One of the most universal human experiences is to visit one’s elementary school, as an adult, and be amazed at how small it looks. I had a strangely analogous experience Saturday night at the FYF music festival in Los Angeles.

This two-day indie music festival features about 60 bands performing on five stages spread out over the expanse of Exposition Park at the University of Southern California. I had, by late evening, visited all but one of the stages — that one being the stage in the L.A. Sports Arena. Entering the building to listen to the music of house/dubstep DJ “Joy Orbison,” I was treated to the incongruous sight of portraits of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy flanking a concession stand in the lobby. It turns out that Nixon’s portrait was there because he dedicated the building, in 1959, when he was vice president. And Kennedy’s was there . . . because this was the site of the Democratic Convention that nominated him for president in 1960.

Once I was inside the hall, it took a great imaginative leap for me to picture this as the site where that history was made. The house music was loud and monotonous; the light show was insistent, as light shows tend to be; and even more, I was taken aback by how small the place seemed. When I was a kid, in the 1970s, I read Theodore H. White’s book, and saw TV documentaries, about the battle of titans that took place there — Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, struggling for the opportunity to replace the man who had won World War II. Tell me if this picture of the ’60 Democratic Convention doesn’t look majestic.

But last night, a stage big enough for JFK and LBJ wasn’t big enough for Kanye West . . . who performed at the festival’s Main Stage, a few hundred feet away.

But maybe my childhood image is actually the accurate one – and objects in the rear-view mirror really are larger than they appear. At some point, I’ll have to visit the Cow Palace in San Francisco — a site with similar emotional resonance in my memory — and see if it looks big enough to have been the stage for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 emergence, as the progenitor of a new conservative politics that would transform America even more than Kennedy’s New Frontier did.

(Oh, and about the music. Kanye West gave an energetic performance and really connected with the audience, but I can’t say I came away liking his work any more than I did previously. But the good news is, there are, on the evidence of this festival, a lot of great bands working today. Highlights, in my view: Melody’s Echo Chamber, Alvvays, La Femme, a band called “!!!,” Savages, and Dinosaur Jr.)