Amongst the heat, massive amounts of people and Pete Yorn’s tour bus exploding into a giant fire, there was much good music to be had.
We spent the earlier part of the day checking out Sound & The Jury who won some kind of contest to be there. They were promising, but we only caught the trail end of their performance. We moved over to the BMI stage–and the shade–to catch Adam Hood performing his Americana country songs. Nothing real special here, but definitely good festival music.
After some “Chicken in a Cone”, Amy Lavere hit the stage at the BMI to be rudely interrupted by the giant smoke billowing from Pete Yorn’s tour bus. It was a pretty frantic situation as we counted 6 fire engines heading in its direction. It didn’t seem like they were all that prepared for potential fires as there was no easy route to the area because of the traffic and the fact that the only road to the blaze cut through the VIP area where girls were looking entirely too posh–and out-of-place–to get out of the way.
The rest of the afternoon was spent listening to the likes of Will Hoge (who had a hilarious song about not being on the radio because Los Angeles people suck–went over real well in the Texas crowd) and John Ralston who seemed entirely too inebriated to carry a tune–the harmonies of his bandmates were wretched as well.
We ended the night jamming to LCD Soundsystem, Queens of the Stone Age, and the Kaiser Chiefs. The latter probably had the most active audience as it’s always nice to see a crowd of people jumping in unison under the lights of the stage and the dark of the night. It was probably one of the better visuals of the afternoon (which I failed to capture on camera).
Check out more photos at my Flickr account–the black and white is intentional!
