A summer festival doesn't become a party until the first girl shows her breasts. At this year's annual Music Midtown festival in Atlanta, the acute eye got that several times over, and then some. That along with a Jakob Dylan sighting, one brief torrential downpour, obligatory testosterone and Budweiser-fueled fisticuffs and, oh yeah, more than 125 bands rocking out on six stages provided quite the hedonistic weekend.

Over the course of the three-day event, an estimated 180,000 patrons crammed their way around makeshift stages to witness the full musical spectrum, from the alternapop of Semisonic to the R&B pizzazz of Montell Jordan to the neo-swing of localites Kingsized to the classic rock of the dubious classic rock offshoot Creedence Clearwater Revisited.

"The crowd was awesome," said Jake Slichter, drummer for Semisonic, minutes after his band's Sunday afternoon set. "We didn't get hit with too many bottles and it didn't rain. What more can you ask for?" Semisonic battled a faulty sound system during their fifty-five-minute show but "that makes it more rock," Slichter said. "If everything works, then it's no good. That's the symphony, but this is rock & roll."

Paula Cole, dressed in an armpit-hair-unfriendly long sleeve shirt, provided her crisp, tempered pop on Friday night while Saturday night's headliners the Foo Fighters unleashed their typically-rollicking set of staples like "I'll Stick Around," "Everlong" and the ballad "Big Me," which frontman Dave Grohl dubbed a "stupid fucking love shit ass song."

Speaking of Daves and Grohl, Dave Reilly, of God Lives Underwater, has seemingly become an electronica incarnation of the late Kurt Cobain, with unwashed blonde hair, a left-handed bass-playing technique and patchwork clothing, which Saturday included a "I Love Jesus and Jesus Loves You" T-shirt. " As for the shirt's meaning, " I could make something up and say, 'Well, it doesn't look like Jesus loves anybody right now, does he?'" he said when queried about the slogan.

Fastball, still riding high from the success of "The Way," proved not every band is suited to playing big outdoor arenas in front of antsy crowds, and could only placate the masses with their country-tinged pop fare, save for their ornery bluesy cover of ZZ Top's "Thunderbird," which bassist Tony Scalzo prefaced by saying, "We're gonna do something from a Texas band and it's not Deep Blue Something."

On Sunday, the masses were expecting a full day of rain, but the skies were clear until the tail-end of Tonic's set, the last on the 99X stage. By then, virtually no grass remained on the floor of any of the five outdoor stages, and the grimy latrines had already taken in some forty tons of human waste (in case you were interested).

The only band that hadn't played -- aside from Dee Snider's S.M.F.'s, who canceled at the last minute after substituting for fellow Eighties hair band Cinderella -- were new wave's synth kings A Flock of Seagulls. The strong that survived piled into the sweltering hot Cotton Club adjacent to the 99X stage. "That's not even nearly the hottest club I've played," said Special J of the 2 Skinnee J's after the band's Friday night set in the club. "I don't remember [the name of the other one], 'cause I passed out."

Gone from the Seagulls, or AFOS as it says on their merchandise, was lead singer Michael Score's trademark skateboard-ramp-style 'do -- and, for the matter, the rest of the original band. After teasing the crowd with thirty minutes of post-"I Ran" material ("Don't worry, we're gonna get into some Eighties shit later," he said), the band acquiesced and gave those too young to know and those too old to remember songs like "Space Age Love Song," "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)" and, finally, "I Ran," which took on a life of it's own with the crowd throwing their fists in the air at Score's command.

After "I Ran," the quartet returned on stage for a two-song encore. During an extended version of "Telecommunication," a large contingent of Flock rockers joined the band on stage for dancing-and-diving. 'When I was relevant, we didn't have moshing,' he might have thought. Instead he said, "Jeeze, you guys must be fucking exhausted." You got that right.

BLAIR R. FISCHER