Outside Lands generally does quite well with the music lineup. However, I have always thought that the real gold at the festival has been the bookings for the Barbary. This year, we finally found time in their busy schedule to talk to some of the people behind those amazing bookings: Rae Livingston of Another Planet and David Owen of SF Sketchfest. We got to spend a little time with them to discuss the history of the stage, the booking process and their careers, and for a bit, we just got to nerd out about comedy.
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SPINNING PLATTERS: So you’ve got Another Planet and SF Sketchfest, both doing that booking. How does that collaboration work?
RAE LIVINGSTON: Well, it happens organically. There’s at least three shows that SF Sketchfest takes to their dome, as we call it. You know, it’s their creative space to come up with all the weird shit they wanna do.
For example, this year we’re doing Red Room Orchestra, playing the music of Wes Anderson, and that’s completely—as far as I can tell—from the mind of David Owen. He just goes to town with that. And then, beyond that, we work together.
We have our own agendas; there’s a lot of us involved. Obviously, there’s all three founders of SF Sketchfest, myself, and then there’s also a handful of people from Superfly who weigh in with opinions. I think we all probably start out the booking process with our specific agendas that we’re pushing.
It kind of always starts with a headliner conversation or if there’s specific variety shows that we know we want to do. We kind of just throw spaghetti at the wall, then start to carve out what we actually want to see happen.
This year, we got it together a little late. We were chasing a few things that were really going to dictate the rest of the schedule, some of which happened, some of which didn’t. So you have to wait until certain things come to fruition and then pair it accordingly—and make sure it’s all well-rounded.
SPINNING PLATTERS: So, Michelle Wolf is your headliner this year—
RL: One of our headliners. We have three ladies at the top this year.
SP: Yes, really amazing to have three women at the top this year. Michelle Wolf, when did you reach out to her, was it before the press dinner or after?
RL: We reached out to her before the White House Correspondents’ [Association] dinner. I specifically remember us talking about her. Then it was announced she was doing that, and we got extra excited.
Also there’s an element of us competing with ourselves from past years—what David, Janet, and Cole have done at SF Sketchfest that year, and then we also have the element of Clusterfest, which we all work on as a team. So we try to make sure there’s not too much overlap between those. So, Michelle, in particular, hadn’t done Outside Lands, wasn’t doing SF Sketchfest this year, and for those reasons was a top billing. In addition to being great.
DAVE OWEN: Yeah it really comes down to: what are we fans of? Who are we excited about? That’s the nice thing about working with Rae—and Emily, Mo and Chris at Superfly—we all have similar tastes. We like a lot of the same stuff.
So it’s actually really easy for this team to put together a lineup, because we all agree on most everything, in terms of what we like and what we think people at the festival will want to come to the tent and see.
With Michelle Wolf—we’re all big fans of her and have been for several years now—then when something like the White House Correspondents’ (Association) dinner falls in your lap, like wow. That’s something to be excited about.
I also want to echo how excited we are at SF Sketchfest to have our headliners, Chelsea Peretti, Michelle Wolf, and Phoebe Robinson, all of whom are major headliners now and three of the best comedians working.
RL: That happen to be ladies.
DO: Yeah, exactly.
SP: This is also the first Outside Lands where the music stage has had female acts in the top line. How do the music bookings correlate to the comedy bookings? Do you factor that in at all, or is it something that’s separate?
RL: I think we work in a Barbary bubble of what we’re excited about and what we’ve been fans of. We’re not mirroring, necessarily, what’s happening in music.
I think it’s particularly cool that there’s strong ladies in music. I think it happened for us outside of that, but we’re also doing some very exciting things with lady chefs this year, so it’s a strong year for women, overall.
SP: Michelle Wolf is kind of a controversial figure at this point, are you worried about getting any pushback for that at all?
<long pause>
RL: No.
DO: No.
SP: It is San Francisco after all.
DO: I don’t think she’s controversial at all. I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of controversy in Golden Gate Park.
RL: It’s pretty on-brand.
SP: Yeah, fair enough. That was a question that I was like, “no that’s a bad question,” as it was coming out of my mouth. So I want to talk about the Red Room Orchestra. I got to see that earlier this year. David, I ran into you at that. Who’s the mover and shaker for getting that lineup together?
DO: Yeah, so it’s become a collaboration between me and the band leader, Marc Capelle. Almost exactly a year ago, he did “The Music of Twin Peaks” at the Chapel, just as a thing to do. He threw it together with his friends, and it was around the launch of the new Twin Peaks season.
So I went to this show and was like, wow, I wanna do this again, at SF Sketchfest, but I want to have the cast of Twin Peaks there. And then, that’s something that happened.
And on the same night, I said what if we did this with other soundtracks? And I called Marc the next day, and said what if we did Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums? So over the course of several months, we built that together.
We figured out who was gonna be in the band, who were gonna be the special guests when we did these shows at SF Sketchfest. And now we’re figuring out: Where else can we take this concept? We’re developing new soundtracks for the band to do. We have a few things we’re going to be announcing soon for the fall and next winter. It just seemed like a good fit for the Barbary.
Wes Anderson is kind of known for his comedies, and also because it’s a music festival, I think it’s going to go over really well with the music crowd. I really like how we’ve been putting more music into the Barbary.
The last couple years we had Jeff Goldblum’s band, we had Henry Rollins doing spoken word, Fred Armisen performed with Bob Mould, so it’s cool to be able to have a little more crossover between what’s happening on the music stage and what’s happening in the comedy tent—and not have it be two completely different things.
That for me is exciting, to not just be a bunch of stand-up but to have music and comedy and podcasts and political things. The diversity of it is exciting for us.
SP: So how’d you manage to snag James Williamson (of the Stooges) this year?
DO: I gotta give credit to Marc Capelle and Allyson Baker, who’s in the band. They have some sort of connection to him, were able to get to him directly. They told him about the idea, and he loved the idea of the concept of the show, but he also loved the idea of doing it in the comedy tent.
He and Marc were joking about how we’re at this point in our careers where we’re in the clown tent. They both had a big laugh about that.
It was almost like he was more excited about doing it in the Barbary, in the comedy tent, than to be performing on a bigger stage. So yeah, he liked the idea, he’s going to join us and jam with us a bit. We’re pretty excited about that.
SP: I mean, any opportunity to hear anything by the Stooges live makes me very happy in general.
DO: Yeah it’s gonna be pretty cool.
SP: Let’s talk the evolution of this stage. The first year, it was more circusy, kind of a variety show kind of thing. It felt like you were slowly adding comedy, and traditional stand-up. Why the move away from the variety show format?
RL: I’ve only been involved for four years, maybe? I think probably, once SF Sketchfest got involved, it naturally got more, what you might consider traditionally comedy-based. We have this running doc of who’s been in the tent over those years.
Looking back at who was in the Barbary in 2011, is Ali Wong. Which, that’s incredible. I was looking at this the other day. Now I see Melissa Villaseñor, which is also incredible. It’s amazing to see, both how far the Barbary has come, to see what tastemakers were booking back then, and also to see how far comedians have come in their careers too.
But you’re right in that it kind of started as more of a vaudeville, truly a circus tent. The name comes from the Barbary Coast and that tradition. I think, as it grew, our partners at Superfly were getting more into infusing comedy into their festivals, and it probably, to their credit, came from them.
And then they were smart enough to engage with SF Sketchfest, who really started to put their stamp on it. And then they let me sneak in there eventually.
SP: I know a lot about David’s background. Rae, what’s your background, in comedy?
RL: Well, I’ve been working at Another Planet—I think this is my tenth or eleventh year—and I started in the production department, and I’m still in the production department. So four or five years ago, around the time I snuck into the Barbary tent—I’d always been a comedy fan and really wanted to see Another Planet doing more comedy. It wasn’t something we were actively booking, so I kind of just raised my hand and said, “Hey man, can I book this for you?“
We’re a really small company, and my bosses were kind enough to let me do it. So, I started by listening in on the Barbary calls, adding my opinions and things I wanted to see. I started booking my own hard ticket shows, then slowly, kind-of really, started booking comedy for Another Planet, got really deep in the Barbary tent, and deep in Clusterfest. We did a comedy tent at Treasure Island. It just kind of happened naturally over the last four-five years.
SP: I have the T-shirt from that year at Treasure Island, and I missed Michelle Wolf on that stage. She’s at the very bottom line.
RL: Yeah! Booking that show was a major accomplishment for me, so I have that poster hanging above my desk. Michelle Wolf is the closest name to me, and it is so incredible to see how far she’s come. We’re really excited to have her. And this time, it’s particularly electric.
