Las Vegas – The American music festival circuit got a lot more interesting over the weekend.
Most festivals adhere to the stick-to-your own philo-
sophy, choosing select bands but never straying far from the festival’s aesthetic ideals. Coachella is elitist in its pursuit of the most interesting indie rock bands and underground hip-hoppers and DJs. And even Bonnaroo, with its malleable dexterity in placing Wilco and Dylan alongside the jam-band elite, has a general vibe it reaches for each year.
But the Vegoose Music Festival, which rocked the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Stadium on Saturday and Sunday, turned the model on its head. There was the hip-hop tent with Atmosphere and Talib Kweli, Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, but there were also The Shins playing against Phil Lesh, Beck throwing down across from Dave Matthews, Spoon rocking out versus Ween and moe., The Arcade Fire playing against Jack Johnson and Widespread Panic.
The overlap extended to the music and the fans. A 6-foot-6-inch guy in back-length dreadlocks was noodling to Spoon’s jittery pop anthem “Small Stakes,” while indie rockers in matching costumes straight out of “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” were losing it to The String Cheese Incident. They were seriously losing it, involving push-ups and “Price Is Right”-winning hand claps in their afternoon dancing.
Such behavior in the hot-and-dry desert would normally be reason for worry, but Vegoose was an alternate reality – like the part of the movie in which the high school goody-goody shows up to the party at the cool kids’ house regardless of the ridicule he’ll face, and survives it! Amazingly, we learned, we’re all cool kids deep down.
This integration seems like a small step, but actually it’s a bigger deal than that. These are two opposing musical factions – the jam-band and indie-rock cultures – not in the sense that they’re against each other but that they’re dissimilar enough to support themselves and live outside the mainstream.
The bands claw their way through this divisive, fickle industry, and oftentimes they don’t step outside their circle of comfort. The same can be said for the fans.
So it’s great that indie-rock fans had the opportunity to walk five minutes across the grounds and see jam icons such as Phil Lesh and Trey Anastasio, both of whom played two-hour sets, something that is almost unheard of for music festivals trying to pack it all in. (Headliners Dave Matthews and Friends played 2 1/2 hours Saturday night, and Widespread Panic played an epic, three-hour set Sunday night, even more to the festival’s credit.)
While jam kids are familiar with The Flaming Lips, the jubilant band that has managed to straddle both worlds, many of them got their first taste of Devendra Banhart’s elegant, joyous folk and Sleater-Kinney’s improvisational rock fury at Vegoose.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
