Treasure Island Music Festival, Day 1- Comfy Buses And Far Out Sounds

Well, it’s pretty safe to say that the inaugural Treasure Island Music Festival, which ran from September 15 to 16, was an overall success. For the way San Francisco Bay Area promoters Noise Pop Industries and Another Planet Entertainment (APE) handled their risky choice of a venue, as well as their round-up of both underdogs and relative (indie) bigshots, they get an A-. Some minor slippage in programming --in terms of choice of performers, NOT in terms of how the whole party all went down-- docked them a bit, but the festival turned out a lot better than anyone should have expected.

The focus of most of the risk was, again, in the choice of venue. For those who don’t have much knowledge regarding the general geography of the SF Bay, Treausre Island is a small (about 1 sq. mile), man-made island that can only be accessed by ship or through two exits onto the neighboring Yerba Buena Island from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge-- a Randall’s Island of the West Coast, if you will. Because they couldn’t rent out enough parking for all the 5,000 to 10,000 fans, and would have had to contend with angry residents (some people do live on Treasure Island) if they made parking a laissez-affair, Noise Pop and APE forced everyone to drive over to the AT&T Park parking lot south of downtown SF and park there.

The missing link in the journey, and big ramfication of all this? Buses. Anyone who’s been to their fair share of festivals knows that in cases where some sort of centralized transportation is needed to get the fans to the grounds, there’s usually an uncomfortable bus ride and a 30 minute wait for that bus ride. Well, that definitely wasn’t the case with Treasure Island. Ususally at least 3 or 4 buses, on average, were stationed at either end of the route, arriving within 2 minutes if there were none there at first, and the interior of the vehicles housed 30 to 50 comfortable leather seats. So, all in all, transportation wasn’t much of an issue.

The venue planning was also top notch. After going through the gate, fans found themselves in a grounds area about the size of two football fields, which was just right for housing a ferris wheel, numerous arts, crafts and concession stands, and the main and support stages, without making anyone walk much to get to any of them.

Now, for the music. Saturday seemed to be geared toward those who liked the hip-hop and dance-heavy shows at this year’s Noise Pop, with veterans of the quite eccentric persuasion, Honeycut and Ghostland Observatory, playing sets.

Saturday was also the designated day for the generally weird. Every performer, from M.I.A. to Thievery Corporation, seemed to bring across a new vibe, with more exoticism in their sound as well as their visuals (dress, background videos, etc.) than the previous performer. Obviously, this might be the point of any self-respecting lineup-- avoid monotony at all cost, right? But those who wanted to hear any good amount of genuine Chuck Taylor-Black Levi’s-boogie would have to wait until the next day (with hard-rock outfit Kinky’s admittedly guitar-heavy set notwithstanding) and it just would have been nice if there was a little bit more balance.

Nevertheless, on Friday fans were treated to quite a nice range of sounds, whether they were coming from a Gibson or not. They could hear DJ duo Flosstradamus pretty much just spinning a straight mix of hip-hop standbys-“Jump Around” and “Push It” were among those in their repertoire- or Gotan Project’s Massive Attack-go-to-Buenos Aires trip-waltz, to mention a couple examples.

There was a common denominator to everything on Saturday, though-- the Beat and its ability to effect any sort of general motion in a 7,000-strong mass of bodies. This first day wasn’t about listening carefully for subtle synth and guitar effects or introspective vocals as much as it was about just letting off some steam, with each idiosyncratic outfit simply providing a new flavor as the night wore on. There just should have been a little bit more of that Beat traded in for some of the rock on Sunday.

-- By Ross Moody