One of Ice Cream Man’s first escapades in slinging was at Street Scene in San Diego. At the time the ice cream still cost a dollar instead of zero dollars. This time, we were able to finally make another appearance, slinging behind the Fulana stage for the 25th anniversary of the fest.
Headlining the fest this year were Black Eyed Peas and Beastie Boys. Unfortunately, due to illness, the Beasties canceled their tour this year, vaulting M.I.A. into festival headliner status.
Street Scene is fairly unique compared to other large festivals. Instead of finding one huge empty area to fill up with people, corn dogs and expensive water as the blaring summer sun beats down, Street Scene is laid out along a few downtown streets including the parking lot for Petco Park. That’s not to say the summer sun wasn’t still a factor: highs on Friday got over 103 degrees, however the relatively late start (doors opened at 4pm both days) allowed for the majority of the fest be in the night.
I rolled down early on Friday to set up with Bessie after stopping by National Ice Cream to load up for the weekend. Since things were still hectic and our spot wasn’t set yet, I ended up hanging out and waiting until the crew identified the truck and started mobbing me for ice cream.
Once we got set up and the ice cream crew showed up, we got rolling. The spot we had wasn’t the best, but having spent time outside where we were set up, people already knew we were around somewhere and hunted us down. We were also near the artist trailers so we got a few of them stopping by, in fact I’m pretty sure Jenny Lewis was into me. On Saturday many artists came by just to tell us they saw Ice Cream Man at Outside Lands the day before.
Being set up where we were, we got a great view of the Fulana stage with highlights including Modest Mouse, who played the best show I’ve ever seen from them, Conor Oberst and Thievery Corporation. We also got a great view, with great sound of the unfortunately similarly named Fulano stage across the way, which played an alternating set with our Fulana stage. Band of Horses and The Dead Weather played amazing sets and M.I.A. blew people away with her festival closing show that included a mini Beastie Boys tribute where her dj played “Intergalactic” and “Sabotage” while she flowed over it. In fact, the only disappointing performances were Cake, who had the bad fortune of being hit with constant sound problems in addition to having the Black Eyed Peas equipment blocking their video show behind them, much to the ire of singer John McCrea, and Public Enemy who went on far too late and dragged their performance almost a half hour past their time, setting back the other bands. Black Eyed Peas ended up even costing Street Scene $40,000 (allegedly) by playing past curfew.
With all the awesomeness on those two stages it was almost easy to forget the two smaller stages down the street. I was able to get away for a bit to check out Ra Ra Riot and Gram Rabbit, but missed many of the other sets.
After a long weekend of slinging, partying, drinking and heat exhaustion it was good to get back home to Long Beach, but looking forward to doing it again next year.
