Austin City Limits, Day 1: Jenny Lewis sweats it out
September 26, 2008, at Zilker Park
By Erik Adams
Published: September 27th, 2008 | 1:50pm
The 2008 Austin City Limits Music Festival got underway on September 26, in all its dusty, sunny, noisy glory. Venus Zine writer Erik Adams and photographer Eric Uhlir will be at Austin’s Zilker Park for all three days of the festival, and their observations, thoughts, and shots from each day will be posted through Monday.
Noon: Just through the gates and I managed to lose my girlfriend. We had to go through separate entrances (press pass, what?), so we made plans to meet inside the park, but didn’t specify where. This was a dumb move, because Zilker Park is huge. Not as huge as, say, Grant Park, home of Lollapalooza, but still enough space to swallow a person whole. It took us 10 minutes to locate each other (dumb move number two: “Yeah, go ahead and leave your cell phone at home.”).
12:10 p.m.: Austin’s own Dan Dyer on the AT&T Blue Room stage. The style of polished-yet-retro R&B that Dyer plays has always irked me, but it’s one of the styles that Austin City Limits the TV show and music festival were built on (the others being folk, country, and the blues). Live, his sound was rougher, and therefore more enjoyable. His syrupy ballads? Not so much.
12:22 p.m.: Did I look up the correct Autamata in preparing for the weekend? The band I found sounded somewhat atmospheric, but the one playing the Austin Ventures stage was like a fake Metric with chugging guitars and gurgling synths but no heart. Both Autamatas claim to be from Ireland, so the mystery remains unsolved.
12:38 p.m.: First bad dancing sighting: Woman in bikini and cross-trainers jerking back and forth.
1:04 p.m.: In a lull due to technical difficulties, Arkansas-bred singer-songwriter Christopher Denny tried to drum up excitement for the imminent University of Texas-University of Arkansas football game. Along with ACL, the football game will gum up Austin for the rest of the weekend. He then told an old dog joke (“I’m looking for the man that shot my paw”). His voice — a wheezy, wobbly tenor that recalls Roy Orbison — is better than his jokes.
1:31 p.m.: What Made Milwaukee Famous has graduated from a tight power-pop act to one that retains its tightness while giving in to more spacious arrangements. One song dropped a Star Trek reference. You can take the power pop out of the nerd, but you can’t the nerd out of the power pop.
2:03 p.m.: Across the park, Yeasayer was in full-on world music groove mode. My girlfriend, a recent convert to the Guitar Hero video games, suggested that if “2080” was in a Guitar Hero game, I would play it nonstop. She’s absolutely right.
2:30 p.m.: ACL’s a funny festival because it attracts a large number of regular folk, in addition to rabid music fans and hipsters. The roaming pack of three dudes in short athletic shorts and outrageous shoes (Cowboy boots? With purple shorts?) were clearly trying to spook the squares.
3:30 p.m.: Del tha Funkee Homosapien didn’t show up until five minutes into his set and instead let his DJ and hype man kick things off. It was kind of annoying. But as one of the few hip-hop artists that might appeal to the ACL set, he was given a lot of leeway.
4:29 p.m.: Gogol Bordello was one minute early for its set, and Eugene Hutz entered the AT&T with much more bravado and stage presence than Del. There was a curious flow to the Gogol set; it was a while before Hutz and the main core of the band were joined by percussionist-MC Pedro Erazo, and it was a few songs more before dancer-vocalists Pamela Jintana Racine and Elizabeth Sun showed up. David Byrne was the next act on AT&T — could the slow-build band thing be a tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense?
5:57 p.m.: Under the crammed Washington Mutual Memorial Tent, technical difficulties delayed Jenny Lewis’ starting time. Once everything was sorted out, the sweaty mass met Lewis with screams and assorted adulations. Lewis and her band were in top form as they made a run through the best tracks from her freshly released LP, Acid Tongue. The title track, which features Lewis solo on guitar and the band providing group harmonies, was particularly affecting.
6:55 p.m.: The late start to Lewis’ set meant it overlapped even further with Byrne’s; I got out of the tent just as he was launching into the Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless.” The set, which celebrated the collaborations between Byrne and Brian Eno, was an aesthetic wonder: There was a thick backing band and a trio of dancers, and everyone on stage was clad in a white that matches Byrne’s hair color perfectly. The new Byrne-Eno songs from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today were intriguing, and definitely sounded better than some of the airless Heads covers that were presented. Byrne seemed to have such firm control over everything, but somehow he let “The Great Curve” come off as a straightforward rock song.
8:22 p.m.: The Mars Volta’s set climaxed early when Cedric Bixler-Zavala did a handstand during the first song. From that point on, it was all self-indulgent noodling.
More coverage:
Austin City Limits, Day 2: Godmother of Soul Sharon Jones steals the show
Austin City Limits, Day 3: Stars share the stage with 'a lot of bitches'
Issue #35
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