Highlights first: Scorching sun. A midnight battle of Santa Clauses vs. alien nuns. Twenty thousand people for 10 shower stalls. A snowstorm. Armies of chanting Canadian hockey fans. $3.50 Starbucks grande, house brew. A bubble descends from outer space. A giant-sunglass uniform on each and every female face. A mind-bending view of the Columbia River gorge, with rolling bare hills on the other side, and boats. Loads of really good indie music! (some soul and reggae too). This was the seventh incarnation of the Sasquatch! music festival, held during the Memorial Day weekend at the Gorge Amphitheater in central Washington... and it's all true.

      I left San Francisco on the first United flight on Saturday, missing the Friday shows. The first day's lineup (headlined by the Nine Inch Nails) seemed tailored for suburban teenagers with pierced noses, not my thing at all, certainly not worth a day off work. Judging by Craigslist postings, many people were only interested in the Saturday and Sunday shows, which seemed good for finding a morning ride to the middle-of- nowhere site. However, in the two weeks before the show, none materialized despite my extensive search. Seattle craigslisters came through as flaky at best, stopping correspondence midway through despite my ample offers of cash---how do those people function in real life anyway? So, I was left to rely on my legendary knowledge of public-transit workings. The trip was doable, just a bit expensive. Quite in line with the $130 for show tickets, and $76 paid on eBay for two days of camping.

      From the air, I couldn't see Seattle; the city was completely covered by clouds, and on the ground it was about 8 °C and raining. I had a shot at catching the first morning bus to Ellensburg, but it could only work out if I raced in a cab from Sea-Tac to the downtown Greyhound. The flight was a touch late, and I couldn't find any cabs, so settled for a near-free ride on the #194 Metro, barely making the second bus. I had already talked to an Ellensburg taxicab company about going to the Gorge. I expected the cabbies to think I was crazy but the owner, as far as I could visualise the other end of the phone line, didn't blink at the 45-mile trip and quoted a fare just under $2 per mile. Which is as good as it ever gets in this country. I confirmed the order as I got off the dog in E-burg, and soon the cab arrived and about an hour later deposited me in the middle of Sasquatch campground, a grassy field surrounded by treeless, volcanic-soil desert overgrown with sage bush.

      There were no assigned campsites, so I just threw my backpack on the ground without setting up camp, and took a brief note of the surroundings to be able to find it later. I hurried to the amphitheater, less than a mile away, passing crowds desperate for show tickets (I later found out that Saturday tickets were going for about $120, and Sunday's, for over $200, cf. $55 per day cover plus Ticketmaster crap). I got to the venue just in time to see Sufjan Stevens. No cheerleader squad at this show, just a fat Uncle Sam dancing to songs from Illinoise!, and a stage decorated with red, white, and blue balloons for the patriotic holiday occasion. Many in the front row were dressed as Superman, or carried giant S-man dolls, since the band itself has apparently been prohibited to use the image in any way. The atmosphere was festive; after a cloudy morning the sun came out, bringing out much exposed skin and necessitating sunscreen. The desert air warmed up.

      Iron and Wine was next. Sam played his better-known songs, switching to an electric guitar midway through and culminating with a rocking version of Jezebel. Neko Case stood in for backup vocals, and the duet was the cutest of the weekend. The Gorge is an amazing venue, by the way. The main stage is set inside a natural amphitheater (a half-moon reentrant for you geologically inclined) carved into the east bank of the Columbia. The incline is just perfect for a lazy repose on the grass---you don't have to squat or stand up to see the stage. The lower part of the incline has natural-looking ledges, perfect for sitting. There is also a downstairs pit by the stage. The selling capacity is such that even with full attendance, the incline part has plenty of elbow and knee room, and even for the headliner it is possible to get into the pit for a close-up view of the band and only be a few rows away. The sound is the best I witnessed at an outdoor venue. Monstrous speakers produce a wide, unfocused pressure field at the incline, so the sound actually feels stronger in the amphitheater than inside the pit, only sputtering for brief moments when wind picks up.

      But as Sam Beam played, on the horizon a storm was brewing. Literally. We could see a giant cloud spewing streaks of rain, coming from the north. As Neko Case took stage, it started to sprinke. Then rain. Then, seemingly in a few seconds, to hail. At about 1705, hailstones were coming down hard; the skin of my right hand is still scratched and burning two days later, I tried to protect my face with it from the hail. Neko soldiered on; isn't this what country music is (was?) about, a beautiful middle-aged woman braving it stoically into the face of unpredictable, out-of-control things and emerging with grace?

      Alas, the toughness only lasted so long. At about 1710, power turned off and Ms. Case hurried off the stage. Festival staff frantically covered the equipment with tarps. The hail kept getting worse. People started to leave in droves. The grass of the incline was covered with a layer of snow, the ground turning into mud from the sandals of the participants in mass exodus. The wind picked up, pelting faces with biting chunks of ice. Nobody wanted to play snowballs with me.

      The hail finally ended around 1720. The main stage stood empty, covered with about 10 cm of snow and ice. The incline stood empty, soaked. Whatever audience remained, huddled inside the pit, uncertain of whether the show could go on. The lights were out, but soon enough the mean cloud departed; the sun was still high in the desert sky. It felt uncomfortable inside soaked clothes---I wore plenty, alas mostly cotton---but the wind stopped, the air felt quite warm, and in that was hope. Soon enough, people with snow shovels arrived on the stage (man! had they planned for contingencies), and one of the organizers took up the microphone and told the audience to hold on. Ms. Case showed up next, people still shoveling, apologized and declared her set over but that most others would continue. The crowd erupted.

      It was only so appropriate that the first band to emerge on the freshly shoveled and toweled stage were the Tragically Hip. Their leader, Gordon Downie, proclaimed something to the effect that in order for a show to be truly remarkable, something has to happen (, eh?) The downstairs was taken over by forty-something men and women wearing hockey jerseys and Viking beanies, waiving Maple Leafs and sporting missing teeth (I'm only exaggerating a little tad here, eh? and yeah, Let's Go Oilers was the chant of the weekend, from both the aged Canucks and the younger Victoria/ Vancouver/Calgary crowd, and some party-along Americans, too). I'm no fan of the Hip, despite their cult status in Canada I'm sure most 'Merkins never heard of them.

      I owned one record of theirs before the cold winter of 2000 forced me to sell the whole collection and donate plasma in order to eat. Gordon Downie indeed is the Canadian version of J. Michael Stipe, as far as showmanship. To me, there wasn't much music to back the act up, an observation that extends the comparison---at least as far as recent history---if one is so eager. The power and pressure were there, an assault with a bare hint of skill. Sort of like watching a 20-years-ago Canada vs. USSR hockey game. (Yes, something I did back then...) Throw the puck into the zone, figure it out later. Through sheer muscle but usually, not at all. Enough aboot the sporting life.

      Next, I stood through a Shins set and waited and waited for this song or another to change my life, but alas. All that seemed to change was the frequency of my trips to the bathroom. Not trying to dis the Shins, they are a fine band. Just, overhyped and overrated for their accomplishnents so far, compared with contemporaries Deathcab and Modest Mouse.

      The sun was setting, the snow, not melting. Despite the no-ins-or-outs policy, the organizers allowed those who bolted back in; else, who would buy the overpriced beer? Oh yes, the beer. Choices were a 20-oz Coors for $8.25, a 20-oz Coors Lite for $7.75, or a small Heineken for $4.50. The impression I received was that my money directly fed the portolet cleanup crew. Step 1: pay $8.25, receive a metal cylinder with yellow liquid. Step 2: ? Step 3: repatriate yellow liquid with whence it came from, inside a plastic box. The food, on the other hand, was OK, edible, kinda nutritious, and only marginally too expensive---given the warm Sunday weather, a $20/day food budget seemed sufficient. (The organizers allowed in food from the outside anyway.)

      Due to some contract agreement stipulating an early-to-bed, Ben Harper traded the closing position with the Flaming Lips. So, the minority of indie hardcores like myself had to stay awake through the two-hour, double-encore Harper set. Mind you, the Ben Harper experience was in no way uncomfortable or displeasing. The reggae, blues, and soul mix felt very lovely and romantic and touching and yadda yadda and certainly was helped in digestion by ample quantities of methylenedioxymethamphetamine that seemed to flow freely in some neighborhoods. Just, not my cup of tea, of acid, etc. (The next day: "Who is Ben Harper?" at least one person was with me on it. That was great.)

      The Flaming Lips were... well worth the wait. To me, the best of the two- day field. An arena-size production on a $3000 budget. Armed with hideously inventive things like mounting a cheap webcam on the microphone stand and running the image through a delay and a displace, creating, between songs, an array of psychedelically swirling Wayne Coynes on the giant screen. The shenanigans reported after various recent Lips shows were seemingly all present---the bubble, the dance crew, confetti cannons, and Bohemian Rhapsody. Their visuals were reduced to a somewhat redundant naked-woman theme, the essence of the Flaming Lips experience.

      After an hourlong setup and sound check, the set opened right around midnight with the contraption unveiled at the 2004 Coachella, a giant inflatable plastic bubble---"from outer space", no less. Mr. Coyne must have had much experience with it by now, as it took no time at all to get zipped into the plastic or get dis-bubbled. Once inside the bubble, Wayne walked on the heads of the audience, (ego?) tripping and falling and getting grabbed by the knees by excited female fans. The Flaming Lips dancing troupe this time, instead of the usual animal assortment, consisted of two warring factions: about 23 Santa Clauses on the right (speaking of frugal costume arrangements...), and a dozen or so alien nuns on the left. As in, a nun costume complemented with a green rubber alien mask. The troops were armed with bright flashlights. If I understood Mr. Coyne correctly, no other but Sufjan Stevens joined the Lips dance for the evening, but it was impossible to tell under the alien disguise.

      With all the buildup, the opener, Race for the Cure, was climactic. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody followed. The visual of a naked lady putting on sunscreen was fully subtitled in that Ego-Tripping font and color scheme (case you wondered, it's "Basmillah!") This smash was hard to follow, and Free Radical from the latest album (break-dancing lizard visuals) was received much more coolly. The Lips played other fairly recent favorites such as Yoshimi (naked Yoshimi visuals), She Don't Use Jelly (make your pick of visuals for this one), and Do You Realize. In-between, the Santas and the Aliens had a flashlight fight. Wayne peppered the crowd generously from the confetti gun so that after the show, streaks of colored paper blew around the campground, carried there by returning fans. For the encore, the Lips played an anti-war song with images of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, and W-43 flashed against the giant screen.

      My own experience took a downturn at 2 am as I got back to the campground. The backpack was missing. I thought I remembered the lay of the contours (there were some) pretty well, so after a brief search I gave up, walked to the campground office, and filed a police report. I half-expected something like that to happen, and there were no valuables or irreplaceables in the pack. I knew that selling the Sunday ticket would net at least as much money as was needed for a taxi ride to Ellensburg, plus a Sunday night spent in a hotel. So, I was not too disappointed, and not particularly sleepy. The sun got up just after 4 am, and I returned for another search. I went through the whole section of the campground, not trusting my memory anymore even though it couldn't have possibly been impaired by the weasel-piss beer. Around 0600, I had a hunch, and in a few minutes, located the pack. It was inside a car right next to the place I had left it. Someone was at the campground when the hail hit, and being a nice but stupid Samaritan, they thought of nothing better than sticking the pack inside their Nissan. Now instead of having dried in the desert air for 12 hours, the wet pack had been stewing inside the vehicle, and I had had a sleepless night. "I got up, remembering to thank him"...

      I called the sheriff's office and called off the report. Then, I waited a bit more, not wanting to wake up the Nissan people. Some in the campground stayed up all night, and there had been a couple loud parties, but in all it was fairly quiet. Some young hipster girls in the next campsite got up and swilled beer for breakfast. Early risers hurried to the showers, getting the best deal.

      I finally mustered enough courage to wake up the people and ask for my pack around 0730. I set up the tent, then got into the lines for coffee and shower. The stalls by then were a disgusing mess of soapy water standing ankle high. It took about 55 minutes of wait, which, in hindsight, was excellent---only 10 stalls---most of the 20,000 attendees must have settled on the hygiene of a Sasquatch. Then I slept for a couple hours.

      Sunday, as a whole, was less interesting to me than Saturday, the lack of hail notwithstanding. It got pretty warm, and without sunscreen just about anyone was destined to burn. The first band I saw was Nada Surf ---nothing remarkable. Then, Arctic Monkeys took the stage, proudly declaring this day to be their first time playing outdoors. A few Seattle people I talked to deemed the Monkeys overrated, a sentiment that's against the vibe in pretentious San Francisco where the 6,000- capacity Warfield sold out weeks before an upcoming Monkeys show. I heard them for the first time, and thought I caught just the right amount of dissonance on top of the aggression and the catchy that if you'd add a touch of weirdness a-la Radiohead transformation of Kid A, this band could be truly great. But maybe that's not in the plans, and even if, the buzz would die. But maybe not (see Radiohead).

      At some point early on Sunday, I had an epiphany that quickly terminated the liquid repatriation process and soon yielded much needed enlightenment, resulting in a greatly increased enjoyment level of the festival: I discovered that a single booze tent also sold wine. At $5.50 for a 200 ml cup, the half-decent Australian Chardonnay seemed the cheapest buy per mole of ethanol. Alas, the tent ran out of Chardonnay quickly but had Merlot... "I'm not drinking any stinking Merlot!" But I did. Under the unyielding sun. Until said sun set, last call.

      Freshly powered, I got close to the stage for the Decemberists. They didn't disappoint. The hourlong set paraded through most of the Picaresque material, with some older songs thrown in. Colin Meloy was his usual orphan-child-of-the-pirates self, and there was plenty of accordion action from Jenny Conlee for a funky Eastern European dance. The Bagman's Gambit stretched out long, almost jam-like, and The Chimbley Sweep bade farewell to the traders' ship.

      As usual, a Dave Bazan show opened with a completely inappropriate joke on impregnating a hippie girl. The Headphones set closed with an equally gross one ("What's green and tastes like pork? Kermit's finger.") Happily, no queston-and-answer session on the topic of masturbation this time. (Been through a few of them.)

      On another side stage, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah closed. All I knew about the band before the weekend was that my ex hated them for aesthetic reasons. Another thing I didn't know was that I had actually heard their record in full last Thursday. It was played as I sat at Sparky's, a 24-hr diner in the Castro, working on some routes on my laptop, between, oddly fitting, R. E. M.'s Rich Pageant and the latest by Chili Peppers. Despite the ugly sound quality of the side stage, I thought the band was strong, delivering almost-surreal songs of disaffect and despair wafting on top of snappy, Eric Judy-like bass lines. A band I will definitely keep an eye on.

      Next to last on the main stage was Deathcab. Talking to people after the show, I heard "not so great". This left me wondering about form and function. As in, oh gosh, I remember Chris Walla when he was cute and had hippie hair. Despite I. Brock's professed fear of getting to be 35 (he's got another few to go), Mouse's material is bound to age gracefully if at all (see also, Tom Waits). Look at the Pixies---Kim was the real deal on last year's tour at well over 40. On the other hand, Deathcab is, after all, ugm, for Cutie. Sorry about all the puns.

      And then I fell asleep on the upper lawn. It was warm and I had brought a sleeping bag. I awoke to probably the second song of Beck's set. But, his puppet show was, unfortunately, not enough to stay awake for. There was a puppetmaster on stage with a bunch of dolls, one for each band member, and the puppets mimicked all the moves. That's all the exhausted me could comprehend. Two days of concerts, with almost no sleep in-between, make for a very tired boy. I dragged back to the campground and slept until morning.

      Well, slept as much as I could given a mild hangover and all the parties going on. Compared to the previous night, this one was bursting with action, and not of a particularly welcome sort. Small groups of people, seemingly mostly Canadian, seemingly in their late teens at the oldest, kept trampling through, yelling out such indie anthems of the 20-and-under generation as Loving is All I Got. (Oh may be things are a tad different in Canada, eh?) There was some annoying bongo banging, some portolet tipping, and some flashing-light-Frisbee throwing. Coachella camp by comparison, the year that I went, was dead quiet.

      Which brings me to the thing that seemed the most problematic about the whole affair: a complete lack of security at the campground, compared with lax but visible policing at the show grounds. Lax, as in you could contraband pretty much anything if you were borderline smart about it, but visible as in people in uniforms just being there. At the campground, there was no authority. A potential disaster if the crowd had been anything but a bunch of indie kids, or clueless teenagers from the Northwest. I'm not arguing for enforcement, people come for recreation and if they want to party, I'm willing to live through reasonable noise for a weekend. I may even enjoy a good party. But, simple presence of uniformed people here and there would seem reassuring to at least the single females among the attendees.

      The remainder of Monday: I got up, stood for about 10 minutes with a sign asking for a ride, got one with two cute ladies from Victoria, got to Ellensburg, on a Greyhound, to Seattle, #174 to Sea-Tac, on a very delayed flight, took BART home. Total cost? Close to $500. The UAL ticket was the least expensive part; free for 15k miles, well, $10, and as an added bonus, no attitude, early door closures, or full Y fare extortion attempts for missing my originally booked Monday morning flight. The booze was probably just under $100. No merch.

      In all, a good experience. Not as remarkable as the 2004 Coachella, but close. I wouldn't suggest doing the public-transit-by-yourself thing to anyone, though, and I wouldn't do it again; I wouldn't stay in the campground, either.

-Vladimir Gusiatnikov 05/31/06