Sasquatch Report: "I've Been Drinking For The Past Ten Fucking Hours"

So much is in the delivery. The unsteady, sunburned drinker who wearily slurred his estimate of the time he'd spent drinking Sunday somehow packed cosmic distances into his phrasing. Or there were the two young men, fleeing the rain shower, bleating: "What's gone wrong? Where are the naked hippies? Where are the naked hippies!"

People certainly do drink up at the Gorge. Maybe it's that country air. Saturday night we were down on the floor waiting for Ben Harper to start and an inebriated man asked us if we knew where someone was. Actually, he glanced at us in passing, was seemingly pulled back our direction by elastic, and as he locked his gaze on us, the words stumbled out. We shook our head. He asked again. We still didn't know. "I'm...I'm...just...fuckin'...with ya," he produced next. "You...you have...great...facial expressions!" he said to us. "This one is contempt," we told him. (We hadn't yet discovered where you could get coffee and were testy.)

Sasquatch 2006 closed with Queens of the Stone Age, Death Cab for Cutie, and Beck. We can't claim to be fans of QOTSA, but the people behind us were, and bayed happily after every song, so it was presumably a good show (though later one of them muttered to another about how the band was "digging deep for material"). All day there was a brisk wind that blew the sound into whorls by the time it hit the hillside, so we gave up trying to judge who they sounded like.

DCFC opened with their new year song, exactly as we anticipated. Much of the set came from Plans, and everywhere we looked people were singing along. So was Sean Nelson, who for the second time that day, joined a band onstage for a song. We can't remember which because this was just before we'd heard that the place next to the one selling elephant ears was selling coffee, and we were a little foggy. We may also have been slightly stoned from the prodigious amount of second-hand pot smoke blowing around. No matter what your state of mind, everyone around us agreed that "I Will Follow You into the Dark" was a remarkably pleasant and tender few minutes.

The sun was down and we were making a mental note to bring a parka if we ever do this again when Beck appeared, and everyone rose to their feet (to the consternation of those passed out flat-on-their-backs -- "Sit down! You're ruining it for everyone!" they cried, but the effort soon exhausted them). Beck is into puppets lately. We're normally puppet-friendly, but they got a great deal of big-screen time. As we were listening to the concert through a supplementary set of loudspeakers on the hill, they increased the distance we felt from a live performance. That said, the set was chock-full of bona-fide Beck hits, and he worked in two songs from Sea Change, that were perfect for a windswept, dark evening in the Gorge.

It ended abruptly, no encore, and everyone got up and began streaming out. We were back in Seattle at 2:15am.