Squatch This!

I can't quite tell who was performing, but here's a panorama of the Sasquatch mainstage from the top of the amphitheater. Pretty gorgeous, isn't it? Slightly less gorgeous when the winds picked up on Sunday, lowering the temperature significantly, whipping dust in my eyes, and stopping the show for several hours.

Overall, my photos from the weekend are pretty bad. I didn't try to get particularly close to the stages, so my photos of bands are generally blurry and far away. One of my travelling / camping companions went down front and got some nice shots of Mixmaster Mike, but that's about it. Here are the best of the bunch:

Clockwise from top left: Beastie Boys (via the big screen), Polyphonic Spree before wind shut down the mainstage, Arcade Fire, Mixmaster Mike

The clear highlight of the weekend, music-wise, was Arcade Fire's set on Saturday evening. The Beastie Boys mainstage set was great, but there was too much overlap from their "instrumental" set the night before so it didn't feel super fresh. I also really liked Viva Voce, the Dandy Warhols, and the few songs that the Polyphonic Spree squeezed into their set. I've been checking out reviews of Sasquatch (a good one is here), and a couple of people have said that they didn't like the Long Winters. I completely disagree--they are not a band that I'm familiar with, but they seemed so pleased to be playing that they really stood out for me. Interpol, by contrast, were overly reserved for this type of show--not much interaction with the audience, not much interesting going on onstage. By the time they played, I'd been at the festival for maybe 10 hours, and had spent maybe 3 of those hours trying to get away from the wind and warm up. I needed a band with some energy!

A lot of the bands that played were new to me, so I didn't have huge expectations for anyone so I wasn't super disappointed by anything--I didn't HATE any of it, and some of my criticisms are probably based more on the surroundings / challenges of a huge festival than of the music itself. For instance, Ghostland Observatory sounded great for a couple of songs, but was a little too loud and shout-y for me after that, probably due to the headache that was induced by drinking gigantic beers in the very hot sun. Did they pour the beer down my throat? Of course not!

The biggest non-weather issue that I had with the festival was that they ran out of stuff (fries, straws, sweatshirts) as early as the first day, and many of the vendor staff were pretty unhelpful / unfriendly. The festival is a professionally run event, with much (if not all) of the concessions provided by a huge company. How hard is it to have enough straws?

Camping worked out just fine--we stayed at the "premium camping" site rather than the main site, and it was very nice. The concession stand had unexpectedly delicious food.

In knitting news, I worked on the Sailor Girl socks on the way to the Gorge, and worked a little on the new Chevron Scarf during the festival. I'm much happier with the new colors than the red / yellow combo of the false start I posted last week. I'm not sure how true the colors are here (try to ignore the shadows), but this is the scarf in progress on the Sasquatch lawn:

Note that the High Street Messenger Bag performed very well on this trip, holding lots of extra stuff for those long festival days--on Sunday, I packed a pair of yoga pants, an extra shirt, and wool socks in addition to the stuff I took in on Saturday.

Wow, this post was almost as exhausting as the festival itself. I apologize in advance for any errors, omissions, or general confusion, as well as the lack of comprehensive linking, but this has already eaten up too much of my evening!