The LA Weekly, to the best of my knowledge, has never sponsored a festival before. I couldn't help but wonder, "Why now?" Its inaugural concert the Detour Festival (named for the streets it was blocking off downtown) was announced only a few weeks after the Weekly's parent company, Village Voice Media, was purchased by New Times (which, in one of the strangest corporate moves I can imagine, proceeded to change its name to Village Voice Media. wtf).

My guess is that either the leftover staff of the Weekly or its new parent company (or possibly both) was wondering whether the paper was still Important to the Community. After all, it's certainly not where young LA people turn to for classified ads, or to look for apartments - they don't even need it for concert listings. And while the Weekly has never been at a loss for snarky commentaries on arts, media and local politics, it surely does not have those markets cornered.

So what better to do than rope off a few blocks of downtown for a festival concert in order to remind The People that the Weekly is way Hipper than, say, the LA Times? (Ironically, the Times building loomed large over the concert grounds, as if smirking at the fact that the Weekly's readership is headed in the same direction as the Times'.) What's the Times got? The Festival of Books?

A few things evoked this curiosity at the Weekly's motives. Besides the odd timing of the event, the performers were not some unique local melange of well-knowns and unknowns meant to reflect the ferocious local loyalty of an influential alt-weekly. In fact, most acts seemed chosen simply to ensure ticket sales - the headliners in particular - rather than affirm the Weekly's place in the hearts and minds of hipster Angelinos. The big names were Queens of the Stone Age (from the desert), Basement Jaxx (from London), and Beck, the token LA headliner. Off the top of my head, out of the 24 or 25 performers, I counted only a handful from LA: Beck, Travis Keller (of Buddyhead fame, DJing a set), The Elected (side project of Pasadena-based indie pop band Rilo Kiley), Redd Kross (Avant rock from Silverlake), and pop band Everybody Else. Even most of the indier acts, such as Of Montreal and !!!, were out-of-towners.

But enough of my petty criticisms. Here's what I saw.

Of Montreal: I started my day with this Athens, GA based indie pop band. There was a sort of "debauching-at-Versailles" theme to the show, with some members of the band in women's clothing and others in powdered wigs and French Revolution-era military garb. Vocalist/songwriter Kevin Barnes went through several wardrobe iterations - from a trenchcoat to a red lace cravat to shirtless with only a green skirt on to a Paul Frankesque rainbow t-shirt and cutoff jeans that displayed plenty of midriff - and did a fairly hysterical scene in which he appeared to sodomize one band member with a katana. Oh, the songs? About half from last year's "Sunlandic Twins" and half from next year's "Hissing Fauna."

Blackalicious: The show's sole hip-hop act was conscious, sample-heavy Bay Area hip-hop duo Blackalicious, and I tried to go catch a few songs. The beats were bangin', no doubt, but the mix was bad and Gift of Gab  lacked the charisma to move the enormous crowd he was presented with, resorting to such tired gimmicks as "People on the left, say: PARTY OVER HERE FUCK YA'LL OVER THERE!! People on the right, say…" Can't we all just get along? 

Travis Keller: I was curious enough to go to the DJ stage (inside a gutted former church on 2nd street) and see what Travis Keller was spinning. Mostly loud post-punk obscurities that I'd never heard before. I went to get pizza.

Weird Science: After pizza, I went back to the DJ church to check out what was up with Weird Science. It was a decent mix of loud, generic housy stuff, and they had recruited a bunch of well-intoxicated women to dress as Sexy Nuns and dance on the stage. The crowd was into it, but the mix was uninspired. I went outside to stake out a spot for the Elected.

The Elected: Blake Sennett of Rilo Kiley's charismatic side project is, I admit, a really amusing band. Driven by Blake's seriously-I'm-a-big-star stage persona, and backed by an air-tight band, they breezed through tracks from their most recent album "Sun, Sun, Sun." Sadly, the mix was disastrous. When they started, the engineer forgot to turn off the between-sets music, which played on top of the first song of the set. During another section section, when the horns came in, rather than turning up the horn mics the soundperson turned up the piano to an overwhelming volume. Instead of fixing this problem, the engineer just left it that way. Yuck. And strangely, the band did not complain about it. But no time for the end of the set because I had to get to the main stage for

Basement Jaxx: I have never been that big a Jaxx fan, Discovery getting much more play on my stereo than Kish Kash. But Jaxx brought that fire, an enormous energy with a lot of live musicians, a note-perfect horn section, and a rotating cast of vocalists. The band burnt through favorites and new songs, climaxing with "Where's Your Head At." The lyrics to the verse section of the song were changed to "We can't evolve / evolve without you," and on their delivery, a cadre of people in ape costumes paraded onto the stage and proceeded to scale the rafters. Awesome.

VHS or Beta: Then it was back to the DJ church again to check out what VHS or Beta were spinning. Mostly recognizable house bangers (my day was brightened by Mylo), so I hung around and danced for awhile.

Beck: I returned to the main stage, curious for what Beck would bring after a recent run of fairly unimpressive albums. The show kicked off with a little bit of "Loser," followed by "Summer Girl" and "Mixed Bizness." Beck has a lot of stage energy, but the two more recent songs simply fail to impress.

!!!: So I bailed on Beck and went to check out New York dancepunkers !!!. Warming up for them was a man in drag who called himself Kelly. I know nothing about Kelly except that he is hilarious. Backed by cheesy drum programming and a dude in a purple superhero suit with an enormous bulge in his pants, Kelly spat Valley Girl platitudes like "That's a cute top / That's a cute top / That's a cute top / Can I borrow it?" which gradually morphed into "That's a cute top / You're not fucking wearing it / So let me borrow it / Betch." Yes, the word "bitch" was distinctly pronounced as "betch." This brought the lolz. !!! baited the crowd, and there was plenty of friendly dancing, pushing and shoving near the stage, which was cool until someone planted a high-heel into my foot. Not awesome. !!! leaned on new songs, which were pretty amusing (however identical the songs were to each other), and the relatively small crowd (most people were at Beck and Queens of the Stone Age) had greater enthusiasm for them than any other band that day. I think that may prove my thesis that, for the Weekly to truly stage a festival that will improve their cred, they should have stuck with acts that were going to entertain, rather than acts that were going to sell a lot of tickets. Maybe next year.

-Greg
Photos by Rachel Alonso