Festival Review: Lightning In A Bottle 2008 - Santa Barbara, CA 2008

“If Coachella and Burning Man had a kid, that kid would be Lightning in a Bottle.” - Jesse Flemming

For those who have been to the first two festivals mentioned above, Lightning in a Bottle co-founder Jesse Flemming’s description of his four day party in the Santa Barbara-adjacent woods makes perfect sense.

However, should you have no reference point for either, please allow me to elaborate.

If a tatted-up, crooked visor, camo-cargo shorts and wife-beater wearing LA-club kid got dragged from LAX to an afterparty somewhere in Echo Park and managed to seduce a girl wearing a billowy, seven-layer, trinket-laden homemade dress and an aqua-colored bandanna covering her is-it-braids-or-dreads? hairdo…

Their child would grow up with a penchant for sustainable living and skull-shattering, filthy-ass, electro-crunk basslines. Their child would eat a bag of mushrooms, frolic in the woods for a while with a hula-hoop and a pair of stilts, and then come back and set the CDJ’s on fire. Their child would be Lightning in a Bottle.

Get it now?

A festival in full bloom | Photo: Chris Nelson

Anyone who has stumbled into The Do Lab area at Coachella knows that these people know how to throw a party. Even within the precise, manicured, and (compared to LIB) somewhat sterile setting of Coachella, The Do Lab injects the air with their free-spirited beat-mongering.

Give them a few acres of campground and three days to put on their own event, though, and you get a full taste of Jesse and Josh Flemming’s party-throwing edict, which was born nine years ago as an illegal mountain rave/birthday party with all of 100 people in attendance.

“When we first started throwing this party, we had four sets of Christmas lights and a few China balls,” said Jesse Flemming during an interview on site at this year’s festival.

“It’s taken on a wild growth of its own,” he said, remarking that it now shatters any expectations or notions of what he and his brother thought it might become. Attendance doubled from last year alone, crossing the 6,000 mark this time around.

Safety first | A concert goer lets it all hang out | Photo: Chris Nelson

Both Flemming and Do Lab Music Director Arin Ingraham, who was also present for the interview, are quick to clarify that LIB is an “arts and music” festival, in contrast to Coachella, which bills itself as a “music and arts” fest.

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