Virginal, Mobile, Festive: Saturday

Festival spokeslady Audrey Fix Schaefer says it'll be a few days before festival organizers have solid attendance tallies, but she notes that walk-up sales were strong both Saturday and Sunday, and that Friday was the strongest sales day since the first day tickets went on sale in the spring, perhaps benefiting from an inviting weekend weather forecast.

Of course, it's all about the music, and the festival was mostly a triumph in terms of both the eclectic lineup and the merits of their performances. In a time when high fuel prices and other economic factors are making it harder on both sides for musicians and audiences to connect with one another, V-Fest gave fans about 48 hours of music from which to piece together a 20-hour, two-day live playlist. While some acts naturally warm to the festival setting (clumps of sunburned people who, unless you're Kanye West or Dave Grohl, most likely haven't come expressly to see you) more than others, the overwhelming feeling was that most acts put on a show that fairly represents what you'd get if you saw them as a headliner. Even with the basic tickets priced at $97.50 for a single day (the same amount, less fees, you'd have paid if sprung for the top ticket for 85 minutes of Coldplay last weekend) or $175 for both, the value-for-money equation seemed pretty fan-friendly.

SATURDAY

In the press parking lot, I pound a quart bottle of Gatorade before going to check in. A few cars down from mine, another guy is pounding a Heineken. Clearly, I am an amateur among professionals.

Cat Power has the thankless task of opening the festival with a 12 p.m. go-time on the North Stage. Usually when playing a big festival, you rock your hits. Another way you can go is to rock somebody else's hits. Her most recent album, Jukebox, is her second collection of covers. Here's John Fogerty's timeless antiwar anthem (or at least, anti-hypocrisy anthem) "Fortunate Son", at the same tempo she's been singing everything else. Yeah, I always thought this was a good song, but that it could stand to be a little less angry. At the end the tune seems to morph into "Sympathy for the Devil", with Cat doing the "woo-woos." And here's James Brown's "Lost Someone". (When Sharon Jones covers Mr. Dynamite on the same stage about four hours later, it's gonna sound a whole lot more convincing.) The smoky, midtempo stuff the once and future Ms. Chan Marsall is doing isn't really the kind of thing you crave while the sun is beating down on your head (Note: buy hat later), but she's a confident performer, and she gets it over.

She sings her last song in Italian, I think, showing off a great accent despite glancing regularly at a lyric sheet. There's a guy in the crowd wearing a Velvet Revolver T-shirt. Does he intend to shove his way to the front during Stone Temple Pilots' set as a form of protest?

At 1300 hours, I consume the day's first pretzel ($4; a Lincoln with tip). Ballparkily chewy and salty; superb. I stop in at the El Jefe Design booth to shake hands with ace poster designer Jeffrey Everett, whom I've written about but never actually met in person.

1315 hrs. -- Straw hat procured ($21). You might think that class isn't something you can buy, but look at what's riding on my head. You know what would go great with this hat? A beer. Actually, it was probably the pretzel that did it, and given the nice weather, the story of my hydration status will happily be a lot less suspenseful than it was last year, but whatever. Hoegaarten, 24 oz. ($9; a Hamilton with tip.)

They're showing these cool short films on the video screens of both stages between acts. Must investigate further.

Gogol Bordello take the South Stage, their frontman sporting what is hands down the best mustache in rock 'n' roll.

For 15 minutes, this is my new favorite band. This guy does the sort of tapping with an acoustic guitar that Van Halen is famous for doing with his electric. There's a graybeard fiddle player and a guy playing the accordion. The crowd loves it. They're like the Pogues, if the Pogues were from the Ukraine instead of Ireland. An excellent festival act.

T-shirts: The official festival merch shirts are by Edun, the company Bono's wife, Ali Hewson, started with the goal of promoting "trade, not aid" with third-world nations. Every trash can has a recycling bin next to it, and a sign claiming that 40 tons of waste was spared from landfills after last year's festival through recycling and composting. The bins are labeled "Landfill" and "Recycling," a nice reminder of where's it's all going.

Later, in the press room, a young staffer asks who is going to photograph Citizen Cope, since she needs to escort them. No one stands up. She asks again. Again, no one stands up.

Once again, the food and beverage menu is nearly as varied as the musical lineup. Crabcakes. Gyros. Pitas. Chicken Tenders. Quesadillas. Veggie Pitas. Also, portabello pitas. Lemonade, Limeade, or Oranageaid, available in regular or diet editions. Diet! Purely for the sake of thorough journalism, I order a diet limeade. The guy cuts two whole limes and two whole lemons in half, and juices each one, then shovels some ice in a plastic cup and asks me if I want Equal or Splenda. I know: It's about as rock 'n' roll as a hybrid minivan. But it tastes just like real Limeade! $6, and I realize walking away that I've forgotten to tip the guy, when he's done more work than the pretzel guy or the beer guy, both of whom I tipped.

On the North Stage, Once Oscar-winners The Swell Season are onstage five minutes before their start time, tuning up. Guitar balladeer Glen Hansard starts the show by himself. "Thanks for sticking around on such a hot day," he says. Dude, you weren't here last year. Plus, you're from Ireland. You just don't know. "The only thing I know about Baltimore is from The Wire," he says.

His partner in art and now in life, 20-year-old pianist and singer Marketa Irglova, joins the 38-year-old Hansard onstage, and they begin to perform "Lies". Once was shot something like three years ago, and its theatrical run was last summer, so these six or seven songs from the movie ought to be getting tired by now, but they're not. "Hey you," says Hansard in the middle of the tune. "You." He's talking to the cameraman creeping up behind Irglova to get a closeup shot of him. "There's only two of us onstage. Can you fuck off a little bit?" Cut to a long, long shot of the band shot from the midfield tower. Cut to the screens displaying text messages sent from the crowd. Hansard turns to speak to one of the stagehands, and it looks like he's using sign language. "It's really weird up here," he says.

He introduces "Falling Slowly," the song that snagged him and Irglova an Oscar this year, as the child that they reared and then said "go off and make your parents some money." He invites the crowd to sing the chorus with them, which fails to destroy the tune. Later, he tears up a cover of Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" and works in bit of "Johnny B. Goode", complete with an all-too-brief duck-walk. "We're sharing a dressing room with Chuck Berry today. It's so fucking surreal." After a rave-up of Michelle Shocked's "Fogtown", Hansard leaps from the stage into the little barrier-protected moat between the field and the stage to perform an encore number. Whomever's running the sound desk starts playing recorded music through the P.A., apparently unaware that Hansard has eight minutes left in his set time -- and is, you know, still performing.

Supper --- Chicken Souvlaki ($8) and Raspberry Iced Tea ($5, refills $1). Tastes like chicken. Good chicken. With Tsaziki sauce.

The Dap-Kings sound great even when they're just warming up. They wear slick suits and hats -- good thing there's a breeze today! The Dee-Kays start vamping it up, and emcee/guitarist Binky Griptite starts his standard introductory banter: "Tonight we're gonna present to you Miss Sharon Jones," apparently on autopilot since it's 3:25 in the afternoon. Sure, they're used to playing clubs, but they probably do a lot of daytime European festivals, too.

Binky introduces her as "110 lbs. of soul," in which case everybody else's soul-load must top out at 109. Her funky, brassy eight-song set includes not one but two James Brown covers, "There Was a Time" (featuring her demonstrations, again a la Brown, of the Camel Walk, the Boogaloo, and the Funky Chicken) and then a simmering "It's a Man's Man's Man's Man's World". Best performer of the day so far, hands down.

The retro vibe continues, in the best possible way, when The Silver Beats take the South Stage. They had been billed as Chuck Berry's band, but here they are, with no cranky 81-year-old rock legend in sight. The fidelity with which they recreate the Fab Four's sound, especially the interplay of John and Paul's voices isn't just remarkable -- it's downright eerie. The fact that the four of them are visibly Japanese, and sporting '60s suits and moptops, certainly adds to the charm of the thing, but their appeal goes way behind novelty: They're giving energetic, faithful performances of the best rock songs ever written, from every Beatles era, including the one after the Beatles stopped playing concerts themselves: "Daytripper", "Come Together", "Glass Onion", "Get Back". "Please enjoy the Japanese Beatles!" suggests the singer, politely and unnecessarily. After them, Chuck Berry's workmanlike set can't not feel a little anti-climactic, but give the guy a break. Adjusted for age (he's two decades older than Iggy Pop), he's killing it. And when he does "Carol", the camera catches the devilish gleam in his eye as he recites over the bridge: "She's in the mood / No need to break it / I got a chance / I'm gonna take it." Creepy? Puh-shaw! He plays "Sweet Little Sixteen", too.

Sensing I've more or less gotten the gist of Chuck Berry circa 2008, I start to wander towards the North Stage. The aural landscape sounds like a car radio dial sliding gradually through a sea of static from Berry's "Teenage Wedding" to Wilco's "Impossible Germany". God, I wish that radio station actually existed.

Jeff Tweedy has pulled out his lime-green pinstriped sport jacket for the occasion. I have some hopes that because this is festival gig, he'll take the opportunity to lighten up a bit and perform some of Wilco's more accessible (i.e, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and earlier) material. But here comes an interminable version of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", and now here's that Sky Blue Sky tune about how doing the laundry makes him miss his wife ("Hate It Here"). Bruce Springsteen went through the same midlife crisis that Tweedy now seems to be experiencing when he was getting into his 40s. It made for the least interesting music of his career, but Bruce lived to rock another day, and Tweedy will, too. When he gets around to "Monday" and "Outtamind (Outtasite)", a pair of rockers from 1996's Being There that seem tailor-made for outdoor summer rockitude, they sound perfunctory. But then: "Hoodoo Voodoo". I'd completely forgotten this song existed, even though I spin both volumes of Mermaid Ave. -- the pair of Wilco-and-Billy Bragg-write-melodies-for unused-Woody Guthrie lyrics discs from 1998 and 2000 -- as often as any Wilco album. Thanks, Jeff.

I'd never seen the Foo Fighters before, but they more than deliver the goods. Dave Grohl is tanned, fit, and completely at home sprinting across the wings of the embiggened-this-year South Stage. I wonder if there's some trick singers know for making that throat-shredding sound without actually shredding your throat. If not, Grohl's career -- already surprising in its longevity -- can't possibly last much longer. After the high-voltage opening hit parade of "The Pretender" and "Times Like These", the energy dips a bit with an endless "Stacked Actors". The acoustic set is happening when I wander over to the dance tent to check out a bit of Underworld. (It ain't you, fellas. It's me.)

I stay well clear of Jack Johnson on the North Stage -- I have to drive home, after all. My theory is that the reason Johnson is (as DCist Kyle pointed out to me) closing down all the major festivals this summer is that he's a natural form of crowd control, lulling everyone around him into a state of supplication.

FAVORITES: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, The Silver Beats

HAPPY SURPRISE: Foo Fighters

OMISSIONS, REGRETTABLE: Lupe Fiasco, Rodrigo y Gabriela

OMISSIONS, INTENTIONAL: The Offspring, Citizen Cope, Jack Johnson

BEST MUSTACHE: Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello

CRANKY AS EXPECTED: Jeff Tweedy, Wilco

CRANKY AS UNEXPECTED: Glen Hansard, The Swell Season

ALBUM I LISTEN TO ON THE WAY HOME: Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home.

Ace photographer DCist Kyle weighs in - Saturday:

Without a doubt, the best set I saw over the weekend was Underworld's headlining performance in the Dance Tent on Saturday night. After a day of ho-hum performances, particularly on the North Stage, watching Karl Hyde, Rick Smith and Darren Price put everything in its right place with some banging tunes was a welcome change of pace. "Cowgirl" came early in the set and fans took the "I'm invisible" chorus literally and started dancing like no one was watching. Crowd favorites like "Pearl's Girl", "Jauntia/Kiteless" and "Push Upstairs" soon followed, culminating in a rousing "Born Slippy" that had people running to the dance tent from all over the racetrack. Hyde was directing the crowd and dancing like a madman for the entire set. It was impossible to watch him and not get caught up in the energy in the tent. That was my first proper Underworld gig, and not only was it one of the best set I've seen in three years at the Virgin Festival, that was one of the best gigs I've ever seen, period.

Saturday's other standout sets included Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, which was the only thing I saw on the North Stage that I liked that day. Jones, a former prison guard at Riker's Island, ran her band through a set of revivalist soul music that made the rest of the day's acts seem downright sleep-inducing by comparison. Unfortunately, it seemed like most of the crowd was over at the South Stage for Lupe Fiasco and Bloc Party. Lupe didn't do much for me and Bloc Party were a bit off. They didn't have their usual pacing and energy. Cat Power tried hard but her performance never grabbed me, while British sensation Duffy seemed to be all flash and no substance.

Gogol Bordello were the other noteworthy act for me that day. Their gypsy-punk becomes a bit of a one-trick pony after a while, but a festival gig is the perfect setting for them. Soulwax also gave a great mid-day performance in the dance tent.