Lightning in a Bottle is put on every year by a promoter called the DoLab. This outfit also sponsors pavilions and stages and such at other festivals like Coachella, but LIB is their flagship event. It typically happens over Memorial Day weekend somewhere in California. When I went, May 23-27, 2018, it was at Lake San Antonio which is in rural Monterey County in the middle of the state. In 2019 it moved to another venue and, unsurprisingly, was canceled for not only 2020 but 2021 as well.
Getting There
It wasn't exactly in an easy-to-reach location, and from San Antonio, Texas it took me most of the day to reach. I covered most of the distance with two flights, San Antonio-Phoenix and Phoenix-Burbank. The next leg was a six hour train ride on Amtrak's Coast Starlight from Burbank to Paso Robles, a small town in California's wine country.
This wasn't the fastest or shortest path, but I'd long wanted to know what Amtrak's trains were like and this was a great excuse to work one into a trip. The train ride was pretty slow and the food was not impressive, but the great view of the countryside made it worth the trip. The banner photo at the top of this page was taken from this train.
And plus as the train left the L.A. area it went by a few Hollywood backlots.
The train trip lasted six hours. Now is that because Amtrak is that slow or because California is that big? Yes. I don't know the exact distance but on the map it looked slightly shorter than the distance between San Antonio and Dallas.
At the Paso Robles station I met my friend who I'd be camping with. We drove from there to our final destination in her truck, making "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" a somewhat accurate description of my entire trip.
Also I have to mention how it was a little funny I was traveling such a long way from San Antonio to get to Lake San Antonio.
The Venue
The festival grounds were huge. I don't think it took up as much space as the Holy Grounds of Tomorrowland, but it was definitely close. It mostly encompassed several high ridges sticking out into the lake bed like fingers. Between the ridges were deep gorges with long foot bridges over them.
This is what it looked like on the ground. In the background, from left to right, you can see some of the stages and pavilions: Beacon, Lightning, Pagoda Bar, and the Learning Kitchen. In the foreground is one of the many bridges I mentioned.
Like I said, this place was huge, and the whole time I was there, I kept underestimating how long it would take to walk to one place or another. Anytime I tried to get anywhere, I would always think "it's just over the next bridge" only to find it was really over the bridge after the next bridge, if not the bridge after that one.
As people walked both ways across the bridges, everyone kept to their right and high-fived everyone they passed by walking the other way. This was something that I really liked on the first day but found tiresome by the end.
Experiences
Calling LIB a music festival is extremely inaccurate, since there was so much more there to experience. Looking at reviews and such I keep seeing the term "transformational festival" bandied about. I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean but I can tell it's supposed to be more all-encompassing than "music festival" which is definitely inadequate.
At the Learning Kitchen you could attend various food-related workshops. I went to "How to Mead: Making, Tasting & Celebrating" put on by Frank Golbeck and Golden Coast Mead on Thursday evening, to learn about a wonderful beverage I'd wanted to know more about, and more importantly, "Pickling 101: Make & Take" presented by Jerrold Ridenour on Friday afternoon. Everyone who was there for the pickling presentation got to learn by doing, preparing sliced cucumbers with the right vinegars and spices and sealing them in jars. I remembered everything I learned here and have, in the years since, successfully pickled not only cucumbers but asparagus, green beans, and shredded carrots.
Asparagus, green beans, and shredded carrots, a year and a half later in my apartment in Stuttgart.
I've still got the schedule of events. Take a look at some of the other things you could have discovered at the Learning Kitchen: "Loco Plantiful Taco Party," "A Hemphasis on Beer: Hops and Cannabis are Cousins!" (that's true, as I learned at the Stiegl brewery two years later), "Cooking with Weeds and Wild Seeds," to name but a few. Some of these I wish I had gone to when I was there.
There were other pavilions--Beacon, Crossroads, Culture Hub, Memory Palace, Cauldron, and Healing Arts--hosting a slew of presentations and workshops over various topics. I only went to one, "Drawdown to Buckminster Fuller: How to Reverse Climate Change" at Beacon on Friday afternoon, presented by Amanda Ravenhill and Ryan Kushner of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. This I found quite interesting, and their proposed solutions to climate change gave me the impression that the Buckminster Fuller Institute had the rare distinction of being eccentric but also not cranks. Now if only I could remember what their solution to climate change was!
Flipping through the schedule I can see quite a few presentations I wish I could've gone to ("The Future of Space Exploration & Living," "The Future of Money: Cryptocurrency and Blockchain," "Dismantling White Supremacy & Intersecting Movements," "Saving our Ocean through Seafood") and plenty more I'd still stay away from ("WTF is Going On: An Astrological Overview of 2018 and Beyond," "Group Acupuncture," "Building a Shamanic Community," "Intro to Magick for Lightworkers"). And this wasn't all...
There were still other pavilions, Artclave and Earth Arts, which I never even visited, hosting art-related workshops. Artclave was mostly dedicated to drawing and painting, while Earth Arts taught things like fire starting, blacksmithing, and even rope making. And what's this...Earth Arts also had one called "Mead Making as Medicine"? Now I really wish I'd gone to that!
And if you're into yoga, there were not one but two pavilions, Yoga Luna and Yoga Sol, dedicated to that. I never stopped at either one; every time I walked past and saw the movements going on I always thought "I need to stop by here later" but never followed through on that.
They even had a roller skating rink, something I've never seen before at such a festival. I did try this out once, but didn't stay long, because I can only go around in a circle so many times before I get bored.
There was also a Ferris wheel, which I'm sorry to say I never got around to riding.
Finally there were so many colorful performance artists walking around the place...
Food and Drink
Food has always been wonderful at every festival I've been to, and LIB was no exception. There were food stands serving sushi burritos, poké bowls, even avocado toast, among many other things. Unsurprisingly there was at least one vegan kitchen. And I also found an interesting coffee concoction at one of them...
There were also plenty of coffee stands scattered around the festival. These days I need coffee to survive, but I found it frustrating that the only sweeteners available at these places were agave nectar, honey, and syrup, which don't pack much sweetness and are essentially just sugar. There was one place that had stevia but it quickly ran out.
One day I did encounter some people from a local organic food business selling cashews. At home I usually eat cashews with breakfast so I bought a couple bags, one flavored with sage and the other with curry. Not bad.
What about alcoholic drinks? Every festival seems to have a house beer as I call it, and at LIB it was New Belgium Fat Tire. That was the one beer you could get at every drink stand. I think New Belgium had some kind of sponsorship deal with the DoLab, because not only was there that "Hemphasis on Beer" presentation, but at the few places that sold more than just Fat Tire, all the other choices were New Belgium products. They were all pale ales and IPAs, including the Hemperor made with hemp, which are too bitter for my taste. Fat Tire's alright though, I think it's an OK amber ale. Beyond the beer, there was a more expansive bar by the Grand Artique stage which served various liquors and cocktails and I think wine.
The Music
So much to do and experience at this place...a label like "music festival" is just too inadequate to describe it. Maybe I should say something about the music now? It was, as you may have guessed, mostly of the electronic variety, but not entirely. There were six stages dedicated to music, Lightning, Thunder, Woogie, Favela Bar, Pagoda Bar, and Grand Artique. Lightning and Thunder were your typical big music festival stages where the bigger-name acts were. Woogie was more of an open field which just happened to have a DJ booth and sound system in it. Grand Artique looked something like an Old West frontier town, Pagoda more resembled one of the workshop pavilions, while Favela looked like a Brazilian slum.
What would the people who live in a real favela think if they knew that people with a lot more money than them were spending it to dance all night at a stage that looks like their rough and dangerous home? It kind of reminds me of the movie Zoolander in which the villainous fashion designer Mugatu created an expensive, upscale clothing line meant to look like the dirty rags worn by homeless people.
This is what Woogie looked like. During the evenings this space was a dancefloor with a lot more people in it. Another review I read on another site mentioned that there were water cannons there, but I don't recall this.
Those six stages weren't enough to contain all the music, which is why three of the workshop pavilions, Beacon, Crossroads, and Memory Palace, also became music stages during the evenings. Additionally Yoga Sol also hosted "sound healing" events then.
We got there on Wednesday just as the festival was beginning. The music first started that night as the sun was going down. There wasn't a whole lot open that early; the group I was with hung out at the Favela Bar for a while, and then at the nearby Yoga Sol some of us got our first exposure to ecstatic dance.
Thursday the festival slowly opened up more. Of all the stages and pavilions I think only about half were active that day. I can't say which sets I listened to at this point, but I do know I went to the "Patricio & Kraddy '80s Prom Party" at the Favela, or at least part of it, and then wandered into Beacon and stayed for most of Nadi's "Electropical" set. Nadi was one of my favorite musical discoveries from LIB. Everything in this set sounded like reggae vocals played over hip-hop and house beats. The whole set is on Soundcloud now.
Friday is when this event fired up to full power. I wish I could remember what specific sets I went to but unfortunately after three years much of my memory of this festival is a little jumbled. Friday I saw two artists I'd wanted to see when I arrived, Giraffage at the Thunder stage, and Purple Disco Machine at Woogie.
The crowds gathered for Giraffage at the Thunder stage on Friday. I'd really liked his mellow and dreamy sets, and this one was no exception.
Dirtwire, kind of a fusion of electronic and Appalachian music, warming up the Lightning stage on Saturday evening.
Enzo Muro spinning house beats late Saturday night at the Favela Bar.
The Thunder stage Sunday night while CloZee, somewhere behind those lights, was playing. She's very slow, mellow, and hypnotic, and I caught another one of her sets a month later at Electric Forest.
Zhu headlined the Lightning stage on Sunday night. I'm not sure why I didn't go to his set. I don't remember thinking about it; maybe it's because I'd already seen him twice the previous year, at Middlelands and Austin City Limits.
Some other sets I remember catching parts of throughout the weekend were Sofi Tukker, Tokimonsta, Anderson .Paak, and Fever Ray, all at the Lightning stage.
Last Reflections
It just so happens that this was my first festival outside the state of Texas. It showed in a few ways, like in the one bar at the Grand Artique stage where I could buy shots of whiskey, and the woman behind the bar who was openly smoking weed.
The weather, on the shore of a lake in central California at the end of May, was also pretty chilly at night. Seeing so many people wearing next to nothing while I was shivering in a sweater seemed like a real sign that I had lived too long in south Texas. It just so happens that Saturday morning I got an email telling me that I'd got accepted for that position in Germany I'd volunteered for, so pretty soon I'd be moving away from that heat.
Something else really memorable about LIB which I didn't really appreciate at the time was the amazing architecture. So many of the pavilions were some of the most fantastically designed temporary structures I've ever seen. Since I didn't appreciate it at the time, I didn't think to intentionally take a picture of any of them, so here's what I could zoom in on and cut out of the pictures I did take...
Beacon
Pagoda Bar at night
Learning Kitchen
Yoga Sol
And then of course there was the Zoa...
The Zoa was a huge inflated plastic ball meant to look like a giant single-celled organism. People were always spinning it every night and sometimes lying underneath it as it spun.
And finally, the ground we all walked on was quite rough and rocky. Because this huge festival took up so much space and I had to walk so much, my well-worn pair of Vans were rendered unserviceable by the end. I chucked them in a trash can outside LAX airport and wore Crocs the rest of the way home.
I got home by a completely different route than how I got there. No trains this time. They had chartered buses taking people from the festival to LAX airport, so I rode one of those and flew directly from there to San Antonio.
I definitely have to go back to LIB at least once more. I couldn't make it in 2019, being half a world away, and it was cancelled in both 2020 and 2021. It should certainly be back in 2022 and hopefully I'll be there.
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I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the most fun I had in my whole life, as the wristband claimed it would be, but it was up there. And yes, that's a picture of the Pagoda Bar on the chip.
Want to experience some of the music from that festival? I've tracked down a great deal of sets that have been uploaded to Soundcloud.
