If you weren't able to make the trip to Lollapalooza this past weekend an excellent alternate music festival was taking place just a few short hours away at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Track- the Virgin Music Festival. I arrived on Saturday afternoon in time to catch the last couple of Amy WInehouse tracks. She sounded good, but looked like she wanted to be elsewhere, I just wanted to buy her a crab cake sandwich- she looked like she could use one.

Afterwards made it over to catch Peter, Bjorn and John who's 4 pm time slot seemed to be a perfect fit for them. Songs like "Amsterdam" and "Paris 2004" sounded really strong to me and their set seemed a lot more energetic than their Bowery show a few months ago. Next up was James Murphy and his LCD Soundsystem crew which was strange to see in broad daylight. They delivered pretty much the same set they've been playing all year, but got the crowd of hipsters, frat boys and random locals who just wanted to "check out the scene" all jumping around in a frenzy.

I had to boogie in time to get over to the North Stage in order to catch the Beastie Boys dressed up in suits who proclaimed "It's hot as a motherfucker out here today!" Agreed. I had checked out weather.com several hours before I boarded the bus, but since it was already technically Saturday the site told me that Baltimore was 74 degrees. Excellent. Unfortunately that was what the weather was like in Baltimore at 1 a.m. not the next day which felt like it was closer to 100 degrees. The Beasties were a definite highlight of the weekend. Their set flowed smoothly from old school hip-hop to the Latin-flavored instrumentals to the inevitable "Sabotage" which made the packed crowd go apeshit. I noticed that they changed a lyric in "Sure Shot" from "well you say I'm twenty-something and I should be slacking" to "thirty-something" which ends up being funny considering these boys are now pushing forty.

Anyway Mike D in particular sounded very excited to be seeing the Police who were due up next. I thought they sounded great, some people were more interested in checking out Modest Mouse, but I had to witness this reunion for myself. They basically played a best-of set which was smart and appreciated by the crowd, too bad they changed up the arrangements on a few of the tunes as to rest Sting's voice from all the falsetto that he sings. He could still hit the notes when he wanted to, he just wasn't hitting them for the duration of the songs. The encore of "So Lonely" and "Every Breath You Take" was literally breathtaking. It seemed like the night was over but they came out once again to play "Next to You." An excellent Day One.

DJ Del will be DJ'ing at Nurse Bettie (106 Norfolk St, NYC) on August 8th.