The Hangout organizers presumably intend the word “Hangout” to be read with leisurely fellowship in mind, and certainly that matches the vibe here in Gulf Shores. But one passable alternate reading is “hang out” as in “Letting it all hang out,” as in my bare gut protruding across my belt line, as in eating something called the Damn It To Hell Sandwich that will undoubtedly contribute to that gut’s expansion, as in then dipping my legs into a swimming pool while sipping beer and watching live music. As in wringing the most possible sensory pleasure from 10-12 hours at the beach.

Saturday’s early hours were best suited for those kinds of exploits. You know this is true when even a brass band that covers Daft Punk (called Brassft Punk, obviously) isn’t intriguing enough to justify scolding those who chilled in hammocks or rode the giant inflatable water slide instead. One early act did stand out, though: an ’80s throwback called Wild Cub whose frontman looked like a younger version of John C. McGinley from . Though they’re jumping on this train a little late, they’re riding it deftly, channeling the “Burning Down The House”/”Our House” spirit with traces of Hot Chip’s graceful lightweight New Wave and Abe Vigoda’s razor-sharp tropical post-punk.

The first true gobsmack of the day came courtesy of Public Enemy, though. MTV’s Sway got the crowd hyped for “the most important group of my lifetime” (pffft, but did they give him his first TV?) who proceeded to make the Boom Boom Tent go boom. Their dancers were dressed in army fatigues, and true to form, the set really was like a coup, an invading force causing absolute chaos. Chuck D’s thunderous calls to arms barely require a microphone. A live band/DJ combo powerfully recreated the Bomb Squad’s air raid siren sonics; when the bassist slipped in the “Rapper’s Delight” bassline during the jam session, it magnified how revolutionary those concrete-blasting Bomb Squad beats were at the time. Flavor Flav, perhaps the only P.E. member familiar to the nearby white guy in a Coldplay tour T-shirt and cowboy hat, fulfilled his hype man duties expertly.

After that, Shovels And Rope’s post-Stripes roots duo shtick couldn’t help but feel Dust Bowl dry, even while submerged in a pool. Dirty Projectors, like their fellow emerging indie legacy acts Grizzly Bear and the Shins the day before, surprised me with how many of their songs feel like staples already. Yet other than the unfickwitable “Stillness Is The Move,” these knotty compositions lacked oomph Saturday; Dave Longstreth’s awkward banter (“I feel like you need to get a pretty fierce SPF going out here”) elicited a stronger emotional response in me than most of the music. Give me a lackadaisical Projectors performance over a high-energy Wolfgang Gartner EDM skree, though. The California DJ/producer is very good at what he does — his recordings bang, and his set kept up a frenetic pulse — but to an electro house noob like me, nothing about the show set him apart from a legion of beat-droppers.

At the Chevrolet Stage, the Roots put on a show for your mom and your college radio buddy alike, a choreographed-stepping, “Sweet Child O’ Mine”-covering, grown-and-sexy tour de force. They’ve always been energetic performers, but it seems they’ve learned a thing or two about show business during their tenure with Jimmy Fallon. Maybe they could teach Holy Ghost! how to work a crowd sometime.

For some reason the crowd was chanting “USA!” in the Boom Boom Tent when they should have been chanting “TDE!” Kendrick Lamar’s 20-minute delay was quite hypocritically killing my vibe, but all was forgiven within seconds of “West Side, Right On Time,” and my vibe was fully resuscitated by the time those “Hold Up” horns dropped. Kendrick did six songs (those first two plus “Pussy And Patron,” “Fuckin’ Problem,” “R.I.P.,” and “A.D.H.D.”) before dipping into good kid, m.A.A.d. city material, which I have to believe was purposeful given how many times he asked how many of us had been with him since the beginning. If K.Dot’s goal was to flaunt a catalog that exhilarates even without last year’s acclaimed debut album, he achieved it. That said, this would have been a lesser performance without the top-down cruisers “Money Trees” and “Poetic Justice,” the instantly iconic “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “The Recipe” and especially the furious “Backseat Freestyle” and “m.A.A.d city,” all of which appeared before “Swimming Pools (Drank)” closed out the coronation. “Hiiipower” was in there too somewhere, and there’s no better way than that to describe how this guy’s operating right now. “I’m sorry if anybody came in your good clothes tonight,” Kendrick said. “We fucked that shit right up.”

At dusk on the Chevrolet Stage, Bassnectar demonstrated why he’s the one DJ at Hangout who graduated from the Boom Boom Tent to the beachfront. Threaded with drony feedback experiments and bits of Kid Cudi, Mims, the B-52s and even Nirvana, his performance percolated with the aggression of a rock concert. Speaking of rock stars, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers headlined Saturday with exactly the kind of show you’d expect and hope for, hits on hits executed with old-pro swagger and stoner enthusiasm (“Wow, we’re on the beach in Alabama!”). They trotted out “Won’t Back Down,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and “Free Fallin'” within the first hour, and the hits kept coming from there. It was enough to make me wish the Heartbreakers would leave behind the bluesy old man phase that birthed 2010’s Mojo and get back to churning out American classics, though frankly even the blues rock was putty in Petty’s hands.