Behind Fifteen Years At Outside Lands Festival

This weekend, August 11 – 13, some of the biggest names in music will be in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the fifteenth annual Outside Lands festival. The star-laden lineup is being led by Kendrick Lamar on Friday, Foo Fighters on Saturday and Odesza on Sunday.

The eclectic trio of headliners will be joined by an incredible array of artists — Lana Del Rey, Zedd, Janelle Monae, Maggie Rogers, DJ Diesel (Shaquille O’Neal), Willow, Father John Misty, Conan Gray, Alvvays, The 1975, Meghan Thee Stallion, Joy Oladokun, Cigarettes After Sex and countless more.

As always, as well, food and beverage reflecting the highly rated Bay Area cuisine will be a major component of this year’s festival. As will the iconic location. I spoke with the festival’s Allen Scott and Rick Farman about this year’s lineup, past successes, music discovery, infusing the Bay Area into Outside Lands, cannabis as part of the festival and much more.

Steve Baltin: This is your fifteenth year. Does it feel like it flies by so fast for you guys?

Allen Scott: In some ways yes, and in some ways, no. Rick and I were just babies at the beginning and now we’re fathers with many kids.

Rick Farman: Yeah. What’s the adage about long days, short years, or something like that? Like raising kids. It kind of is like that. And I don’t know if it’s a great analogy, but it does feel like we’ve got a teenager. Where we’ve like, this thing is matured and it’s become really something and it’s only growing.

Scott: It’s interesting you say that, Rick. Because my daughter was actually born nine months before Outside Lands started. So she’s grown up around Outside Lands going as a baby to toddler and that sort of thing. But she’s 15 now, the same age as the festival, and she now brings her friends and doesn’t want to hang out with her father. Only wants to get free tickets.

Baltin: Allen, don’t feel bad. I have talked about this with everyone from Perry Farrell and Patti Smith to Shaquille O’Neal. You are never cool to your kids. And if you were cool to your kids, then something is wrong.

Farman: Right, that’s correct [chuckle].

Scott: Yeah, that is so true. There’s a brief moment when I’m cool when she’s negotiating for wristbands for her and her friends. And that’s a pure manipulation.

Baltin: Talk about when you were booking this year and the pros and the cons of being 15 years in. On one hand, how do you top yourself? On the other hand, people trust it and they know what they’re getting when they go.

Scott: We top ourselves every year, Steve. So, that’s not an issue for us. No, seriously, there’s some ebbs and flows on the lineup from year to year. And some years, like this year, we feel like we hit a home run. And we hear that from our audience and the chatter after we announced the lineup. And sometimes half the audience has issues with the lineup, ’cause it doesn’t appeal to them. And half the audience loves it. This year, I think it was about 99 percent positive, which is really rare for a festival. ‘Cause everyone loves to complain about not meeting their expectations. For us this year, Kendrick was a really important artist. That’s why once he confirmed things started falling around it. The Foo Fighters are arguably the biggest they’ve ever been right now. And they wanted to play. And then Odesza, who is just selling a ton of tickets, they did 44,000 tickets in the Bay Area last time they came through and it’s kind of right down the pike for the Outside Lands audience. And then you have Lana Del Rey, we were the first festival to announce her. And she’s kind of untouchable. She’s like Kendrick, everyone rallies around those two artists. It’s similar to Radiohead, when we first started the festival in 2008. Everyone who comes to the Outside Lands could agree on that band and thought they were great. And that’s where Kendrick and Lana are right now for our festival. And it goes down the line 1975, down through the lineup. I mean, we felt very fortunate this year that the stars aligned and everything came together and now we’re stressing about next year already. So that’s just how it goes.

Baltin: So who’s the dream headliner for 2024?

Scott: We would love Fleetwood Mac, but I think that may be off the table.

Farman: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd.

Scott: Yeah [laughter].

Baltin: The more elusive the artist the more in demand they are.

Scott: Well, you know who that elusive artist is for me, who I want to do two nights of the Greek Theatre here in Berkeley with is Tracy Chapman. And I feel like no one really thinks about her too much, but she’s got so many songs, so much credibility she doesn’t play. And now you have Luke Combs with his rendition of “Fast Car,” which is massive right now, but that’s kind of my bucket list to do a show with.

Baltin: Festivals are allowed to evolve and grow, but so it’s interesting for you guys talk about that combination of discovery of new artists and then you’re exposing people to artists that they never would see otherwise.

Scott: Yeah, that’s absolutely one of the great parts about festivals, and I love hearing from people discovering artists. Before the festival, people put together playlists and they go down and they’d listen. And before they even set foot at the festival, they’re discovering artists and determining who they want to see. And then they go out and see them live and hopefully take that artist with them. We work really hard to have a multi-generational festival and not just ride the trends. That’s why I mentioned Fleetwood Mac, something like that. And I think you see it with our lineups that these are career type artists is what we try to book, that people will be talking years to come. And that’s what the discovery artists too. Lizzo started opening the main stage headlines, Tame Impala, all of these stories that have come, Twenty One Pilots, all these artists that have come through and played early day slots and then come back to headline. And we’re really proud of that.

Farman: I’ll add that it goes beyond music for us. The discovery element is really also about other elements of Bay Area culture and arts that we want to support and expose people to. So whether that’s somebody discovering a new wine that they love or a new restaurant or a cannabis product or a piece of art, a local artist, or even some sort of local cause-based organization that is part of the fabric of the Bay Area. These are all things that we put a ton of time and energy into curating, just like the music. For that idea that hopefully people come out there and they discover something that’s authentic to hear, that’s local, and that they can either continue to experience if they live here or take it back with them to wherever they go.

Baltin: I had one of the best vegan meals of all time at Wildseed. That place was incredible. Talk about sort of how you incorporate that in to the festival. Jazz Fest is the benchmark for this because it’s been going since the late ’60s. New Orleans is such a distinct flavor, that it’s a huge part of Jazz Fest. So how do you bring San Francisco cuisine into Outside Lands?

Farman: You’re right on track there, Steve. My company, Superfly, was started in New Orleans and we were hugely inspired by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and everything Quentin [Davis’] team has done. And I think part of the original thesis that Allen and I had when we started Outside Lands was really looking at something like that and saying, “Hey, the Bay Area has all of the elements to create an experience that can expose its culture in a festival in a way that’s just as dynamic as any place in the world. And then on top of that, we’re blessed with this amazing site in Golden Gate Park.” Those are the foundational ingredients. And so a lot of what we do in every facet is really find local curators and people who really know every element of that particular thing that we’re trying to expose. So we have somebody who’s one of the foremost wine sommeliers in the Bay Area, choosing all the wines. We have a guy who’s like huge part of the craft beer scene selecting all the beers. We have somebody who’s very vested in the whole restaurant community, curating every restaurant. And look, the whole team of people that produces this event, almost all of us live in the Bay Area. So we’re all a part of that curation. We’re out at a restaurant and we’re like, “Man, this place should be out at Outside Lands. Let’s get these guys some exposure out there.” That’s really what I think makes this pretty special and unique is it really is homegrown. We all live here, we all live and breathe this. There is a real mission here in similar ways to Quint, right? When Quint was starting Jazz Fest and until to this day, he considers himself, I know like somebody whose mission is to spread New Orleans culture. We kind of feel the same way about the Bay Area.

Scott: Yeah, and we’re really proud of that. And I feel like it’s a really diverse lineup, but you’ve got to remember in 2008, all the major festivals were having, burgers, pizza, hot dogs, chicken on a stick, things like that. No one had incorporated a local restaurants in like Jazz Fest had. And again, this is different and Rick can talk to the nuances of it, but we have 100 local restaurants out there and the diversity of cuisine is just astounding. Everything under the sun. And the same thing with wine, no major festival had had served wine prior to Outside Lands.

Farman: And then we were the pioneers with cannabis. We’re really still the first, the only large scale music festival that has legal sales and consumption of cannabis. And we were the pioneer there. And really helped forge the process of how you do that. And so every time we see an opportunity to celebrate things that are Bay Area culture, we do it. One thing I’ll say, when you think about the food element, and I am one of these people, when I go to Jazz Fest, I go there just as much to eat as I do to listen to music. And I think a lot of people have recognized Outside Lands is that same experience where you can walk around from place to place. And I think it’s exactly, New Orleans does New Orleans food amazing. The Bay Area is a culinary mecca, right? In the sense that like, it’s got elements of almost every cuisine here done really well. You can have incredible Nepalese dumplings out at Outside Lands. You can have incredible tacos. You can have a wide array of food. And each day you can make an experience around that. And I think a lot of the people what they leave with is, yes, great music festival, but all of these other elements. One last thing I’ll say too is the multi -generational thing, I think is also fairly unique in the festival scene. Not that there aren’t other festivals where you see this. But a lot of what we see happening is people going with their teenage kids, they’ll each go to see something, they’ll meet up for lunch, they’ll go back out and do their thing, meet up, at another part of the festival, have some more food, whatever it is. And I think that element of it also really speaks to the Bay Area culture. Bay Area has a scene of music lovers and culture lovers of all ages. And I think it’s one of the things that powers the great Bay Area music scene. You do have people of really all ages who really love to go out and love to experience the things that are here. And we’ve been able to design for that in many ways.

Scott: That’s a great point. And the demographics of Outside Lands, not just the diversity of ages, but diversity of ethnicities. And we’re able to do a lot of different programming because of that. And we’re able to swing the pendulum pretty wide on who we can have headline. We’ve had J Balvin, we’ve had Kali Uchis in the last couple of years in that market. We’re doing our first K-pop act this year with Aespa. And then of course, everything else under the sun. So it’s been really fun stretching the programming. And I think you’re gonna see more of that in the coming years.

Baltin: Who’s the definitive Outside Lands artist for you right now? The artist that best encapsulates what the festival is about musically in terms of the cross-section of styles.

Scott: From this year’s lineup, it would be Kendrick Lamar. Because his audience goes from high school up until the people in their 40s. And he’s so culturally relevant. And a genius songwriter, and performer, and incredibly creative. His last tour was mind-blowing. Like I said earlier when I was talking about Kendrick Lamar. It’s like the artist that everyone can kind of agree to, that’s excited for in our audience. So that’s mine.

Farman: I think what Allen was saying before, this is a lineup where there’s something for everybody. And I agree Kendrick is one of the few that really unites everybody. I think Foo Fighters do that too. Like Allen was saying, they’re in a place right now where I think they are being recognized multi-generationally. I think when you talk about the diversity of our lineup and the things that I think people in the Bay Area really gravitate towards, I think Janelle Monáe is going to have a massive set out there. And you can tell sometimes the programming and where the slots fall and we know enough about how the crowd flows in and out of the festival into different areas and every year there’s a couple things when we walk away and you’re like, “Wow that artist really just fit the moment.” And I think that’s gonna be her this year.

Scott: Right, she’s going to be penultimate on the Lands End stage right prior to Kendrick.

Farman: Yeah, and that late afternoon slot where everybody’s sort of kind of getting settled for the headliner, you see it often where an act like that can just take the field by storm.

Scott: Yeah, 40, 50,000 people watching.

Baltin: Who are the artists you feel will come back and headline years from now?

Scott: On the bigger end, 1975 and Lana are really all right on that cusp. They’re close this year, but on the smaller end, Noah Kahan is having a tremendous run right now. He’s having a phenomenal run, blowing out all his tickets, and his latest album is up there on the Spotify charts. It just came out Friday. I could see him getting to that status, who’s on the lineup. I have to refresh myself with the lineup.

Farman: One I’ll quickly mention, just ’cause I think with this last record, he transcended, and I think if he does it again, is Lil Yachty. I don’t know if you’ve spent time with that record that he put out this year, but it’s definitely one of my favorites. And I feel like it expanded his audience, to a deeper pool and if he gets another record that really can continue to expand that audience. I could see him blowing out.