From the Vault: Live Blogging FYF Fest’s Save Our State Parks Festival 2009
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It’s a bright Saturday in L.A., and while throngs left town to get their holiday on elsewhere, the hipper masses stuck around to suck in the Save Our State Parks festival. A three-stage charity throwdown designed to offset the ever-looming California budget cuts, it’s taking place at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and featuring just about every “now” band you can name.
We’re talking Wavves, No Age and other frequenters of the Smell. We’re talking Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, Torche and other smart metal bands that don’t have long hair. We’re talking Black Lips, the Thermals, Lightning Bolt and acts every other indie-rock blog out there is also yapping about. And to top it all off, Tim and Eric – they of Adult Swim fame – are conspiring to do something weird for 40 minutes.
We’re about to head off to the fest, and we’re going to try to pull off this while live-blogging thing, for the first time, at a show. We don’t know how the cell phone reception will be up there, we probably won’t be able to upload imagery till later on – hell, we’re not even sure if this is going to work. But if you wish you were going where we’re going, maybe you’ll want to pop over to the IndiePit Blog throughout the day, ’cause if we can actually pull off this experiment, it could be cool.
All right, enough dilly-dallying, Sally Salami. Time to get to the show, or we’ll be late.
Well, we made it here without much hassle. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the show itself – the fire marshall just laid down the law and shut down entry into the venue for the time being. This is extra awesome because the lines are longer than the ones you saw on November 4. It’s name-drop city, with kids trying to top each other’s obscure-band references.
No one seems to know how this delay is going to impact the itinerary, which, in the first place, was packed tight. More soon, though. Yay, concerts.
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At the back of the line, a band spontaneously set up their gear and started playing. What a novel idea: watching live music while you’re waiting in line forever to watch live music.
All right, doors open. We’re in. Woods are playing somewhere, we gotta find them.
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Another masterstroke: Creating a state park without any trees (palms excluded), benches or shade. Only in Los Angeles, sista!
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Woods are running more than 15 minutes late, which means we’ll soon have to book it back to the entrance to see if Crystal Antlers are on time. And if they’re not, then come back here.
On a positive note, everyone is really friendly and cool. Not the hipsters of the Tortoise generation, that’s for sure. Some random nice dude told us where we could get a free case for our previously case-free iPhone, and someone else struck up a friendly conversation about finding a cure for cancer. Someone else is equally confused as to the state of the previously established set times.
A cure for cancer, a cure for pain …
Not many families, though. Mostly students happy to hang with each other after being apart over the summer.
Since we don’t use the word “vibes,” we’ll instead say good feelings are in the air.
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Never mind, Crystal Antlers are playing the same stage as the still-delayed Woods. So even though the latter are almost 30 monies behind, we’re still good.
Maybe strangers keep coming up to us striking up conversation because they notice our special (media) bracelet and think we’re in one of the bands. Or maybe they’re curious how one person can produce so much sweat. Or maybe we’re just cynical.
Like a magnet half the time, we’ll try to stay positive.
And Woods begin.
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Woods worth the wait. They open with a blistering noise instru-mental, the cascade into Jason Lytle-sounding cry-core paeans to the audience. Or loves lost. Or someone else entirely.
But their vocals, they’re so high-pitched that the speakers are crackling like popcorn on the stove.
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Someone just walked by wearing a Sodom tee and TSOL jacket. Best of all, he couldn’t be more than 14. Audience gets an A so far.
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One of the Woods guys keeps putting on what looks like the bottom half of a football helmet.
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Woods aping Sonic Youth with a wicked long feedback song. It’ll be A Kool Thing when the sun goes down.
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After fully covering the grounds, there actually are a few tables and trees, so we qualify our previous comment.
Crystal Antlers, repping Long Beach, are soaring through their set and screaming at the top of their lungs Greg Lulli-style. Hey, it beats the Dub Allstars.
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Yeah, Crystal Antlers have TV on the Radio or Arcade Fire potential. Powerful stuff.
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Darker My Love coming on in a sec, but we’ll only be able to catch them for a sec since Wwaavveess are starting soon too.
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Is there some sort of contest going on between the two sexes, to see which can wear the shortest shorts?
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Darker My Love suffer the consequences of starting too late. No excuses for warming up for 15 minutes at a three-stage festival.
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Cool: “No More Dirty Coal” tee. Passé: Charlie Manson tee.
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Wavves just have two people, but they can’t stay in sync for more than a second or two. But that’s because it’s mad drummer Zach Hill filling the seat tonight, and being the fastest drummer out there, he has trouble even keeping up with himself.
The vocals sometimes recall a warped version of the Beach Boys. Good band to sound like ’round these parts.
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They don’t bother to tune or come up with set lists ahead of time. Replacements, Sebadoh, Vaselines and even maybe Nirvana mighta tapped Wavves for opening duties.
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It’s finally starting to cool off, and what better band to cool off to than Mika Miko, who we caught playing at the Santa Monica Library of all places a few months ago. If we had better linking ability at the mo’, we’d send you to that review. But you’ll have to search instead.
Sadly, Mika Miko are suffering from flavor-of-the-month fatigue today. As they just publicly lamented, everyone’s flocking to the Times New Viking set. The price paid for set times running late.
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Where would Times New Viking be without the cymbal? Answer: nowhere. And that’s a band that’s even more ostentatiously obsessed with keyboards, no less.
But we do like them. They’re like Quasi with the gender roles reversed: If Sam Coomes were behind the kit and Janet Weiss were filling the keyboard-playing role, it’d sound a little somethin’ like this. Plus there’s a guitarist to make their music even Viking-ier. Hoorah.
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Bands with minimal lineups – a guitarist and drummer, maybe a keyboardist or bassist too, if they’re feeling especially decadent. Thriftiness is the way to go these days.
The upswing about set times getting all hackneyed: We’ve been able to catch most of Mika Miko, Times New Roman and the Thermals without missing hardly any of their sets.
Need we declare again how much we wish audiences were this smiley, receptive and generally cool years ago, when equally great music was cracking through the frozen pond of the mainstream?
The Thermals are getting everyone bouncing around and causing so much foot-tapping that the floor seems to shake – even though we’re at a park and the floor is dirt.
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It’s hard to tell who’s having a better time, the Thermals – or us.
But if this is any indication, their drummer just stood up, blew kisses and tossed his funky sunglasses into the crowd – even though their set isn’t about to finish anytime soon.
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Ridonkulously, we have yet to mention that this is doubling as a Fuck You Fest. Cool, now we have those keywords in the story.
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Thermals’ singer, who lives in Portland (OR), is being a good citizen/salesman for the Northwest with his Sleater-Kinney shirt.
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Everyone’s eating up these guys.
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Boo-nah. Lightning Bolt’s set is stopped because fans are getting a wee bit too enthusiastic. So we have to behave ourselves until the fire marshal is done sitting us in the corner.
But it’s hard to take the suggestions seriously when the drummer is reprimanding people while wearing a Mexican wrestling mask.
The Locust have nothing on these guys. Because, somehow, amid the barrage of super-maximum-insecurity distortion, there are actually songs here. And ones that last longer than a fleeting 50 seconds.
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Someone just tried to crowdsurf with an actual surfboard. Again – only in Los Angeles! Badum-bum.
Lightning Bolt, like so many bands today, know full well how to both entertain and challenge their crowds. Well done, sirs.
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Are we so sure that Lightning Bolt aren’t really Hella in disguise? Even if they’re (supposedly?) from Providence, not California?
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Lucero drew between a third and a quarter as many people as Lightning Bolt – no surprise, really, since they stood out like a sore thumb as the most veteran, rootsy and maybe even sleepy band on the bill. And they’re working with a major.
They would’ve been wise to play earlier in the day, because the music is only getting more intense as night falls.
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We quickly flocked to Fucked Up, who quickly instigated the first real mosh pit of the night – one that put to shame many we’ve seen even at metal shows as of late.
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Fucked Up are about are about as true as punk-rock can be anymore. They wryly closed by saying they didn’t have any merch for sale but they totally support DIY; as such, fans should sell their own homemade merch that says “Fucked Up” and pay them most of the profits for copyright infringement.
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Maybe the reason this festival has been a downright roaring success is because they charged $20 per ticket. The crowd does not consist exclusively of people with salaries but also youngins who are simply thrilled to be at a show. There’s a freshness aspect going on here.
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Peanut Butter Wolf? Eh. He tried to interact with the crowd when he could but was mostly too caught up mashing old videos that appeared on “Yo! MTV Raps.” Why does Kris Kross still get revered, when they’re the hip-hop equivalent of Saigon Rock?
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Tim and Eric doing a somewhat straight face parody of every classic-rock cliche: struts, false endings, pompousness, etc. … absolutely brilliant, but those unfamiliar with them don’t get it and aren’t being sold. Those who got it laughed so hard they could barely stand.
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Converge, following Torche, kept up the trend of the Oak Stage getting louder over the course of the day with loads of loud dissonance and riffs so hard they turned the crowd into a dust storm. And broke a guitar during their first song. They busted out the title track to their October 20 album, Axe Will Fall (think that’s right). And they were a worthy lubricant for the even more challenging Dillinger Escape Plan, who followed.
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But first, on the Redwood Stage, hometown heroes No Age, playing their sixth fest. Just like Converge presaged Dillinger, so did Wavves with No Age, even of they played much earlier.
Along with the Thermals, Lightning Bolt and Fucked Up, they’ve been the biggest hit so far, and the only sore spot has been a “random” act of social stupidity involving dozens of people in the crowd spraying soda cans simultaneously on everyone else. Save it, poseurs: There’s great music to be enjoyed.
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Tee reading “Dead Kennedys”? Too soon.
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Jennifer from Mika Miko apparently getting arrested for being onstage during the performance by No Age, who are furious and have stopped playing. Crowd chanting “What the fuck?”
No Age apparently got her off the hook before starting their last song.
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Battery finally dying. Dillinger killing it with their first “real” L.A. show in four years and first here with their green-cheeked new drummer, who seems to be managing OK. Took them a brief eternity to get onstage, though, and no one in the crowd is moving.
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Black Lips putting some to sleep. Audience about half the size as it was for No Age.
Mayhem had nothing on this.
Over and out.
[This article was originally published on Indiepit.com.]
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