An entire parking lot pulses, batting aloft, in SoCal fashion, abnormally gigantic balloons, shouting along for dear life with the words flashing on giant festi-vision screens: "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me … for me … for meeeEEE!" As the few thousand in the crowd warble the last of their falsettos, about 30 concertgoers dressed as animals, suns, Jedis and ex-presidents start going crazy onstage while Wayne Coyne and the rest of The Flaming Lips tear into the big guitar finale of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

The Oklahoma City band's Saturday set, the highlight of the two-day San Diego Street Scene festival, was further punctuated by mass sing-alongs (led by Coyne and a nun hand puppet) of "Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots, Pt. 1" and "She Don't Use Jelly"; Coyne's use of a chest-mounted strobe light and green-smoke-belching megaphone; an impromptu "Cow Jam" accompanied by Coyne on an electronic educational toy, a gift from a fan. The exclamation point: a cover of Sabbath's "War Pigs," set to flashing visuals of Rummy, Bush and the rest of the Baghdad boys — followed by a plea to "Stay classy, San Diego" and a general sense of fuzzy elation.

Sure, it was strange to attend a concert called Street Scene and find oneself in a stadium parking lot. But that's the price of expansion. After being held for 20 years in the downtown Gaslamp Quarter, this year's two-day megalithic music fest invaded the parking lot of Mission Valley's Qualcomm Stadium — home of the NFL's San Diego Chargers — after one year in the lot outside the Padres' new Petco Park. Incongruousness aside, the festival, scattered across three sponsored stages (facing different directions to minimize sound bleed) and interspersed with diversions like Inflatable Land, was set up so that ambitious attendees could catch at least part of some 30 acts or camp between the white lines in one of the accompanying drinking areas and settle in for the night.

Vancouver's Hot Hot Heat kicked off our Friday on the Captain Morgan stage. As red Metropolitan Transit System trolleys cut through the lot behind him and the hot dry breeze stirred up his signature spiral locks, white-jacket-clad singer Steve Bays led his band through hits from their latest album — "Goodnight, Goodnight," "Jingle Jangle" — as well as old fave "Oh, Goddamnit" while kids in fauxhawks held up cell phones and, seriously, crowdsurfed to the front of the stage. (Which makes now as good a time as any to make this point: California indie kids, along with being much more orange than their East Coast compatriots, skew much more oi! punk/West Coast Choppers.)

Day one's high point was either the again-reunited Social Distortion — Mike Ness, all tank-physique and slicked-back hair, led the group through classics like "Sick Boys" and "Prison Bound" — or Jack and Meg on Dolly's "Jolene" and their own haunting "Little Ghost."

Day two, however, was for the big fireworks. With Mixmaster Mike, Method Man and Snoop Dogg on one stage and Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, the Lips and The Pixies on another (and, yawn, 311 on yet another), choosing was more difficult.

With a hilly palm-tree vista as a backdrop, Britt Daniels led Spoon through an excellent early set peppered with "I Turn My Camera On" and "I Summon You" from the new Gimme Fiction and Kill The Moonlight's "The Way We Get By" as Wayne Coyne recruited in the crowd.

Ben Gibbard and Death Cab for Cutie battled through technical glitches and not quite having the songs from their due-this-month Plans ready to play. "I forgot to sing at the end because I thought the stage was on fire," admitted Gibbard as mysterious black smoke billowed from stage right, before launching into a set-ending jam in which instruments were smashed and cymbal stands were slammed down on stage.

Following The Flaming Lips' showstopping performance, Snoop Dogg and The Pixies clinched the proceedings, the former getting funky to "Gin and Juice" and "187," and the latter's Frank Black and Kim Deal delivering renditions of "Number 13," "Debaser" and "Wave of Mutilation" (the fast version) that put those performed at last year's Tweeter Center dates to shame.

Street Scene July 29-30, Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego, Calif.