Detour 2007

The only thing that will get me to attend any kind of large music festival is the phrase: free VIP passes.

Saturday I made this exception to attend the LA Weekly's Detour Festival that surrounded City Hall in Downtown Los Angeles despite dreading the traffic/parking hassle and mental shudders of too many retarded people squished together inside my personal bubble. My blah attitude intact I drove into the valley of buildings with the goal of having fun and not paying for one damn thing.

Fortunately this festival adventure didn't disappoint.

Corey and I rolled in about 4.30 and progressively moved closer in circles to landed a free spot on the street a block away from the entrance. I should take this moment to thank Jeff at Passion of the Weiss for hooking me up with VIP passes through his blog. Then I would like to tell Boost Mobile to fuck off for not putting me on the will call list. I was actually alright with not getting in as this happens when dealing with guest lists so a final big thanks goes out to the LA Weekly folks making sure after a good fifteen minutes of unsuccessfully checking with every other guest list that I got in.

Maybe my puppy dog eyes did the trick.

Corey and I walked around City Hall, checked out the decently priced food selections, the required festival communal metal sculpture to bang on, and the rickety (free?) ferris wheel before taking in some of the acts at Comedians of Comedy stage. The set up was nicely spread out and I'm not sure if the event was just undersold but even in the largest crowds there was plenty of elbow room and good sight lines.

Of course the main selling point of any music festival are the bands playing even without multiple major acts this year.

We caught the Shout Out Louds set which was alright and marveled at the singer's channeling of Robert Smith voice with a lisp impersonation. That was odd. Moved over to Kinky, a band I enjoy on the stereo, but probably wouldn't have seen on their own - though after that set I might have to reconsider this stance.

With all the drunk kids stumbling around it was nice to slip into the VIP area to have a seat on the leather couches, a separate bar and pizza line, and the fancy bathroom trailer with sinks and stalls. Moved to the street and caught the tail end of Autolux which wasn't doing it for me and headed back to The Raveonettes who so did.

Afterwards was more staying away from annoying people VIP section time chatting to non annoying friends, including chit chatting with Laura from The Randies as I haven't seen her since they left for warp tour. Spied a bit of the Teddybears' set on the tv screens (with actual teddybear heads on!) and thought I needed to see that. As we tried to make our way out to the stage, security was forcing us the long way around which meant missing most of the set. At this point I was getting super hungry and remembered that I was old, getting grumpy and could care less for Bloc Party so off we went to call it a night.

Festival photos by madmojo and valeriee used under creative common license