It’s been a few years since Treasure Island was around to cap off our weird, hybrid summer-autumn, and in the void left by Pink Saturday’s disappearance and the subdued pall that is Halloween, We were more or less blindsided by May’s happy announcement that Pier 80 — a former tow pound and increasingly a venue in its own right — would be home to the inaugural Portola Festival, crowned by Flume and the Chemical Brother.
Meanwhile, the talent bookers for Outside Lands, long the core of Golden Gate Park’s summertime hedonism, look to have been reduced to bottom-feeding. OSL has leaned into cannabis while slipping the bounds of its commitment to legacy headliners. No more Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, or Elton John; this year, it’s Green Day. (Although if you weren’t born in the “late 1900s,” as the kids say, maybe Green Day feels like peers of Sir Elton.)
And, of course, just as Hardly Strict Bluegrass goes head-to-head with the Castro Street Fair in early October every year, Portola’s seizure of the late-September weekend that’s always been the province of the Folsom Street Fair almost feels like counterprogramming. Oh well, we all gotta choose.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying “Thank God for the return of Lightning in a Bottle” — and on Memorial Day weekend, where it most certainly belongs. Headlined by the likes of Kaytranada, Four Tet, Glass Animals, and GRiZ, it’s the dusty zenith of everything that makes festivals… festivals: deep house, Berlin electronica, techno from the world over, multi-person floaties in the lake, long lines for shockingly fresh poke bowls, Frank Reynolds fan art, Boxed Water, messages from the Green Team that “Boxed Water is not better,” and a goofily adorable neon-pineapple art car drifting madly about. An RV wonderland, a dry run for Burning Man, and a mecca for people who treat their bodies like a temple and for those who treat it like a dead mall where the anchor tenants were Mervyn’s and Circuit City, LIB continually nails it all. This was a reunion.
Granted, the Coachella-fication was palpable this year. Maximalist New Zealander Opiuo’s Sunday night set in particular was where people could be seen videoing themselves bopping and grinning — but if there’s one thing that distinguishes LIB from virtually every other multiday fest, it’s a kind of grounded presence undergirding the music that’s markedly different from Outside Lands’ bourgie Michelin-starred offerings (to say nothing of the wine-fueled BottleRock in Napa, which has a “Verizon Stage.”)
As when you’re undeclared and choosing your spring semester courseload, there’s an almost overwhelming number of workshops and talks, from Sound Healing to You Are a Mushroom Having a Human Experience to Standing for the Sacred Against Psychedelic Capitalism — all banked by the acknowledgment that Buena Vista Lake outside of Bakersfield has been the unceded terrain of the Tulamni Yokuts and their descendants.
To the extent that the phrase “post-pandemic” isn’t a cruel fiction, there’s no time and place this writer had looked forward over the past few years to quite like the Woogie Stage during the late afternoon and early evening. And on Day One, the back-to-back, sunset-spanning combination of Lubelski and VNSSA was more or less the distillation of one’s dreams. (You know you want to go from underground London in 1982 to Detroit in 1987 to Central California in 2018 in the most circuitous way possible.) Johannesburg native Kyle Watson, who’s got a proverbial green, an upward-pointing arrow next to his name these days, followed, and the effortlessly expressive Whomadewho extended the vibes into Saturday.
The moody, black-hatted Monolink, bringing a Teutonic antidote to the endless Golden State sunshine for at least the fourth year in a row, expanded his stage presence to a much fuller sound than his previous, singing-while-playing-guitar-and-DJing effort. Chet Faker, equally capable of walking while chewing gum, seemed comparatively over-choreographed, engulfed by the massiveness of the Lightning Stage. But it’s GRiZ, getting queerer and queerer seemingly in real-time, brought the whole thing to a climax. If you want proof that the world is changing for the better, at least in some ways, it’s the number of cis-hetero dudes comfy enough to get GRiZ tattoos.
In terms of genre and demographic broadness, this was clearly the most varied lineup so far — an impressive feat considering how trying to please everyone so often yields a lackluster, flabby, centerless bill. If you wanted to go on a journey, there’s Yotto. If you wanted a connection to powerpop, there’s SG Lewis. If you wanted to get rowdy with your krewe, there’s Big Freedia.
If Lightning in a Bottle 2019 was known for a freak thunderstorm — an omen for the pandemic-borne cancellations to come for the next two years? Probably not, but still spooky — then LIB ’22 was all about the wind. Saturday night saw some cyclonic activity, such that every EZ-Up and canopy in and around our campsite was a mangled wreck sometime around 1 or 2 a.m. (There were dozens of canvas-wrapped, vaguely arachnid-looking corpses everywhere on Sunday morning, and nothing brings strangers together like stripping the ruins for parts to huddle under the midday sun. The tents were almost universally spared.)
Maybe you did yoga every day, or maybe you went 96 hours without a shower and on almost no sleep. No matter who you are or what your vibe is, we all get treated to the same cognitive dissonance of a hard landing in the default world. Stopping at a McDonald’s outside Bakersfield for an egregiously large quantity of McNuggets and a heaping order of unsolicited stares, you have no choice but to pursue your lips and giggle, making silent eye contact with the friends who know.
