with only two stages - the sets go on pretty much exactly on time. Less than a minute after Murs closed out, Aubele was already strumming away.
By the time Passion Pit took to the Bridge stage, the crowd had filled in and the band was reaching the late-comers back at the gates with a nice loud sound. At points the levels seemed off and lead singer Michael Angelakos’ vocals seemed to get lost in the mix. Or maybe he’s was getting a little hoarse from the falsetto - it was hard to tell, but the movers and shakers in the crowd didn’t seem to care at all. The real dancers though, were starting to get their swing out in the fringes of the crowd. Passion Pit closed out with a few of their power jams that left some fans echoing with impromptu singalongs while the crowd drifted to Dan Deacon who was most likely starting up an extra generator to power all the electronics he brought to the Tunnel Stage.
From a distance, Dan Deacon sounded like the slot machine floor at a casino in Reno. I think a bunch of kids in tights won a cup full of nickels. With about a dozen percussionists backing up his tweaked-out woody woodpecker samples, Deacon led the crowd in a “group interpretive dance” after rallying the crowd to try and match the glory of a Norwegian Death Metal Festival. If cute chicks in tights and glitter love Passion Pit, then your engineering school friends who used to play D&D love Dan Deacon. This festival is kind of like college, is what I’m saying. Although, I did see a couple tye-dyed hippies jamming to it, so he’s definitely got a broader appeal than I would have though. Some of the diehard Deacon fans seemed a little bummed that he had to play on the stage and not out in the crowd, as he’s been known to do in the past.
I guess the set times were going over a little bit because The Streets didn’t even give anyone time to walk back to the main stage before kicking it off. The cameraman for the jumbotron apparently couldn’t believe that a white dude could rap because he was focusing on Mike Skinner’s rasta-backup man. Skinner did manage to compliment the crowd on how good they looked though, and let us know that we San Franciscans would do well across the pond. It was kind of hard to understand his lengthy stage banter with that cockney accent, but I’m pretty sure he called the city “SanFranDisco” before launching into a track off of his breakout self-titled album. He closed with “thanks for letting me shout words at you for the past hour and ten minutes,” asked everyone who “came to have a good time” to get down (!!) and then pointed out that only the ugly people were still standing and that we were no longer in Sacramento. OK, man, sounds good.
After everybody got moving through Passion Pit, Dan Deacon and the Streets - DJ Krush seemed like a good chance to take a breather. I’m not a huge fan of House music at festivals or House music before dark as a general rule. It’s good stuff in clubs because they’re dark and you forget that you’re in a room with a ton of sweaty people in it. But outside at a festival there’s too much visual stimuli and you start to wander off. Like I did, back to the main stage as Sabina Sciubba of Brazilian Girls came on dressed for Halloween a little early.
Anecdotally, Brazilian Girls are really catchy. Their euro-clubby sound fit in with all the DJ sets of the night, but they play it all live on real instruments. It sounded good, but really it’s better music to dance to than to watch because aside from Sciubba’s ridiculous bullseye-heart costume, there wasn’t really much of interest on the stage.
LTJ Bukem and MC Conrad followed Brazilian Girls with a thumping Drum and Bass set, which kept the crowd moving and provided an interesting backdrop for MC Conrad to lay his lyrics over. The techno + hip hop combo seemed like a gimmick at first, but it’s actually a convincing combo. They had a large crowd that jumped with every thump and shouted back whenever Conrad asked. MSTRKRFT’s intro cut of LTJ Bukem though, so we migrated through the fringe dancers in the middle of the meadow - the kind of people who like to have a little extra room for their flashy light twirling dance. After dark the House music thing really starts to work. With all the flashing lights and the huge crowd on a rare warm night, Treasure Island felt more like an island in the Mediterranean than the middle of the Bay.
Towards the end of MSTRKRFT’s set they fired the crowd up with a couple heavy-hitting crowd pleasers that even techno-skeptics like myself could get into. Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.” came on with the singalong sample and a crunchy bass-line that makes it impossible to stand still. The cameraman for the jumbotron was again getting experimental and pulling some real 1990’s MTV camera tricks out of his bag. “D.A.N.C.E.” drifted into some late 90’s Orbital to match the cinematography. After the rib-shaking bass that was pounding me at the front of the crowd for MSTRKRFT, I really have no complaints about the sound. You can get away with a lot of decibels when you’re out in the middle of the Bay, and they were certainly taking advantage of that fact. After another incredibly recognizable house song that I don’t know the name of (I think I heard it on a Scion commercial or something) they really closed it with Bohemian Rhapsody - the ultimate big-crowd jam, great for simultaneously getting chilled out and fired up.
By now, walking back to the Tunnel stage to catch Girl Talk it became apparent that there were not nearly enough trash cans around, since I was stepping over piles of garbage and discarded liquor bottles. For shame! Girl Talk’s set made me forget that though as Gregg Gillis threw in a couple new or re-worked mashups. He snuck in Phoenix’s “1901″, for example and as usual, there was a great assortment of carefree dancers pulled from the crowd up on stage - mullets and fedoras and tights and feather boas! And some lucky people got stuck at the perfect spot on the ferris wheel to see throng on people below.
The organizers may have slightly underestimated the drawing power of the Keystone state because the crowd was packed deep. I thought I was pretty far back in the crowd for Girl Talk, but when I turned around the sea of people went on behind me for at least 50 yards. I had to fight my way out of a crowd of really short girls to a mashup of, appropriately enough, “Get Low Girl” and “Move, Bitch”. Aside from crowd troubles, you could see why they all packed in. The set was solid and it obviously doesn’t seem hard for Gillis to throw in new material. His trademark leafblowers TP’d the crowd and a giant black pillow-looking thing floated out on the sea of people.
The real highlight though was his closer - the mashup of Biggie’s “Juicy” and “Tiny Dancer” is one of my favorites from his album mixes, but then HOLY FUCK FIREWORKS. Out of nowhere and perfectly timed with, fireworks erupted from behind the stage and Gillis was visibly excited as they lit up the sky above him and the unsuspecting crowd. The great draw of Girl Talk, more than his mashup sets, is how much fun the crowd has during his sets. The atmosphere is less like trying to recreate a clubbing experience and more like trying to recreate that really rad house party where some wasted girl was streaming rolls of toilet paper through your friend’s apartment and someone was putting M-80s in a pot on the stove. Seeing the DJ have as much fun as everyone in the crowd is infinitely more exciting than a guy in a booth bobbing his head.
Girl Talk fading out under the ashes of the exploding fireworks was the high point of my Saturday, for sure. So much I hadn’t noticed that MGMT had already started their everybody-knows-it hit “Time to Pretend”. Apparently some people in the middle of the meadow got trampled by some overzealous Girl Talk-MGMT crossover fans trying to switch stages. MGMT seemed a little flat as they played Oracular Spectacular straight through. The only problem with this approach was that it meant their three hits were over about 5 songs into their set and everyone started making an exodus to the buses home as track 6, “4th Dimension Transition” drifted off across the Bay.
-Andrew Dalton
