Ah, I-5, my constant companion.
After heading up to San Francisco for the Treasure Island Festival, I had the good fortune of having to go back up the day after I got home for Free Yr Radio. Luckily, I got to take Bessita this time which means a radio and air conditioning. Happy days!
After getting back into town and getting a full night’s rest, I headed to pick up ice cream from Wonder Ice Cream in Newark. For those that don’t know, that is about an hour away from San Francisco, so, despite getting off to an early start I found myself racing against the clock to get loaded up and back in town in time from the get go.
Being the intrepid ice cream pro, I was able to ignore the constant pleas to get to USF right away and rolled up ready to spread joy to the good students. Since KUSF was our beneficiary station for this trip, they had a booth set up to raise awareness for the King Khan concert that night. I actually got a call from King Khan himself that he wanted to tag along to sling, but due to the hectic schedule for the day, it didn’t work out. I did get help from Jet, the fundraising coordinator for the station, and together we were able to get rid of quite a lot of ice cream on campus.
The plan was after USF we’d go by Amoeba Records down the street and give out some more ice cream before heading over to Urban Outfitters for the show that night. Knowing the ice cream capacity for Bessita and the volume of people that would be downtown during the concert I got a little worried that we wouldn’t have enough. Luckily this wasn’t the case. Amoeba was disappointingly devoid of people. We did manage to get a bunch out to the employees and the few lucky people that were hanging out there and pack up to get to UO.
As I expected, there were tons of people by the Urban Outfitters, but most seemed oblivious that there was anything going on. I figure that in San Francisco there is always some kind of event happening and the people there have become jaded. I know I’ve learned to ignore people trying to sell stuff and this had to be a similar situation. The hundreds of people who were actually there for the show were excited at the prospect of free ice cream while they waited, however, and also jumped at the Good Magazine photo booth. I ended up being left with only cherry Bomb Pops after a while, so I took those boxes and went up and down the line passing them out to the people who had been waiting patiently.
This gave me the opportunity to go inside and check out the show. I knew nothing of King Khan before the show so I didn’t know what to expect. He was joined by a bunch of his friends (who turned out to be Oakland’s Gris Gris) and played pretty much straightforward garage rock. The performance was pretty raucous and loud. Entertaining, but a little too much for me so I headed back out and waited for the end which meant I had to keep telling people we were out of ice cream and have to look at the sad looks on their faces.
I spent the night out on the town once more in The City and surprised a bunch of people that were confused since I left on Monday. Gotcha!
