Ice Cream Man

We love San Francisco. Any excuse to take a trip there we jump at. We start festival season off with Noise Pop then make a trip back for Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park and Gooch usually slings cream at Treasure Island.

Outside Lands is only a couple years old but with two of the most respected production companies putting the festival together (SF’s Another Planet and Bonnaroo’s Superfly) you’d never think it was so young. Things kicked off big last year with Radiohead and Tom Petty headlining and this year they landed Pearl Jam along with Dave Matthews, MIA, Black Eyed Peas, Tenacious D, Os Mutantes and a bunch of other great bands.

Our trip from Ashland, OR took us down the California coast on Highway 1 which is always a beautiful, if lengthy, drive. The day we arrived we dropped off some gear at our house then met up with The Dodos at Rickshaw. They were sound checking for their sold-old show that night and after that was done we all walked over to the steps of city hall and they played a song for us. We all thought we were going to get busted and asked to leave but the cops that walked out didn’t seem to mind and once we were done we left quickly.

The main difference for us this year was that last year we were parked pretty far behind the main stage where we didn’t get much traffic. This year they moved the artist hospitality area to the top of a hilled area on the side of the stage which gave us a lot of visibility and traffic and also allowed us to see the mainstage and hear all the bands that played there. BONUS! Ben and Jerry’s donated a couple thousand cups of Vanilla, Cherry Garcia, and Chocolate Mint Cookie and, as you can imagine, everyone in SF was enjoying the goodies. I didn’t get to really watch too many shows on Friday but Pearl Jam, Built to Spill and Silversun Pickups all sounded great. My friend Jimmy the Rat came by and we hung out for a bit and I was happy to be with another Pearl Jam fan who isn’t a fan of Ten.

We only needed to get a couple performances for this weeks episodes so we weren’t too worried because we had three days but….. the stuff we were hoping to get wasn’t going to take place till late the last day. If for some reason something went wrong, we’d be in a pickle. Reggie Watts, a ‘respected’ comedian and musician came by at the same time as Albino so we all headed over to the reflecting pool just outside of the fest and Reggie beatboxed over an impromptu Albino song. On Saturday Reggie stopped by again with his loop pedal and he freestyled a track while giving away some ice cream. I even made a li’l cameo in the song but I’m not sure how well that ended up.

On the way to Golden Gate Park I spied a pair of roller skates for sale at a garage sale and had to pick them up, even though they were a size to small. It was fun riding them a bit but the scrunched up toes got a bit uncomfortable after a few minutes. Dave Matthews Band and Jason Mraz were the big names on Saturday but the set I was into the most was Raphael Saadiq. He’s from Berkeley so this was sort of a home-town show and he brought out his full band for a soul and R&B explosion that also included a cover of “Search and Destroy” which was quite unexpected. Later that night we ran into him again at one of our favorite restaurants in town, House of Nanking.

Sunday ended up being a better day than even we expected. We were able to give away almost all of the Ben & Jerry’s we had on board and Heartless Bastards came by to play a beautiful acoustic song in the area where we had had the truck setup last year. If that wasn’t awesome enough, With a hell of a lot of hard work and tenacity Wayne was able to get Os Mutantes to perform a song of their new album backstage before their show at The Independent that night. We even got to stick around for about half the set which was great. Props to Extra Golden who opened up for them too. Hopefully we’ll get them on board someday.

So our trip to SF ended up being about as good as we could have hoped for. Thanks to everyone who helped. Keep an eye out for us next month at Treasure Island. We’re still not sure who’s going to be rocking it but we’ll be up there slinging.