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I show up in time for about half of Magic People's set, which is nice but means that things are running really late. They're your typical bass/keys/keys/flute/drums quintet, with the drummer and one of the keyboard players doing most of the vocals. The keyboard player that does vocals is wearing some sort of mic'ed gas mask sort of thing, so his voice is pretty muffled and completely unintelligible. In fact, my main problem with this band is that their overall sound is kind of a muddy mess, but I can't really tell how much of that is them and how much is O'Brien's. (Purp is good, but there's only so much you can do with this system.) The flute is an interesting touch, but I can only hear it when not much else is going on. (One of the keyboards uses a flute-like patch from time to time, but those sounds don't sync with what I can see the flautist doing.) More prominent is the theremin, which is used to good rhythmic effect on one song. There's not much in the way of tune here—vocals are mostly shouted—but there could be some hiding in the mud, and I'll want to check them out again some time.
After skipping out on the next band to get hot dogs, we come back to find that Major Stars have about 15 minutes to play before curfew. So their set is short and rushed, which doesn't really fit well with their long, meandering psych-noise excursions. (Nor does it help when Wayne has to change a string after the first song.) Still, they manage to squeeze in three songs by ignoring the curfew and the increasingly emphatic finger-across-neck gestures from the staff and the booker. The singer's wailing gets largely lost here, but I'm standing right in front of Kate's amp, so I get an extra-large helping of rhythm feedback. (As well as a couple of body slams when Kate spills out into the audience.) They pack a whole lot of punch into a short set.
