DAY TWO

My 41st birthday. It’s now the weekend, and where yesterday the crowd was large but absent the weekenders, today it’s immense. We show up at the roughly the same time to catch the Decemberist’s milquetoast set that features a remarkably unremarkable blues number that hardly merits the enthusiastic reaction I see from the crowd. And I like this band. I’m starting to believe a whole slew of the population doesn’t know alternative from a hole in their ass. Former Smiths bassist Andy Rourke spins in the DJ Dome thing, but looks suspiciously like some drunk bloke who has his iBook plugged into a large amp and merely pressed play on his iTunes. He stands around disinterested and points a finger to someone in the audience liks some ersatz Vegas performer. It should be noted that every day of the event a different member of Love and Rockets DJs. I guess this is what old rock musicians do now.

We are told !!! (ChkChkChk) is the ticket so we flew to the Mojave tent and enter slowly from the side into a situation that is literally the turning point for me in the weekend. Up until now I’ve felt uptight, still trying to unwind from arriving and the trip, thinking to much about my birthday and feeling sorry I don’t get to do my 20s all over again. !!! lays on some kind of building propulsive funk jams with dual vocalists not unlike Blood Brothers but without the angst. Sure, I’m breathing a lot of second hand grass here but I feel like I’ve unzipped my skin and exposed my, wet, tender and over-stimulated nervous system to the equivalent of a warm bath of aural Vaseline. Tonight will also establish our new method of prowling the grounds for what to see, stopping in and discovering, taking what we like and leaving the rest Ozomatli (nope), like Girl Talk’s mash-up laptop Girls-Gone-Wild performance, though I gotta hand it to Gregg Gillis for making up for the obvious lack of stage presence by having a huge crowd come up on stage and dance like a bunch of idiots. I hear later Paris Hilton was one of them. LCD Soundsystem was great but too crowded. We leave before midinght. A great birthday.