‘We Can’t Franchise This Festival, It’s Uniquely San Francisco’: Outside Lands’ Founders on Its 15th Anniversary

It’s kind of a miracle Outside Lands ever happened at all.

The team behind the event started pitching it to San Francisco officials in 2006. Inspired by the city’s musical lore and the fact the city somehow didn’t yet have a major fest, their goal was to host a world class music festival in the city’s historic Golden Gate Park, a verdant thousand-acre landmark tucked between the city’s Richmond and Sunset districts.

While the park had hosted bluegrass, drum circles and ’60s-era acid tests, a concert had never happened there after the park’s 7p.m. curfew. But the team pitching the festival — Rick Farman of Superfly, the company behind Bonnaroo, and Allen Scott, Sherry Wasserman and Gregg Perloff of San Francisco’s independent show promoter Another Planet Entertainment — had a vision, and they were willing to jump through hoops to make it happen.

They mailed the 28,000 residents in the park’s adjacent neighborhoods notifying them of proposed festival hours and road closures. They set up a multilingual community hotline for residents to notify fest officials of blocked driveways, sent out mailers, ran ads in three newspapers and launched a website in English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish with information about the event. The hired an arborist to determine how close to trees and root systems they could build stages. They deployed a sound engineer to measure the park’s ambient noise, re-routed bike lanes and figured out where to put breaks in the the fence line so the feral cats living in the park could enter and exit.

“It was very, very difficult,” says Scott. “The city was very skeptical too, and it took a while for us to trust the city and the park and for them to trust us. Now we’re all in lockstep.”

The team finally got the green light for the festival in 2008, when they launched Outside Lands with headliners Radiohead, Tom Petty and Jack Johnson. 15 years later, the festival is a cultural, musical and economic juggernaut, having evolved along with San Francisco while showcasing the best of local culture. Outside Lands 2023 starts today (August 11) in Golden Gate Park with headliners Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters and ODESZA, along with more than 100 other acts.

Upon launching in 2008, Outside Lands came to life in the same year as several other major North American music festivals including All Points East in New York and Mile High Music Festival in Denver. This was also the same year as the recession, and while many of the other events launched in 2008 had faded out just a few years later, by this time Outside Lands had become a phenomenon, generating $60 million in economic impact for the city in 2011 alone.

“That [number] changed the entire conversation with the city,” says Scott. “People started not just seeing this not just as a music festival with a bunch of people out having a good time… [In terms of economic impact] it’s like having the Major League Baseball All Star game [in the city] every year.”

Scott and Farman credit the festival’s longevity to Golden Gate Park itself, with the venue providing a singular, distinctly San Franciscan atmosphere. So too does the festival focus on incorporating other elements of the city.

In 2018, the festival debuted Grasslands, becoming the first major U.S. music festival to feature a curated cannabis area two years after California legalized recreational marijuana. (Outside Lands received the city’s first ever permit for cannabis sales and consumption at a festival.)This year Grasslands returns with more than 20 different cannabis brands, many of them local, extending the heady lineage of the park from the era when the Grateful Dead played on the park’s Hippie Hill.

New this year is Dolores, a electronic-focused stage that pays homage to San Francisco’s rich history of queer parties, performances and activism. The area is being programmed by a spate of SF-based queer party promoters including FAKE and GAY, OASIS and Hard French, and will feature a weekend’s worth of music from local and regional DJs, drag queens and more.

Another major infusion of local culture comes via the festival’s food programming, which over the years has grown to feature food from more than 95 local restaurants, as well as drinks from 30 breweries and a flurry of Northern California wineries. (Those who are especially flush this year can also opt for the Premium Experience ticket, which includes unlimited food and drinks, a personal concierge service, golf cart rides to stage and which runs at roughly $5,000.) Scott says organizers have turned down food vendors from Las Vegas, L.A. and New York, and equates the importance of the fest’s food and beverage options to that of the music lineup itself.

“We want to be a force, and I think we have been in representing so many positive elements of what’s going on in the city,” says Farman. “When you look at the amazing culinary and beverage scene that’s going on at Outside Lands, these are local purveyors that are open today that people go to and are thriving and have the ability to do a very difficult thing, which is transforming to being a vendor staffed with quality people out in a park. These are real signs of a healthy community and a healthy economy.”

Demonstrating these healthy aspects of San Francisco has become more crucial for the festival over the last few years in particular, as the city has gained a reputation as a nexus of homelessness, drug use and business closures, particularly following the pandemic.

“Now it’s even more essential that we celebrate what makes San Francisco great,” says Scott. “We’ve been kicked a lot lately. The media and places around the country like to kick us when we’re down. This [festival] is a reminder to everyone of what makes San Francisco such an amazing city.”

This year’s sold out festival anticipates hosting roughly 220,000 attendees over its three days. They’ll hear music at eight stages named after iconic San Francisco locations (Sutro, Twin Peaks, Panhandle, etc.), they’ll drink wines grown in vineyards throughout the region, smoke NorCal kush, eat local foods and generally just add to the musical legacy of the city and park itself. For the organizers, all of that and everything else they’ve achieved more than makes up for the work it took to help them lock in the festival site more than 15 years ago, one they hope to keep utilizing, says Scott, “for as long as time goes.”

“For better for worse, we can’t franchise this festival around the country or world,” he adds. “It’s uniquely San Francisco.”