Yeah, it was that good

The Sunset Junction street fair in Silver Lake is looming this weekend, with its lineup of local and national bands one of its big attractions, but lots of L.A. music fans might still be nursing a hangover from the F-Yeah Fest, which brought some 70 bands to Echo Park last weekend.

In its third annual outing, the event grew from two days to three, and its mix of high-profile acts with lesser-known bands, and its spirit of community between artists, fans and urban environment made it something like an underground, miniature version of Coachella.

In addition to the Echo, a prototype no-frills rock club, the festival employed the performance space at the nearby Jensen Recreation Center, requiring a two-block stroll that encouraged interaction with hot dog vendors, a taco truck and the Sea Level record store.

With its white surfaces, exposed girders and a brick-walled lounge area with white couches, the Jensen space looked more like a chic gallery than a rock room. But by the end of Sunday it smelled like spilled beer, having hosted some of the more raw and thrashy bands of the weekend.

The low stage made it hard to see the players, but it fostered intimacy, as fans slammed heads and bodies in alarming proximity to the musicians. Brandon Welchez, the singer of San Diego punk-cum-free-jazz band the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower, made the most of it, going face to face with the audience and getting a lift for a bit of crowd surfing.

The eruption of mosh pits was one thing that distinguished F-Yeah from the similarly configured festivals staged at the Echo by Arthur magazine. It wasn’t surprising considering that this year’s curator was Keith Morris, an eminent figure in L.A. punk circles for decades. His band the Circle Jerks closed the fest’s first night on the Echo stage, following the rising L.A. punk band the Bronx.

The Thermals, from Portland, Ore., represented a less hard-core form of punk, with engagingly wide-eyed singer-guitarist Hutch Harris yelping his densely verbal songs with a sort of David Byrne inflection.

But Morris wasn’t a one-note curator. His program was also heavy on the psychedelic-tinged pop-rock that’s such a prominent strain in L.A. these days, with Silversun Pickups and Foreign Born representing the folk-rock side and the South Bay’s Dios Malos executing absorbing pieces in a Beatles mode.

There also were solo singer-songwriters and a hip-hop duo, and one Echo Park band showed up in two guises on consecutive nights: Future Pigeon laying down its atmospheric dub reggae on Friday and Wiskey Biscuit playing its rootsy, Stones-tinted rock on Saturday.

The real value of an event such as this is not just its bargain nature (tickets were $20 a day) but also its tendency to expose patrons to acts they wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

If fans who went to see such draws as Giant Drag and the Bronx did any circulating, they might have run across something like the San Diego band Sleeping People, whose Amber Coffman looks like a kid sister in a Disney Channel sitcom and plays supercharged prog-rock guitar licks that would make Geddy Lee cry.