During the Detour Festival, you couldn’t help thinking of all the other pop music fests whose shadows it lands in: It’s a less crowded Sunset Junction Street Fair with bigger bands; it’s the San Diego Street Scene when it was small; and it’s Coachella without the heatstroke.
It was almost too much like Coachella, since most of Detour’s headliners are veterans of that yearly desert extravaganza. However the bill was a mix of new and old alike and featured a variety of musical tastes and genres.
The big-name bands at the L.A. Weekly Detour Festival drew a crowd of more than 15,000 on Saturday Oct. 7. Beck, Queens of the Stone Age, Basement Jaxx and Blackalicious headlined the all-day event located in the heart of downtown on the steps of city hall.
Fortunately, at least for those smart enough to have arrived at Detour early, the downtown traffic migraine never materialized. That plus the general smoothness of the nine-hour affair and a strong turnout of about 15,000 people were good omens for future fests. It’s easy to imagine Detour expanding to a full weekend in not too many years.
Still, as good as Detour was, future fests hopefully will be more musically diverse. Blackalicious, the token hip-hop act, simply wasn’t enough. And in this hugely Latino city, how could this event end up with just one Latino artist, Tijuana’s terrific Nortec Collective?
Detour’s creators – promoter Goldenvoice and the LA Weekly – will need to figure out what they want their festival to be. Is it going to be a place for showcasing a diverse array of homegrown stars or a place to see national and international musical talent?
Beck, who was by far Detour’s main attraction, mixed older hits with cuts off of his new disc, “The Information,” all played to a clever video background of look-alike puppets that mouthed every sung lyric.
Although Beck was the headline attraction, Basement Jaxx was the star of the show. It was just last year that this band from the U.K. sold more than 800,000 copies of their double platinum album “The Singles.” Basement Jaxx stole the show with it’s unique blend of ska, reggae, hip hop, dancehall and drum and bass combined with the soulful’gut-punch guest vocals of Queen BellRay, Lisa Kekaula.
Besides Beck and Basement Jaxx, Detour’s other high point wasn’t a band but a venue, as DJs took over the former St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. Now an arts center, it was a sight to see Hollywood turntablists Steve Aoki and Blake Miller – known together as Weird Science – spinning behind eight long legged ladies who writhed in nun habits on what had once been an altar.
While that was going on, couples were spotted lip-locking in the church’s old confessional stalls and downing cups of beer.
At that moment, Detour – and Catholicism, for that matter – were never more entertaining.
