The Austin City Limits Music Festival
2005
A Review
Of Sorts
October 3, 2005
So we went to the ACL Music Festival in Austin last weekend. Wow. It’s hot down there. Real real hot. I’m not exactly sure humans are meant to exist in that climate.
Hurricane Rita made it all the more suspenseful. The day before the festival started, the weather people were saying she was gonna hit Galveston as a Category 5 hurricane. Or bigger. “The Monster Storm.” Very scary.
We, of course, went to Austin anyway. Why not? It’s not on the coast. Bring a rain jacket and come on.
As it turned out, Rita went north, leaving Austin with just a nice breeze for the first couple days of the festival. That helped ACL some but it was still plenty hot (didn’t help Port Arthur or Beaumont at all, of course).
Oh yeah, it was hot. And the third day of the festival, the breeze died, making the subsequent high of 108 degrees all the more brutal.
The crowds were mighty friendly – I didn’t see even one fight which was remarkable in that heat. Maybe they’re just used to it down there.
For the uninitiated, this was the fourth year of the Austin City Limits Festival, held in late September
at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas. Presented by the venerable Austin City Limits television show (Public Broadcasting), the Festival claimed more than 130 bands this year on eight different stages. The shows are staggered to a certain extent, presumably to minimize sound interference between stages (although this was still somewhat of a problem), but you can’t see all the bands. You have to make choices. This review reflects the choices I made, right or wrong.
You probably don’t want to hear a blow by blow description of my trip to ACL. Suffice it to say, we managed to achieve the correct ratio of beer, water, and trips to the port-a-potty to survive the weekend
in style. We saw some amazing bands there and undoubtedly missed more than we saw. There were a couple of disappointments (not naming names – people’s taste varies) but, for the most part, some really nice surprises.
I saw all or part of shows from: the Austin Collins Band,
Bobby Bare Jr.,
JT Van Zandt,
Steve Earle and the Dukes,
Lucinda Williams,
Blues Traveler, the
South Austin Jug Band, the Weary Boys,
Mike Doughty’s Band,
Buddy Guy,
Kelley Hunt, the New Amsterdams,
Jeff Black, the
Kaiser Chiefs,
Dave Alvin & the Guilty Men,
Donna the Buffalo, and Bukka Allen.
We could hear the
Austin Collins Band as we were waiting in line to get into the Festival the first day. By the time we got inside, they only had a couple of songs left but we heard enough to compel us to go buy the CD. The CD doesn’t sound any where near as good as they did live – too much of a Nashville over-produced kind of sound but we’ll be keeping an eye on them.
Steve Earle
showed up with his Dukes and played much of his most recent disc, “The Revolution Starts Now,” in the blazing mid-afternoon sun. Earle seemed more relaxed than he has the last few times I’ve seen him – could be the new wife he’s proudly sporting - but he did manage to remind the crowd that it’s been a pretty tough year, what with the hurricanes and the situation in Iraq, and he treated us to energized versions of “Rich Man’s War,” “The Revolution Starts Now,” “F the CC,” and the sly “Condi, Condi” tribute to Condoleeza Rice. The aforementioned new wife, Allison Moorer, looked and sounded great on stage, especially singing the Emmylou Harris portion of “Comin’ Around.” A highlight
for me was his medley of “New York City” and “The Unrepentant.”
Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men
were pretty much incredible. We were conniving enough to get right in front of the stage for maximum effect. There was some sound interference from a couple of the other stages but Dave and the guys did their best to drown out
Arcade Fire and The Decemberists. They succeeded.
This was probably the hottest part of the day on the hottest day of the Festival – a day that broke the previous record for that day by ten degrees. Just saying.
Alvin greeted the audience with “Hello, my fellow French fries.” Luckily, the stage was soon overtaken by shadows and once he started playing, we forgot all about the heat. He kicked it off with “Sinful Daughter,” then “Abilene,” followed by “Out of Control” (my favorite), “Dry River,” “Ashgrove,” and ended with “American Music.”
He’s got a big voice and a mean guitar. And he has all kinds of ways to hold his smokes while he’s playing.
Lead guitarist Chris Miller’s demeanor while he subjected his guitar to things a teenage air guitarist dreams about in his bedroom was relaxed and a bit amused. In fact, the entire band appeared to be having as good a time as the audience. And the audience was eating it up.
The New Amsterdams
was maybe the best new (for me) band I saw at ACL. They definitely had the tight t-shirt/jeans/heavy tattoo thing going. Very nice. They
had a cool stand-up bass that was bowed as well as plucked. The
Amsterdams started with an acoustic guitar but brought in the electric guitar and the harmonica on a few songs. This band uses lots of gratuitous profanity which I especially enjoyed (see
Bobby Bare). They also have an EP on their
website you can download for free which I of course did as soon as I got home. It’s good but a lot more mellow than what they played at the Festival. Live, they sounded a little like The Wallflowers. I’m looking forward to hearing more of their stuff.
The Kaiser Chiefs
were new to me as well – British with a strong punk influence. They had a lot of energy – the lead singer was leaping all over the stage, intermittently announcing that he might faint (did I mention that it was hot?). It was not really the right time to wear skintight jeans – some in the band were even wearing ties. Those
crazy Brits. But they were outstanding.
One of the first groups we saw,
Bobby Bare Jr. and the Young Criminals’ Starvation
League exceeded our expectations. They kicked it off with “Flat Chested Girl from Maynardville” and played “Valentine”, “Let’s Rock and Roll,” “The Monk at the Disco,” and that song about not wanting to be “that motherfucker.” The next day, they surprised us with a second set – they replaced some band that was scared off by Hurricane Rita.
The set list was pretty much the same as the day before but this time, Bobby showed up in a lovely blue leisure suit. Very nice. His sax player, Deanna Varagona, was seriously wailing on her horn – she said after the show that they were glad to have the opportunity to play again since they felt they weren’t at their best the day before but from where I was standing, both shows were grade A.
Another surprise addition to the line-up was
JT Van Zandt, son of the late great Townes Van Zandt
and a singer songwriter in the tradition of his father. Very self-deprecating.
Kelley Hunt has a strong strong bluesy voice. She also got the geezers dancing in 105 degree heat.
We reluctantly weenied out on the
Robert Earl Keen show - couldn't take another
hour of direct sun, and found a shady spot under
a big tree where we couldn’t see the stage at all but we could hear
Lucinda Williams belting out “Real
Live Bleeding Fingers (And Broken Guitar Strings).”
She also dedicated "Crescent City" to the people of New
Orleans. Good stuff.
The hippies came out for
Donna the Buffalo, the ultimate jam band. It’s funny – you could walk around the venue and predict who was gonna show up for this band. And everyone was dancing. Jeb Puryear,
lead guitar, looked laid back and maybe a little chemically isolated – a large part of his charm. I think he plays on autopilot.
And he wears a goofy hat which is kind of hard to
resist. Tara Nevins was up there too, playing
everything in sight. Seriously.
I didn’t see Morgan Heritage myself but heard that it was some pretty great reggae as well as a forty-five minute rant on why marijuana should be legalized. Sorry I missed that one.
Many of the descriptions in the ACL
promotional material didn’t match the bands at all. One band we were very excited about
after reading the description which hyped it as alt-country, post-punk, rebellious rock and roll, turned out to be nothing but big hat country with the lead singer actually calling out, more than once, “Where are all my senoritas?” and “Let’s get crazy, folks!” Talk about cliché. So we left and ran back to
Mike Doughty’s Band. . .
Mike Doughty’s Band was a pleasant surprise.
He used to be with Soul Coughing. Live, he and
his band sounded kind of like Social Distortion although after reviewing the CD, the comparison was more like the Dave Matthews Band. I’d like to hear more of these guys.
There were a lot of bands that we just heard one or two songs by and walked on, for various reasons. Either someone else we really wanted to hear was playing or the crowd was too much at that particular moment (Blues Traveler) or it was just too darn hot
to sit in the sun for another hour (Buddy Guy,
Robert Earl Keen) and it was a choice between shade or
heat stroke.
Others in my party had good things to
say about The South Austin Jug Band, Gov't Mule,
Del Sol, John Prine,
Thievery Corporation, Built to Spill, Martin Sexton,
and the John Butler Trio. But they weren't
willing to contribute to this review (you know who you
are).
As always, we left the Festival happy to have seen what we did and wondering about the stuff we missed.
-naomi
(photos courtesy of Brother Dave Pierce)
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