Sometimes spending a full day at a summer music festival is all about picking your spots and making do with the best you can get. Friday's All Points West lineup offered a glimpse at transcendence: the sun fighting its way through hours of cloud cover to end the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set with a final bust of light before sundown followed by a rapper headlining a rock show, opening with a cover of the band that most had bought tickets expecting to see. Yesterday's festivities sounded a little more on the aggro side with Tool's Maynard James Keenan overheard barking at the crowd, "You just can't f*** with Jersey...unless you want your ass kicked."
My Bloody Valentine may have come across the Atlantic to do just that, ruffling the crowd's feathers with their eardrum-shattering set ending on fifteen-minutes of noise, described as "one window-shattering chord played nonstop." Word is that the Tool fans were not eager to wait patiently—MBV apparently had a sea of middle fingers waiting for them...if they'd ever stop gazing at those darn shoes.
Saturday may have had the widest spectrum of acts on its bill, the common thread between them described as music that was "ticked-off or tempestuous." That left so many different pockets of fans that Rolling Stone says most bands yesterday were "greeted with either indifference or hostility." Even the comedians were widening the gap with 30 Rock's Judah Friedlander claiming he beat up the "bunch of pussies" in Tool and Tim and Eric putting on a set described by the Jersey Journal as an "interesting show mostly dedicated to a gross-out bodily function."
That being said, the biggest factor in keeping fans happy for Day Two may have simply fans' ability to enjoy a day's worth of music without any threat of thunderstorms. After organizers offered fans who got soaked through Friday's show a chance to return for free, today appears to have dealt them an even worse hand. The heavy rain this morning into the afternoon created such rough conditions that the opening of the gates were delayed opening until after four. Will Coldplay take the stage before rush hour traffic starts up?
