BY ANDY TENNILLE

Taking its moniker from the name American settlers gave the area during the California Gold Rush of the mid-19^th Century, the Outside Lands Music & Art Festival made its inaugural debut last weekend in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, marking the first time city officials have opened the historic landmark for night-time concerts.

Radiohead headlined the festival's main stage on Friday night, kicking off three days of music featuring more than 65 national and local artists across six stages scattered throughout the park.

As is the nature for first-time festivals, the weekend didn't go without its challenges. Transportation to and from the festival was largely inadequate. While many attendees wisely chose to utilize the event's complimentary bicycle parking service provided by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, there was not enough coordination with city officials to deploy ample MUNI buses to accommodate the 60,000-plus daily attendees. Taxi cabs were scarce and parking in and around the park practically non-existent.

The problems didn't end once you entered the festival grounds. Due to the park's landscape, festival organizers were forced to work with its existing layout, resulting in several narrow bottlenecks that made travel between stages extremely difficult and crowd management next to impossible. Sound gremlins continually plagued the event, dropping out several times during Radiohead's set and forcing Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers to take an unexpected break during their headlining set Saturday night. The topography and location of some stages - such as the Twin Peaks stage - presented aural snake pits for festival sound engineers trying to achieve pristine sound.

All that said, the focus of the weekend was the music, and promoters - Another Planet Entertainment, Superfly Presents and Starr Hill Presents - did not skimp on the talent. In honor of the recent XXIX Olympiad, BLURT awards medals - gold, silver and bronze - for the highlights of the weekend.

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Friday

Gold: Radiohead

Despite the inexcusable sound problems, the five blokes from Oxfordshire, England delivered an extraordinary set that lived up to the hype, covering material from their entire catalogue in a little less than two hours.

Silver: Felice Brothers

The reputation of these upstate New York folk rockers preceded them, so I skipped highly anticipated sets from Manu Chao and Benevento-Russo Duo to check them out. Not only did the Felice brethren exceed my high expectations, but the quintet - frontman Ian Felice, drummer Simone Felice, keysman James Felice, bassist Christmas and fiddler Farley - proved critic's comparisons to The Band weren't just hyperbolic hype or lazy journalism. The Brothers' excellent self-titled album, released last March, is no fuckin' fluke. Raucous and gritty, The Felices opened my eyes on Friday and could very well be my favorite new artist of the weekend.

Bronze: Black Mountain

Eerie and creepy in all the right ways, Black Mountain delivered a set of heavy rock ‘n roll that expanded on the blueprint set out in their two LPs, In The Future (2008) and Black Mountain (2005). Playing opposite the indie rock hip band Cold War Kids and Nashville soul singer Charles Walker & the Dynamites, Black Mountain served as the dark underbelly of the day's music, channeling the unhinged psychedelic beauty of Pigpen-era Grateful Dead mixed with the menacing drone of the Velvets.

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Saturday

Gold: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

Simply put, Tom Petty is an American treasure. For more than 35 years, the Gainesville, FL native has delivered radio hit after radio hit without ever pandering to the music industry machine or diluting his artistic standards to placate mainstream America. Although Saturday night didn't deviate too much from Petty's standard tour set list, why should it? When you've penned tunes like "Free Falling," "Refugee," "Last Dance with Mary Jane," "American Girl," "Running Down a Dream" or the Traveling Wilbury gem "End of the Line," there's no reason to stray from the status quo. The icing on Petty's set was the inclusion of Steve Winwood, who sat in for a brilliant rendition of "Can't Find My Way Home" and "Gimme Some Lovin'," and confirmed once again what a fantastic, chameleon-like backing band the Heartbreakers can be.

Silver: Two Gallants

Hometown boys Two Gallants may be just a duo, but don't tell that to guitarist Adam Stephens and drummer Tyson Vogel. The two childhood friends play with a reckless abandon that transcends their limited instrumentation and inspires dynamic live performances. Saturday was no exception. Part blues-rock, part folk, the Gallants are anachronistic cowboys that seem indifferent about the trends and fads of modern music. Despite their youth, they are old souls, and their music reflects a harkening for days gone by.

Bronze: M. Ward

Any time I have the chance, I jump at the opportunity to see M. Ward. An auteur akin to the likes of Wes Anderson or Hunter Thompson, Ward's music is unmistakably his own, replete in his suave baritone and tasteful guitar playing. Yet with the release of each new studio album, Ward continually evolves and grows as an artist and studio innovator. Ward's performance at the Sutro Stage on Saturday birthed a new revelation for this writer. In the middle of his set, Ward dropped into "Post-War," the title track off his excellent 2006 LP. A quiet, almost-waltzing tune, Ward had a crowd of thousands of festival goers captivated in silence during his midday set without the benefit of the cloak of nightfall. His music is simply sublime.

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Sunday

Gold: Wilco

Despite being housed at the horrendously uphill Twin Peaks stage and snubbed of a headlining set in favor of soccer-mom-rocker Jack Johnson, Wilco brought their A-game on Sunday and showed why they are among a handful of American bands worthy of carrying the torch passed down by Petty, Springsteen or Bono. Frontman Jeff Tweedy was his talkative self, commenting after "Impossible Germany" that ace guitarist Nels Cline had ripped his note-perfect solo with a safety pin holding the zipper on his pants together. "California Stars" was a nice choice for the NorCal crowd, who rained applause and accolades on Tweedy and company at their conclusion of their set like the headlining act they should have been.

Silver: Andrew Bird

One-man bands don't do much for me, but Andrew Bird truly breaks the mold. Not that Bird was alone onstage for his Sunday afternoon set: drummer Martin Dosh and bassist Jeremy accompanied him. But Bird's multi-instrumental tendencies (violin, guitar and his much-lauded whistling), coupled with his ability to create dense compositions through digital looping technology, really showcase what a marvelous orchestrator and songwriter he is. I walked away from Bird's set on Sunday extremely impressed and logged onto iTunes later that night to purchase his records, which is as good an indication of my appreciation of the artist as any.

Bronze: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings/Widespread Panic

Sunday afternoon forced many Outside Lands attendees to make a few tough decisions: Toots Maytal, Stars, The Mother Hips or Bon Iver? Andrew Bird, The Cool Kids or the Drive-By Truckers?

As Grace Potter arrived on the Presidio stage and Broken Social Scene opened their set on Twin Peaks, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings descended on the Polo Fields, the first time the crack Brooklyn soul & funk band has been asked to play a main stage set at a major U.S. festival. Never a disappointment, Jones and her Dap-Kings bopped and bounced through an hour-long set that channeled the very best of the Stax Records bands and touched on all three of their fantastic full-lengths, Dap Dippin, Naturally and 100 Days, 100 Nights.

Later in the afternoon, as Rogue Wave and Rodrigo y Gabriela began their sets elsewhere, Widespread Panic attracted a packed house at the smallish Sutro Stage, prompting many in attendance to wonder why the veteran, Athens, Georgia rockers weren't on one of the larger stages. While they don't seem to have much in common with the Dap-Kings on the surface, Panic tipped their caps to their shared influences by dropping straight into a full-blown version of "Green Onions," the classic 1962 Booker T. and the MGs track, smack dab in the middle of their 90-minute set. 

All photos by Andy Tennille. To view a full set of photos from Outside Lands, go to Tennille's Flickr site.