Lightning in a Bottle Set to Return After Three-Year Hiatus Next Week
*The best* music festival in California will return to Buena Vista Lake from May 25th through 30th
It’s been a busy week for festivals in the Bay Area, as summer stalwart Outside Lands dropped its 2022 daily lineup — Phoebe Bridgers! Lil Uzi Vert! Polo & Pan!—only to be pre-empted by the arrival of a sexy, contentious newcomer, Portola.
A nod to an obscure 1909 fest that announced San Francisco’s post-earthquake resurgence, it’s filling the void that Treasure Island left when it peaced out in 2018. But for a lot of people, the euphoria was short-lived, as even the endless sunshine of California festival culture has its dark side.
Billionaire Philip Anschutz, the railroad baron, entertainment mogul, and Coachella owner with a long track record of anti-LGBTQ+ financial support, is behind Portola. (In a bonus middle finger to festival-goers, Anschutz, who initially made his money in oil, is openly hostile to cannabis, too.)
Old right-wing white men own a disproportionate share of the world, it’s true, and purity is virtually impossible for even the most devoted of us. But if you need something unambiguously positive to jump-start your Hot Vaxx and Boosted Summer 2.0, the return of Lightning in a Bottle (“LIB,” for short) — which is coming back after a three-year pause —is the proverbial ticket. (Less-proverbial tickets are still available, starting at $435 for G.A.)
The 2019 incarnation was, in this journalist’s circles anyway, a retroactive touchstone of pre-pandemic life. It was the thing you commiserated about with your friends while pulling your mask down to drink rosé in your socially distant circle painted on the grass in Dolores Park. Dubbed “Lightning in a Puddle” for the freak early-May thunderstorms that chased more than a few people out of their tents early during the wee hours and briefly halted the sets that afternoon, it’s the last camping festival many people have been to.
And now it’s back at Buena Vista Lake outside Bakersfield, with a killer lineup: Kyle Watson, Glass Animals, Big Wild, Yotto, WhoMadeWho, Clozee, Big Freedia, and GRiZ. San Francisco’s own Empress Of will be there, as will perennial heroes Monolink and Patricio, the entire Desert Hearts crew, and all the artsy weirdos and yoga enthusiasts too.
LIB is, in short, the best festival in the state, bigger than Northern Nights, less overtly bro-y than Dirtybird Campout, and with fewer, um, Culver City-based wellness influencers than that big one at the Empire Polo Grounds. To call it a weekend is grossly inadequate.
It’s a five-day dry run for Burning Man, an outgrowth of The Do LaB’s Coachella tent, and a haven for everyone under the alternative sun: the people who treat their body like a temple and those who treat it like a dead mall where the anchor tenants were Mervyn’s and Circuit City. It’s a party; it’s the party.
Some of the best sets this writer has ever seen were at LIB, including a rare Fever Ray performance in 2017 and a let’s-get-Day-One-started Walker & Royce experience two years later that felt like opening the spigots for summertime itself, with an ever-haunting Jan Blomqvist a couple of nights later. (Also Escapade, the quasi-supergroup consisting of Walker & Royce and Ardalan. Can’t forget that one.)
Whether slapping hands with a hundred strangers while crossing a bridge at the edge of Lake San Antonio or dashing from the Woogie stage to the Lightning stage against a sea of people or jiggling your glutes for the dark lord (so to speak) it’s the perfect combination of curatorial excellence and pure joy with your friends.
LIB’s return enters into a dramatically different festival landscape. Let’s face it: Outside Lands, which has deftly avoided pigeonholing itself into a single genre and considerably improved its commitment to gender and racial equity, now seems to have gone full mainstream, clipping the wings of its own programming ambitions. (Green Day and Weezer are what pass for top-tier legacy acts now?) Maybe, in booking Kaytranada, M.I.A., Toro Y Moi, and Four Tet, Portola’s industrious promoters simply did an end-run around a complacent OSL. Artist contracts of this scale usually include radius clauses, after all.
But neither of those festivals has camping, or a treehouse, or food available at 3 a.m., or an arms race of absurd totems. Neither of them has Seth Troxler or Opiuo or VNSSA. It’s been three years, and we’re about to see if LIB can, once again, bottle that lightning.
Lightning in a Bottle, May 25–30, at Buena Vista Lake in Kern County; festival information, including ticket tier prices and a “First Timer’s Guide,” can be found at www.libfestival.org.
