SPIN

An all-star lineup including Black Keys, Deadmau5, TV On the Radio, Patti Smith, and Cut Copy rocked the fifth annual Virgin Mobile FreeFest this Saturday at Merriweather Post Pavilion, a forested amphitheatre complex between D.C. and Baltimore. Excuse the packed crowd of some 50,000 for smiling from ear to ear, because of the price of their ticket was zero. Zilch. Nada.

The all-day event had plenty highlights over three stages. Here, we rate the nine best moments.

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-- By Mark Jenkins

"Jump!" commanded Big Sean, a Detroit rapper whose "big" tag doesn't refer to his physique. That fans just waved their hands in the air was only due to the fact that Sean was playing the West Stage, which faced a muddy, unsheltered field, so either people were too hot in the midday sun, or afraid of landing calf-deep in the straw-covered muck.

Of the bands that wanted to be U2, the Cure, the Smiths, New Order, or all of them at once, Bombay Bicycle Club came the closest. That wasn't because of the London quartet's songs, which weren't noticeably sharper than Cut Copy's or Two Door Cinema Club's. It all came down to Jack Steadman and Jamie MaColl's canoodling rhythm guitars. MacColl mostly scrubbed the strings, while Steadman picked bell-like patterns, and both played much faster than the tunes' generally mid-tempo pace, making the twin-guitar roar the music's real engine -- even on songs that employed a dance beat. The effect was spun-sugar sweet, but the band's strategy for creating a vast electric roar that avoided guitar-hero swagger could only be termed "punk."

Most death-country bands take a slo-mo approach, dragging their woe up the mountain as if it's all their mule team can handle. But Okkervil River whomped its material, playing hard, fast, and loose, even with the "Sloop John B" part of "John Allyn Smith Sails." Pummeling "The Valley," from this year's I Am Very Far, frontman Will Sheff spit lyrics worthy of black metal into a Satan's-hootenanny maelstrom: "A slit throat makes a note like a raw winter wind," he sang as Michael St. Clair alternated between yawping fiddle and blaring trombone. If Okkervil's tunes sometimes took too much of a beating, the set's sheer abandon was ample compensation.

There were few opportunities to scream "rock'n'roll" at V-Fest -- and most of them came when Grace Potter and the Nocturnals were on stage. Although Potter played keyboards a lot, she began her set with a flying-V guitar strapped round her neck, and followed the opener with a "love" song with this Nietzschean moral: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." If Potter and the Nocturnals (who sounded a bit like Heart) weren't particularly distinctive, they were certainly strong.

Since Australia's Cut Copy and New York's !!! began their sets only 15 minutes apart, fans couldn't see much of one without skipping the other. Both played '80s-style dance-rock with vigor and skill, but the Aussies were the more interesting -- if only because their performance was so much looser than their crafty but exacting recordings. Frontman Dan Whitford ricocheted around the stage as guitar feedback mussed the tidy, keyboard-based tunes, and much instrument switching led to unexpected timbres. Two additional percussionists gave "Corner of the Sky" a Steve Reich-like groove, and "Take Me Over" went exuberantly Caribbean with (synthesized) steel drums. In !!!'s defense, it was the only act that had to set up a full band on the smaller Dance Forest stage; the group could have swung harder with more room to move.

Not even all of TV on the Radio's admirers are convinced that the band has more than one song. But at V-Fest it didn't matter, because that churning tune was a monster. Multiple keyboards, squawking guitar, and intermittent trombone yielded a massive yet well-managed noise, with Tunde Adebimpe's vocals positioned just above the squall. Making out anything more than catch phrases was impossible, but here's what Adebimpe was probably singing in "Caffeinated Consciousness": "I'm in an army / A mega-shake / A force of nature." If he'd sung that during every number, he would never have been lying.

There wasn't much funk or soul at Virgin FreeFest, except in such denatured forms as house music and dance-punk, and what was probably the only reggae riddim was played by Patti Smith and her band. But the day began and (nearly) ended with the blues. The first band to play was Alberta Cross, a London-bred, New York-based quintet that melded country-blues and stoner-rock for a small crowd at the West Stage.

About nine hours later, the Black Keys drew a spillover crowd to the covered amphitheater, the largest of the fest's three venues. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney's wiry sound was both more traditional and more modern than Albert Cross', even when the duo added two more players for the second part of the set. Rather than the woozy style of '70s blues-rock, the Keys favor a clipped, urgent style that evokes both first-generation punk and the days when recorded songs rarely topped 2:30. The band couldn't play arena-rock if it tried, but it held the rapt attention of some 25,000 listeners. When Keys finished, Deadmau5 and Ghostland Observatory were just getting started, but if felt like the show was over.

Most concertgoers didn't think three heads were better than one, judging by the number of feet that pranced to the West Stage for Deadmau5's set, compared to those at the Dance Forest for Teddybears, the ursine-masked Swedish trio. The Toronto man-mouse DJ's popularity was visible all day: More T-shirts pledged allegiance to him than any other festival act, and several fans sported homemade mau5-heads. (In the spirit of interspecies cooperation, one woman had accessorized her head with a Hello Kitty backpack.) Deadmau5's fest-ending set was characterized by a nifty lightshow -- supplemented by pulsing LEDs on the nearby Ferris Wheel -- and the sort of fill-in-the-blanks loops and thumps that especially appeal to listeners in altered states. Teddybears, their masks outfitted with red eyes that gave them a fiendish twist, couldn't compete with Deadmau5's eye-popping visuals.

The only member of the original punk generation to play FreeFest, Patti Smith transformed what was essentially a greatest-hits set into the day's most dynamic performance. The 64-year-old singer's choice of material didn't surprise: It relied heavily on her 1975 debut, Horses -- plus "Because the Night" and "People Have the Power," of course. But at an event that bent American first principles into marketing slogans -- "let free sing" was the official motto -- Smith seemed as much a contemporary Thomas Paine as Horses' rockin' Rimbaud. She marked the eve of September 11 by demanding freedom for John Walker Lindh (jailed on trumped-up charges as an "American Taliban") and asked everyone to "remember who you were" before 9/11/2001.

She also offered elegies for late The Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll and Amy Winehouse on her way to an exuberant closing medley of "Land" and "Gloria" that included the "Jesus died for somebody's sins / But not my mine" crack she avoided for many years after her 1996 comeback. It's a tribute to Smith's fearlessness that she earned what were likely the fest's only boos.