I just joined the Daily Cal this semester, so not expecting to get a sweet complimentary press ticket, I bought my tickets to the Treasure Island Festival like a normal person in August. I didn’t get a fancy shmancy press pass with all the luxuries. No internet access, no free water, no private bathrooms, no smug sense of superiority. I was roughing it. But I got to capture a perspective from the front lines: I wiggled my way through the crowd to get closer to the stage, I was part of the conga line at the end of Dan Deacon’s set, I wandered through the art booths and midway games, and I danced my face off pretty much all day. So here’s a wrap up of the true festival-goer experience:
For one, getting to the festival is a little bit of a task if you don’t have a car and a VIP parking pass. I left my house around 1040am to take Bart to the city and walk to AT&T Park, and by the time we got off the complimentary shuttle to the island, it was 1:15.
Still, it’s hard to even let bumps like this affect your mood at a place like the Treasure Island Festival. How often do you get to spend a day listening to fantastic live music surrounded by a conglomeration of artists, students, hippies, ravers, weirdos, and normal people who all share a love of music? It’s a pretty fascinating sociological phenomenon, and always a spectacle. Today’s weirdness included old-timey midway games, a few guys riding around in motorized cupcakes (literally, cupcake cars where you could only see the driver’s head poking out of the top), and about a dozen people dressed up in rubber robot and monster costumes who would run around and dance with people. The last one was probably pretty terrifying for the few handfuls of people tripping on acid.
These weird elements are typical of any major music festival these days, but Treasure Island is particularly unique for a few reasons. For one, Treasure Island sells out at 12,000 tickets, which is dwarfed by the 40-60,000 people the larger festivals like Coachella and Outside Lands attracts. It’s so small that you can hear the music playing from almost anywhere on the island. The art booths seem to spill towards the music into distances you would normally stand from the stage at Coachella. But it’s still large enough to provide a similar experience to these festivals, but small enough to feel significantly more intimate. Also, there are only two stages, and the schedule is designed so that when one band finishes on one stage, the next band starts on the other. This eliminates one of the worst things about music festivals: having to choose between two of your favorite acts playing simultaneously on different stages.
And thank God for that. With a lineup like Saturday’s, you don’t want to miss a thing.
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Tags:
dan deacon,
festival,
girl talk,
mstrkrft,
Music,
passion pit,
treasure island