This past weekend I took Friday off from work and MJ, his friend Matti who is in town visiting and I headed over to Outside Lands 2012 for the 3 day music festival. We took public transit most of the weekend, piling on to the overflowing MUNI Metro to get across town each day, so that certainly was an interesting beginning to our weekend adventure.
As for the festival, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not really my thing. The attendance estimate was 65 thousand people, which is quite the crowd! And while I enjoy music, I find my attention waivers for bands I’m not all that familiar with. Fortunately we timed each day well so we didn’t spend an overwhelming amount of time there each day and were able to see the bands we wanted. First up that I wanted to see on Friday was the Foo Fighters!
Saturday’s big draw for me was Metallica. I’m not a metal fan, but I have a soft spot for Metallica, and a friend of mine who is into metal sent me piles of music that led me to have a greater appreciation for it, and we went to see both Iron Maiden and Trans-Siberian Orchestra live, both of which put on spectacularly theatrical shows. Seeing Metallica was a pretty big deal, and their show was great. And it had fire. And fireworks.
Plus, San Francisco’s Golden Gate park is a fog machine so their laser show looked awesome:
We spent the most time at the festival on Sunday, when we arrived in time to see performances from Franz Ferdinand, Regina Spektor and Jack White, all of whom I knew exactly one song from but we hung out in the concert field and enjoyed the music… and food:
I swear that funnel cake was the worst thing I ate all weekend! I only managed to finish half of it and my stomach was angry at me for it later, but it was so good.
The last performer of the evening on the big stage was the legendary Stevie Wonder. I didn’t quite realize how many hits he had until he got up on stage and started rattling them off. It was very cool to see him live.
As the evening wore down we also caught a bit of Skrillex, but exhaustion had crept in for me by then and we called it a night pretty quickly and headed home.
More photos from the weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631020948548/
It was quite an interesting experience to see so many people gathered in Golden Gate Park for such a big event, and I’m very glad we were able to attend this year.