Dispatch from Austin City Limits

Within seconds of setting foot on Texas soil, a horde of fire ants swarm up my shoe and begin sinking their fangs into my ankle, leaving angry sores that last for days. Combined with the total airport power failure and the crazy drunk woman in the airplane seat in front of us, I begin to wonder if my third annual summer music trip with Maureen (after Lollapalooza in 2006 and VirginFest in 2007) might be ill-fated. But luckily the ants are the last bad thing to happen, and Austin City Limits is a blast.

We arrive a day early and spend Thursday touring around town, starting with barbecue at the Salt Lick, browsing through vintage records at Antone's, and then on to the University of Texas campus. The undefeated Longhorns are hosting Arkansas on Saturday and burnt-orange T-shirts are everywhere. (Various local publications allege that the UT starting quarterback is named "Colt McCoy" but I'm pretty sure this is just an elaborate joke devised to mock gullible out-of-towners.) We stop by the world-famous Ransom archive (Gutenberg Bible, check; fascinating early drafts of Underworld, check) before heading on to the museum (which recently acquired a great Anselm Kiefer) and then the Texas statehouse.

Except apparently you're not supposed to call the statehouse the "Statehouse" but rather the "Capitol" because, as our tour guide mentions on at least eight separate occasions, Texas was its own country for ten whole years before joining (and then dropping out of, and then re-joining) the Union. In any case, it's a beautiful building. If you speak while standing directly on the lone star in the center of the rotunda, it produces acoustic effects that are, while not quite Wren's whispering gallery, still kind of neat. We're staying with friends, whom we meet for Tex-Mex near their place in the very pleasant surrounding hills.

Day One

There's a line at the brunch place full of fellow concert-goers--capacity at Zilker Park is 65,000 and it's full all weekend--but the half-hour wait for my guacamole omelet is so, so worth it. We park and ride the shuttle to the main gate, emerging into a hot-but-not-oppressive afternoon sun. Wandering over to the "AT&T Blue Room" stage, we catch the end of an energetic set from What Made Milwaukee Famous. Then we navigate through a sea of folding chairs (more on this later) to catch the insta-buzz NYC sensation, Vampire Weekend. They're okay; I have no particular objections to the music but find their preppy smugness to be off-putting. Maureen agrees. "That one," she says, pointing to lead singer Ezra Koenig on the Jumbotron, "is going on my list of guys who need to have their [butts] kicked."

"John Mayer is still first on the list, though."

We've got an hour before the next act, on the other side of the park (there are seven stages in all, so the whole enterprise requires careful planning). The food is much better and cheaper than at our previous festivals and the drinks are plentiful. (Overall the concert organization was terrific with the lone, notable exception of running out of Lone Star tallboys by mid-Saturday afternoon.) Marketers are handing out sweatbands festooned with the logo of the recently deceased Washington Mutual; I grab a handful to sell as collector's items on Ebay. We make our way near the front of the AT&T stage and settle in for the most multi-cultural band in all of creation, Gogol Bordello. 

It's hard to describe how preposterously entertaining they are, in a bordering-on-and-often-crashing-into-absurd kind of way. The video clip below only hints at their awesome gypsy-rock assault (warning: the sound is terrible because the microphone on my little camera can't handle the rock music). You half expect to be handed a release form explaining that images of you may appear in the next Sacha Baron Cohen movie, what with frontman Eugene Hutz's manic testosterone-addled raving, the roller derby outfits, and all the rest. It's like they're daring you not to get the joke. 

We decide to skip Jenny Lewis' performance in the [Dead Bank] tent since she'll be here in DC on Thursday. We catch a little Hot Chip and then idle near David Byrne, looking sharp in white hair and an outfit to match, doing the Peter Gabriel world music thing. That leads to local favorite Alejandro Escovedo's tight, expert sound. He's on one of the smaller stages and the median age of the crowd suddenly jumps up about 20 years. The band is super-professional as the evening turns to night and they lay down old favorites along with much from Alejandro's justly lauded new album, Real Animal. It's wise, hopeful, and good way to finish the day. As we wait in line for the shuttle bus, The Mars Volta plays on the big AMD stage, sounding like what you'd get if you shot Led Zeppelin full of amphetamines and locked them in steel cage for a musical battle to the death. 

But that wasn't the end of the day. As the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World," Austin is stuffed with great venues into which many ACL bands book late-night gigs. We walk up 6th Street (which is a lot like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and I mean that in the worst possible way) to Emo's Outdoors and the Drive-By Truckers. They arrive after midnight, start a little slow, and my mind begins to wander as I reflect on how age makes it harder to stand all day and stay up all night. But then, at the stroke of 1AM, the Truckers reach beneath the dashboard, flip a switch that shoots reserves of moonshine directly into the engine, and rip through an incendiary set of southern rock anthems that are damn close to the Platonic ideal. Later, we walk back to the car, senses heightened, knowing it will be hard to sleep. 

 

Day Two

The idea was to get there early but we end up needing more time to recover than originally planned. As we walk to the buses, Maureen dashes into the historic Driskill Hotel for a drink of water only to emerge minutes later with a sly grin. "Robert Plant is in the lobby," she says. "We had a moment." I pale, flashing back to Hammer of the Gods. What kind of moment!?! "There was eye contact," she explains. "We bonded because we both have long curly hair."  

Brushes with greatness take time and so we grab lunch and the next band to see is...the Drive-By Truckers. Redundant? No, sir. Shonna Tucker grabs swigs of Jack Daniel's mid-song, Mike Cooley makes me want to take up smoking, and Patterson Hood regales the audience with a lengthy story of how his momma recovered from a six-year vodka bender by marrying a 350-pound long-haul trucker named Chester who killed eight men escaping a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam. Highlight (see clip): a rousing version of "Hell No I Ain't Happy" -- truly, a song for our times. 

We buy some concerts T-shirts and CDs from the temporary Waterloo Records outlets before heading over to see MGMT.  This involves a lot of navigation through the afore-mentioned lawn chairs, which are proof that profound technological change doesn't always involve fancy computers. We all remember folding lawn chairs, but the key innovation was making them collapsible to the point where you can sling them over your back with relative ease. The lawn chair profusion at ACL has become so great that they've had to designate special areas in which chairs can and cannot go. As with other sectors of the economy, advances in lawn chair technology have expanded the boundaries of possibility, resulting in new incentive structures and the need for new policies to match

Unfortunately, when the crowds get big enough, those boundaries start to erode and movement slows to a crawl, like rush hour gridlock in a big city. Personally, I think deploying new chair tech is fine if you're physically unable to walk or stand for long periods of time, but otherwise sitting in front of one stage all day betrays a fatal lack of seriousness and arguably moral weakness in matters of or relating to rock and roll. 

Anyway, MGMT draws a huge crowd as the Brooklyn duo wisely augments their synth-driven sound with a solid three-piece band. They play most of their excellent debut, Oracular Spectacular, with the highlight being a mass-jump-inducing rendition of "Kids." (see clip).

From there we walk back to the AT&T Stage end of the park--and here let me pause to suggest that if you're going to spend what I presume was a lot of money to have "delivered by AT&T" plastered on everything and you're marketing to a generally youthful, affluent audience who as such are likely to own AT&T-exclusive iPhones, you might want to give some thought to what will inevitably happens when tens of thousands of people in close proximity try to use said phones all at once: they'll be repeatedly reminded that your network kind of sucks. 

But I digress. We listen to Conor Oberst doing a reputable job in the distance before Iron & Wine begins on the Dell Stage. There's a cute couple with an even cuter three-year old daughter sitting behind us, which gives me hope that my future children won't cramp my music-loving style. (Readers with evidence to the contrary are kindly asked to keep it to themselves; we all need our illusions. Although Blues Traveller and Band of Horses are playing the same stage tomorrow, Sam Beam pretty much wraps up the crazy beard championship while playing a lot of good tunes from the Woman King EP and The Shepherd's Dog. It gets dark and our Austin friend joins us for Beck, who kicks off with "Loser" before playing some pretty good stuff from his new record as well as his ultra-depressing break-up album, Sea Change. We pause on our way out to hear Plant and Allison Kraus sing "The Battle of Evermore"--not bad--and decide to follow the crowds and walk all the way back to town. 

At this point we're pretty tired so obviously the smart thing is to get some rest drink several margaritas before heading back to Emo's for another post-midnight show. As we arrive Man Man is finishing up an act that seems to consist of wearing denim cut-offs and white face paint while jumping up and down in unison and beating on things. So we grab a few Shiner Bocks and wait for Okkervil River to begin. They do not disappoint. We saw them open for The New Pornographers at the 9:30 Club a few months ago and they were good then, but now the Austin natives are truly in their element, playing in front of an adoring crowd that knows all the lyrics by heart. The space fits about thousand people total but only a few hundred beneath a makeshift overhang in front of the cramped stage, and it's hard to imagine anything to improve. Highlights: "Unless It's Kicks" and "A Girl in Port," among many (see clip). 

We get home even later and more wired than the night before. 

Day Three

Of all the bands in all the world, there may be none more ill-suited to play on a huge festival stage at 1:30 in the afternoon under the hot Texas sun than a two-person post-punk act that looks, sounds, and feels like a smoke- and fashion model-filled downscale London nightclub at 4AM, i.e. The Kills.  But that's exactly where they were, and they were not happy. You could practically see last night's alcohol steaming off of Alison Mosshart's vampire skin, while Jamie Hince repeatedly cursed his manager and made comments like "This is suicide" and "We've never played in daylight before." (One suspects that getting dumped by Kate Moss last week didn't help.) But credit where due: they didn't mail it in. It was actually a good set, helped by the fact The Kills have released some stellar albums in recent years. Mosshart would venture to the front of the stage for a few seconds, recoil from the light, retreat back to her microphone, retch, cover her head with a towel full of ice cubes, and then try it all over again. It was actually kind of charming. 

We rehydrate and then return for Stars, day to The Kills' night in term of sound and disposition. Torquil Campbell repeatedly thanks the crowd and organizers for the honor of performing as the veteran Montreal pop rockers play mostly highlights from Set Yourself on Fire and In Our Bedroom After the War. Next up is Neko Case, playing what she says is the final date on what must have been a very long tour supporting Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. At first I'm worried that the spare arrangements will be insufficient for the space and crowd, but the music grows in confidence throughout the hour. We then turn quickly back for a repeat from Okkervil River, the crowd again super-appreciative and the music again strong and driven, although the band starts to get ragged toward the end. 

Originally the plan was to pivot back to the Raconteurs, but I grow weary and the beverage stands call. So we grab some dinner and I'm pleasantly surprised by the nearby White Denim show on a smaller stage. Then we shimmy through the chairs and crowd to get near the Band of Horses, whom I'd never seen live before. Turns out I didn't know how much I was missing. They wisely play nearly all of Cease to Begin, which is tailor-made for a festival setting, all hooks and soaring choruses.  At one point lead singer Ben Bridwell looks out into the crowd with a beatific smile and says "Wow, look at all these people. Y'all are beautiful. I love you!"

Maureen says, "He just put the bong down and walked right on stage." And let's just say that, based on the olfactory evidence, Bridwell had a lot of company.

Foo Fighters close things out but frankly these are always the least fun parts of a festival; due to the lack of other shows you end up standing in the dark with a zillion people about half a mile from the stage watching tiny figures on a big screen. Plus we have tickets to The Black Keys at Stubb's downtown. So we leave to the strains of "Learn to Fly" and make it to our concluding show of the weekend just as the Akron blues-rock duo begins to play. "Growing up in Akron would make anyone sing the blues," notes Maureen, an Ohioan herself. I can't argue with that, so we order one last Lone Star and relax in the evening air, enjoying the final cymbal crashes and heavy chords of a terrific Austin weekend.