The following is a report that was written after San Francisco's Outside Lands Festival, but was not published until now due to time constraints.

SAN FRANCISCO - The first major rock music festival to grace San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in nearly four decades was a huge success last month (August 22-24), drawing a crowd that organizers estimated at over 150,000 people.

Outside Lands celebrated its first year as the Bay Area's newest major rock festival with three days of music from artists and bands like Radiohead, Jack Johnson, Tom Petty, Beck, Andrew Bird, Widespread Panic, Wilco, Broken Social Scene, Rouge Wave, Manu Chao, Ben Harper, Primus and Rodrigo y Gabriela, among dozens of others.

Unlike most other summer rock festivals, there were no sun burns or cases of heat exhaustion at Outside Lands. San Francisco's famously reliable fog, that the city is known world-wide for, drenched Golden Gate Park's Polo Fields for most of the three-day music festival - probably not what the over-advertised Heineken vendors wanted, but what did they expect in August on the west side of San Francisco?

Believe it or not, Anchorage, Alaska has higher summertime temperatures, on average, than San Francisco, California (and it's not because of the hot air blowing from Sarah Palin's mouth).

But on the last day of the festival, Sunday August 24, the sun came out and blue skies replaced low-lying clouds and mist. Having been to plenty of outdoor concerts and festivals in the hot sun, it's easy to welcome and appreciate the cooling waves of continuous fog.

MP3s from Outside Lands lineup artists:

"KC Accidental" - Broken Social Scene
"Herectics" - Andrew Bird
"Sightlines" - Rogue Wave (check out the band's other music, they're awesome.)

When Radiohead took the stage late Friday evening, the lights surrounding the entire venue beamed up through the fog like lasers - a common site in northern California. Just ask anyone who has shone a flashlight or drove with their headlights on through the thick summer fog - you can literally cast a beam of light for as far as the eye can see.

Perhaps this is how Stars Wars director George Lucas, a native of northern California, came up with the idea for the famous laser weapons featured in the classic trilogy.

Anyways, the sets for good indie bands and artists - like Andrew Bird, Broken Social Scene, M. Ward, Rogue Wave - were too short, and the time delay between various acts were too short for such a huge place - literally four football fields from end to end. Next time they should also do something about the dust - that really surprised me since most of the park is lush and green (thanks to the fog and irrigation); dust is just not something you see in San Francisco.