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On the Cover:  
The crowd cheers for Skrillex at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday Sept.17, 2011. Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

**Table of Contents**

A Note from the Author

Credits

Ten years of the Austin City Limits Music Festival: 2002-2011

The Austin American-Statesman has been covering the Austin City Limits Music Festival for longer than it has actually been around. From its roots as a two-day shindig full of Texas artists to a three-day party known the world over, some of the biggest names in pop music have played the fest, from Coldplay to Kanye, from Willie Nelson to R.E.M.

This ebook collects most, but not nearly all, of the news stories and reviews the _American-Statesman_ staff and freelancers wrote about ACL for the festival's first 10 years, from 2002 to 2011. There are many, many more reviews of live sets than there was room for here. To find more, head over to austin360.com and check out our Austin Music Source archives.

We hope this provides a nice time capsule of what Austin was doing, thinking and above all listening to during those 10 fests. Enjoy. -- Joe Gross

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Britt Daniel of Spoon rocks a 2005 ACL house in Zilker Park.

Before the Festival

Austin City Limits Music fest to debut in fall at Zilker Park

By Michael Corcoran  
May 1, 2002

Fans of "Austin City Limits" see the show's musicians perform in front of an artificial backdrop of the Austin skyline. But when the Austin City Limits Music Festival debuts Sept. 28-29 at Zilker Park, the real city lights will be in the background.

In a rare case of solidarity regarding outdoor music, city leaders, the Austin Parks and Recreation Department and neighborhood groups say they support the festival, expected to attract 30,000 music fans a day.

"What a glorious joining of two of the things that mean the most in defining who we are," City Council Member Beverly Griffith said Tuesday at a news conference to announce the inaugural fest. "Our music and our parks system are our treasures.

"The event, which aims to be a smaller, Austin-centric version of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, with multiple stages and dozens of acts, has been in the planning stages for months. But the project didn't receive the final go-ahead until Parks and Recreation Director Jesus Olivarez met Friday with business owners and neighborhood groups from Barton Hills, Zilker, Bouldin and Rollingwood, Olivarez said. "Everybody was in favor of it," said Olivarez, who added that traffic was the main concern. "We're going to handle it just like we do Trail of Lights, where we have about 35,000 people a day."

Promoter Charlie Jones of Capital Sports & Entertainment said the lineup and ticket details will be announced in several weeks. He intends to book a mix of local and national talent, with particular emphasis on acts that fit the KLRU show's rootsy format. Jones just returned from a scouting trip to Jazz Fest and said the Austin event also will have a massive food court serving food indigenous to Texas. In heralding the festival for its expected economic benefit, Mayor Gus

Garcia noted that 10 percent of hotel residency in Austin last year was directly attributed to the music scene. "Live music has a lot to do with our superior quality of life," he said.

Wendy Morgan, the city's director of music marketing, said the festival should attract fans from far beyond the city limits."

'It's too early to compare it to Jazz Fest," said "Austin City Limits" producer Terry Lickona from a small stage near the Zilker Park soccer fields, where the event will be held. But he predicted that the festival bearing his TV show's name would be an instant success.

"We've been Austin's best goodwill ambassador for 27 years. We have fans all over the country," he said. Lickona said the two-day fest should pick up where Aqua Fest, which went belly-up in 1998, left off.

"Almost every city next to a river has an annual musical event of this sort. It's time we did again, too," he said.

### Austin City Limits' festival is music to a skyline's ears

By Michael Corcoran  
September 27, 2002

Promoter Charlie Jones of Capital Sports & Entertainment stepped onto the " Austin City Limits" soundstage, with its glittering faux Austin skyline, and felt his knees go weak. "It just hit me," he said after the Sept. 3 press conference to unveil the schedule of the maiden Austin City Limits Music Festival. "I was suddenly overwhelmed with how huge this was. I looked at Charles (co-promoter Attal) and said, 'Strap on your helmet; here it comes.' "

Here it comes. This weekend, the Austin skyline behind the musicians will be real, and the city will host what Attal has long said it's needed: a weekend-long music festival of top talent in a beautiful park.

"You have to wonder why someone hasn't done this sooner," said the lifelong Austinite. "But the important thing is someone's doing it now."

As of Thursday, more than 25,000 two-day tickets had been sold, which makes organizers' goal of 35,000 per day likely, unless it rains. The show will go on even in a downpour.

"It's not going to rain," Jones said last week from his office in the San Jacinto Tower next to the Four Seasons Hotel. Earlier reports of a possible hurricane, which came nowhere near Austin, had left the 33-year-old undaunted. "Rain is not in the script."

Indeed, everything about the festival, embraced by the city, the community, corporate sponsors and national booking agents, has followed a charmed plot thus far.

When "ACL," which has been looking into extending its brand recognition, signed on in April, promoters got to draw on the show's 28 years of quality and credibility.

"We had been discussing back and forth with the mayor's office and the city manager about doing a fall event that highlights Austin as the live music capital of the world," said City Parks and Recreation Director Jesus Olivares. "We'd been approached by some promoters over the last couple years, but it just didn't feel right." After an MTV sports and music fest in 1997 left Zilker looking like the site of a tank battle, Olivares had good reason to be wary.

"Then we heard 'Austin City Limits Music Festival' from Charlie Jones, and we all went, 'Yeah!' "Olivares said Mayor Gus Garcia "was instrumental in getting the event off the ground," and when the City Council voted unanimously in mid-May to officially sanction the festival, "it was all systems go."

A new kind of concert

Not since Aqua Fest went belly up in 1998, after several financially disastrous years, has the city hosted an annual multiday event on Town Lake aimed at the mainstream. But even in Aqua Fest's mid-80s heyday, when upward of 200,000 people passed through the turnstiles over a nine-day run, it was more carnival than concert.

Austin has boasted the South by Southwest Music Festival every March since 1987, but that's a cutting-edge, club-hopping, music industry exhaust-athon, not a balmy day in the park.

From the festival's first public unveiling April 30, Zilker has received co-headlining credit. "Our parks and our music are Austin's treasures," then-Council Member Beverly Griffith said at the press conference. But quality music bookings and indigenous food booths would also be important, and more than one speaker referred to the event as an Austin version of New Orleans' wildly popular Jazz & Heritage Festival (better known as "Jazz Fest").

Jones and Attal had just gotten back from Jazz Fest, where they were less interested in the music than in how the shuttle system was set up. They noted the line of taxis and stood by the front gate for an hour watching the crowd wade through security checkpoints. Jones made a diagram of how the stages were set up so the sounds wouldn't bleed together. He drew up a facsimile of the food court (which has been almost as big a draw as the music during the festival's 33-year run).

Although Jones had been talking about such a festival for Austin since he successfully produced the A2K event downtown on New Year's Eve 1999, the Austin City Limits Music Festival started to become a reality in January when Bill Stapleton, president of CS&E, introduced the idea to a "Future of Austin City Limits" committee formed by KLRU, the public television station that owns the show.

"We were looking for ways to market the show to younger audiences. Attaching the name to a major music festival seemed perfect," said Stapleton, Lance Armstrong's agent, who expanded into the entertainment field when he merged with Jones' Middleman Productions in August 2001. The pair first worked together in 1999, when Jones was hired to produce the first Armstrong victory parade and celebration at Auditorium Shores with only a week's notice.

"When we decided to join forces, the first thing we talked about was putting on a major annual concert that would do justice to Austin," said Stapleton.

Looking to the future

Though ACL Fest organizers won't divulge the talent budget, they put the entire cost of the event at $1.25 million, most of which goes for production expenses. "This festival isn't costing the city a penny," said Jones. "We're paying for everything." The city parks department, meanwhile, will receive $1 from every ticket for park revitalization.

KLRU doesn't have to put up any money -- the station will receive an undisclosed percentage of the gross -- but Mary Beth Rogers, vice chairwoman of the KLRU board, said there's still a risk to the show's reputation. "We want everyone to have a wonderful time in the park listening to music, but if they don't, for whatever reason, it reflects badly on ' Austin City Limits,' " she said.

The financial risk falls on the shoulders of promoters CS&E and Charles Attal Presents, but both Jones and Attal contend that logistics, rather that gate receipts, are the biggest concern in this first year. "I would rather break even or lose a little money and have everything run smoothly than make money and leave a bunch of fans unhappy because this didn't work or that was a mess," Jones said. Pull this one off, and they'll get to do it again. And again.

"We'll know on September 30 whether there'll be an Austin City Limits Music Festival next year," Jones said. CS&E has a three-year deal to use the " Austin City Limits" name, but the city is waiting to see how this year's fest comes off before committing Zilker next year. A torn-up park or complaints from neighborhood groups about traffic or noise would cause the city to rethink its support, said Olivares, who added that damage is likely to be minimal because all the stages and food booths are set up on the periphery and not in the field.

One entity looking ahead to next year is the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has sold nearly 200 room/tickets packages for this weekend without advertising. "We have a link on the festival's Web site (www.aclfestival.com)," said bureau music liaison Wendy Morgan, "but there really wasn't enough time to advertise and fully market this thing."

Still, about a third of those attending the festival are from out of town, according to Internet ticket sales, and that puts the event's economic impact at between $3 million and $4 million, Morgan said.

"People are always looking for an excuse to come to Austin, and this event has the potential of being a major draw for years to come," she said.

KLRU general manager John McCarroll sees this weekend's festival as a way to bring a much larger number of fans to the live " Austin City Limits" musical experience than can attend the 400-capacity tapings. Rogers said she's had ticket requests from public television station owners from all over the country. "This could become an annual celebration of public television," she said. "Also, it's an amazing opportunity for our corporate underwriters to entertain clients and interact with the public." "ACL" sponsors Schlotzsky's and Chevrolet have underwritten two of the festival's six stages.

Bands? No problem

The "ACL" musical legacy gave Attal a guideline for which acts to book, but because he had only seven weeks to assemble nearly 70 acts -- most of them national -- he found himself overwhelmed when he started with an empty slate in early May.

"I'd never booked anything of this scope before," said Attal, who co-owns Stubb's Bar-B-Q. "I was freaking out a little at first." The first band to commit was String Cheese Incident, whose manager Mike Luba is a close friend of Attal's.Luba sent the word out in the jam band community about this cool festival in Austin, and Attal's phones started lighting up. National booking agent Frank Riley, who handles Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin and Wilco, was instantly aboard with those acts. "Frank got it right away," said Attal, who sent out 150 offers and ended up booking 40 national acts in two weeks. "I've been watching ' Austin City Limits' my whole life," said 34-year-old Attal. "Certain acts are just not going to fly under that banner." Hence, there's not a rave DJ or gangsta rapper in the midst. The show's longtime producer, Terry Lickona, was brought in as a booking consultant, and he said that when he saw the proposed lineup there wasn't a single act he would veto.

When it all seems too much for these young promoters, who've never worked on anything so substantial, they take time for a favorite daydream. They're on the side of the stage, looking out over a delirious crowd of 35,000 on a gorgeous balmy Zilker afternoon. Jones said that he's always thrown the best parties, back to when he was a teen and his parents left town. But this would be the best one yet. "One day," Jones and Attal think. "One day soon."

That day is tomorrow. Then it happens all over again Sunday. Unless it rains. "It's not going to rain," Jones said again, pounding his desk with mock emphasis. Why is he so sure? "This little guy told me," he said, holding a small plastic Yoda figure that oversees his desk from the rim of a lamp. "He's guided us through it all so far."

So that's the secret.

### Hot times, long lines

More than 40,000 pack Zilker Park for first day of fest

By Michelle M. Martinez and Michael Corcoran  
Sept. 29, 2002

Sweat and frustration filled the air as people waited -- some for more than an hour -- to get into the first day of the inaugural Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday.

But inside the giant gathering at Austin's Zilker Park, the mood was driven by the music from such acts as Los Lobos, Wilco, Gillian Welch and Nickel Creek.

"It's a real laid-back atmosphere," said Rachel Carlson, a student at Southwest Texas State University. "There's just a lot of different sounds you can go to."

Blankets and collapsible chairs dotted the park's rolling landscape as people relaxed and listened to the acts. Some swayed to the music, among them Maryanne Chessy, who was in a crowd of around 2,000 people listening to Los Lobos perform on one of the festival's six stages.

"I like all the acts here," Chessy said. "I just moved up here from San Antonio in June, and one of the big draws was the music."

While long lines were a common complaint among many of the more than 40,000 people in attendance, the waits for transportation and entrance into the park were far shorter for some, largely based on timing and luck.

"The lineup is great, so it's worth it," said Glen Greer, who lives in New Mexico.

Organizers had expected 30,000. But they said they were quickly trying to make adjustments to accommodate the crowds. They also reported few emergencies. Tannifer Ayres, who was staffing the medical tent, said early in the day that more people had been treated for blisters on their feet than heat exhaustion.

As the afternoon wore on, about 30 fans had become overheated. City emergency medical personnel made four trips to the festival, the most serious for a woman complaining of heart problems and overheating. Saturday's high temperature was 92 degrees at Camp Mabry, just north of Zilker Park. Today's high is expected to be 93 degrees.

Big crowds want in

One of the earliest signs that the crowd would be bigger than expected came when two dozen bike racks quickly filled and another 10 were added just after noon. Another was the wait for bus service from parking garages near the Capitol. The service began at 11 a.m., but a line began forming around 9 a.m. "One-thirty was the worst time," said Lisa Suchlike of Capital Sports & Entertainment, which promoted the event. "It was like everybody decided to come at the same time."

Around that time, Michelle Hittner was stuck in a snaking line waiting to trade her tickets -- which she bought in May -- for a two-day wristband.

"A friend of mine who only bought her ticket yesterday is already inside," Hittner said. "Here I bought my tickets in May, and I'm still in line." Hittner waited 45 minutes before organizers dispersed volunteers to speed up the process.

"Since it is the first year, there are a few little kinks here, but the minute they came up, they were immediately taken care of," said Keith Hagan, publicist for the festival.

About the same time, a peeved Jeffre DeMouy stood in a line with about 500 people as he waited to pick up his tickets. At one point, organizers gave everyone in line a bottle of water to help beat the heat.

"There are no signs or no organized lines," said DeMouy, who is from New Orleans. "They are just stringing people along the grass." Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers could take a lesson or two from the people who run the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, DeMouy said. For the long-running Louisiana festival, there are multiple off-site locations where people can buy tickets and catch a shuttle to the event.

Hagan said organizers plan to make more adjustments today. "There's certainly going to be more people at the box office, and if there is a huge walk-up, we're going to be ready for it," he said. DeMouy was just as upset about the hour it took him to catch a shuttle from 14th Street and San Jacinto Boulevard. People reported waits as long as two hours, but Capital Metro officials say the longest wait was 45 minutes. Capital Metro increased a stable of 25 buses that started the day at the parking garages to 45 to accommodate riders.

Catching a taxi to the festival wasn't much easier. During the early afternoon, telephone lines for Austin taxicab companies were constantly busy, and getting through was as likely as finding the toy of the year the day before Christmas.

"The only time I have ever seen it like this is when we have the South by Southwest music festival," said Tommy Oliver, a driver for the American Yellow Checker Cab Co. "And even that's nothing like this." Inside the festival, queues for food and beer were just as frustrating for some people -- the wait for food was as long as 90 minutes around dinner time -- but most took it in stride.

"We've been in line for 50 minutes, but now we've gotten to be friends," said Cindy Ems of Houston, who was standing in line next to Joanna Garcia of Austin. "Hey, it's all relative," Ems said. "We're having a good time and we're about to get our food."

Fun for all ages

None of the kinks, however, kept most of the crowd from enjoying the music or the atmosphere. Some played frisbee or hackey sack; one man read a book under the shade of a tree.

People perused artisan booths stocked with necklaces, purses, colorful skirts and artwork.

Jason Clark and his wife, Marigold, enjoyed performers such as Gillian Welch, Wilco and Nickel Creek throughout the day.

The couple, who brought along their son, Jackson, said they liked the child-friendly environment.

"It's great that kids Jackson's age got in for free," Jason Clark said. "Kids can be just as big live music fans as adults. Jackson is under two, and he already know what he likes."

The milling masses were in constant motion, with the field getting a workout during competing 5 p.m. sets from Wilco and Patty Griffin. Others in the audience clung to precious shade, even if it meant hearing music overlap from two or even three stages.

When Griffin opened with "Chief," her red hair aflame in the sun, hundreds of fans chose to stay under trees, far away from the stage.

### ACL fest has a few limits, but lots of music

By Michael Corcoran and Joe Gross  
Sept. 30, 2002

"Limits" was the key word during the early hours of the first Austin City Limits Music Festival. Organizers were overwhelmed by a crush of concertgoers and shuttle buses and underwhelmed by food booths and ticket counters, which were in short supply.

But "music" eventually won out.

The Faithful Gospel Singers officially got the ball rolling at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, but it was local ensemble Grupo Fantasma, at 12:15 p.m., that drew the first substantial crowd of the day. After their high energy set ended, the vast majority of folks wandered off toward the siren sounds of God's voice, or at least the Blind Boys of Alabama's approximation thereof. Songs such as "Run on for a Long Time" and "Soldier in the Army of the Lord" provided a powerful call to spiritual arms.

Gillian Welch, playing on the Texas Stage at 3 p.m., faced a massive crowd. Acoustic folk always suffers in the transition from the coffeehouse to the festival stage, but Welch's time with T Bone Burnett's "Down From the Mountain" tour has added some gravitas to her farmgirl shtick. She and partner David Rawlings made beautiful music out of almost nothing.

Across the green at the same time, Los Lobos played a set that was heavy on songs off the new album, though the crowd saved its greatest enthusiasm for "Anselma," a song from their 1983 debut. The Los Angeles group had barely ended when fans of alt-country stars Wilco began gathering at the foot of the Feature Stage, even though there was an hour between acts. Coming off of what was described by many as a triumphant set at the Mercury the night before, Wilco took the stage to the screaming of thousands of fans. Opening with the aching ballad "Misunderstood," the band drew on material from all over their career, including "War on War," "Kamera" and "Jesus, etc." from this year's alterna-hit "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Frontman Jeff Tweedy's attempt to get the crowd to sing along with "California Stars" probably sounded amazing if you were one of the faithful near the stage, but it didn't really carry to those who were farther back.

Getting the audience going was the task of the Jam Stage, which didn't always draw the biggest crowd, but often drew the most energetic fans. An already overheated audience was more than willing to dance to the "live progressive breakbeat house" of Toronto's the New Deal at 4 p.m. Two hours later, on the same stage, Sound Tribe Sector 9 played a more amorphous brand of electronic jamming. But the band's intergalactic sandal funk achieved a mild sort of beauty by the end of their set. Or maybe it was just the sun going down around 7. It was a little tough to tell.

National acts such as Los Lobos and Wilco may have brought out more than 40,000 folks a day, but local bands benefited from the throngs. The Weary Boys' sped-up hoedowns and Bob Schneider's world-beatnik posturing got back as much energy from the masses as they put out.

Unfortunately, a wonderfully poignant set from Abra Moore was smothered by the rowdy guitar rock of Joe Bonamassa on the American Original Stage about 100 yards away.

For sheer surreality, however, you couldn't top the experience of standing in the midpoint of Saturday night's closing sets by the fest's biggest draws, Pat Green and the very different String Cheese Incident. Green's fiddler Brendon Anthony seemed to jam with Cheesehead Michael Kang's mandolin runs for a sound that really wasn't any worse than either group by itself.

Sunday, the fest's logistics improved, and the locals continued to win over new fans. Jane Bond's punky-tonk truths sounded a tad out of place at 12:15 p.m., but the crowd was more than ready for them, and she looked thrilled to be in front of hundreds of people, many of whom were likely seeing her for the first time. Fellow Austinite Kelly Willis, playing at almost the same time on the Texas Stage, drew the largest early crowd, though local country kicker Jack Ingram, who shares a fan base, if not a sound, with Willis, was playing at the Feature Stage.

At 2:30, Austinite Shawn Colvin looked mighty tiny on the Texas Stage all by herself. As with Welch, it was hard to imagine that her set was any different than the one she offers at an intimate club gig. But those looking for something more rousing could groove to College Station gospel/folk singer Ruthie Foster on the American Original Stage. Foster induced chills in the midafternoon swelter when she opened with "Woke Up This Morning," and had the packed audience on its feet by set's end.

Local troublemakers the Gourds played to their biggest crowd ever Sunday, as upward of 10,000 went delirious as the band pulled out its rarely used secret weapon:, a bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg's gangsta-rap track, "Gin & Juice." "Hey, Terry," singer Kevin Russell said, referring to " Austin City Limits" producer Lickona. "How 'bout booking us for the show?"

The American Original Stage, which may have suffered from being set back from much of the main traffic stream, contained some of the festival's most dynamic music, focusing on gospel and soul. (It was also tented, which certainly seemed like a blessing from the Almighty.) The Durden Family Singers, complete with five-part gospel harmony, performed a brilliant reimagining of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," changing the central figure from a stalker to Jesus.

Later in the afternoon at the same stage, Beto y los Fairlanes, decades-old vets of the Austin scene, tried to move the crowd with powerful, detailed salsa. But by that time the heat was beginning to take a serious toll, and there were few dancers who could answer the beat's call.

But the energy picked up again for Ryan Adams at 6:30 p.m. While Emmylou Harris held court at the Texas Stage with a folk trio, Adams took the Feature Stage in full rock band mode for much of his set, even banging out a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar." He also provided what might as well be the fest's epigraph with his very first line: "This is where the summer ends," he sang on "Nuclear," the first song from his brand-new album, "Demolition."

And indeed, the festival had a sweet, end-of-summer feel to it. None of the music was too heavy, too abrasive, or -- thanks to the massive amount of space the planners had to work with -- too loud. If you wanted to devote yourself to Caitlin Cary's heart-tugging alt-country or worship Patty Griffin's fiercely etched songs of heartbreak, you could do that. But if you just wanted to sit in one of roughly 8 billion folding chairs, throw a football or grab a $4 beer and talk to friends, you could do that, too.

Leaving the fest Sunday evening, as sacred steel player Robert Randolph all but levitated the Heritage Stage crowd with covers of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," Gretchen Wagner, 28, was exhausted, but "it's a good kind of exhausted." She was waiting for a friend near the exit; they were about to get on a bus to go back to their car. Wagner is new to Austin -- she's been here less than a month -- but thanks to the ACL fest, "I have a much better idea of what (local bands) I want to see." She was a little too tired to flip through her mental Rolodex for names -- "I'm keeping the schedule" -- but she remembered that she loved Foster. "I'm definitely coming back next year," said the recent Minnesota transplant.

In this maiden year, ACL's glitches ranged from the exasperating (90-minute waits for transportation and food) to the irritating (the screeching heavy metal played over the PA Saturday at the American Original tent between gospel sets). But by any account, the weekend was an unqualified success. At about 5 p.m. Saturday, with the crush contained, stage announcers were calling this, with some authority, "The First Annual" ACL Fest. It was an idea whose time had come. And even if, at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, it seemed as if everyone decided to come at the same time, the end result was worth the wait – whether you'd been waiting an hour and a half or your entire life to get in.

Taylor Johnson/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Aerial photo of Zilker Park during the 2002 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Kelly West/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Tift Merritt plays the 2002 ACL Fest.

A tale of two festivals

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 18, 2003

Sure, this year's Austin City Limits Music Festival is one day longer and dozens of bands beefier than last year's. But is it possible that ACL 2003 and ACL 2002 are actually the exact same festival? Below, we offer evidence that each act at this year's fest is a thinly disguised version of an act that played last year's. If you're still unconvinced, think about this: No one has ever seen the two festivals together in the same park.

Larry Kolvoord/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. at the 2003 festival.

R.E.M. . . . is this year's . . . Wilco

Bright Eyes . . . is this year's . . . Ryan Adams

Yo La Tengo . . . is this year's . . . Luna

Los Lonely Boys is this year's . . . W. C. Clark

Dwight Yoakam is this year's . . . Emmylou Harris

Liz Phair . . . is this year's . . . Eyes Adrift

Bruce Robison . . . is this year's. . . Kelly Willis

Steve Winwood . . . is this year's . . . Eric Johnson and Alien Love Child

String Cheese Incident . . . is this year's . . . String Cheese Incident

Brian K. Diggs/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Los Lonely Boys hit the stage for ACL Fest 2004.

### ACLove

The Austin City Limits Music Festival was all about what we do best.

By Patrick Beach  
Sept. 22, 2003

There was so much there it was easy to miss what wasn't there. No all-seeing blimp overhead in homage to almighty Bud. No depressingly common food like you can get at any strip mall in America. And, most surprisingly, few if any strenuously ostentatious displays about how we're keeping Austin weird, man. The sophomore edition of the Austin City Limits Music Festival was alarmingly chill, polite if not genteel. From Friday through Sunday, an estimated 65,000 people behaved much, much better than they typically do during afternoon crawl on Interstate 35.

"I think the concert reflects the best of Austin," Austin Park Police Sgt. Mike Hargett said Sunday night. "It's amazing how peaceful everybody has been."

Hargett reported one arrest Sunday for a traffic-related offense on the periphery of Zilker Park. Two people were reported arrested Friday, suspected of attempting to pass counterfeit tickets and a $20 bill. Hargett said local fixture Leslie Cochran was not arrested Saturday, as had been previously reported, but voluntarily accepted the offer of a ride away from the festival.

Hargett estimated the crowd at 45,000 to 55,000 daily; organizers said 60,000 people attended Sunday.

Music fans came from Iowa, New York and Japan to see 130 acts and et foods offered by nearly four dozen vendors. Beatle Bob, the Zelig of pop music, validated the worth of the event with his presence. Johnny Cash, that icon of American music, was mourned on the stage of what was to have been his daughter's set.

We walked and walked and walked. And stood and stood and stood. Got just a little wet in a light drizzle now and then on the latter two days. Bought a cowboy hat we looked stupid wearing but didn't care. Danced when we felt like it. Ate the jalapeno sausage with grilled onions; went back for another one. Celebrated ACL Fest II for what it wasn't, therefore tacitly validating our own taste and bottomless reservoir of cool, knowing that this was something that would have come together quite differently in any place other than here. Mostly what ACL Fest isn't is South by Southwest. SXSW is a capitulation. We greet those industry folks all Texas-friendly-like and tell them how to get to Las Manitas, but deep down we're as pleased as Parisians watching German soldiers marching down the Champs-Elysees. Then there's the aggressive scenemaking, the keeping of score by watching who's getting invited to what private parties. Instead, ACL Fest is where we happy inhabitants of the Greatest City Ever (trademark pending) go hang with our fellow Whovillians to listen to music we collectively agree is good.

This year, there was more and better everything: shuttle buses, although there was a wait, in fact an unpleasantly long one Friday night. Bands. Days. A substantial and most welcome upgrade in food quality. (You try asking for roasted squash at Ozzfest.) Los Lonely Boys nearly taking the roof off the gospel shed. Tift Merritt ruling Saturday afternoon, including making the inspired choice of Rosanne Cash's "Seven Year Ache" at the Johnny Cash tribute minutes after

finishing her own set. The singer for the Dandy Warhols telling the crowd he was desperate to replace his ropers and the crowd yelling, "What size? What size?" Lucinda Williams throwing a fit, because something would have been missing if she hadn't. Al Green screaming, "Tex-as." A lot. The Gourds closing with the Stones' "Miss You." A set by Robert Randolph and the Family Band that will be talked about for years. G. Love & Special Sauce closing with a song titled a word we can't use that way in the paper. And the band that basically broke alt-rock into the mainstream as a closer. Absolutely everything, not just the choir robes, about The Polyphonic Spree. A sand pit turned into a beach for kids to dig around, with face painting, balloon animals and the chance to make Arthur glasses nearby. A visit from Clifford the Big Red Dog, and no, that's not the beer talking.

Glitches remained. Organizers agreed the roughly 20 different kinds of security passes for staff, media and talent are confusing and out of hand. Some people had as many as six or seven passes on their lanyards and had to keep showing the guards the passes until they found one that worked. It was like back when you had to try your Diners Club card because the place didn't take Visa.

And we needed still more portable bathrooms.

Here's what passed for ugly at this relaxed gathering, an exchange Saturday between American-Statesman writer Brad Buchholz and a 50-ish guy wearing earplugs:

Earplug guy to Brad: "Who is that playing guitar up there?"

Brad: "That's Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter from Steely Dan." (And also the

Doobie Brothers, he might have added.)

Guy: "What?"

Brad: "That's Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter from Steely Dan!"

Guy: "WHAT?"

And so on. After the set:

Guy: "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Who did you say that was playing

guitar up there?"

Brad: "I don't know. Couldn't tell you."

But the prevailing sentiment was that of Mark Edwards, who got laid off from his Dell job and now works as an artist in Cedar Park and was selling his wares. He gave one of his hand-painted Texas flag cowboy hats to man-about-town Cochran on Sunday afternoon, wondered if that was the kind of advertising he might come to regret and then, speaking of both business and the scene, summed it up.

"I'm really happy," he said. "And it's not over yet."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603  
American-Statesman staff writer Brad Buchholz and Michael Corcoran contributed to this report.

### From Al to Ben and All the Bands in Between

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 25, 2003

**Steve Winwood  
** Capital Metro Stage, 7 p.m.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Steve Winwood in 2003.

Steve Winwood at ACL? Admittedly a bit of a head-scratcher.

But what can you say about a guy who first came to prominence as a skinny Englishman who could sing like Ray Charles? Whatever your feelings about his use of his gift at times \-- "Higher Love," anyone? -- it still counts for something, doesn't it?

Actually, some reports have suggested that the golden throat is starting to show signs of tarnish, but it certainly sounded fine Friday. Winwood and his band instantly grabbed an already pumped crowd (for Steve Winwood?) with an inspired version of the organ rock classic "I'm a Man" and remained in peak form through a set that drew from across his career. Older tracks such as Traffic's "Pearly Queen" swelled to extravagant, psychedelic heights. And VH1-lite fare such as "Back in the High Life Again," which evolved into a lengthy, tropical jam with Winwood on mandolin, was impressive.

The natural closer, the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'," sent the audience away on a high, but it was the torrid, show-stopping rendition of Traffic's epic signature tune, "Mr. Fantasy," that left me scratching my head yet again. Had I really just been rocked by Steve Winwood?

\-- Jeremy Egner

**Dwight Yoakam**  
Cingular Stage, 8:45 p.m.

You could almost hear several thousand hearts sink as one when Dwight Yoakam, the foremost honky-tonk revivalist of our time, walked out onto the Austin City Limits Festival stage with... a banjo player? Scary. But, as Yoakam explained from the stage (and he was in an unusually ebullient mood), multi-instrumentalist Keith Gaddis and he teamed up for a week's worth of acoustic-based dates, which evolved into a 45-city tour. After opening with "The Power of Love," Yoakam and Gaddis were joined by an acoustic bassist and a drummer behind a small trap set. The ensemble even spent some time sitting down, which seemed to please Yoakam's female fan contingent none at all.

Still, the stripped-down approach worked well enough to charm the masses out there in the dark. Indulging in what he called "an eclectic romp" over the past 18 or so years of his prolific career, Yoakam essayed everything from his own debut of "Guitars and Cadillacs" to a mountain string band cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me." And, of course, there was a tip of the Stetson to the late Johnny Cash: a reverent version of "Ring of Fire."

\-- John T. Davis

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Al Green plays the 2003 edition of the ACL Fest.

**Al Green**  
Capital Metro Stage, 8:45 p.m.

He strides on stage in a spotless white suit and gold chain. His band is large: guitar, bass, drums, horns, keyboard, dancers, the works. A fog machine is going. They look ready to burn. They look at their leader in his white suit as he surveys the massive crowd, cheering as he's introduced. "We have a legend in the house tonight," the announcer says.

At 9 p.m. on the Capital Metro stage, the Rev. Al Green turned to his band, said, "Let's go to work," and in front of thousands of tired ACL attendees, proved just why he is a legend with an explosive set that was just getting started when he had to leave at 10 p.m.

Opening with "Let's Get Married," closing with a thunderously groovy "Love and Happiness" (what a bass line!), parking a brilliant reading of "Amazing Grace," a few more hits, and plenty of preaching in between ("Texas, God kept us here for the good times!" ), Green rocked harder than any act that day. Though some complained that he spent too much time leading the crowd in singalongs, his voice hasn't lost a note, his dancing hasn't lost a step and his band sounded like it could vamp on the Lord's word all night long. "Don't let nobody fool you (and) tell you the Rev. Al Green retired," he shouted near the end of the set. Let's hope he can bring that groove back next year, and maybe we can give him a few more hours to let us come down and get saved.

\-- Joe Gross

**Johnny Cash tribute**  
Cingular Stage, 3 p.m.

When the word came down that Rosanne Cash had canceled her ACL gig after her father died, word quickly spread that the slot would be filled by a tribute to the great man. Saturday afternoon, word proved true.

Hosted by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, Austin country's toastmaster general, the set opened with the award-winning video to Johnny Cash's remarkable cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," projected onto the Cingular stage screen. The images of days gone by, juxtaposed with footage of Cash as he looked last year, were all the more powerful for their massive size.

Things didn't let up when the live music started. Benson and up-and-coming belter Tift Merritt glided through a strong version of "I Still Miss Someone" that set the tribute's casual vibe. Then Merritt announced she would pay tribute to Cash by "honoring his daughter" with a lovely cover of Rosanne's "Seven Year Ache." The ringleaders of the recent Southern rock revival showed up to pay tribute as well. At the start of his band's set, Drive-By Truckers' frontman Patterson Hood talked about envisioning June Carter Cash and Johnny sitting down to have dinner in heaven. Then guitarist Jason Isbell provided his own version of celestial music: a moving version of "I Walk The Line" that was marked by his plaintive vocals. Guitarist Mike Cooley followed with a deft reading of "Give My Love to Rose" and then Memphis' North Mississippi Allstars played acoustic versions of "Home of the Blues" and "Big River."

Dallas' Old 97's all but stole the show with "Let the Train Blow the Whistle," a song they covered on an early 7-inch single, and "Ring of Fire," which brought everyone back on stage for the tribute's most heartfelt moment.

"ACL" producer Terry Lickona introduced the final part of the tribute -- Johnny Cash's 1987 appearance on "Austin City Limits" shown on the stage's monitor -- by decrying "the plastic pop that passes for country" these days. About five minutes after the screening started, it began to rain. Which was somehow totally appropriate.

\-- Joe Gross

**Los Lobos**  
Capital Metro Stage, 3 p.m.

A light drizzle didn't scare many Los Lobos fans away from the festival's largest stage Saturday afternoon, where the band dipped deep into its 20-year-old back catalog for a ruggedly enjoyable set.

Getting into gear on "Don't Worry Baby," singer/guitarist Cesar Rosas belted out the chorus with a fire that belied his customary deadpan stance. The unflappable David Hidalgo followed a little later with "The Neighborhood," and listeners who had never seen the band may have wondered how such body-shaking music can be made by men who rarely move a muscle. Easy: The band knows its business so well that showmanship is superfluous. From the baritone sax riffs doubled with electric guitar to the explosive percussion on "Mas Y Mas," they reminded the crowd that the word "jam" didn't always mean "bloated and self-indulgent." Cumbias and other Spanish-language numbers peppered the performance, but the group put an Appalachian spin on "One Time One Night" by inviting Nickel Creek fiddler Sara Watkins to sit in.

The rain returned, but only as the band began the second song of its encore; predictably, Rosas and Hidalgo seemed unfazed.

\-- John DeFore

**Robert Randolph**  
Capital Metro Stage, 5 p.m.

Sensational pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph didn't need a radio DJ to introduce him. Saturday afternoon at Zilker Park, it would have been more fitting for the New Jersey flash to be preceded by flight attendants, pointing out what to do when the cabin pressure gets to be too much. Randolph and his Family Band took off like a jet airliner on "Going In the Right Direction" and the audience didn't touch down for an hour. Randolph, who stole the show at last year's inaugural ACL Fest, isn't afraid to share the stage. In the course of a mere hour, he called up Cody and Luther Dickinson from the North Mississippi Allstars to play "The March" and then traded solos with Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers, who looked genuinely surprised when his name was called, to jam for 20 minutes on Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Under Foot," which segued into "Purple Haze," which morphed into "Voodoo Chile." Wearing a Sammy Sosa jersey, the 26-year-old Randolph, who played his first concert just over three years ago, solidified his reputation as the most exciting young guitarist on the scene, with his slicing, soaring licks. He was raised in the House of God Church, a Pentecostal sect where the steel guitar is a sacrament used to whip congregants into a frenzy; seeing him apply the same mindset to a festival crowd was a thing of wonder. When Randolph and his hard-hitting band ended with the Sly Stone-ish "I Need For Love," they passed the mike through the crowd, the strained townie vocals adding to the communal groove.

Randolph in Austin in September: A tradition is born!

\-- Michael Corcoran

**G. Love & Special Sauce**  
Capital Metro Stage, 2:30 p.m.

A favorite at last year's ACL festival, the perpetually chilled out G. Love & Special Sauce brought their loose and funky backporch blooze to the Capital Metro Stage Sunday afternoon. G. Love (born Garrett Dutton) came out with alt-pop singer-songwriter Jack Johnson, and the pair kicked things off with a couple of pleasant acoustic strummers. It was after Johnson left, however, that the set really took off. Early audio problems -- the thick bass drowned out pretty much everything -- were solved before they became too much of a distraction, but there isn't much that could obscure G. Love. So many singer-songwriter types have copped Dutton's hip-hop-flavored, Anglo-scat style, it's easy to forget how fresh it can sound. A master showman, he dazzled on fire-breathing harmonica and guitar solos, and prowled the stage flaunting a flair for freestyle rhyming when he wasn't playing. One minute "Baby's Got Sauce," a slow, swinging tune "to the ladies," seemed to calm things down, the next, G. Love was scraping his guitar against his amp and using the mic as a slide for a feedback-drenched solo. Of course there can be too much of a good thing. The dreaded solo montage, which came complete with a Frampton-esque vocoder interlude, tested all but the most dedicated groovers (yo G., we only have an hour), but the still-irresistible "Cold Beverages" redeemed. The band closed with a country-fried ode to the feminine form. There's not much I can say about its vulgar charms other than to note that when it began, as if on cue, a sky ad for the Yellow Rose Cabaret came zooming into view. ACL: Feel the magic.

\-- Jeremy Egner

**Jack Johnson**  
Cingular Stage, 4:30 p.m.

Jack Johnson's ACL show was a whole lot like Austin: laid-back, ethnically and culturally diverse, left-of-center but not confrontational about it -- and way too crowded. When the dreamy surfer-turned-songster crooned, "Slow down, people, you're moving too fast," he must not have been paying attention to the unnavigable sea of fans before him, made up of everyone from coffeehouse-ers to Kappas to couples with kids.

Sandwiched on the schedule between Ben Harper and G. Love & Special Sauce, Johnson split the difference between them musically as well, breezing through a dozen of his characteristically innocuous roots-pop delights. G. Love himself even dropped by to collaborate on a low-key rendition of his own "Stepping Stone" (an appropriate choice, since it was GL&SS's recording of the Johnson-penned "Rodeo Clowns" that got Jack noticed in the first place). It was a lovely, love-filled affair: The guys smiled, the girls swooned, and the couples, well, did what couples do.

In fact, the only hitch in the show came at the very end, when Johnson left the stage five minutes ahead of schedule -- before an audience who knew he was five minutes ahead of schedule -- just so they'd bring him back out again.

A premeditated encore? Jack, Jack, Jack -- that's so not Austin.

\-- Josh Eells

**Ben Harper**  
Cingular Stage, 6:30 p.m.

Ben Harper, like Elvis and Chris Carrabba, is one of those musicians who inspire a following bordering on messianic. As a result, his faithful treat him the same way a high school teacher treats the smart kid: He doesn't always have to be perfect, he just has to not mess up. On Sunday night, Ben Harper did not mess up. He mixed old favorites like "Excuse Me Mr." and the requisite encore "Steal My Kisses" with newer favorites-to-be like "Diamonds on the Inside." He let his Innocent Criminals run wild, stretching the first four songs into 40 sweaty, jam-filled minutes. He brought out sacred steel guitarist Robert Randolph, one of the darlings of this year's festival, for a pas de deux on "Temporary Remedy." He served up an impassioned medley of "Sexual Healing" and "Let's Get It On" that was so steamy even Marvin might have blushed. And he did it all with a vivacity that blew even the clouds away (all, that is, except for the herbal-scented one that settled over the crowd during "Burn One Down").

Harper didn't need to be perfect. But he wasn't too far off.

\-- Josh Eells

Charles Attal went from flying by the seat of his pants  
to soaring among the nation's top promoters

By Michael Corcoran  
April 29, 2004

It's the phone call every promoter dreads: an agent on the other end of the line, stammering, apologizing and then basically snatching away $25,000 in the course of a minute. "They canceled!" Charles Attal yells to the next room.

His assistant Amy Corbin is at Attal's office door in, oh, about half a second. She doesn't need to ask which act won't show. A week earlier, it was announced that Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy had gone into rehab for an addiction to prescription drugs. But Attal had added 28 days to the date Tweedy had entered treatment and that still left a couple days before the two sell-out shows at Stubb's.

On April 14, however, the band decided to begin its tour in May, so the April 24 and 25 dates at Stubb's were scrubbed. That's 4,000 refunds.

"If that happened five years ago, I would've put my fist through the wall," says Attal. "I'd be down at the liquor store buying the biggest bottle of booze they had. But I've learned to roll with the punches. The agent will make it up to us. The band will make it up to us. It all balances out in the end."

Such is the roller coaster ride of the concert promotion business. Tim O'Connor of Direct Events has said that anyone who isn't ready to put all their money in a suitcase and throw it off the tallest building in town isn't cut out for the promoter's life. Attal likens the job to playing blackjack 12 hours a day.

But if that's the case, this 36-year-old native Austinite of Lebanese descent has been beating the house. He's not only a partner in the instantly successful Austin City Limits Music Festival, which is expected to bring more than 150,000 fans to Zilker Park Sept. 17-19, but also the king of clubs, booking Stubb's, which he co-owns, the Parish and La Zona Rosa (in conjunction with O'Connor), as well as Trees and the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. The next frontier is Houston, where Attal has been talking to the Messina Group about partnering upon shows.

"Charles has so much flexibility with all his various venues," says William Morris agent Kirk Sommer. "If you've got a baby act, he's got a 300-capacity club (Stubb's indoors). But he can also put you in a 1,200-capacity room, a 2,000-seater or even bigger than that." Attal has become a one-stop shop for agents booking Texas shows, especially since expanding to Dallas three years ago. Getting an act from New Orleans to Oklahoma has never been so painless.

According to Pollstar magazine figures for 2003, Charles Attal Management -- he kept the name incorporated during a brief stint managing the Damnations -- was the No. 24 top grossing promoter in the country, with ticket sales of $7.43 million. In the total number of shows booked -- more than 550 -- Attal is in the Top 5.

Tossing a copy of Pollstar magazine on the desk of his office in a nondescript East Austin warehouse (the letters on the front door say "Bruce Pie Co."), Attal has to laugh at his status as a top concert promoter. Just eight years ago, when Stubb's hosted the platinum-selling Fugees at SXSW, Attal thought the name was pronounced "Fudgies."

He was beyond green. He probably thought a contract rider was a guy on a bike who delivered it.

To see Attal work the agents on a recent afternoon -- "What are you smoking?" he asks one after hearing a high asking price -- is to marvel at just how comfortable this former rare book auctioneer (his father is noted antique appraiser Lucky Attal) has grown in the promoter role.

But not everyone has been cheering Attal's ascent. "It's obvious that he's out to be some big music mogul," says Graham Williams, who books and manages rival club Emo's. "I was booking shows my senior year in high school. Attal was probably trying to decide which fraternity to pledge to when he was a senior." Williams says Attal is so aggressive in booking his venues that "he'll steal an act from Emo's, even though he knows he'll lose money."

That's a charge Attal calls ridiculous. As for his college frat life, Attal says "that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm doing now."

A guitarist in the dreadful punk rock band Clown Meat, Attal was drafted as Stubb's booker in 1995 when a group of friends laid plans for the barbecue joint/concert amphitheater. "They figured since I was in a band, I knew the music business," Attal says.

When Stubb's officially opened a year after the SXSW Fugees show, Attal found that national acts were skeptical of playing an unproven venue. "I wanted to book Cheap Trick and they said, 'We're not playing some barbecue joint,' " Attal recalls. "I flew to New York to plead my case and the agent finally said, 'OK, but if you blow this one, you'll never get another show from us.' " Almost 2,000 people showed up to see Cheap Trick and the band declared the show their best gig of the year. Stubb's was on the map.

But Attal was in such a rush to establish his venue, he overbid for almost every show that first season and lost money repeatedly. "Every other club owner in town hated me," Attal says. "They said I was causing a bidding war and driving up prices. Now I realize that they were absolutely right, but at the time I just had to have every big show. If I lost a concert (to another promoter) I'd take it personally."

Such conceit almost sank Stubb's in its second year when Attal paid too much for a George Clinton show and lost almost $15,000. "I didn't know how close we were to closing," says Attal, who took tickets and ran sound to save money. "My partners told me afterward, when things got back on track."

Eventually Attal earned the respect of top agents. "Wolfie gets it," says Sommer, using the nickname adopted by agents when word got out Attal's real first name is Wolfred. "He understands what we need and he delivers every time." Sommer recalls the time he called Attal at home at 10 p.m. because a client playing Stubb's that night needed a DVD player for its act. "Charles unplugged his own DVD and took it down to the club. I mean, he bitched every minute of the way, but he and his staff always do what needs to be done."

Attal's office receives 400 to 500 calls a day and he says he gets at least a dozen every night at home or on his cell phone. But Attal clearly loves to banter with agents, like the one from William Morris who calls to complain about his client's noon performance slot at the upcoming ACL Fest. "She's gonna be huge by then and you've got her playing while the roosters are still crowing," the agent huffs. Corbin does some research and finds that, indeed, the act's attendance numbers have vaulted in recent weeks and she's been moving a ton of CDs at Waterloo, so Attal moves her on the master board to 3:30 p.m. "Is the unfortunate one in?" Attal says, when he calls to give the agent the good news. When the receptionist tells Attal the agent will have to call him back, Attal says, "Well, just give him a message. We've had to scratch Mindy Smith from the festival." Attal then hangs up, with a big smile. The phone rings six seconds later.

"I was just (messing) with you, man," Attal says to Smith's agent. "It's the only way I can get you to return my calls."

Having agents promptly calling him back has not been much of a problem in recent years, but Attal found that he had to practically start all over again when he tried to break into the Dallas market in 2001. "We do more urban shows in Dallas than anybody else," Attal says, "but the first one was tough." Attal had booked Lucy Pearl, featuring members of Tony! Toni! Tone!, at the Gypsy Tea Room and two days before the show they had sold exactly one ticket. "The big urban radio station didn't know who we were. They wouldn't even announce the show or give away free tickets." Attal and company kept hammering away at the station and finally convinced them that Charles Attal Management was legit. The station announced the show and it sold out in two days.

After his first-year fumbles, Attal has learned some tricks of the trade, such as papering the house when a show is tanking. Last year, a David Lee Roth show that needed to sell 1,500 tickets to break even had sold less than 600 a day before showtime, so Corbin and a group of friends went all over town, giving away free tickets at hair salons, ice cream shops, record stores and all the rock radio stations. When more than 1,000 freebies were redeemed, the bar did its best non-SXSW business of the year and the show, a potential $10,000 loser, ended up breaking even.

"The stress of the concert business is unbelievable," Attal says. And potentially dangerous, as he found out four years ago when he collapsed in his Los Angeles hotel room while on an agent-courting trip. When he returned home and described his symptoms to his mother, she took him to the hospital right away. He ended up spending five days in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. He'd lost a third of his blood.

"That was my wake-up call," says Attal, who's learned to lean heavily on Corbin who, in the past year, has become his live-in girlfriend. ("I'm the boss at the office," he says. "She's the boss at home.") Corbin started working for him five years ago out of a spare bedroom in a house in Travis Heights; today they rule over a budding concert empire that includes booking one of the Top 5 music festivals of the country.

"I didn't even know I was going to be booking the ACL Fest until the day of the first press conference (in April 2002)," Attal says. "I had shared an office with Charlie Jones and we'd become friends," he says of the Capital Sports & Entertainment concert division head. "After the press conference he said, 'Well, what do you think? Do you want to book this thing?' "

Where the lead time for booking the ACL Fest is currently 10 months before the event, Attal booked it all in two months the inaugural year. "I called in every favor I had," he says. "Being aligned with the TV show helped. But, still, no one really knew what to expect back in May 2002."

The concert industry was still reeling from the effects of 9/11, with ticket sales down 20 percent across the board, Attal says. But the first ACL Fest was an unqualified success. The break-even point was 30,000 fans each day; 42,000 showed up the first day and about 35,000 the next.

On the first day, the fest was too successful. Long waits for shuttle buses, wristbands and concessions had hundreds of fans fuming. But by the end of that first fest, almost everyone agreed that a new Austin live music tradition had been born.

There was a moment during that first ACL Fest when it all sank in for Attal. He was standing with his parents at the side of the stage during Robert Randolph's scorching set on the final night. Attal had been telling everyone they just had to see this great pedal steel guitarist and Randolph had come even better than advertised. A pre-teen girl, moved by the music, danced with abandon behind the drum riser and the level of intensity just kept getting higher and higher.

Lucky Attal surveyed the scene and started to say something to his son, but instead just took a deep breath and gestured out to the ecstatic crowd, which stretched out as far as you could see from the stage. "You did this," Lucky Attal seemed to want to say, but, seeing the look of satisfaction on his son's face, he didn't have to.

Kelly West/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Elvis Costello at ACL Fest 2004.

### The Austin City Limits Music Festival

All we want for your third birthday is to push those city limits

By Joe Gross  
Sept. 16, 2004

Dear Austin City Limits Music Festival,

Congratulations on reaching your third birthday -- and stretching out your musical belt a little. I thought about making a cake, but feeding 75,000 people seemed a little outside of my baking skills. There's a multiplication-of-barbecue-sandwiches-and-fishes joke in there, but we'll skip it.

In wedding terms, this is your leather anniversary. Do you need a new pair of boots, maybe with the ACL logo on them somewhere? Or does Terry Lickona already have a pair like that?

So what does this age mean? In festival years, does this mean you're old enough to drink? To vote?

I guess you could have done the former two years ago, when only 40,000 people a day showed up as opposed to the 75,000 you're expecting tomorrow. Seventy-Five. Thousand. When it's supposed to be 95 degrees all day. Sorry if I keep repeating it, I'm just trying to picture the beer lines around 2 p.m. And the W.C. lines an hour later. Yikes.

That's what's on everyone's mind these days (voting, not W.C.s). I wonder how many people will log onto www.electoral-vote.com, fingers crossed, when they go to check their e-mail at the laptop tent.

This is Austin after all, progressive enclave in the middle of the Texas formerly known as a republic. And just as Texas has never really gotten over being its own nation, Austin has never really gotten over being its free-thinking, mellow conscience. Austin prides itself on being not quite like anyplace else in the United States. People keep moving here, and it's not because rents are going down.

A lot of folks come here for the life- style. It's not the hustle and bustle of a New York or Los Angeles, nor the small-town separatism of a Luckenbach or a Woodstock. It's in the middle. A university city that ensures an open mind and a state capital that cinches that at least someone, somewhere is wearing a tie and triangulating the middle.

Which is what the Austin City Limits Music Festival is all about: the middle. Not too cold, not too hot. Not too radical, not too pop (except for Sheryl Crow, but she's the exception to a lot of rules, and, thanks to boyfriend Lance Armstrong, almost a local). Music for a town that doesn't like to offend anyone. Music that says "Can't we all just get along?" ACL fest: where the musical middlebrow, mid-list artists go to celebrate the autumn solstice.

This isn't as much a critique of the folks that book this thing as you might think. Frankly, the talent-buyers at Charles Attal Management have an absurdly difficult job -- and they do it remarkably well. They have to take into account the aesthetic reach of the " Austin City Limits" television show itself, and balance that with what they think Austinites will come out to see.

It's a full-time, 12-months-a-year job, and a miracle that Attal and company pull off with such skill and verve. They do it all with a remarkably low ticket price. And let's not forget how cool it is having this thing in the center of town, rather than in some field somewhere out past Buda.

Perhaps because this year's fest was marketed to folks outside Texas, its aesthetic reach seems wider than in years past:

* Hip-hop, without a doubt the most important music of our era, makes an appearance with a set from the Roots.

* Cat Power, the folky, flaky indie artist also known as Chan Marshall, is a remarkable songwriter and artist known for her spotty live shows, the sort of high-strung affairs that occasionally end without much of a set at all (but hey, if we can live through Lucinda Williams' meltdown last year, we can live through anything).

* Dashboard Confessional is at the forefront of ultra-earnest emo rock.

* There seems to be a great deal of buzz about Rose Hill Drive, whose power trio excursions are rumored to transcend their jam band categorization.

* And, of course, there's the Pixies, who, for good or ill, all but invented what the teeming masses think of as alternative rock. No wonder they are the year's biggest reunion story. These are all very good signs that you're slowly expanding beyond the triple-A format roots.

But there's so much more room to grow and explore. Pollstar may compare you to Seattle's Bumbershoot, but the 'Shoot has far more indie punk (Against Me) and hip-hop (Nas) than you have. All of this modernity coexists quite peacefully with the "Gatemouth" Browns and the Wailers. Coachella, a festival out in the California desert, moves from the Rapture to Stereolab to Dizzee Rascal and the Austinites currently known as And You will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

This isn't to suggest populist headliners should be replaced with obscure artists and difficult music, that Scandinavian death metal should replace Sheryl Crow. Far from it. If you have popular headliners, the kind that can draw tens of thousands on their own (former Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio), this means you have more room to play with the earlier slots.

Nor is it to suggest that the ACL fest become like all the other festivals. But Austinites are an amazingly catholic bunch, proud of their eclecticism. Don't underestimate them. They can take a bit of a challenge. They embrace one.

To kick off the show, how about some avant-garde jazz at noon from an improvisational legend, such as band leader and MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark? Some electronic music, such as Kid 606 in the early afternoon? Some progressive folk from a Devendra Banhart? Some underground hip-hop on a small stage? (Better still, some local hip-hop on the Austin Ventures stage; we're not just a city of singer-songwriters). Some noisy, psychedelic rock, such as Comets on Fire or Houston's own Rusted Shut, would not be out of line. A little punk here and there wouldn't kill anyone.

Of course this is the city of Americana and cosmic cowboys and Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray and Los Lonely Boys. But it's also the city of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators and the Big Boys and the Butthole Surfers. There should be risk here and there. Meaning should be at stake now and again. Something should be up for grabs.

Admittedly, some of the above artists might smack of pure hipsterism. Besides, the music at ACL already has all of the authenticity it needs.

Ah, yes, authenticity. That's what these three days are about, right? Separating out the art from the commerce, the musical wheat from the pop chaff, the sincere from the cynical.

Austinites -- and most of the artists, for that matter -- are smart enough to know that the authenticity ACL preaches is as much of a cultural construction as hip-hop's gangsta pose or metal's anger. What chafes isn't the middle-brow nature of the festival but the sanctimony that comes with it. If there's any way we can avoid having organizers come onstage and talk about how against-the-grain we all are for coming to this show, congratulating us for rejecting all that is pop and transient and supposedly flash over substance, that would be great.

Because you can't have it both ways. You can't pat yourself (or us) on the back for avoiding cynical popism while booking (or attending) a festival that rarely challenges Austin's view of itself. We criticize because we love. We love this town; we love what it has meant and what it could mean. We love the fact that there's a festival where we can even entertain these ideas, that we have a population who can embrace so much.

You should be very proud of yourself, ACL. In three short years, you've built a big, popular festival out of nothing. Now it should be the envy of all those other festivals. Now it's time to explore the margins and push those city limits.

Happy birthday. Here's to many, many more.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926

### For 70,000 music fans, a sweaty scene at Zilker

By Jean Scheidnes  
Sept. 18, 2004

Austin, are you ready to ROCK? Then get set to SWEAT. If you're heading to Zilker Park for the second and third days of the Austin City Limits Music Festival, expect to be more than a little moist by the time you get through the gates. Embrace your sweat. Watch it trickle down your shins.

And if you should suddenly stop sweating, go to the medical tent. Afternoon temperatures of almost 100 degrees did not deter the 70,000 fans who poured onto the festival grounds long before the comparative cool of dusk. Crowd-pleasing acts on Friday's bill included local heartthrob Bob Schneider, gospel greats the Blind Boys of Alabama and Louisiana sleeper hit Marc Broussard.

Early birds staked their claim to patches of tree-shaded grass, until they looked like castaways clinging to atolls for dear life. Optimists put blankets down on the perimeters to wait for late-day shade. Those less fortunate milled around under umbrellas.

"Heat is going to be the big issue this year," said Tannifer Ayres of the festival's emergency action team. Watch for dizziness, nausea, disorientation, she said. "For every beer you drink, have a water. I can't stress enough . . . alcohol is not a hydrator." Police said 100 people had been treated for heat-related illness at the medical tent. Two were transported to the hospital with heat exhaustion or possible heat stroke. Two others went for treatment of a seizure and an ankle injury.

The medical staff and festival organizers were doing an "excellent job" of ensuring that people had enough water and had their needs met, said Lt. Randy Pasley of the Austin Police Department. No arrests were made, police said.

"The crowd has been magnificent so far," he said.

Three-day passes are sold out, but single-day passes are still available for today and Sunday.

The festival has also extended its influence far beyond the borders of Zilker Park. It was evident in the impenetrable snarl of traffic around Waterloo Park, where loads of festival-goers departed in shuttle buses every few minutes.

It also was evident in the ocean of bicycles parked near Barton Springs Pool and the thick line of shorts-and-sandals clad people who swarmed Friday afternoon down Barton Springs Road, trying to reach what has become one of the city's musical meccas.

Inside the festival, last year's long bathroom lines had diminished considerably. Festival organizers had also redesigned the food court to make it more accessible.

Oppressive heat did not deter Ismael Retana, who said he moved to Austin largely because of the festival, nor others who poured into Zilker Park and hooted for their favorite bands. Last year, Retana, 25, quit his job rather than miss the festival. This year, there's no need, since he doesn't happen to have a job.

Attendees generally expressed pleasure with how smoothly the festival was running, and how laid-back the attitudes were. (You can take your beer anywhere!) Although drinking, people-watching and shopping were side attractions, the more than 130 acts were the main events.

"I saw the lineup, and I really thought it was a joke," marveled Jenny Adrich, 27, from Seattle. "All my favorite bands in one place, for so cheap."

Adrich and two friends said they were very pleased at the prices, especially for beer and water. At $2 for a bottle of water, no one was getting gouged. All three stated their intentions to buy one of those straw cowboy hats. Yes, the hats are back from last year's fest, and they've been multiplying all day. At the SoCo Art Market, Texas Headwear is doing very brisk business in them, for $15 a pop. But the hottest accessory is a battery-operated, hand-held misting fan being distributed by SBC Corp.

To get one, you first must obtain a promotional coupon from an SBC representative in the park, and then exchange it for a fan at the SBC tent. While you're at it, you can check your e-mail, watch golf on TV, anything to be inside for a few blessed minutes.

If you can't score an SBC mister, another smart-looking accessory is a paper fan, as is an umbrella, opened for shade, sweet shade. There are tight masses of people huddled under any patch of shade and in front of the large mist machines.

Why not schedule the fest in comparatively cooler October? Festival officials say they don't want to go head-to-head with Longhorn football weekends, and the Horns have a bye week.

In front of the stages, there's tension building between the chair people and the standers. The chair people feel that by lugging a chair around all day, they've earned the right to an unobstructed view. The standers think the chair people need to get over it; this is a festival.

It's a little surprising that there's no restriction on bringing 18-foot poles into the festival, but that's what a lot of groups have done, so they can find one another. Atop the poles are all manner of flags, piatas, windsocks, balloons and paper lanterns. The freakiest among them have scarecrows that, dressed in "Keep Austin Weird" tees, resemble Austin hippies about to be burned in effigy.

The most surreal sight has to be "the beach," a sandlot with beach umbrellas and Adirondack chairs. Two biker dudes sat there with their boots on, smoking cigars and keeping watch over a stroller. The longest lines -- and they're only seven or eight-people deep -- are for snow cones and smoothies.

As the day goes on, fewer and fewer people are wearing shirts. Women are sporting bikini tops or improvising them out of rolled up tank tops. Men are sporting big, naked beer bellies. Naturally, this is a casual affair, even by Austin standards. Chris Leroy, 24, of San Francisco proudly sported his Red Dog T-shirt, khaki shorts and flip-flops.

"Today is church, and this is my Sunday best," Chris Leroy said. Anita Powell and Joe Gross contributed to this report.

### ACL Music Fest Day 2: Bigger, hotter

About 75,000 people get in and get along  
as festival sells out for the first time

By Melissa Ludwig  
Sept. 19, 2004

What would you do if a hurricane forced you to evacuate your town? Take an 18-hour road trip to the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and charge it your parents, of course. That's what Mike Kuczynski and eight of his friends from Tulane University did when they heard Hurricane Ivan might be headed to New Orleans.

"My dad told me to put it all on the card," said Kuczynski, 21. Like many at this year's festival, the group ran into an unexpected snag when, for the first time in ACL's brief history, the show sold out all 75,000 tickets for Saturday, and a few of the guys didn't have any.

"How do you sell out a festival?" said 22-year-old Will Seemann, who thought he wouldn't have any problems buying a ticket Saturday. "I didn't even think twice about it. I guess it's really blown up."

Seemann, who ended up scoring a ticket, wasn't the only one scouring the crowd for extras Saturday afternoon. Scalpers were doing brisk business, but the demand far outweighed the supply.

Kuczynski groused that he saw people trying to sell $40 one-day tickets for $80 or $100.

Inside the gates, everything about Saturday's show was stepped up a notch from Friday. The heat seemed a little hotter, the crowd a little thicker and the lines for everything from food to cash machines a little bit longer.

By 8 p.m., 65 festival-goers had been treated for heat-related illness, 17 for breathing problems and 113 for minor cuts and blisters. Five had been taken to the hospital, one with an elbow fracture and the other with a head injury.

"We've just been slammed with heat," said Tannifer Ayres of the Southwest Emergency Action Team. "And a ridiculous amount of Band-Aids."

For those on cell phones trying to find friends, the airwaves were jammed with signals, and calls disappeared into thin air. Even if cellular contact was made, there was no guarantee of finding anyone in the sea of people.

As for the music -- the reason for the crowds \-- critics and fans agreed that this ACL Fest has so far been a marvel of booking and scheduling, mixing acts on the cusp of making it, such as Ray LaMontagne, Donavon Frankenreiter and the Killers, with old KGSR faves and groove-oriented jambands.

Word got to top dogs Charles Attal and Charlie Jones at 1 p.m. that Saturday's concert had officially sold out, as they were standing in the wings during the Soundtrack of Our Lives set. After high fives all around, the duo left for the traditional tequila shots that festival organizer Capital Sports & Entertainment's principals chug to mark such momentous occasions.

Tickets were still available for today.

Despite the increased crowds, festival-goers were well-behaved, said Lt. Randy Pasley of the Austin Police Department. No arrests had been made by 10:30 p.m.

Early in the day, one of the longest lines threaded up to the Texas Headgear store. The sun had created a bull market for straw cowboy hats.

"Last year we had two stalls," Texas Headgear owner Troy Wright said. "This year I only have one. But on Friday we did 33 percent more business than last year's two stalls combined."

Late Friday night, there was mass confusion at the cab staging area, with reports of 2 1/2-hour waits for a taxi.

Jones, the promoter, said the performance times of the night's headliners are often staggered by about 15 minutes so that everyone doesn't leave at the same time. So he was a little worried when the lines for shuttle buses stretched about a quarter-mile down Barton Springs Road on Friday at the 10 p.m. curfew.

"In 45 minutes, everyone was gone," he said. "The buses worked great this year." Saturday afternoon, Jones said he was pleased with how (relatively) smoothly everything seemed to be going. "With more people come more expectations," he said, "and more work."

Jeff McAdams and Rod Napier decided not to deal with the crowds. The two former Air Force buddies sat outside the festival in folding chairs dispensing free advice and taking pictures of people next to a giant inflatable polar bear.

"We're doing our part to keep Austin weird," Napier said. Of those who wandered up to take advantage of the "Free Advice" sign, most wanted to know how to get a ticket or a date.

Clint Jarrett, a scruffy-faced 23-year-old from Houston, wanted some guidance with the latter.

Napier had a ready answer: "Shave and be confident."

Michael Corcoran and Joe Gross contributed to this report.

### The Austin City Limits Music Festival: Dispatches From the Front

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 23, 2004

Solomon Burke

It didn't take long at all: By midway through the first day, ACL had topped -- by a wide, wide margin -- the high water mark of last year's soul offerings, Al Green.

Solomon Burke may not have quite the name recognition of Green, but unlike Mr. "Let's Stay Together" (who last year was too focused on loving up the crowd to croon) Burke came to sing. He used the full hour, and left the stage begging, "Please, next time give me more time."

Burke is a soul giant figuratively and literally; the very large man needed a wheelchair to get on and off stage, and held court from a 6-foot gilt throne. But he made a liar of any high-school choir teacher who claimed that you can't sing well while seated: Burke was in fantastic voice on songs such as "Spanish Harlem" and Tom Waits' "Diamond in Your Mind."

The repertoire was medley-heavy -- he paid tribute to "Soul Clan" members such as Otis Redding and Ben E. King in one long string – but Burke was not one to start a chorus and let the crowd sing the rest. He sang a third of his fantastic comeback album "Don't Give Up On Me" and only really dipped into his past once, with a fast, New Orleans-inflected version of his old hit "Cry to Me." But from new covers to old chestnuts, everything was invested with passion. Before leaving the stage, Burke made what will surely be the most unexpected political statement of the weekend. After introducing "Don't Give Up On Me" with a shout-out to those suffering disease and hardship worldwide, he exhorted the crowd: "Come November second, you're the ones that will make the difference -- please make a change." The crowd went wild with approval and laughed when Burke derisively attributed some of the song's lyrics -- "it's always tomorrow" -- to George Bush. Burke claimed it had been 25 years since his last Texas appearance; judging from his performance and the reception this crowd gave him, he'd do well to return very soon.

\-- John DeFore

**Franz Ferdinand  
** Friday 8 p.m. Bank Of America Stage

Musical revival movements don't usually last very long – remember those Gap ads with all the swing dancers, kids? -- but they sure get a lot of attention while they're with us. Glasgow, Scotland's, Franz Ferdinand are the standard-bearers of the return of post-punk, the late-'70s subgenre that wedded punk's brutal sense of economy and just as brutal sense of politics to the rhythms of funk and disco and reggae. And their playing does their predecessors proud; they're clean and tight and understand the uses of chicken-scratch guitar as well as anyone who ever hailed from Scotland.

They're popular, too. ACL placed the band at a mid-sized stage, and it really wasn't enough to satisfy the throngs who showed up for their 8 p.m. set. This band needed bigger amps; 100 or so yards from the stage, the sound had almost no presence -- a real problem given that the audience extended out three or four times farther back than that.

On record, Franz Ferdinand make their shtick work -- they're tuneful and energetic enough to make you forget, at least for a moment, that it is shtick. And in a club, they can, reportedly, rock your world.

But out in the open, with not enough ampage and no walls to send those angular rhythms bouncing off each other, the music just kind of drifted off from the stage. At which point you noticed how little there is going on in the songs. The music may be post-punk, but the lyrics are barely post-adolescent -- these guys have little more on their minds than girls who won't pay any attention to them (a situation that presumably rectified itself when they started playing in a world-famous rock band).

The result is music that's expert but that has forgotten -- if it ever knew -- the sense of adventure and daring that fueled the original post-punk wave. Standing next to me at the show was a kid trying to photograph the band with his cell phone. But he kept getting the same error message over and over again: "Not enough memory for higher resolution."

Exactly.

\-- Jeff Salamon

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Black Francis of The Pixies performs at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, 2004.

**The Pixies**  
Saturday, 8:45 p.m., Cingular Stage

"It's the Pixies!" squealed one woman in the middle of "Come On Pilgrim," the band's second song of the night.

Yes, it was the Pixies -- or, at least, an acceptable simulation. All four founding members -- Black Francis, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering -- were there, and so were many of the best Pixies songs. (Though unsurprisingly -- or is that perversely? -- not their biggest hit: "Here Comes Your Man.")

What it wasn't was "The Pixies" -- that is, the band as an idea, as a ferocious challenge to (and extension) of pop and rock traditions. This was, instead, a band whose once-radical stop/start, loud/soft, fast/slow revision of post-rock has long since been rendered normative by indie-rockers high and low (most famously, Nirvana).

Which means, reunited after 12 years apart, the Pixies are working a very young end of the oldies circuit. Saturday night's 8:45 closing set featured no new material, just 21 songs in 60 minutes, delivered at a brisk pace of just under three minutes apiece. "Bone Machine," "Subbacultcha," "Wave of Mutilation," "Crackity Jones," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Debaser," "Velouria" and 13 others were performed in brisk succession, with no yapping in between. Black Francis sounded in good voice, and Santiago seemed to be tossing off his junky lead guitar lines with the usual flair. But it wasn't always easy to tell; the sound was atrocious, marred one moment by nasty feedback and the next by an odd muffling that made a hash of the band's extreme dynamics. (Apparently Modest Mouse had even worse problems on the same stage earlier in the day.)

The funny thing is, the Pixies' songs are so sturdily and simply built that it would take a lot more than all this to undo them. Likewise the band's fan base. The huge -- and I mean huge -- audience gathered in front of the Cingular Stage came to hear some familiar songs, see some familiar (if older) faces and yell, "It's the Pixies!" one more time.

Saturday night, they got to do all three.

\-- Jeff Salamon

**Wilco**  
Sunday, 6:30 p.m., SBC Stage

With a brilliantly noisy, magic-hour set on Sunday, Wilco re-proved themselves one of America's greatest rock bands. Not one of the greatest alt-country bands.

Not pop bands. Not post-9/11, fuzzy, obtuse, art-balladeering bands. One of the greatest rock bands, with all of the complexity, volume and nerves the title demands.

The biggest shot in the arm, as one of their songs goes, has been the addition of veteran avant-garde guitarist Nels Cline. Their most recent album, "A Ghost is Born," doesn't feature Cline, and this is a shame. Based on his often manic, feedback-soaked performance, he added wail and spine to singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy's occasionally amorphous melodies. The piano pounds that sounded weak and flailing on the album version of "At Least That's What You Said" turned into car crashes when Cline slammed into them. Cline's slide guitar added texture and verve to the moving "Jesus Etc." while the Calexico horn section did the same to "I'm The Man Who Loves You."

But the news was the noise. Again and again, tunes devolved into a glorious roar. "Poor Places" crashed into a symphony of feedback before charging to "Spiders," the chugging motorik monster from "A Ghost . . ." The normally unflappable Glenn Kotche couldn't quite decide how fast "Spiders" was supposed to be, but nobody cared. It was a triumphant set from a band that many had thought were incapable of reinventing themselves. As they head toward middle age, Wilco dreams of noise. Who knew?

\-- Joe Gross

**The Roots**  
Sunday, 2:30 p.m., SBC Stage

So why aren't there more hip-hop bands at ACL? Because there aren't many more hip-hop bands, period.

In a genre filled with DJs and software manipulators, Philadelphia's The Roots are the rare hip-hop act with as much instrumental virtuosity as anyone else at this no-DJ, no-drum machine, no-samples festival. Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson is the greatest jazz drummer in the history of hip-hop, and guitarist Kirk Douglas gave old Funkadelic fans a sturdy dose of Eddie Hazel guitar rave-up that all but asked the musical question, "Who says a rap band can't play rock?"

Moving a sweaty crowd of young'uns who had their hand fans working overtime, The Roots offered an hour of music with almost no breaks between songs. There were plenty of Roots tunes, but also snippets of Santana's "Black Magic Woman," Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "White Lines" and the Incredible Bongo Band's canonic "Apache" breakbeat.

The groove got a bit cluttered at times, and Black Thought, though an energetic frontman with a gift for connecting with the audience, doesn't vary his flow enough to shoulder the burden of an entire set. And a live version of the band's radio-friendly 2002 collaboration with Cody Chesnutt, "The Seed (2.0)," was, minus Chesnutt, somewhat dutiful -- the melody was de-emphasized, the 4/4 beat pushed way up in the mix, and Douglas' vocals almost desperate.

Still, this was as fun a party as ACL had on offer; what other hip-hop act -- heck, who else, period -- would build an all-out guitar-jam on top of the chord progression of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4"?

\-- Jeff Salamon

### ACL Fest's big albatross

By Michael Corcoran  
Sept. 23, 2004

It's gotten too big, too soon. In its third year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival was bursting at the seams with crowds of 70,000 to 75,000 a day (not counting the world's largest guest list) squeezing and craning and squinting out stage views from as far away as Barry Bonds can hit a baseball. Add 100-degree days and, well, I'm guessing quite a few of those 75,000 people had a less than delightful time.

If you're like me, here's how the experience went: The first day was greeted with trepidation. How am I gonna get there? How am I gonna get home? Will I be able to withstand the heat, especially with all the walking I'm going to do? Why couldn't I be a movie critic?

All those thoughts went through your mind in the morning, but day one ended up being a lot of fun. The heat was brutal, but after seeing soul legend Solomon Burke in a three-piece suit, challenging the midday sun with only his voice and a tuxedo-clad 13-piece band, you felt like a wimp. You marveled at the scope of the festival – the equipment, the manpower, the array of talent, the unending hordes -- and toasted Capital Sports and Entertainment's ability to pull it off again.

Then, like me, you'd probably had enough of this whole dang thing by about 3 p.m. Saturday. You even left before the Pixies, the one band you wanted to see, because the crowds and the heat finally got to you and made you realize that sitting at home in your underwear watching Auburn vs. LSU is paradise. On paper, this was one of the greatest music festivals ever booked. But you could put the paper in the oven and arrange a bag of tater tots on top of it for how it played out. On Sunday, spiritually recharged by a day of watching football, you returned to Zilker and had a couple of good hours before you got swallowed up again by this mini-city of umbrella chairs and shirtless guys and teenagers who couldn't care less about the music but showed up because the worst thing that can happen to a high schooler is for something awesome to occur and them being the only one of their clique to not be there.

In the end, the hassles and the magic canceled each other out. So what happens next year to make this fest more manageable, like the first two years? Does Charles Attal book fewer big names? Do they raise ticket prices precipitously? Do the organizers go ahead and schedule the fest to coincide with a home football game? Will they schedule this thing a couple weeks later, when temperatures start to drop?

No, no, no and yes. Since "scaling back" is not in the CSE vocabulary, and a major price increase goes against the populist vibe, what the ACL Fest needs to do is expand to the other side of Barton Springs Road, where a huge, barren field sat completely without purpose, except to park a few cars and land a couple helicopters, this past weekend. This field could hold at least two stages, drawing 20,000 to 30,000 fans from the main area. Everybody would be able to get closer to the stages. The percentage of happy festers would rise.

Also, based on the UT football schedule that CSE has always used to set the date, the fourth annual ACL Music Fest will almost surely be held from Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2005. The Longhorns have an away game against Missouri on Oct. 1.

During the first year of the ACL Fest, it didn't seem possible that the Zilker Park soccer fields would prove to be too small to accommodate the crowds in just two years. But that's what happened this weekend.

Luckily, the answer sits just across the street.

Brian K. Diggs/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Solomon Burke at ACL Fest 2004.

Brian K. Diggs/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

An aerial photo of the Austin City Limits Festival in 2004.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Trey Anastasio performs at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2004.

At ACL, will the bands play on? Answer at 6:30

By Michael Barnes  
Sept. 22, 2005

Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers said they will announce at 6:30 p.m. today whether they will cancel or reschedule portions of the nearly sold-out event because of Hurricane Rita.

Festival promoter Charles Attal insisted Wednesday that the three-day event at Zilker Park, now in its fourth year, will go on. "No, we will not cancel," he said. "We would wait it out, but it is rain or shine. We will be fine on Friday and Sunday." Officials with Capital Sports and Entertainment Inc., which is co-producing the festival, said they will not put their fans, musicians or staff members in danger because of high winds, high water or lightning. Yet they declined to define the thresholds for those dangers.

Hurricane Rita is expected to move through Central Texas on Saturday with winds up to 60 miles an hour, waves of heavy rain and threats of tornadoes.

Industry experts say that 40 mph-plus winds can threaten the trusses used to build outdoor festival stages, especially the upper structures that hold banks of lighting equipment.

"Forty miles per hour is probably not a bad number to start with, depending on the structure," said Karl Ruling, technical standards manager for the Entertainment Services and Technology Association, which represents show business technicians.

Standards for temporary stages are under revision by Ruling's national association because "they blow down sometimes, and it's not pretty when they do."

ACL Festival spokesman Mark Higgins said that organizers, in consultation with Austin safety officials, would make the call on the fate of the festival.

Yet the city could act alone and pull the plug if the weather looked particularly threatening to public safety.

"I don't anticipate that happening," City Manager Toby Futrell said Wednesday. Festival organizers "are professional folks. They're not fly-by-night operators. They have always been professional and responsible."

Futrell said her staff is consulting with festival organizers regularly. Bill Stapleton, a principal partner with CSE, said the group does not carry rain insurance on the festival, which means that ticket refunds would come out of the producers' pockets. About 65,000 people are expected to attend each day. Three-day passes sold out months ago for prices up to $105. Day passes for Friday were still available for $50 plus service fees.

If Zilker Park is damaged because the festival went on in heavy rain, CSE has promised to restore it to its pre-festival state. "It's our responsibility to put the park back the way it was when we arrived, if not better," Higgins said.

Victor Ovalle, spokesman for the Austin Parks and Recreation Department, said the park staff would work closely with festival officials on public safety decisions.

"We do have staff monitoring that situation, and they'll be looking at the grounds," Ovalle said. "But it's premature to go into the damage." The festival is an annual bonanza for local food and retail vendors who set up shop at Zilker Park. They were watching the weather closely Wednesday.

"CSE is calling the shots," said Fred Schmidt, co-owner of Wild About Music, a gallery that sells music-related items. "We'll be out here as long as we can, but there's no point in being our here if there are high winds and it's too dangerous for the musicians to play."

Howard Burke, manager of Roy's Austin, said the restaurant will use a tarp to cover its park operations.

"The show's got to go on; we've got some great food made up," Burke said. As long as the festival is open, Capital Metro will provide its planned shuttle service, agency spokeswoman Libba Letton said, but it might be cut back because of lower attendance.

CSE officials say no participating bands have canceled so far, and that none has been rerouted because of potential airport closures. More than 120 acts from around the world are scheduled to play.

More than 200 festival tickets were for sale Wednesday on Web sites such as eBay and Craigslist, but only a few sellers posted Hurricane Rita as a reason: a University of Texas student who was heading home to Houston to help his family, and a Houston native who was hosting Houston-area family members and friends and planned to volunteer with the Red Cross in Austin.

Additional material from staff writers Patrick Beach, Joe Gross, Pamela LeBlanc, Ben Wear, Renuka Rayasam and Stephen Scheibal.

### Yes, Austin, there'll be a party at Zilker. ACL given go-ahead

By Joe Gross  
Sept. 23, 2005

With Hurricane Rita's threat to Austin reduced as it veers east of its earlier projected path, Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers and city officials said Thursday that the nearly sold-out event would go on today through Sunday.

"There's very, very little chance of rain," said festival co-producer Charlie Jones of Capital Sports and Entertainment Inc. at a Thursday evening news conference. "All our event models pay very close attention to safety."

Weather services forecast possible thunderstorms and winds up to 22 mph for late today and early Saturday. Industry experts said the truss towers used to build temporary outdoor stages like the ones used at the Zilker Park festival become worrisome with winds at about 40 mph.

"We made this decision at the right time," Mayor Will Wynn said. "In no way will the City of Austin abdicate our responsibility for public safety at this event. Many of us have been striving to get back to normal. This is a good way."

So far, only seven acts have canceled their performances, mostly because of travel difficulties. Festival organizers have replaced all the canceled acts, including Nashville, Tenn., favorite Mindy Smith.

When Iguanas guitarist Joe Cabral, evacuated to Austin from New Orleans, found out Thursday afternoon that Smith was forced to cancel, he put together a band calling itself the Texiles, featuring members of the Iguanas, the Radiators and Peter Gabriel's band.

With so many hurricane evacuees in town, Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services plans to reduce its presence at the festival. Although medical personnel will be stationed at Zilker Park, ambulances will not, said Chris Callsen, senior division commander for EMS.

"They cannot count on our resources being committed to the event," Callsen said. EMS Assistant Director Gordon Bergh said the department is preparing to respond to a major humanitarian event. It will have additional ambulances available in anticipation of severe weather and will be able to respond to emergency calls from the festival.

ACL fest's first official event, the Soundcheck Gala benefit concert for KLRU-TV, took place as scheduled Thursday night at Zilker Park, with attendees -- who paid about $500 a ticket -- enjoying cocktails, dinner and music by John Prine and Robert Earl Keen. Both are scheduled to perform at the festival.

Hurricane Rita was the talk of the event.

"I almost feel guilty being here; this is such a treat, and folks are sitting in traffic on highways heading north," Patti Thurman said. She and husband David plan to arm themselves with ponchos and umbrellas in case the rains hit.

John O'Hagen worried about the park grounds. "As I was walking in, it did occur to me that this could be awfully muddy," he said. Nashville musician Billy Prine, brother of John Prine, was relieved nothing was canceled but added that he should have packed his swim trunks.

Although nervous about the weather Thursday, many artists and fans had taken a wait-and-see approach to the festival.

"There's been so much preparation and so many people involved that we're crossing our fingers and hoping it comes off as planned," said Christina Marrs of the Austin band Asylum Street Spankers, scheduled to play Saturday at Austin Ventures stage.

Some fans canceled their travel plans because of weather forecasts. Zach Stambor, a Washington D.C., writer, intended to attend with two friends from Chicago. He decided Thursday morning not to come. "We had everything planned in June," he said. "Last night we were talking, and looking at the weather channels, we decided that sitting through the rain and the wind isn't worth it. But I wish (festival organizers) would (have made) an announcement before 6:30 p.m. (Thursday) for out-of-towners."

It's festival or bust for other visitors.

"We considered canceling the trip," said Sammy Glidden, 33, of Minneapolis, who is and part of a group of 12 who checked into La Quinta near the Capitol on Thursday afternoon. "But we knew regardless that we'd make our fun wherever we go."

If it rains, traveling partner Daniel Renner, 33, also of Minneapolis, said, it won't matter. "I'll lay down in a ditch if I have to. We'll just slide around in the mud."

Food and retail vendors continued to make preparations for potential wind and rains.

"We've taken extra tarps and ropes to tie things together, and the restaurant group has discussed ways to exit quickly," said Jeff Blank, owner of Hudson's on the Bend.

"We may get a little bit of rain, but we need that," he added. At each step along the way, festival organizers worked closely with Austin officials to assess weather-related safety concerns. According to its contract with festival producers, the city received $21,680 for use of Zilker Park plus expenses, which is comparable to the fees paid by other local organizations, such as Austin Symphony Orchestra for its annual Fourth of July concert in the park. Additionally, $2 from each three-day pass is sent to the city -- more than $120,000 – for park improvements.

Organizers of the Pecan Street Festival, scheduled for this weekend on East Sixth Street with dozens of arts, crafts and food retailers, along with performance stages, are also watching the skies closely. "Obviously, our main concern is the safety of the artists and vendors and the people who come out for the festival," said Rachel Hullie, arts and crafts coordinator for Road Star Productions, which stages the street festival.

"Clearly, we're not going to put people's lives in danger. Right now, we'll go ahead as planned."

Additional material from staff writers Kate Alexander, Michael Corcoran, Ricardo Gandara, Pamela LeBlanc and Dale Rice.

### Steamy opening on ACL stages

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 24, 2005

The day was full with cancellations and last-minute replacements. Kathleen Edwards dropped out, which meant only one chance to hear Lucinda Williams. Mindy Smith, so charming at last year's fest, couldn't make it, so the Texiles, an aggregate of New Orleans players including four-fifths of the Iguanas and a top-flight horn section, were tapped for fill-in duty. When they did a bittersweet "When I Get Home," after thanking their new home of Austin for some serious hospitality, the crowd responded with warmth. But the band never really lifted the throngs into the stratosphere where they were begging to be taken. Too much trumpet and not enough second line beat. The stages seemed to bleed into each other more than in recent fests, with the mid-field Austin Ventures stage especially vulnerable. Too bad for Nic Armstrong & the Thieves, a four-piece from Nottingham, England, who have taken the Austin club scene by storm the past two months. Their set did not validate fevered new fans who've called the band the second coming of Saturday's headliners Oasis. They kinda sounded like the Waterboys in leather jackets. -- Michael Corcoran

*

As countless songwriters have discovered, it's amazingly hard to write like John Prine. He is one of the finest songwriters of his generation, a Zen master of American vernacular who constructs remarkable beauty out of the disappointments and joys of everyday life.

Prine makes it look easy, but these sorts of songs slip into corn in a lesser writer's hand. Heck, they slip into corn in his -- one of these days "Sam Stone" will be retired as a Vietnam vet anthem -- but the way the crowd sang along with Prine at the headliner-sized Cingular stage Friday night, it won't be any time soon.

Kicking off with his back-to-the-woods anthem "Spanish Pipedream," Prine took the stage with a stand-up bassist and electric guitarist, both impeccably dressed in suits. Everything was impeccable about them, from guitarist Jason Wilbur's flawlessly tasteful Telecaster solos to bassist Dan Jakes' understated, mama's-heartbeat thump. Prine's voice took a little while to warm up, but that didn't stop him from preaching to the anti-war choir.

"I retired this next song in 1978," Prine said to introduce "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore." "I thought it had outlived its usefulness. The president made a liar out of me."

Everyday melancholy brings out the craftsman in him -- "Some Humans Ain't Human," the fabulous "Angel From Montgomery" and the dust 'n' bones ballad "Souvenirs" show Prine as a man who truly understand the old phrase "happiness is an occasion."

He knows that to articulate both joy and sorrow with equal vigor is the best way to keeps us human. -- Joe Gross

*

Unlike the year before last, when a lyric sheet malfunction sent Lucinda Williams into a tailspin, this year's performance by the once and perhaps future (who knows?) Austinite was blissfully free of incident.

Not only did Williams look as if she was having a devil of a good time wowing the scorched crowd in front of the SBC stage, she also treated the audience to that rarest of gems at a Lucinda show -- new material. Kicking off with deceptively downbeat back-to-back renditions of

"Drunken Angel" and "Pineola," Williams ranged across the breadth of her career, from "Crescent City" to the bleak-yet-beautiful "Out of Touch" and "Real Live Bleeding Fingers (And Broken Guitar Strings)."But it was the new stuff that proved enthralling. "Jailhouse Tears" revealed a rarely seen playful side of Williams the writer; a country spoof with lines like "They locked me up . . . you locked me out" and "I used to be a user . . . You're a three-time loser."

Williams' show ended on a roller coaster peak, not a trough, however. "Get Right With God" sounded tentative when she first began performing it, but it has metamorphosed into a showstopper, with snake-handling guitar, snare-popping drums and Williams shimmying across the stage like Little Egypt, clapping hands and flashing her horse-laugh grin.

Hey, even blues-singin' girls just wanna have fun. -- John T. Davis

*

Stable, public couplehood is such a rarity in rock 'n' roll -- heck, in popular culture in general -- that to see it on display is to be reinspired by the possibilities of marriage. Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel are Mates of States, and indeed, they are mates. Straight out of Lawrence, Kan., she takes keyboards, he plays drums, they both harmonize of tight, sharp pop songs.

No wonder they're one of the hottest indie rock acts around, and no wonder the large crowd at the AMD stage seemed thrilled to see them. Or maybe they were screaming from the heat.

Beet-red behind her keyboard, Gardner swayed in time to the zippy tunes, her voice shining like a girl with her first crush. Hammel's striped-shirt, bowlish hair and wrap-around shades made him look like a mod who stepped out of "Quadrophenia" and right onto stage.

The demi-hit "Fluke" -- with Hammel's drums finding the sweet spot between indie rock's thump and disco's shake \-- got the large crowd moving.

Again and again, the Mates demonstrated that their songs didn't need anything more than what they brought with them: killer melodies on that organ and lithe, swinging drums. -- Joe Gross

### Performers have Louisiana in mind

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF  
Sept. 25, 2005

Jones Family Singers

Alice Spoonts closed her eyes Saturday minutes before noon and saw New Orleans.

"We've been going to Jazz Fest for 15 years, and, I'll tell ya, we've never seen a group in the gospel tent there better than this one," she said.

Yes, the Jones Family Singers from Bay City were that good, with lead singer Alexis Jones Roberts matching the Staple sisters, the wail of Mavis and the growl of Oletha, in intensity.

They were five women of various ages and hairstyles, in lime-green T-shirts and jean skirts, whipping up a smallish audience of maybe 50 (though it grew as the set went on) like they were playing a jampacked Baptist church on a Sunday morning.

"Now, you've all heard about that Hurricane Rita bearing down on Texas, but we're all here, safe and happy," said Roberts, a master of call-and-response, slowing down a Holy Ghost stomper. "Now, how many people think Jesus worked it out?" Hands shot up.

The hour flew by, with 12-year-old drummer Ian Wade never dropping the beat and the Rev. Fred Jones coming out for some Julius Cheeks-style exalting to give Roberts a break. Guitarist Fred Jones Jr. did an impossibly high falsetto lead on one number, and Velma Davis took the lead on Motown-like "Going Over Yonder" to put a little break, a little more melody in the hard gospel fire.

But the group was at its best on "Rock and Roll With Jesus," when little pockets of fervor broke out and the lime-topped five swayed and rolled their arms and pointed in approval to fans who had cut loose from inhibitions.

Amid the day's sweat, you can be sure a few tears welled up. It just didn't seem possible that music could be more passionate, more joyful, more of a reason to come out on a hot and windy morning. – Michael Corcoran

Built to Spill

Built to Spill hasn't released an album in four years, but they sounded right at home on the Cingular stage and drew a massive crowd. Of course, some of that crowd might have been there to get good seats for Death Cab for Cutie, which was the next band on that stage. The irony is that Death Cab often was called Built to Spill Jr., but now the younger Death Cabbers have a hyped-to-the-hills album, plugs on "the O.C." and a better time slot than the band Spill jacked its sound from.

Guitarist/singer/leader Doug Martsch filled the band's hour with his high, reedy, Neil Young-ish voice and reams of interlocking guitar, bass and drums steady and rolling. The band stuck largely to hits (such as they are; the band has never really broken out of college radio). Songs were pulled and stretched like taffy.

For those of us who worship the sound of an amp feeding back, Built to Spill set the standard for the weekend, with Martsch leaning into his amp while his two hired-gun six-stringers soloed away.

It was an excellent set all around, but for some of us who grow weary of roots rock and sunscreen, the best parts were the reams of guitar noise, shapely and shuddering in the hot, dusty afternoon. Wilco, it's your move. -- Joe Gross

Dirty Dozen Brass Band

The Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club provided the 1977 genesis for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the pioneers in the revival of New Orleans' historic, though moribund, brass-band tradition. And indeed, their set at the Capital Metro stage was both sociable (the joint was packed) and pleasurable (if the throngs of dancers and hankie-waving second liners is any indication).

But underneath the gaiety, there seemed to be an undercurrent of anger and injury. The New Orleans musicians who are playing the ACL festival (the Dirty Dozen, Kermit Ruffins, the Iguanas) are in pain, and the fact that the city was flooding again even as the band took the stage had the recurrent quality of a nightmare.

To these ears, the Dirty Dozen's set was a roar of defiance from nine throats, a back-atcha riposte to the malicious forces of nature. Oh, sure, the show fell into discrete songs, the funk vamp that opened the set, the NOLA standard "Junko Partner," a call-and-response carnival take of Dave Bartholomew's "The Monkey Speaks His Mind," a roof-raising excursion that used "When the Saints Go Marching In" as its jumping-off point (with founding member Efrem Towns in a Saints jersey serving as head cheerleader), and a thunderous take on Stevie Wonder's "Superstition."

But as a whole, the Dirty Dozen's show was the sound of a city shouting back in the face of loss and despair.

The band, for a moment, was in fact a city in microcosm: There was the blare of car horns, the wail of a cop's siren, the rumble of the streetcar, the jive and rebop of the street hustlers, the eternal, irresistible groove that might be the sound a river makes if a river could set itself to music.

For just a little while, it was all there, the Crescent City, whole and inviolate and destined to rise once more. That's a gift not only to the rest of us but to all the musicians of New Orleans itself. --John T. Davis

Buddy Guy

One never knows which Buddy Guy is going to show for any given performance: the one who phones it in or the one who means it. Fortunately, Guy decided this ACL Fest crowd was worth cranking it out for, at least part of the time, and so he did.

"I know it's kinda hot. I'm hot, too." Guy told the crowd. "Let's get it on!" The intensity of his performance eventually got as hot as the midday sun. Though he's about to reach 70, he had no problem hitting high notes as easily with his voice as he did with his brown Fender Telecaster, which he played before switching to his more familiar polka-dotted Strat.

Guy delivered "I've Got Dreams to Remember" and "What Kind of Woman is This" from his new album, "Bring 'Em In," (out Tuesday) a collection of classics done as duets with fellow guitar greats, and some others not on the album (a snippet of "Fever," another of "Feels Like Rain") before slipping into his unnecessary renditions of other guitarists, including Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton (he chose the Cream tune "Strange Brew," perhaps because those guys are heading stateside for three reunion shows).

He nearly let his sax player steal the show several times, but when Guy decided he still had something to prove, he went for it, taking his also-familiar stroll through the audience (so to speak; he had an empty aisle straight to the soundboard) and wowing the crowd with a few vicious licks.

He was playing a song from "Damn Right, I've Got the Blues, " but as he sashayed toward the board, his gold watch, gold rings and gold teeth gleaming, he wore a huge "No-I-don't-really-have-the-blues-at-all!" grin. By the time he was done, neither did anyone who was listening. -- Lynne Margolis

### 'Franz Duran,' other festival bands had remedy for the heat

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF  
Sept. 26, 2005

Coldplay

Despite the three days of heat, and despite the settling fog of headache-inducing dust (I suspect we'll be bleeding dirt for weeks), a majority of festers still dragged themselves to Coldplay's flashy event-ending set. Of course, being the final hour-and-a-half-long act gave Chris Martin's quartet the right to be as theatrical as Cher and as self-righteous as U2's Bono.

The big-screen camera shots and negative-exposure effects didn't help their music, but it sure didn't hurt the experience.

"Politik," "Yellow" and "The Scientist" were more than just crowd pleasers: Their inspired singer, Martin, immersed himself in each song with a passion matching what his studio albums have captured. With the subtle addition of guitarist Jon Buckland and quaking bassist Guy Berryman, the songs adopted Coldplay's most anthemlike sound yet. Perhaps they were trying to prove themselves as ACL's last act. Intimidated by an earlier headliner, Arcade Fire, Martin gracefully admitted that bands like Fire "should make you try all the more hard." Another inspiration was Johnny Cash, to whom they paid homage with an English-accented "Ring of Fire."

After encore songs "Clocks" and "Fix You," the show came to an end. The soft piano melody on "Clocks" was as hauntingly loud as ever, and "Fix You" vibrated with an acoustic flutter. If this kind of show keeps up, Martin's crew could easily leave Dave Matthews and his cronies in the dust. -- Jeff McCrary

Arcade Fire

Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, Richard Parry, Tim Kingsbury and Butler's younger brother, William, formed the Arcade Fire in 2003 in Montreal. In 2004, they released the album "Funeral" on respected U.S. indie label Merge. By the end of the year, it was a sleeper smash, moving more than 100,000 units so far.

Earlier this year, they sold out Emo's. Friday night, they sold out Stubb's. Sunday, they played in front of tens of thousands on the headliner-worthy Cingular stage at the ACL Fest. Not too shabby for a band that just turned two years old.

All nine of them (the core five plus a few hired guns) marched onstage carrying red flags, in their customary black suits and dresses, as if they were on their way to, well, a funeral. But their detailed, kitchen-sink music is anything but depressive. It's a powerful wall of organ melody, bass, drums, guitar, dueling violins, French horn and accordion.

They opened with the wailing "Wake Up," all howling the melody into whatever microphone was in front of them. On "Neighborhood No. 2 (Laika)" the band switched off instruments, which continued throughout the set, while Chassagne took the mike from her husband, Win Butler, for the moving "Haiti."

They juggled instruments, they hurled joyful melodies at the crowd, they raged against melancholia while acknowledging its power, they looked impeccable doing it. Let's hear it for Canada. -- Joe Gross

Franz Ferdinand

You have to go back to, I don't know, maybe the Stray Cats and Duran Duran to find a band as committed to its innocuousness as Scotland's Franz Ferdinand, who are about as original as wearing a "Vote For Pedro" T-shirt but kick it out like they're the saviors of rock. They did their big hit, "Take Me Out," which welds a Strokes intro onto Gang Of Four guitar and MTV '83 melody, early on.

Drummer Paul Johnson stepped to the front on "Walk Away," a pastiche of new wave cliches from the Oct. 4 release "You Could Have It So Much Better," as a helicopter with a cameraman leaning dangerously close to the edge circled around. No doubt this will be for an upcoming video. No doubt it will sell a ton. No doubt critics will hate it.

But a non-caffeinated version of Franz Duran is not an option. They eat up the spotlight. They get the kids dancing. Don't hate them just because you can't wipe the stupid grin off their Shaun Cassidy faces.

Then again... -- Michael Corcoran

### Hot but happy at Austin City Limits festival

For music fans, sonic bliss worth the blistering temps

Michael Corcoran and Dick Stanley  
September 25, 2005

Thanks to Hurricane Rita's easterly exit Saturday morning, it was another Dust Bowl day at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Zilker Park, but hardly any of the tens of thousands of people in attendance at the sold-out event seemed to mind.

Except those such as Karen Gossman, who just had to take a break from another record-setting 101-degree afternoon. She found a shady spot out of the wind and sun to recline and play misting water over her red face from one of the battery-operated, water-filled pocket fans that festival sponsor SBC Communications was giving away.

"Sittin' down," said Gossman, 26, who came from Pennsylvania for the fourth annual event. "Chillin'."

The medical techs of the South West Emergency Action Team, who were handling emergency care, said they'd had no one to send to the hospital.

On Friday, the three-day festival's first 101-degree day, 11 people were hospitalized with such problems as cardiac arrest and seizure. "We've just seen 60 heat-related cases, 20 for eye irritation from the dust, and a crazy amount of blisters and sunburn," the team's Tannifer Ayres said Saturday.

Transportation away from the festival remained a headache for many. "There was no sign outside our exit to tell us to go right to get cabs," Nate Douglas of Atlanta said. "Everyone who walked to the left, and there were hundreds of us, were going where there were no cabs." A few were offering their cabs to the highest bidder.

"One guy was charging $60," said Douglas, who went back to catch a shuttle. "It was so crazy and confused at 15th Street. Nobody knew where to go or what to do when they got there."

It took him more than two hours to get to his friend's house at 45th Street and Burnet Road.

On hearing that cab drivers were gouging desperate concertgoers, festival promoter Charlie Jones said, "That really (ticks) me off. We meet with all the cab companies and work on the situation, but there are always going to be rebels that we have no control over."

After all the pre-Rita jitters and highway traffic, other visitors were just happy to arrive in Austin and to be of service.

Matthew Seiler, owner of Maine Root Handcrafted Beverages, drove down from Portland early in the week with his radio tuned to news stations. In the back of his truck were 20 pallets, 1,200 cases of root beer earmarked for sale at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

But as the dire reports about Hurricane Rita filtered in, so did news that four of his employees had to bail out because their flights through Houston had been canceled. Saturday afternoon, a shorthanded Seiler was slammed by thirsty fest-goers, but he couldn't have been happier.

"I thought 'worst-case scenario' all the way down," he said. "I woke up this morning, and the sun was shining, and I've been in a great mood ever since."

One thing these big crowd events do generate is an enormous amount of trash. But the ubiquitous blue water bottles were going to good use, at least, with the empties being decoratively stuck into the openings of a chain-link fence by Austin artist and festival volunteer Deborah Lewis and her friends.

They were shaping hearts and smilies with the bottles, which will be recycled when the festival ends.

"It's to make people aware how much stuff can accumulate," said Lewis, 43. Security personnel at the entry gates were doing brief body friskings for prohibited items such as fireworks or weapons. No arrests were reported Saturday, but there was one arrest Friday night for marijuana possession with intent to distribute.

Though a few more musicians, such as Australian favorite daughter Missy Higgins, were forced to cancel because of transportation obstacles, members of other acts raved about attentive, excitable crowds and cool backstage vibe. "The people have their ears on here," John Popper of Blues Traveler said of the ACL mobs.

Fans gushed as well. Gossman, a State College, Pa., retail manager, said she came because friends in Austin urged her to. So she drove to Washington and picked up a friend, and they flew here together on Friday.

Despite the heat, she said, it had been a great idea.

"Oh, my God, yes," she said. "100 percent worth it."

Brian K. Diggs/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Festival goers move through the dust bowl of ACL Fest 2005.

### THE WEEKEND IN REVIEWS: RELIVE ACL AS THE DUST SETTLES

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF  
September 29, 2005

The Double

Last-minute replacements the Double took the AMD stage at 11:45 a.m. Friday, subbing for the Ditty Bops. Gerard Cosloy, co-owner of Matador Records, the Double's label, was in the crowd. "I thought they would be playing in front of nobody," he said, looking at the small crowd of earlier arrivals. "But this is certainly more than nobody."

The AMD stage comes with a powerful sound system, the better to carry the Brooklyn band's fractured pop songs across the field. The peals of feedback and waves of distortion made for a bracing, palate-cleansing start to what was shaping up to be a long, hot day. Singer/bassist David Greenhill's everyman tenor sailed across the field as he drew on songs from "Loose in the Air," the band's new album, and "Palm Fronds," from 2004. Ending the set with a rumble and wail, the band treated early arrivals to the kind of hip indie rock that there was precious little of at last year's fest.

Sometimes it pays to show up early, no matter how hot it gets.

\-- Joe Gross

Bobby Bare Jr.

Big outdoor music festivals are not where I'm at -- spiritually, musically, skin tone-wise -- but I had a good feeling about the fourth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival when I arrived just after noon Friday to hear Bobby Bare Jr. play a lilting, almost nursery rhyme-like "I'll Be Around" that dissolved into blasts of white noise from guitarist Mike Grimes, while Deanna Varagona played a baritone sax about the size of a teenaged son.

There it was, the fest in a microcosm, so gentle and, at times, boring one moment and then, boom, like a palm slap to the head. Bare Jr. was fine, but the first band of the day to really get me going was deSol, a Latin rock group from Asbury Park, N.J. Even though the heavily percussive band was wholly derivative -- think Santana at Woodstock, or Del Castillo at Antone's, for that matter – singer Albie Monterosa packed plenty of charisma and guitarist Rich Soto was a soaring menace of shrill sustain. They got the crowd dancing salsa (or a reasonable facsimile) on "Blanco y Negro" and fanned the fervor with "Chango." But when they closed with a cover of Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va" (the Santana version), they chose a crowd-pleasing moment instead of one that would establish them as a creative force. But, you know, in the heat, the crush of people, the inclination to search for something else, an old favorite was probably the right choice.

\-- Michael Corcoran

Death Cab for Cutie

Death Cab for Cutie played during one of the sweatiest time slots -- nearly 4:30 -- but that didn't stop fans from pitching a blanket to their finest classics -- "Title and Resignation," "Sound of Settling" and "New Year" almost allowed you to forget about the heat – and their trendiest selections from their newest album, "Plans."

The heat may have stifled the volume, or maybe it's because the Cingular stage is cursed with technical problems. But when you're listening to "Resignation" while lead singer Ben Gibbard wails away like Meg White on a simplistic snare drum riff or noticing how much they have improved upon that song with their latest single, "Where Soul Meets Body," who really cares about technical problems?

\-- Jeff McCrary

Dirty Dozen Brass Band

The Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club provided the 1977 genesis for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the pioneers in the revival of New Orleans' historic, though moribund, brass-band tradition. And indeed, their Saturday set at the Capital Metro stage was both sociable (the joint was packed) and pleasurable (if the throngs of dancers and hankie-waving second liners is any indication).

But underneath the gaiety, there seemed to be an undercurrent of anger and injury. The New Orleans musicians who are playing the ACL festival (the Dirty Dozen, Kermit Ruffins, the Texiles) are in pain -- and the fact that the city was flooding again even as the band took the stage had the recurrent quality of a nightmare.

To these ears, the Dirty Dozen's set was a roar of defiance from nine throats -- a back-atcha riposte to the malicious forces of nature. Oh, sure, the show fell into discrete songs -- the funk vamp that opened the set, the NOLA standard "Junko Partner," a call-and-response carnival take of Dave Bartholomew's "The Monkey Speaks His Mind," a roof-raising excursion that used "When the Saints Go Marching In" as its jumping-off point (with founding member Efrem Towns in a Saints jersey serving as head cheerleader), and a thunderous take on Stevie Wonder's "Superstition."

But as a whole, the Dirty Dozen's show was the sound of a city shouting back in the face of loss and despair. The band, for a moment, was in fact a city in microcosm -- there was the blare of car horns, the wail of a cop's siren, the rumble of the streetcar, the jive of the street hustlers, the eternal, irresistible groove that might be the sound a river makes if a river could set itself to music. For just a little while, it was all there -- the Crescent City, whole and inviolate and destined to rise once more. That's a gift not only to the rest of us, but to all the musicians of New Orleans itself.

\-- John T. Davis

Roky Erickson

If you can't get behind the fact that "I've been working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog" is one of the five hands-down coolest lyrics in rock 'n' roll, then the fact that Roky Erickson played his first full-length concert on the Austin Ventures stage Saturday night might not mean a great deal.

But to those who recognize Roky and his band, the 13th Floor Elevators, as among the original pioneers of acid rock (they are credited with being the first to use "psychedelic" in a musical context and their 1966 sojourn in San Francisco impacted scores of musicians there), his appearance represented the musical equivalent of touching a saint's bone. More significantly, for those who have observed Erickson's decades-long struggle with drugs and mental illness, his performance of a baker's dozen of his hits and shoulda-been hits marked a literal resurrection.

Backed up by his longtime collaborators the Explosives (themselves veterans of the heyday of Austin's punk scene), Erickson played (played!) and sang (sang!) and even joked with a crowd that included the single largest contingent of grey hair at the festival. Let's face it, the folks who bought the Elevators' and Erickson's albums in their first pressings tend to be Fans of A Certain Age -- there was a smattering of lovingly faded Armadillo World Headquarters and Eeyore's Birthday T-shirts, and tie-dye was not necessarily regarded as an ironic retro fashion statement.

That having been said, Erickson's music remains fresh and compelling today (Hey, the guy's credited with influencing everyone from Janis Joplin to Henry Rollins.) Listening to him was to realize anew how solidly crafted is his body of work. "Don't Shake Me Lucifer" and "Bermuda" are hook-heavy rockers with an early-Stones/Chuck Berry appeal. "The Beast" is a lumbering vintage blues shot through with horror movie and Book of Revelations imager. "You're Gonna Miss Me" is one of the great kiss-off songs in the rock canon, while its polar opposite, "Starry Eyes," is as perfectly crafted a pop confection as any Roy Orbison or Buddy Holly ever minted.

"Now I'm home to stay," Erickson sang in "Splash 1." The fans who have been with him for the whole of the long, strange ride, along with the ones getting their initiation on Saturday might devoutly hope it is so.

\-- John T. Davis

Oasis

When ACL announced it had booked Oasis, questions rose like flies in August. Would they sample songs from their new album, "Don't Believe the Truth," and show the skeptics that they still rocked like it was 1995? Or would they resuscitate their greatest hits from the lineup that earned them self-acclaimed Beatles status? And most importantly, would there be any obvious tension between Noel and Liam Gallagher after their threatened breakups?

Despite the massive cloud of dust that was kicked up during the day, a crowd nearly a third of the population of the United Kingdom shuffled their way to the Cingular stage for the answers.

Yep, they played "Lyla" and "Turn Up the Sun" and proved that they sound more like the Who than ever before -- they even covered "My Generation." Yep, they played "Champagne Supernova," "Wonderwall" and "Don't Look Back in Anger," so there was no reason for anyone to go home unhappy.

And when two brothers restore British rock 'n' roll to this degree, does anyone even care that they threatened to break up for good?

\-- Jeff McCrary

Black Keys

Because they're a two-piece blues band, Akron's Black Keys have been compared to Detroit's White Stripes. But there are plenty of notable differences -- Keys drummer Patrick Carney can actually play, for one thing, and guitarist Dan Auerbach's style is far grittier and more elemental than Jack White's. It's simple, hard-core and full of Hendrix influences.

Carney and Auerbach quickly won over a huge Heineken stage crowd eager to experience the young pair's raw musical prowess, delivered on such tunes as "Thickfreakness," "The Breaks," "Girl is on my Mind," "Set You Free," "The Moan" and "10 a.m. Automatic."

Just when they threatened to get boring, however -- there's only so much Black Keys one can take before it starts to sound repetitious -- they pulled out a cool "Grown So Ugly" and an even cooler, fuzz-guitar-filled finale, the Beatles' "She Said, She Said." John Lennon would have been proud of the treatment they gave it, and their fans loved it. And loved them. No question they were one of the big hits of ACL fest. It won't be surprising if they wind up on a bigger stage next year.

\-- Lynne Margolis

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Lyle Lovett performs at the 2005 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Blues Traveler at the 2005 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

George McConnell of Widespread Panic performs at the Austin City Limits festival in 2005.

Sprinklers will help clear air at Austin City Limits festival

By Michael Corcoran  
June 14, 2006

Dust was the demon at last year's Austin City Limits Music Festival, with swirling soil smog filling the air to the point that many festgoers were wearing handkerchiefs over their faces like stagecoach robbers. (Or maybe they didn't want their hipster friends to recognize them digging Coldplay.)

The dust storm got so bad that Jimmy LaFave started changing lyrics to Woody Guthrie songs so they'd be about Zilker Park. The main stage should've been sponsored by Visine.

But festival organizers Capital Sports & Entertainment and Charles Attal Presents are determined to keep this year's and subsequent festivals from being marred by "Oklahoma Rain." They've agreed to pay half the costs of an irrigation system being installed by the Austin Parks and Recreation Department at the concert site.

CSE's Lisa Schickel said the promoters will pay half of the estimated $500,000 to $700,000 over the next three years on the project, which will bring in a new main water line, plus parallel lines. Eventually, plans are to build a pump that will use water from Town Lake, instead of treated city water, to keep Zilker green.

Work on the first phase, which includes a new sprinkler system for the periphery of the park and more water fountains and misting stations, is expected to be completed at least a month before the Sept. 15-17 festival dates, said Stuart Strong, assistant director of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department.

The ACL fest was named 2005's Festival of the Year by touring industry bible Pollstar, but that was a silver lining to a brown cloud. Schickel said the overwhelming subject of complaints from festgoers was the dust. When promoters had their wrap-up meeting with the parks department two weeks after the festival, they started talking about sharing the cost of a new watering system. "It wasn't just our event," Schickel said. "The Fourth of July fireworks has also had dust issues."

"It's a great partnership," Strong said. "It's beneficial to the strength of the festival, and having this complete irrigation system is something the public can enjoy throughout the year, for years to come."

Currently, the Zilker soccer fields are irrigated, but the peripheral area, where most of the ACL stages are built, is not. Another complaint organizers hope to address at the fest, whose headliners include Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Gnarls Barkley, Willie Nelson, the Raconteurs and Van Morrison, is the lack of shade. The festival's central area is normally devoted to athletic fields, and trees and soccer don't mix.

Last year, when the record highs hit 108 degrees (20 degrees hotter than the 30-year average for that date in Austin, according to the Farmer's Almanac) fans huddled around the few trees on the concert grounds like solar-savaged refugees trying to get on the last raft out of the sun.

Schickel says there will be more artificial shade this year, but rather than just put up white tents, the fest will utilize massive art installations to block parts of the sun.

Finally, a practical use for modern art.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

### Reviews

Sept. 18, 2006  
By American-Statesman Staff

The Shins

By the time the Shins took the stage, the park was really, really crowded — so crowded that the AT&T audience reached almost to the Heineken Stage. Forget trying to negotiate your way through with anything resembling speed. Which is why I caught only part of the Albuquerque-originated band's set.

Not that I missed much. The sound seemed unusually muddy, and their chimey alterna-pop seemed unusually uninspiring. They've done better in the past, including a Stubb's show a year or two ago. But they did command some attention with a new song that they invited everyone to shoot on cameras and cell phones and upload onto their Web site so they could turn the footage into a video. So you may see a reporter's notes — and a shot taken through binoculars — in an upcoming Shins video. Clever.

To be fair, there was plenty of sweet melody emanating from the stage, including songs with titles like "Kissing the Lipless" and "So Says I." Maybe it was the heat — they were wearing mostly long-sleeved black shirts — or the knowledge that they were playing on a stage bloodied earlier by Ben Kweller and about to be filled by the Raconteurs (or maybe they wanted to see the String Cheese Incident), but the Shins weren't an ACL highlight.

Not everyone can be, however. Some bands just have to provide some steady entertainment between the bigger acts, and they certainly did that. -- Lynn Margolis

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

It seems pretty likely that Ted Leo was the only guy at ACL to use the words "DMZ," "Telemachus" and "Daedalus" all in one song. (It was his opener, "My Vien Ilin.") Actually, he was probably the only guy to mention any of those folks. He also was probably the only guy at the fest to inject his set with anything resembling punk-rock energy, jumping around, kicking the air and generally translating his complicated power pop into truly explosive rock action.

Joined by bassist Dave Lerner, with his Afro, and egregiously bearded drummer Chris Wilson, Leo seemed mildly out of place, the one real indie lifer among singer-songwriters, movie-star-sponsored reggae bands and album-oriented-rock strivers (and Gnarls Barkley, who might be all three). His banter seemed more suited to the dingy club than the festival stage; it just seemed unrehearsed.

The band, however, was not. Drum-head tight, song after song blew out of the speakers. "My Vien Ilin" segued into "Little Dawn," whose melodic bass line and high-speed, flickering guitar was reminiscent of the Washington, D.C., punk scene in which Leo spent time in with his '90s band, Chisel. Unlike too many bands that cop from D.C.'s anthemic punk rock, Leo's Irish earnestness never moves into mawkish sentimentality — the tunes just move too fast, like Thin Lizzy as a power trio, or Elvis Costello after some hard-core shows.

Leo doesn't have any hits, but "Me and Mia," the single from his most recent album, "Shake the Sheets," really should have been, and fans sure treat it as such. "Do you believe in something beautiful?/Then GET UP AND BE IT!" Leo howled. Amen. \-- Joe Gross

Marah

"Out here in the fields . . ."

The rule for festival sets should be that each act has to play at least one cover. Something for casual listeners to grab ahold of. The Philadelphia rockers of Marah were tooling away quite splendidly Saturday, turning noon into midnight with the rompish triple-guitar pop of "Round Eye Blues" and such, but then they launched their show into the stratosphere by inserting the Who's "Baba O'Riley" into "Feather Boa."

Suddenly, a good set became tremendous. When brothers David and Serge Bielanko slid into the crowd to play guitar and harmonica, respectively, on "Dishwasher's Blues," which they dedicated to Townes Van Zandt, the jubilation was like good sweat. The band played the theme to "Rocky" when it came onstage and delivered one heck of a left hook.-- Michael Corcoran

Iron and Wine

Sometime when his original, indie nerd fan base wasn't looking, Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, moved from the deeply intimate, lo-fi singer-songwriter, home-recorded folk gorgeousness to, well, becoming something that sounds awfully close to a jam band. Know this: It's working almost brilliantly.

Too many jam bands prize instrumental virtuosity -- and rhythms that drift from "backbeat"ン to "meander"ン \-- over chewy songwriting. (There's a reason that some of the Grateful Dead's strongest material was Dylan covers.) Beam has avoided this by starting with songcraft and blowing it out, adding percussion, electric guitars, throbbing, soulful electric bass and large caliber rock drumming. It's more Neil Young than Phish, and that makes all the difference. Opening his Saturday night set on the Heineken Stage with the acoustic "Sodom, South Georgia" as a duet with his sister/backup singer/violinist, Beam quickly moved to electric material, offering often radical rethinks of some of his indie classics. "Woman King,"ン already possessed of a tough polyrhythmic groove, roared to life in the six-piece band's hands, a juggernaut of sword-in-hand feminism, Beam's whisper occasionally breaking into full throated singing big swing, big beat and Beam's big beard all in full effect.

But "Upwards over the Mountain," a son-to-mother plea for understanding capable of reducing cynical men to tears in its original form, suffered slightly from its rural electrification. Its new arrangement is powerful and well-designed, but nowhere near as intimate. It was hard to tell whether other songs were reboots or new material, although, either way, the crowd loved them. He was wise to close with a sure-fire crowd pleaser, the nine-minute acoustic epic "The Trapeze Swinger" from the movie "In Good Company." As Beam and his sister played, it was clear that the new Beam was pretty much the same as the old Beam. As I recall, some guy named Dylan made this move work pretty well, too. -- Joe Gross

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sam Beam of Iron and Wine at ACL 2006.

Sparklehorse

I am a ginormous fan of Sparklehorse.

That said, I became a little worried when the band started its set with a very shaky version of "Gold Days," one of the best songs from its now-classic album of the underground/indie-rock music scene, 2001's "It's A Wonderful Life."

"Oh ye of little faith," I imagined Sparklehorse singer/guitarist Mark Linkous whispering in my ear. As the sunset glowed burnt orange behind Linkous and his new touring band, Sparklehorse's performance began to glimmer. The band grew more relaxed, sounding more comfortable and solid within the oncoming darkness than under the sun.

The audience was enthusiastic, despite hearing many of the songs for the first time. The majority of the set was made up of tracks from Sparklehorse's upcoming (Sept. 26) Astralwerks release, "Dreamt for Light Years In the Belly of a Mountain." The songs displayed a healthy blend of childlike lyricism, Beatles-meets-Beach Boys-meets-Valium pop craft and Linkous' broken-hearted, soul-weary voice.

Despite the revolving-door policy of its touring-band incarnations, Sparklehorse always will spotlight Linkous and his sedative-enhancing studio compositions. Friday's set revealed that the producers on his upcoming release — DJ Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley), Tom Waits, Flaming Lips drummer Steven Drozd and frequent Sparklehorse collaborator Dave Fridmann — have inspired Linkous to speed up some of the beats. A few of the new songs possessed that kick-drum pulse that sounds as if your heart is slowing down; the greater majority were upbeat, making Linkous sound as if he might even be . . . happy.

\-- V. Marc Fort

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Willie Nelson takes the stage at ACL Fest 2006.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Van Morrison at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

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Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley head to the AT&T stage at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival in Zilker Park.

Favorites and a few surprises: Yep, it's ACL

We know Dylan's new, but some of the 2007 lineup has been here, there and everywhere

By Joe Gross  
May 10, 2007

Well, here we are : The lineup for the Austin City Limits Music Festival is out. We reunited with some old faves (Wilco and Spoon, we're looking at you), and we're looking at a lot of new names here.

Some folks are playing all sorts of festivals this year (what's up, Arcade Fire - see you at Bonnaroo! ), and there are a few people who have us remembering that, yes, they are still recording artists (Pete Yorn, where you been?).

Here, we organize some of the players:

Five frequent fliers (played four or more ACL Fests)

* Wilco

* Ben Kweller

* Spoon

* Asleep at the Wheel (they've played all six)

* Patterson Hood (three with Drive-By Truckers, this year solo)

Five festival floozies (playing four or more U.S. festivals this year)

* Spoon

* Amy Winehouse

* Arcade Fire

* Queens of the Stone Age

* Regina Spektor

10 live must-sees

* Bob Dylan - unlikely to pass through Zilker again (aka the Rolling

Stones rule)

* Queens of the Stone Age - as heavy as ACL has ever gotten

* Bjork - perhaps she will bring guests from her home planet.

* LCD Soundsystem - the second coming of New Order

* Steve Earle - How many impeachments will he call for?

* The Jones Family Singers - awe-inspiring gospel power

* The Arcade Fire - the sound of triumph

* Ghostland Observatory - electronic sleeper smash of '06

* Rodrigo y Gabriela - Irish-tinged Mexican acoustic post-metal? Yes.

* The White Stripes - duh.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Bob Dylan closes the 2007 edition of the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

5 Austin veterans

* Robert Earl Keen

* Jon Dee Graham

* Sound Team

* Blue October

* Guy Forsyth

5 formerly indie indie-rock acts:

* The White Stripes

* Queens of the Stone Age

* The Decemberists

* Lucinda Williams (yes, she counts)

* Regina Spektor (her, too)

5 actually indie indie-rock acts

* Arctic Monkeys

* Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

* Bloc Party

* Blonde Redhead

* Yo La Tengo

5 'Huh, they're playing?'

* Crowded House. Yeah, it's a reunion. Still, we scratch our heads.

* Kaiser Chiefs. They had an album this year? Really?

* M.I.A. The sequel to "Galang" will be out this year, she swears.

* Rev. Horton Heat. Rockabilly is the ska of Texas.

* Pete Yorn. Does he still have the hair? Dude had amazing hair.

This year's model: Amy Winehouse

Most likely to have panties thrown at them (or copies of 'Born to Run' with requests for autographs): The Killers

Most likely to have feminine hygiene products thrown at him (or copies of the Radish album with requests for autographs): Ben Kweller, whose nosebleed cut his set short in 2006

Most likely to inspire singing along from every single woman who ever went to sleep-away camp: Indigo Girls

'We'd love to play "Tales From Topographic Oceans" for you, but it's past the kids' bedtime': The Paul Green School of Rock All-Stars

Welcome (back) to Austin, my Swedish friends!: Peter Bjorn and John

Welcome (back) to Austin, my Jamaican friends!: Ziggy and Stephen Marley

Welcome to Austin, my French/Swiss/Argentinian friends!: Gotan Project

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Ben Kweller is remembered by many for his on-stage nosebleed.

### Two festival workers critically injured as RV catches fire

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 15, 2007

Two Austin City Limits Music Festival service employees were critically injured in a fire Friday afternoon at Zilker Park during the first of three days of concerts.

They were flown to the burn unit of Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, while two other employees hurt in the fire were treated for lesser injuries at Brackenridge Hospital.

Sending a shock wave through an otherwise peaceful and well-attended event , a column of black smoke billowed above the northeast side of the festival grounds at 2:30 p.m.

The fire apparently started in a recreational vehicle, which was parked in a gated service area, and spread to two 18-wheelers. All the vehicles were behind fencing separating the stages and music fans from service areas between the WaMu and AT&T stages.

The names of the four injured employees had not been made public by Friday evening. The cause of the fire was not immediately known. Later in the night, a second fire started on the AT&T stage when a speaker caught fire, Austin Fire Department officials said. The fire was small and stagehands put it out with a fire extinguisher before fire officials arrived on the scene, said Palmer Buck, a battalion chief with the department. No injuries were reported. In the earlier incident, Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services officer Mike Elliott said two people heard a noise in an RV parked in the service area and that when they opened the door of the vehicle, they were engulfed in flames. He said it apparently was a flash fire and not an explosion.

The conflagration turned into a guessing game for the thousands of fans who were on the concert grounds at midday. They weren't sure what was burning, but many surmised it was one of the concession stands. "Around 2:30, I heard some popping noises," said Courtney Powell, who was watching Pete Yorn on the AT&T stage. "You'd see a little smoke, then two cops went running in that direction."

"It all took place in a working area for employees only in the back perimeter," said Troy Office r, emergency services coordinator for the festival. "No patrons were ever in danger. The crowd was great, assisting officers setting up emergency tape. The immediate area around the fire was cleared within minutes."

Three fire engines and EMS crews reached the scene near the "Town Lake Tavern" beverage area on Lou Neff Road, which was closed for use as a service area. Austin Fire Department spokeswoman Michelle DeCrane said that emergency personnel arrived six minutes after the first unit was assigned and nine minutes after the first 911 call was received. A hazardous-materials team also arrived on the scene and set up monitors, but a slight wind from the south shifted the smoke away from the audience. Crowds cleared a path on the service road for the fire trucks.

Organizers briefly stopped the music being played by Yorn on the AT&T Stage and cleared half the area in front of the stage.

The Barton Springs Road entrance had been packed with arriving fans when the fire broke out. It was taking about 20 minutes to get into concert area at that time, and the lines did not slow after the smoke was spotted.

Elliott said that although music fans were drawn to the area of the fire, "the crowds obeyed extremely well" when told to move back. He said planning by all the safety and security agencies involved enabled the response to be as "good as could be expected" considering the tens of thousands of people on the grounds.

By 3:10 p.m., police tape had been removed from most of the scene, and all the music had resumed.

While the fire interrupted Yorn's set, music continued on the seven other stages around the Zilker Park soccer fields. Many fans were just arriving to catch Crowded House or Joss Stone on two of the bigger stages.

No early crowd estimates were available, but festival organizers expected 65,000 on the grounds before Björk's closing set at 8:30 p.m. Blue skies dominated the afternoon as temperatures reached the mid-90s. Festival-goers who walked at midday to the park through South Austin neighborhoods and along Barton Springs Road from downtown got to the gates dripping with sweat and drinking water, which was sold along the roadways by homeowners and other vendors.

The festival continues today with headliners Arcade Fire and Muse. Staff writers John T. Davis, Matthew Odam, Ed Crowell, Marques G. Harper, Tony Plohetski, Melissa Mixon and Mike Elliott contributed to this report.

### ACL REVIEWS

Sept. 17, 2007

Bob Dylan

"I respect him and all, but he sounds like a dying goat." – overheard near a sanitary facility.

Sunday night, 10:15, the Austin City Limits Music Festival over and done with, and all one can think is, "Well, that was unfortunate."

Where to start?

The "evil old dude" voice, enjoyable (to some of us) in an intimate setting yet totally baffling to the casual fan? The giant screen that never showed close-ups or even panned over to musicians taking solos?

The nuanced music, so completely inappropriate to a field of thousands who responded by, well, leaving in droves (As a colleague put it, "Getting up front was like fighting the tide.")

Things looked and sounded grim from the first song, the awful crowd pleaser "Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35."

The mix was muddy, and it was impossible to tell what was going on if you were in the back, thanks to a giant screen that switched between a full band shot and a half-band shot of Dylan's side. A lack of close-ups was bad enough, but not panning over to the mighty Denny Freeman while he took any of his gorgeous solos was just rude.

It's this simple: People started leaving two songs in because they couldn't see the band. That's not exactly good customer relations from Dylan's camp.

Even if you're charitable about his voice, this music just isn't built for the big finish. "It Ain't Me Babe," fun at Stubb's, sounded flat and pat from a distance. "Spirit on the Water," moving in a smaller setting, was a snooze at Zilker.

The band was excellent, of course. These guys are rock solid, and Freeman is a wonder.

The gripping "Levee's Gonna Break" and the nasty groove on "Things Have Changed" injected much-needed energy. "Highway 61" showed a little burn, and the journalist kiss-off "Ballad of a Thin Man" was appropriately sharp.

But too often, they sounded like what they looked like: a quaint dance band, displaced in time. It's sad when you hear the amazingly mean "Like a Rolling Stone" and wonder whether Dylan knows how completely "Now you don't look so proud" applies to himself.

Hey, man, you wanna come back and do five nights at the Paramount, you have my money. You wanna come back to Stubb's, I'll give you a chance.

But in a field at ACL? Never again.

\-- Joe Gross

Billy Joe Shaver

One might say, with considerable justification, that Billy Joe Shaver is not overly preoccupied with razor-sharp stagecraft. He is just as apt to use his guitar for a hatrack as he is to pick it up and strum a desultory chord or two. If guitarist Jeremy Woodall is in the midst of a particularly satisfying solo, his boss might just choose to sit back on his haunches, sip some water and listen appreciatively before getting up to resume his own performance.

Yet there is something undeniably mesmerizing about watching Shaver, who performed on the Austin Ventures stage Sunday evening. Perhaps it's because he has, among all the ACL performers (with the exception of the gospel singers ), the clearest appreciation for mortality. Angels seem to hover closer to him than to other artists, and he often raises his arms to salute them and perhaps beckon them a little closer.

Shaver's canon is so well-known and so highly revered that it seems almost beside the point to mention the particulars, but yes, he did perform "Georgia on a Fast Train," "Ride Me Down Easy," "The Hottest Thing in Town," "Black Rose" and "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal."

There was also, no surprise, a strong spiritual component to his music. More than any country singer since Hank Williams, Shaver is able to reconcile the sacred and the profane. Or, as he jovially saluted the audience, "If you don't love Jesus Christ, go to hell!"-- John T. Davis

Regina Spektor

Regina Spektor is the little Russian Jewish girl who could, the New Yorker singing her strange little immigrant songs to an ever-widening circle of believers. Her album "Begin to Hope" is one of the great sleeper hits of 2006, a strange singer-songwriter affair that's been building and shows no sign of stopping.

There she was, in blue dress and knotted strand of pearls on the AT&T stage, looking for all the world as if she were playing a recital for her grandparents. "Better" chronicled a distressing relationship in sharp chords and her high-pitched, Kate Bushy voice. She played "Poor Little Rich Boy" with one hand . From her boundless smile to her compelling songcraft to those pearls, there's just nothing about her you don't want to root for.

\-- Joe Gross

### Everybody Must See Bob

Reedy legend ends smoothest circus yet on a high note

By American-Statesman Staff  
Sept. 17, 2007

It was an Austin City Limits Music Festival right out of a Bob Dylan song. It was a circus with eight rings (or stages), tens of thousands of colorful fans and a couple of mysterious, mythical sideshows. There were the mighty bands who never arrived (White Stripes, Amy Winehouse, Rodrigo y Gabriela). There was the exploding recreational vehicle and the trucks that went with it. And then there was Dylan himself, the living bridge between the old, weird America and the iPod age.

A dark sea of listeners swarmed the AT&T stage in Zilker Park on Sunday as Bob Dylan opened his set with "Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35. " Right away, crowds pushed forward because there were no zoom shots on the big screens, just static group pictures, while the band sounded muddy from a distance.

Nevertheless, a gravel-voiced Dylan, dressed in black and topped with a cowboy hat, sang "everybody must get stoned" to a delirious response.

Earlier in the day, rock-ribbed Dylan fans raced to secure the best spots by the stage as soon as the gates opened. One pregnant woman wore a T-shirt that read "Baby's First Dylan Show." Still, plenty of people poured out of the park only 30 minutes into the set, as they often do during the festival's final acts, trying to beat the outgoing traffic.

Audiences - officially estimated at 65,000 each day - hid their disappointment about the big-name no-shows by massing around the stages for headliners such as Muse, Björk and Arcade Fire.

"Arcade!" chanted half the crowd Saturday, and the other half added "Fi-ya!" With six enormous neon pipe cleaners dividing the 10 or 11 players onstage (it was hard to get an accurate count because there were so many arms flailing all at once), Montreal's majestic, rhythmic collective hypnotized the audience but were equally as biting, as on the bleak song dedicated to "Gov. George Bush."

Despite relatively clement highs in the low 90s, heat remained a much-sweated topic for the sixth edition of the festival.

"Sure, it was hot," said Sarah Banks of Seattle. "But I just got back from Granada, Spain, where it got up to 122. I tell you, the air-conditioned toilet (in the VIP area) was a godsend."

Increased environmental sensitivity, well-tended turf and widespread availability of drinking water, along with the usual carnival eats and drinks, helped lower personal temperatures at the festival this year. That, and production planning has grown more sophisticated with each iteration.

Chris Conley of Fort Worth has been to ACL Fest the past four years and says the organization improves every year.

"The fire on Friday was a drag, but the response was impressive," said the military veteran, who has first-response training. "The cooperation by the crowd and the swiftness of the organization prevented a bigger tragedy."

Still no official word on the cause of the RV fire - which sent an ominous plume of smoke over the park, but all four of the service employees who were injured have been released from the hospital. Austin/Travis County EMS spokesman Warren Hassinger said that more than 300 festivalgoers were treated over the weekend, mostly for minor problems related to heat, but fewer people (18) were taken to the hospital than last year.

Conley liked the expanded "no chairs" zone this year. "It just makes for a better overall flow. We could get around from stage to stage a lot easier."

Donna and Jeffrey West, who've been coming from Maryland for ACL Fest the past four years, were mildly disappointed that the "no chairs beyond this point" signs were set back more than 50 feet from last year's boundary. They came early Sunday and set up about 100 yards from the AMD stage.

"I think they've got it backwards," Donna West said. "It should be chairs in the front and standing in the back." Jeffrey West added that, despite the setback, they'll bring their chairs again next year: "It's still our favorite festival. We just wish we were a little closer."

Material from staff writers Joe Gross, Michael Corcoran, Patrick George and Matthew Odam.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Arctic Monkeys was a big buzz act at the 2007 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Jeff Tweedy and the rest of Wilco at the 2007 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Ziggy Marley performs at the Austin Kiddie Limits stage for the 2007 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Ocote Soul Sounds perform at the 2007 ACL Fest.

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Bjork brought her unique style and sounds to the 2007 festival.

Eclectic ACL lineup isn't built around headliners

By Joe Gross  
Sept. 26, 2008

Call it the Coldplay problem.

In September 2005, the British rock band headlined the fourth Austin City Limits Music Festival. Three months earlier, Coldplay had released "X&Y," its third album, which went on to sell more than 8 million copies worldwide. Coldplay was the biggest band in the world, and it was playing Zilker Park.

That hasn't happened again. Tom Petty and Bob Dylan headlined ACL the next two years; Foo Fighters have that honor at this festival, which opens today. All three acts are respectable crowd-pleasers, but none has the same juice as Coldplay did in 2005 or as Radiohead does now. Many local music fans are incensed that Radiohead headlined last month's Lollapalooza, the other festival produced by Austin's C3 Presents, but they are not playing ACL.

"If Radiohead was available, they would absolutely be playing Austin City Limits," says Charles Attal, C3 Presents principal and main talent booker.

But theories and criticism abound.

When the lineup was announced in April, fans rushed message boards, such as that at the American-Statesman's Austin Music Source blog at Austin360.com, mostly to complain, which launched a debate: "Not enough big names this year! Who are these people?" - Karen

"All the complainers who don't know who most of these bands are will be raving about them next year and complaining that they aren't playing ACL." - Grape Ape

"The headliners at this year's ACL are by far the weakest ever." – Ming

This sort of dialogue continued for pages of posts.

Coldplay was booked to play ACL the same way all the performers are, Attal says: "They wanted to play it, they were routing right through Austin, it was perfect timing, we were able to get it."

The festival obviously is doing something right. Three-day passes have been sold out for a month, and day passes are close to doing the same. Attal credits this success to what he calls "the guts" of the event and its low price compared with other festivals.

In 2008, Coachella could set you back $249 to $269, plus fees. Bonnaroo cost $209 to $229, plus fees. Lollapalooza was $175 to $205, fees included. ACL was $135 to $170, fees included. Corporate sponsorships offset a lot of those costs.

" ACL is about the overall lineup," Attal says. "It's never been about the headliner. Ever."

The fest also succeeds because of an eclectic, family-friendly aesthetic that never gets too aurally extreme (thanks mostly to its connection with the TV show) and, of course, because of Austin itself. For Attal and for many music fans, the heart of the festival lies in acts such as the Kills, Sharon Jones, Patty Griffin, Erykah Badu and Neko Case, mid-list artists who have strong followings but don't necessarily makes news on the charts.

"We always book from the bottom up, never the top down," Attal says. This is practically his mantra.

"We go club level up to arena level," Attal says, adding that while he does the majority of booking for ACL between November and February, he's already getting calls about headliners for ACL '09. "As more festivals pop up, they're booking further out to get the prime slots. It's getting booked earlier and earlier," he said.

Tom Windish of Chicago has been booking bands for 16 years. His Windish Agency has a number of club-level acts playing ACL this year, including buzz bands Hot Chip, Jamie Lidell and Yeasayer. "As far as I can tell, it's almost never money and almost always logistics," Windish said.

The smaller a band is, the more likely they are to quickly confirm an appearance at a major festival. Bigger acts have much more to think about.

"Tour routing really is the No. 1 factor for bigger bands," Windish adds. "If they're touring in August and there's a festival in August, great. If there's a festival in September and they're not already out, they're not going to want to fly in dozens of people for their production crew."

In other words, you're not booking the five guys in a band when you book a major headliner, you're booking everyone they have on staff. If those people have been promised a break by their bosses in the band, the band is mighty unlikely to interrupt that break for a festival gig, even a headlining one.

Craig Saper, 22, is an Austin native and a TV producer living in Los Angeles who is coming to his first full ACL Fest.

"I'm a little less enthusiastic about the lineup this year than past years," Saper says, "but Austin is a very sacred place for me and I'm more than excited to experience the town once again." For Saper, ACL is a homecoming as much as anything else. " Foo Fighters are going to be great, Beck will be amazing and there are some lesser-known acts I have my eyes on, but I'm really going because Austin is my true home. It's a vacation in this bohemian oasis." Which might very well explain why ACL Fest sells out year after year, no matter who is playing - that and the continued popularity of the television show that inspired it.

"Austin City Limits," the KLRU series shown on many PBS stations, is still going strong in the middle of taping its 34th season.

And there's no question that the show is an attraction for bands. While Attal and "Austin City Limits" television producer Terry Lickona both said an appearance on the show isn't held as a carrot for bands to play the festival, ACL Fest does get a whole lot of bands in town at once. Two birds, one gig: They can play the festival and tape a show in the same weekend. This year, Foo Fighters, Drive-By Truckers, Manu Chao, Gnarls Barkley and the Swell Season are all taping ACL sets.

"Charles and I stay in close contact throughout the whole booking process," Lickona says. "Once we have serious conversations about who he has coming for the fest, I start making calls. By early to mid-spring, we have firm offers for taping."

And it might not be explicitly (or publicly) mandated from either party, but there's no question that ACL the show and ACL the festival rarely diverge in their aesthetics. You're not going to see much metal, hard rock, rap, avant-garde music or punk either place. (No wonder Paste magazine - advocate of NPR-ish rock, neo-soul and music that just screams authenticity - hosted an official ACL kick-off party Thursday night at Emo's.)

Every year, ACL is a bit different but feels essentially the same. It's eclectic within those nothing-too-extreme-please parameters. This year, there's more indie rock at ACL Fest than in years past. Buzz bands such as Fleet Foxes, CSS, Band of Horses and Antibalas are all over the grid. Other than Galactic, there are almost no jam bands, a staple of the first ACL Fest. The prog rock of the Mars Volta abuts the Barcelona soul of Manu Chao; Robert Earl Keen's country hits the stage at the same time as Erykah Badu's ultramodern soul.

So it's no surprise when Attal asserts, "I can tell you that I've already got stuff booked for next year that will make (ACL) a totally different scene."

We'll see.

### Cheers for a rollicking fest fest

A well-organized weekend wins appreciation of crowd

By Michael Corcoran  
Sept. 29, 2008

Ninety degrees never felt so balmy.

In the seventh year the weather gods spared the Austin City Limits Music Festival the record-breaking heat of years past, putting the focus on the music of 130 acts, including a powerhouse set by the Foo Fighters in Sunday's closing slot that some are calling the fest's best ending yet.

Although a few hundred shy of a sellout Sunday, Friday and Saturday nights reached a capacity of 65,000. The ACL mood remained festive throughout the weekend, even spilling out onto Barton Springs Road, where six police cars turned up at 11 p.m. Saturday to break up an impromptu dance party of about 150 people next to the Daily Juice. "For an event of this size, it's very well run," said April Luecke, 29, of Tampa, Fla., a first-timer at the festival.

ACL Fest veteran Jeff Taylor, 38, of Austin said he's impressed with how little adjustments each year make the festival better. "There was more free water," he said. "And the new program booklet is great; it's been very helpful."

But an old nemesis reappeared this year: dust, though the problem was nowhere near as bad as the infamous dust bowl of 2005.

Promoters C3 Presents have pledged $2.5 million for Zilker Park improvements, including a new irrigation system, which will close the area of Zilker used for ACL Fest for six months in the coming year. Relief for the drought-scorched earth can't come soon enough.

When fans crisscrossed the center of the park Saturday, the hit album "Raising Sand," by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, the most anticipated act of the weekend, could've been renamed "Raising Dust." The festival seemed as crowded that night with 65,000 people as it had before the capacity was lowered from 75,000 after the 2004 festival. But a trio of friends from Newfoundland in Canada said the dust was a minor irritation in an otherwise pleasurable experience.

Bob Leeman, 53, John Berghuis, 52, and Bob Tiller, 47, said they are longtime fans of the "Austin City Limits" TV show, and when they heard there was a companion festival, they got tickets online and made plans to attend for the first time this year.

"We have similar festivals in Canada, but they're not run as well as this one," Leeman said Sunday. "And the food is fantastic," added Berghuis, who said he was hooked on the chicken avocado cones from the Hudson's On the Bend stand.

One source of complaints in years past, the noise bleed between stages, seems to have become a more acceptable byproduct of presenting continuous live music on eight stages.

"I had a magic moment last night," Tiller said. "I was walking from Beck (on the AT&T stage ) to Plant and Krauss (on the AMD stage at the other end of Zilker), and as soon as I got out of Beck's range, Plant and Krauss started doing a Led Zeppelin song, 'Ballad of Nevermore.'" A ticket to ACL Fest provided passage to a world unto itself, but it was hard to avoid what was happening elsewhere. The logo at the WaMu stage was a reminder of the largest bank failure in U.S. history; federal regulators seized Washington Mutual on Friday and sold most of its operations to J.P. Morgan.

There was also evidence Saturday that a University of Texas football game was in town, a first during ACL Fest, made necessary when concerns over Hurricane Ike caused the game to be rescheduled. Burnt orange, not black, was the T-shirt color of choice.

Friday and Saturday, 311 festival-goers were treated at the medical tent, with three transported to the hospital Friday and 19 getting an ambulance ride Saturday. The most serious were two suspected drug overdoses Saturday, said South West Emergency Action Team supervisor Tannifer Ayres. More than half of those treated Saturday had heat-related problems or lacerations. Almost 80 were treated for asthma/respiratory problems or eye irritations.

The number of people treated is down from last year, Ayres said. "People are doing a better job of keeping themselves hydrated." It also didn't hurt that temperatures were about 10 degrees cooler than the ACL Fest norm. In 2005, the mercury reached 108. Environmental concerns continue to influence the festival, which used a biodiesel mix and solar panels to power generators. For the first year, beer was served in aluminum cans instead of plastic cups, and more than 400 recycling bins were spread out over the park.

The food vendors, which included such four-star restaurants as Aquarelle and Austin favorites such as Original Hoffbrau Steaks, Vespaio and El Chilito, were required to use biodegradable plates and encouraged to serve items that didn't require disposable utensils. One could eat well without ever touching a fork.

Friday, co-headliner David Byrne, dressed in his white stage outfit, was one of hundreds to ride a bike to Zilker. Pedicabs also did brisk business on Barton Springs Road, which turned into a swap meet for head shops, hat and T-shirt sellers, and especially ticket scalpers, who snapped up extra tickets for cheap early each day and typically sold them later at double the price.

One headache for concertgoers was waits of up to two hours for cabs after headliners Manu Chao (Friday) and Beck (Saturday) let out. The shuttle buses seem to run smoother every year, as long as everyone doesn't leave at the same time.

With this seventh campaign, ACL Fest seems to have taken on more of a South by Southwest, all-over-town feel. Longtime SXSW partiers Blender magazine took over the American Legion Hall at 2201 Veterans Drive and converted it into the Music Lounge Mansion, offering gift bags to ACL Fest performers and the stray celebrity. Former "Love Connection" host Chuck Woolery, a resident of Marble Falls and friend of ACL Fest performer Ben Cyllus, visited the Blender "gifting suite" with Cyllus. Actor Bill Murray, who was seen driving himself from stage to stage in a golf cart, did not.

Last week, Charlie Walker of C3 said that the demand for VIP amenities is the fastest growing aspect of ACL Fest. Hundreds paid $850 for such services as massages and spa treatments, plus gourmet organic meals and free beverages, all in the shade of the VIP Grove. After this year's relatively pleasant weather, and with the promise of the new dust-busting Zilker irrigation system, the VIP section may lose much of its allure. That's a problem ACL Fest organizers will no doubt be fine with.

### Our Austin City Limits Music Festival coverage team  
shares some of their favorite moments:

* 1. "Nothing" written by Townes Van Zandt, performed by Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and band Saturday night. One of the most complete acts of rock music I've ever witnessed. Contained distortion, sex, bass, regret, guitars, mumbling, singing, anger, love, hate, fear, bliss, power, weakness and a slow, rhythmic undertow tough as the tide going out. Fantastic; everything else was a distant second, third, 45th.

* 2. The spectral presence of producer/songwriter/genius Brian Eno at both of David Byrne's sets, first Thursday night at the Paramount, then at Zilker the next day. From the one-chord drone that sits cloudlike on "Once in a Lifetime" to the complexities of "I Zimbra," Eno's ghost-in-the-machine vibe was always felt but never seen.

* 3. The Foo Fighters' festival-closing set. Everyone hoped it would be explosive, which it was. Some of us were not prepared for it to be oddly moving.

\-- Joe Gross, music writer

* 1. Alison Krauss singing "Through the Morning, Through the Night" during her and Robert Plant's set Saturday night - meltingly lovely, with Plant taking a gracious backseat to offer understated harmonies.

* 2. Abigail Washburn singing folk songs from Sichuan Province (in Chinese!) with Bela Fleck on banjo and the rest of the Sparrow Quartet on Sunday - one definition of "art" is "a series of anticipated rewards." Washburn's set fit that definition to a T.

* 3. Alejandro Escovedo and the Jones Family Singers at the last "Unplugged At the Grove" free concert of the season at Shady Grove on Thursday -- OK, not technically part of ACL, but I can't imagine a better way to get in the mood for the weekend.

\-- John T. Davis, freelance music writer

* 1. N.E.R.D.: The energy and joy in their set -- reflected in the dancing fest-goers onstage -- perfectly captured my feelings on the first day of the fest. Triumphant.

* 2. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: I never thought I'd get the chance to see Robert Plant live, especially singing Zepp tunes. Transcendent.

* 3. I love/hate getting a taste of a band while walking across Zilker. Love that I can add to the list of bands I want to check out live, hate that I'm missing what sounds like a great set. Added to my list: CSS, Eli "Paperboy" Reed, MGMT, Octopus Project, Mike Farris, Band of Horses and Conor Oberst (thanks to his cover of Paul Simon's "Kodachrome").

\-- Sharon Chapman, XL editor

* Day One: M. Ward. The Portland, Ore.-based finger-picking, blues-rocking troubadour brought a band to help play his music. His cover of Daniel Johnston's "To Go Home" is like really good chicken soup.

* Day Two: MGMT. New York-based pysch-rockers made their recent album come to life in a big way, with screaming guitars and screaming fans.

* Day Three: Conor Oberst aftershow. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings show up to collaborate with M. Ward, Jenny Lewis and Oberst at La Zona Rosa. The music didn't stop until 2 a.m.

\-- Peter Mongillo

* Band of Horses: Ben Bridwell and his talented mates brought soaring, heartfelt low country rock backed by arguably the greatest sense of gratitude of any band at the fest.

* David Byrne: The word "legend" gets tossed around pretty casually these days, but the former Talking Heads leader is well deserving. His blend of calypso and world pop interwoven with Heads' classics filled the audience with light.

* Hot Chip: The whimsical Brits reimagined the electro-pop of Devo for the 21st century and fellow concert-goers and I bouncing in the late afternoon sun with the same lack of pretense as the band itself.

\-- Matthew Odam, music writer

* 1. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss: Beautifully crafted, incredibly sensual set was one of the best I've ever seen at any ACL Fest.

* 2. N.E.R.D.: My only regret was that I couldn't get closer to the stage for this highly charged set that was truly for the people.

* 3. Gillian Welch: Superbly lovely. The world's a better place when Welch and partner David Rawlings are on stage.

\-- Kathy Blackwell, executive features editor

* David Byrne: Hitting on all cylinders, the punk statesman was clearly having a ball, and how refreshing that he embraces his past and doesn't shy away from Talking Heads material.

* Neko Case: I Twitter-confessed my Neko crush on 360.com, so take this at face value. But she had a typically fantastic voice, ace songs and a backing band that faded into the background like ninjas. Plus she was sweeter than two gallons of honey.

* Band of Horses: The thing that sticks after seeing this roots pop band is how much emotion and joy lead singer Ben Bridwell puts into every moment of each song. Watch them and try to not smile like an idiot the entire time. It's a sucker bet. You can't.

\-- Chad Swiatecki, music writer

* My three favorite ACL moments were catching the incredible energy in some of the last moments of Conor Oberst's performance, listening to A.A. Bondy recount the difference between his and his girlfriend's dreams before diving into a new song, and catching a classic Wallflowers tune ("Three Marlenas") in Jakob Dylan's set.

\-- Alex Daniel, music writer

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Fleet Foxes played the 2008 festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

David Byrne, all in white, co-headlined at the 2008 festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Beck performs during the 2008 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Jack White finally made it! But with his Raconteurs, in 2008.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Erykah Badu performs at the 2008 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Alex Flood, 17, of Austin cheers for Gogol Bordello at the 2008 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Black Keys perform at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Roky Erickson plays the 2008 edition of ACL Fest.

Stealth lineup

With injuries and illnesses, the Austin City Limits Music adapts

By Joe Gross  
Sept. 15, 2009

2009 might become known as the year the Austin City Limits Music Festival had to, in the immortal words of Kool Moe Dee, "go see the doctor."

This has been a rough year for some acts who were booked to play ACL, which is Oct. 2-4 in Zilker Park. The Beastie Boys canceled all shows for the foreseeable future after Adam Yauch announced on July 20 that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Their Oct. 2 headlining slot was taken by another New York trio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (Haters are free to complain all they like; the group is a blast live.)

Then Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo broke his wrist playing tennis, so their fall tour is off, with many dates made up in January. (No Austin makeup date yet, though ACL promoter Charles Attal is pals with Sonic Youth - and Foo Fighters \- manager John Silva, so a makeup date is likely.) And blues singer Marva Wright suffered a stroke.

Of course, anyone can get cancer and anyone can break an arm. But our bodies fall apart as we get older and, well, is this the sort of thing that might put C3 Presents off booking older artists?

"Absolutely not," says Attal, C3's booker. "You can't get scared of things like that. This job's stressful enough, so why live in fear?" Attal says when an artist cancels as late as Sonic Youth, which officially happened last week about a month before the fest, it becomes impossible to find an act of comparable size willing to play on such a short deadline. "It was just too late in the game," for a big act, Attal says, "but you have to deliver the best show you can deliver, and I think we've done that this year."

Michael Franti and Spearhead was moved into Sonic Youth's slot (7 p.m. Oct. 4), and club-level buzz band Dirty Projectors are now in Franti's old slot.

This is a clever fit: Sonic Youth has long been a darling of hipsters and critics, and the Dirty Projectors are in a similar position now. Their album "Bitte Orca" is one of the year's most highly praised; the review-aggregator site Metacritic pegs its average score at 85 out of 100, even if they aren't quite big enough to go right into Sonic Youth's time slot.

There are, of course, headliners to whom nothing bad has happened (knock wood). Though Pearl Jam is releasing a new record this fall and embodies an era that many ACL patrons will recall with high-school-and-college-era fondness, the closest thing to a Coldplay (who was huge when it played Zilker in 2005) the fest has this year is probably Kings of Leon. An enormous draw in Europe, their album "Only By the Night" has sold 1.2 million copies, a smash in today's busted market, thanks to hits such as "Sex on Fire" and "Use Somebody."

Then there's Lily Allen's cancellation, whose ACL gig never seemed like a sure thing and about whom Attal declined to comment. (The British press has reported that Allen is still unable to enter the United States as her working visa was revoked in 2007. It is possible she was booked under the idea that these problems would be sorted out by show time, but that didn't happen.) R&B veteran Raphael Saadiq is now in her Oct. 2 timeslot.

The act following Saadiq on the Xbox360 stage, the intergenerational supergroup Them Crooked Vultures was a huge "get" for the festival. This is what Attal is most proud of in the late confirmation class of '09. The band's first-ever gig was a Lollapalooza aftershow in Chicago (C3 presents also produces that festival); their second and third will be Oct. 1 at Stubb's and Oct. 2 at ACL.

"I am absolutely willing to spend the money on a good replacement when an act cancels," Attal says. "It's never a question of money. It's always timing and scheduling. I don't want to rip anyone off."

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Fans frolic in the mud at the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

### Oh, yeah!

From Karen O to K'naan and Pearl Jam,  
the 2009 festival's memorable moments

By American-Statesman Staff

Sure, there was weather. But what about the music? We didn't let a little wet and mud keep us from reviewing a ton of sets at the three-day Austin City Limits Music Festival. Here, our music team shares some of their highlights. Online at austin360.com/acl, read the dozens of set reviews and scene reports we produced, as well as view hundreds of photos and videos. Phew! Now we sleep.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Eddie Vedder performs with Pearl Jam to close the 2009 festival.

Top moments: Joe Gross

1. The weather on Friday. I've been to every one of these festivals, and though 2002 was lovely, Friday featured the best weather since the fest started attracting big name acts. Clearly, the further back in the year the fest is pushed, the more rain becomes a concern. But I'll take one day of perfect, one day of rain and one day of mud (and more perfect temps) over a 102 degree weekend every time.

2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Friday night, AMD stage. Karen O is one of the most compelling frontwomen of her generation, blending downtown cool, sleeve-heart emotionalism and noisy angst. Live, you cannot take your eyes off her and her ability to move from the sexy dance-vibe of "Zero" ("try to hit the spot/ get to know it in the dark") to the still-raw-sounding "Maps" ("Wait " they don't love you like I love you") with equal credibility is kind of a miracle.

3. !!!, Saturday afternoon, AMD stage. For about 10 minutes, the crowd was suddenly in England at one of that country's truly enormous music fests. To wit: Rain was pouring while on stage, a white guy in a track-style warm-up jacket sang and bounced around over long, loose dance grooves that were half electronic blurt, half rock swagger. What is this, Glastonbury? It was wild.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2009.

Top moments: Deborah Sengupta Stith

1. Raphael Saadiq: The former Tony! Toni! Tone! artist looked suave, sounded superb and seemed positively ebullient with an infectious vibe that spread from the stage and seeped into the soul of everyone it touched.

2. K'Naan: As I was running across the field from one set to another, the strains of the heartbreaking tribute song "Fatima" forced me to change course and catch a few minutes of the powerful Somali musician who puts a haunting face on love in a time of war.

3. !!!: Who knew the band's self-described "moody nightclub music" would work so well on a rainy afternoon? They embraced the afternoon deluge and tossed down their funky genre-smashing dance grooves so hard we almost forgot about the weather. Almost.

Top moments: Chad Swiatecki

1. Pearl Jam 'Austin City Limits' taping. Seeing the most consistent rock band of the past 20 years straight-up own the ACL studio for two hours was a musical moment I might never surpass. Old stuff, new stuff, Eddie Vedder being gregarious and reverential. Just about perfect.

2. K'naan. If you don't want to embrace every day and be a better person after seeing this Somali dynamo, check your pulse. Magnetic and adventurous at once, the guy could teach a master class in how to work a crowd like a speedbag.

3. Dave Grohl drumming. Saw it twice and both times it was the highlight of Them Crooked Vultures' still-developing sound. The flesh and blood version of "The Muppet Show's" Animal, I'd shed not one tear if this became his main gig as long as there's a drums-only clause for him.

Top moments: Patrick Caldwell

1. Former Led Zeppelin bassist and Crooked Vulture John Paul Jones joining Austinite David Garza and fiddler Sara Watkins onstage for a joyful cover of John Harford's 'Long Hot Summer Day.' It would have been inappropriate on the muddy and rain-soaked Saturday or Sunday, but on a toasty Friday afternoon the bluegrass jam was one of the festival's most ebullient moments.

2. The thunderous and transcendent appearances of the full Longhorn Band at the climax of Ghostland Observatory's Saturday Day-Glo dance rock spectacular. Last year fellow Austin electronica superstars the Octopus Project brought down the house with the Austin High band, but Thomas Turner and Aaron Behrens managed to do them one better.

3. Sound and the Jury Winners the Bright Light Social Hour no doubt won a few thousand converts Friday morning, with a hard-rocking set that left shirtless bassist Jack O'Brien grinning ear-to-ear. These guys earned it.

4. Dark folk singer Alela Diane played some sterling and intimate shows at South by Southwest this year, but her early Sunday performance with a full band was a powerful, soulful acoustic stunner that complemented a wet, gray morning.

Top moments: Peter Mongillo

Friday: Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Karen O took David Bowie-style androgyny to another level on the first night of the festival, rocking new and old material with costume changes, including a scary stocking mask adorned with Day-Glo orange paint, and concluding by smashing her microphone.

Saturday: Bon Iver. Despite the rain, the four-piece brought to life intimate material from Justin Vernon's exercise in sadness, "For Emma, Forever Ago" and the more recent "Blood Bank" EP that could have easily been lost in a festival setting.

Sunday: Suckers. Brooklyn-based psychedelic rockers in the same vein as MGMT and Yeasayer made the most of their 11:45 a.m. set, which included songs from their self-titled EP. The band was very much together; it should be interesting to hear the full-length when it comes out.

Top moments: Matthew Odam

Friday: Medeski, Martin and Wood were as tight as they were when I first saw them more than a dozen years ago at Liberty Lunch. Getting to see bassist Wood play mountain blues and roots with his brother Oliver just over an hour later was a nice counterbalance.

Saturday: Bon Iver had a beautiful and aching set that perfectly suited the rainy early evening set perfectly. Kudos to Ghostland for bringing out UT band.

Sunday: No rain! At least not as of 6:30 p.m. Enjoyed the retro raw and powerful rock from the Dead Weather. Jack White knows how to bring a band together. From what I heard about Pearl Jam's " ACL" taping, I expect greatness when it airs.

Food: Restaurant Jezebel's chicken and veggie skewers and Moonshine's corndog chicken tenders with honey mustard.

### Best of the fest

Oct. 8, 2009

Around the 90-minute mark Sunday night – during the guitar solo passage of 'Alive' - Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder ventured to the left side girders of the stage and peered up and down the superstructure. A moment later, he bounded to the right stage edge and did the same thing; feeling the framework before looking out on the ocean of mud-covered fans caught up in his every move and syllable.

As many as 10 years ago, the front man would've gone ape and started climbing, probably winding up atop a speaker stack before diving onto a mass of waiting hands. Who knows if it's because of his firmly adult age (now 44) or just a feeling of 'been there, done that' that caused it, but those two moments of reserve were the only times Vedder or any of his bandmates held anything back during a two-hour epic performance that should put them in the books as one of the best headlining acts ever in Austin City Limits Music Festival history.

Put together a checklist of what you want to see from a festival headliner and it was there: oldies ('Why Go?,' 'Corduroy,' 'Daughter'), well-executed new stuff ('Got Some,' 'The Fixer'), virtuosity (guitarist Mike McCready wailing behind his head during 'Evenflow' or any of a number of solos throughout the night), Vedder being Vedder (plenty of chat to the crowd without rambling) and covers (Neil Young's 'Rockin' in the Free World,' the Who's 'The Real Me,' and, amazingly, Jane's Addiction's 'Mountain Song' with Perry Farrell on vocals). What strung all that together was Pearl Jam's ability to change speeds in a snap and pull the right song from its nine-album canon and fire it just the right way to fit the vibe of the show. It's what makes a transition from almost folk like 'Daughter' into the first verse of the dirgy 'W.M.A.' followed by the full-on stomp of 'Hail Hail' not only make sense but seem completely obvious. That adaptability comes from the band's healthy touring regimen through its 19 years together, which in recent years has bizarrely turned it into an alternate universe Grateful Dead, getting Gen X-er fans to go on the road for dozens of dates at a stretch. And even though Sunday's two-hour time limit was 60 minutes shorter than what they're known for these days, it never lacked for immediacy or felt like there was a base that wasn't being covered well. Whether Pearl Jam makes good on Vedder's mid-set promise to return to Austin in a reasonable time frame (the band's last visit here was in 1995), few of the masses who toughed out the mud through Sunday - 'You all look like a (expletive) ocean" and it's beautiful,' Vedder offered later on - would argue the band put its stamp on ACL Fest and the city for years to come.

\-- Chad Swiatecki

Raphael Saadiq

Raphael Saadiq is one smooth cat. Rocking a black tie and a suit coat rapidly shed in the setting sun, he easily won the Xbox 360 stage crowd over with retro soul grooves complemented with Temptations-esque dance moves. ... His pipes were pure and when he picked up the guitar the man proved he could shred. But the most striking thing about Saadiq's performance was his ebullient spirit. It was an infectious vibe that spread from the stage across the field. He introduced the song 'Faithful' by crying out, 'Do you love me tonight? Do you love me tonight, Austin, Texas?' Then he answered the responding screams: 'I sure hope you mean it.' There was no doubt we did.

\-- Deborah Sengupta Stith

### SATURDAY

The Levon Helm Band

It wasn't the Last Waltz, but it wasn't bad. Levon Helm, whose unmistakable drums and vocals were among the indelible signatures of the Band, brought his own band to town. ... He had a five-piece horn section, four different vocalists, a B-3 organ, accordion and at least three guitarists. Maybe a partridge in a pear tree (I didn't check). The only thing missing was Helm's twangy, evocative vocals. Although he played drums with gusto, Helm was confined to an instrumental role. Throat cancer almost killed him a few years ago, but a recent news release from his record company confirmed that Helm is currently cancer-free. Rather, his silence was attributed to 'doctor-ordered vocal rest.' Fair enough, but disappointing nonetheless.

\-- John T. Davis

### Will city seek a bigger slice of ACL pie?  
Organizer pays $12,000, plus $1 per ticket sold, other costs

By Sarah Coppola and Michael Corcoran  
Oct. 10, 2009

As the Austin City Limits Music Festival grew from a fledgling two-day event in 2002 into one of the biggest music festivals in the country, the fees the city has charged organizers for use of Zilker Park have not changed.

This year, organizer C3 Presents paid the City of Austin $12,000 , plus $1 per ticket sold, to rent Zilker Park on Oct. 1 -4 , according to the company's contract with the city . Those rates have remained constant, even as ticket prices have increased substantially. The Austin-based company has donated $1.4 million over the past three years to the Austin Parks Foundation and will pay another $2.5 million to reimburse the city for new sod and irrigation systems at Zilker. And the ACL Festival pumps at least $27 million into Austin's economy, according to the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau. "They give us everything we need and require, and on top of that, they give so much to the Parks Foundation," said Jason Maurer , events manager at the parks department. "You have to look at the benefits holistically."

City Council Member Sheryl Cole said the city should probably take a fresh look at its special event fees for parks but consider them in the context of other benefits offered by groups like C3.

"We need to consider that they bring other things to the entire city, including the donations they've made to the Parks Foundation, Zilker Park and the benefits to our economy," Cole said.

This year, C3 paid the City of Austin $20,000 to rent Zilker Park for 19 days before, during and after the festival, including time to set up and dismantle equipment. It also paid a $2,000 damage deposit , $1,000 to cover all utility costs, $1,500 to use Republic Square as a shuttle site and $2,500 apiece to the Zilker Zephyr train and the Barton Springs Pool concession stand for business lost during the festival.

C3 paid for all road closure fees during ACL and all police, fire and emergency services expenses, costs that many other event organizers ask the city to waive, Maurer said. "C3 is committed to the communities where we work, and we are proud of the contributions we have made," C3 spokeswoman Shelby Meade said. By comparison, C3 appears to pay more to put on Lollapalooza, a slightly larger three-day music festival in Chicago. However, a precise tally of ACL expenses is not available because C3 donates an undisclosed percentage of ticket sales to a nonprofit that works to improve city parks.

Chicago's parks department does not charge C3 to rent Grant Park for Lollapalooza, which draws 75,000 people per day for three days in August.

However, C3 pays 10.25 percent of gross revenue and 8.5 percent of sponsorship revenue to the Parkways Foundation, the Chicago parks department's fundraising arm. The total payout for 2009 will be $1.9 million. This year, the price was $205 for a three-day pass.

In Austin, C3 has paid the Austin Parks Foundation a percentage of ticket sales since 2006. Neither C3 nor the foundation would disclose the percentage, which is written into a private contract.

But foundation Executive Director Charlie McCabe said the money, over the past three years, has paid for $1 million in improvements to 50 city parks. It also has covered $400,000 to add water lines and improve a lake water intake system at Zilker in 2007 and 2008. And it will reimburse the city $500,000 a year over the next five years for a new sprinkler system and sod the city installed at Zilker in April.

The money from C3 "has allowed us to expand our mission and fund a lot of projects that we wouldn't have been able to do through our normal fundraising activities," McCabe said.

Meade , the C3 spokeswoman, said C3 estimates that, once it makes its payment to the Parks Foundation for 2009 , it will have donated $2.6 million total since 2006 .

The company pays the city $1 per ticket sold, counting $185 three-day passes as one ticket. Last year, the total was $66,923. The amount hasn't been calculated for this year and won't come due for a few weeks . The daily festival capacity is 65,000 paid entrants.

ACL's ticket prices have risen from $25 a day in 2002 to $85 a day this year. The $1-per-ticket fee is the same rate charged to any other event that draws more than 1,000 people, closes off a city park and charges admission, Maurer said.

C3 also reimburses the city for any staff time that parks and Austin Energy workers spend on the event. Last year, that total was $29,921 , including pay for four Austin Energy workers to be on site at all times, Maurer said.

The contract also requires C3 to pay for any damage to Zilker. The sod installed in April became a muddy mess after last weekend's rains, and C3 crews began hosing it off this week in the hopes that healthy grass is alive beneath it. The parks department has no estimate of how much any sod repairs might cost.

C3 has already agreed to rent out more time at Zilker - through Oct. 16 - to dismantle equipment and work to restore the grass. The parks department will seek payment for any days the park might have to be closed beyond that, Maurer said.

Roughly 100 groups rent Austin park space for events each year. Parks staffers don't haggle over the fees to rent park space because those fees are set by the City Council, Maurer said.

"We, as staff, cannot just change them on an ad hoc, discretionary basis, depending on the event," Maurer said.

That means the organizers of a 2006 Rolling Stones concert paid the same rates, though the band kicked in an extra $300,000 for parks improvements.

The city charges slightly different rental rates for other parks. For example, it charges $5,000 a day to rent Auditorium Shores, $2,500 a day to rent Fiesta Gardens and $3,500 a day to rent Waterloo Park, regardless of whether the event is free to the public. The rates are the same for nonprofit and for-profit groups because the wear and tear on the park space is the same regardless of the organizers' financial status, Maurer said.

There is no specific fee for Zilker, however. It defaults to a more generic $3,000 -a-day rental fee for special events that was set before the ACL Festival began, Maurer said. Back then, there were only three big events held at Zilker - the Trail of Lights, the Blues on the Green concert series and the kite festival. The trail pays no fees because it is a city-run event, Maurer said. Blues on the Green organizer KGSR does not pay fees because it produces free concerts at no cost to the city and provides its own equipment, security and cleanup crews, Maurer said. And the kite festival does not pay city fees because the organizer, the nonprofit Exchange Club, provides a free, family-oriented event, Maurer said.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Avett Brothers perform at the 2009 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Hometown hero Black Joe Lewis plays the 2009 festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Felice Brothers squeeze out some tunes in 2009.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The B-52's light up the 2009 ACL Music Festival.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Levon Helm performs at the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Ricardo B. Brazziell/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

John Legend performs during Austin City Limits Music Festival 2009.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Dave Grohl of Them Crooked attacks the drums at the 2009 ACL Fest.

Contract increases ACL cap by 10,000

75,000 tickets would mean more cash for city, event promoters

By Michael Corcoran and Patrick Caldwell  
Sept. 28, 2010

Ten thousand more fans will be attending the Austin City Limits Music Festival this year than last. That's what we can find in the fine print of a contract between the city and promoters C3 Presents that was released Friday.

There's not much difference between this year's contract and 2009's - the fees for using Zilker Park from Sept. 27 to Oct. 15 remain $24,830, plus $1 for every ticket or three-day pass sold. But under the "special provisions" section, the allowable number of tickets sold this year jumps to 75,000, up from 65,000 in 2009.

So not only did ACL sell out in early July, three months before the fest, but it possibly sold 10,000 more tickets than last year. Three-day passes ranged in price from $145 to $185; at a median price of $165, the new attendance cap will add $1.65 million to the gate receipts - and $10,000 to the city. Representatives of C3 Presents could not be reached Monday for comment.

After 75,000 folks showed up in 2004 - and they all wanted to see the Pixies - promoters voluntarily lowered capacity to 65,000 a day to appease neighborhood associations. But this year, it's back to 75,000, plus 5,000 for artists, sponsors, media and the like. The contract with the city states that because of attrition - coming and going - there will never be more than 65,000 on hand at any one time. Polarizing headliners the Eagles and Phish will make sure of that.

### Ready, set ...

Before bands go on stage, 2 festival vets plot show logistics: lights, sound, spacing

By Joe Gross  
Oct. 8, 2010

While you were sleeping, Phish delivered virtually its entire touring spectacle to Zilker Park.

The video, lighting, audio equipment and other gear were loaded onto the Budweiser stage overnight Thursday to create the sort of show you might see if you were going to a regular Phish concert instead of a two-hour festival set. The noted jam band is tonight's headliner at the three-day Austin City Limits Music Festival, which opens today.

At 10 tonight, after Phish and the four earlier acts on that stage are done and the crowd is heading home, the crew will start striking Phish's equipment, finishing about 1:30 a.m. Staff will then start to set the stage for Saturday night headliner, Muse, a band known for its elaborate laser show. A crew from ACL producers C3 Presents will build Muse's lights and video consoles to the band's specifications.

By the time the sun comes up Saturday morning, Muse and its crew should have arrived from Oklahoma City and will have a sound check and make sure all the lights and video work for each song, essentially running a rehearsal in Zilker's morning light.

When Muse leaves the stage Saturday night, the whole process begins again for Sunday's headliner, the Eagles.

This hectic scene will play out to varying degrees at ACL's seven other stages all weekend, as well.

The primary difference between a music festival and a show in a club, theater or arena is that you have to build everything, and it has to work like it's always been there. This sounds obvious, but a million small details need to be considered - from accessibility for the disabled to caring for Zilker's turf.

The modern American music festival circuit is only about 9 years old, the same age as ACL. In that time, production values have skyrocketed at every major fest.

For ACL's first few years, bands came to Austin and played on stages provided by C3 Presents, which also provided their sound system and lights. Acts brought their own instruments, their own onstage equipment such as amps or drums, and that was about it.

Now, headlining acts at festivals such as Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn.; Coachella in Indio, Calif.; Lollapalooza in Chicago (also produced by C3); and ACL want to present the same show you would get if you saw that act alone, so they bring it to ACL.

The responsibility for making the music run on time at ACL falls on two sets of shoulders: C3 production director Dirk Stalnecker and ACL Fest production manager Chris Sorlie.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Muse performs in a headliner spot at the 2010 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Both Stalnecker and Sorlie rose up through the rock 'n' roll ranks.

Stalnecker was high school pals with the folks who formed the band Blues Traveler. "When I got out of college, they asked me to come work for them," Stalnecker said. "I would stay home and they would tour, and I would call the Days Inn and make sure they had the rooms readyfor the band."

He went on to work on Blues Traveler's HORDE festival tour, where he met Sorlie in the early 1990s. Stalnecker managed Widespread Panic's tours for years, but he's been with the ACL festival since its beginning.

Sorlie worked for various production companies before working with ACL as a stage manager in 2003. He's served as production manager for the past six festivals, overseeing what Stalnecker calls "all things rock 'n' roll: staging, sound, lighting."

Stalnecker is with C3 full time, but Sorlie is an independent contractor. With ACL, Stalnecker concentrates on the big picture, such as emergency planning, city negotiations and meeting with neighborhood groups. Sorlie focuses on the day-to-day production.

"A lot of the people in our business who work the festival circuit travel 10 months out of the year," C3 co-founder Charlie Jones said. "It's like the movie business - once you get to the top of the game, you move around. Sorlie's as knowledgeable as they come."

Zilker Park is unusually well-shaped for a music festival. "There is a lower tier of stages (anchored by the Budweiser stage) and an upper tier (anchored by the AMD stage). Rock Island and the Austin Ventures stage is in the middle. There's a working road around the whole thing and a lake to act as a natural perimeter," Jones said.

"I look at things from a production perspective," Stalnecker said. "I'm thinking about how easy or hard things are to build. Jones looks at things from an audience perspective."

Stalnecker pulls out blueprints of the entire park. Everything is surveyed to scale and rendered: trees, vendor areas, barricades, platforms, loading areas, media vans and little triangles of sound pointing out over the crowd.

In front of the Budweiser stage, for example, the sound system covers about 180 degrees wide by 300 yards long. The trick is to know both where the sound is going to go and when it's going to drop off, to balance getting the music to everyone who wants to hear it versus people who are watching other acts.

For example, the Honda stage faces a part of the park that is almost bowl-shaped. At the same time, it is extremely close to the neighborhood behind it. The sound has to be carefully calibrated to best serve both parties.

"It's still far better than trying to make an arena sound good, which, being a big round thing with hard surfaces for sound to reflect, is no fun at all," Sorlie said. "There's an art to it, and it doesn't always work out as perfectly as you hope, but quite a bit of thought goes into the mapping out of what band is playing on what stage at what time."

All of this is considered at the booking and scheduling stage. For example, acts on the smaller Honda stage usually alternate with acts on the much larger (and nearby) AMD stage to avoid sound bleed: Spoon plays AMD at 6 tonight, Sonic Youth plays Honda at 7, and the Strokes play AMD at 8.

As the schedule is worked out, Sorlie and Stalnecker send their blueprints to various sound and light subcontractors so those groups can put together their various pieces, all ultimately reporting to Sorlie.

There are always hiccups. For example, the Eagles are used to playing on an 80-foot-wide stage. Trees at Zilker prevent the Budweiser stage from being wider than 60 feet, so the challenge is to fit an 80-foot show onto a smaller stage. "That's the job," Sorlie said. "That's where the work comes in."

This means the guys in the Eagles will have to stand closer to each other - maybe they'll just have to get along better. "Not our job," Stalnecker said with a grin.

The punch line is that as technology has advanced and sound systems have gotten more focused, bands have simply amped up the production values for what they want to present at a festival. "The bands all want to outdo each other," Stalnecker said.

"And we want to do it," Sorlie added. "They designed their show, their music, their vibe, and it's going to give the kids the most bang for their buck when you give the bands the opportunity to put it all together."

Lady Gaga, who had been playing her own arena shows, performed at Lollapalooza this year.

"She had 35 semis' worth of stuff," Stalnecker said. "I think we talked her down to 22. But she had her full Broadway-esque show at Lollapalooza, complete with the graffitied limo driving across the stage. You saw her do her show, not a smaller version."

"Then Green Day had their 11 or 12 semis for the next night," Sorlie said. "So we loaded out the 22 for Gaga, then Green Day's went on, one headlining show right into another."

"It's hard, it's challenging, but these crazy logistics are kind of the only thing that Chris and I get off on anymore," Stalnecker says. "We try not to say, 'No,'" Sorlie said.

"But without saying 'Yes' to everything," Stalnecker said.

### ACL gets rolling

Warm weather, big crowds on festival's first day

By Patrick Caldwell  
Oct. 9, 2010

After last year's trial by Dillo Dirt and the searing heat and dust bowl conditions that have defined other years of the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the biggest news on Friday's opening day was the weather: mercifully temperate, sunny and even accompanied by a leisurely breeze.

Without the specter of rain that haunted 2009's otherwise pastoral opening day, the predominant feeling on the grounds for ACL Fest veterans was relief.

"After last year, it's so pleasant to be dry and feel the warm sun," said Sarah DeGroat, 22, who traveled to the festival from Texas A&M University in College Station. "We left it as a mud pit last year, and it's so beautiful! We even took our shoes off, although for a different reason than at the end of last year."

From the time the opening bell -- or, in the ACL Fest's tradition, the booming notes of John Williams' "Star Wars" theme -- signaled the opening of the gates, Friday adopted what would be its daylong posture: warm enough to justify the festival's shirtless throngs but far short of the broiling heat that has defined it through its worst years.

That was good news for festivalgoers like Z. Kudski, who traveled from Dallas for his first ACL and anticipates spending about $1,000 this weekend. A report prepared by Angelou Economics and commissioned by ACL Fest producer C3 Presents estimates that the festival's economic impact on Austin last year was just short of $82 million and that 25 percent of attendees came from outside Texas and 33 percent from outside Austin.

"I've been wanting to come down for a while. I was looking forward to it so much, and so far it's living up. It's just been fantastic," said Kudski, 52.

While fan reaction was largely positive, it was apparent by midday from lines to get in and enormous crowds at afternoon shows – like trio Miike Snow's sweaty electronic dance party and a massive, much-anticipated set from the Akron, Ohio, garage rock duo the Black Keys - that the attendance cap, increased to 75,000 from 65,000 in previous years, according to the City of Austin's contract with C3 Presents, was making Zilker Park more congested.

"You can really feel the extra 10,000," said 35-year-old glass blower Mark Alexander of Fort Worth. "Especially between the stages. You're stuck. Then a corridor suddenly opens up."

Even vendors in the art market, where traffic was brisk and hats were doing particularly big business, noticed the change, though none would complain; bigger crowds mean more potential sales.

"I feel like the crowd, even right off the bat, was much more than usual. But obviously, the weather is perfect and puts everybody in a good mood, which just makes things better for me," said Bekka Smith, co-owner of Sola boutique. "Last year was so exhausting. With the mud and people being so dour, it was easily the most trying year we've ever had. So to go from the hardest year ever to the most beautiful year yet makes me feel really optimistic for the weekend."

Musical highlights included a bubbly early set from the Givers of Lafayette, La., who kicked the day off with spirited Afrobeat-influenced pop. Miike Snow attracted a crowd to the Honda Stage to rival 2007's infamous MGMT show and featured a spirited guest turn from Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, providing vocals for that band's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance." Local country prodigy Sahara Smith played a passionate 40 minutes of sultry, smoky Americana. Spoon received a hero's welcome on the AMD Stage, and Austin's own metal master the Sword was equally well-received in a late afternoon set at the ZYNC Card Stage. New York indie darling Vampire Weekend charmed a joyous crowd with its plentiful hooks and a surprisingly elaborate light show.

After nightfall, the New York City cool of the Strokes made for the ideal rock 'n' roll closer. Across the park, Phish played to a smaller than usual crowd for a headliner but put on a passionate set sure to appeal to the band's die-hard fan base.

For one proud father, the Soft Pack's blast of summery garage rock proved worth the trip. Vin McLoughlin, 56, came from Atlanta to see son Matty, the band's lead guitarist, tear it up on a furious string of grinding guitar solos.

"He's a good kid, and when he first started playing guitar, I just said: 'Hey, go as hard for as long as you can. Follow your passion. Not everybody gets to do that,'" McLoughlin said. "It's better than working at the Home Depot answering phones. All his college buddies that he played baseball with say: 'You ain't in a cubicle, but I am. So enjoy it.'"

The festival unofficially kicked off early Friday with a decidedly SXSW feel: Two live radio shows open to the public featured several of the official acts; KUT was at the Four Seasons, and KGSR was at Threadgill's. Each charged a $5 cover, which went to the Seton Shivers Cancer Center. Kerri Holden, director of public relations for the Four Seasons, said the KUT event raised more than $4,500.

Outside the festival, the scene was lively as fans streamed into Zilker Park, perusing the vendors, from food carts to clothing stands, along Barton Springs Road. Code enforcement officials said that as of Friday afternoon, they hadn't found a single vendor operating nearby without a permit.

"This is our second year walking the perimeter, and it appears the educational messaging has worked ," said Melissa Martinez, division manager for the city's Code Compliance Department. "Compliance is our goal, and looks like we're getting there."

A less regulated market emerged in the secondhand ticket and wristband economy. Before noon, many scalpers near the entrance of the festival were selling single-day tickets for around $100; the going rate for three-day wristbands hovered closer to $200. It didn't take long for that to become a buyer's market, though; by midafternoon wristbands were easy to find for under $150.

Another telltale sign of a popular festival could be glimpsed in the bicycle racks across from the festival entrance along Barton Springs Road, where locked bicycles competed for space. Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop mechanic Clark Simensen said cycling looked to be a popular way to get to the grounds this year.

"It's the biggest year for bicycling we've seen since we've been doing it," Simensen said. Mellow Johnny's has set up a satellite location on site since 2008. "I think next year they're probably going to have to beef up the bike racks a little bit because I'm seeing a lot of bikes in trees right now."

The medical team working at the festival treated about 100 people, team chief Tannifer Ayres said. People were treated for general injuries, alcohol- or drug-related illnesses or heat-related symptoms, she said.

Additional material from staff writers Michael Barnes, Michael Corcoran, Barry Harrell and Matthew Odam.

### Harmonious, so far

On Day 2, ACL Fest hums along groovily,  
but some hiccups from past years remain

By Michael Corcoran  
Oct. 10, 2010

Saturday afternoon, Charlie Jones and Charles Attal, two-thirds of Austin City Limits Music Festival promoter C3 Presents, called this year's fest the smoothest one so far. Then Attal repeated "so far" and knocked on his wooden armrest.

Outside the C3 compound, the crowds were arriving en masse to a 46-acre park that already seemed full. But Jones said the gorgeous fall weather - easily the best in ACL Fest history - was the reason more people were coming out earlier, not a new contract with the city that allows C3 Presents to sell 10,000 more tickets than in years past.

"The contract was amended to more accurately reflect what comes through the park during the festival," he said of the new 75,000-a-day cap. "Just because we can sell more tickets doesn't mean we will." Included in the total of 68,000 festgoers Friday were about 1,200 kids younger than 10 who got in free and a guest list of nearly 5,000 staffers, volunteers, sponsors and media.

Where it was brutal heat, choking dust storms or mud in the past that drew the most complaints, this year it was people. As in, too many in front of you to get close to the bands you wanted to see. Also, maneuvering between stages was harder than ever, even though C3 has pushed back the perimeter where chairs are permitted to make for better foot traffic flow.

Although Saturday's headliners Muse and M.I.A., plus dance rockers Deadmau5 and LCD Soundsystem were guaranteed huge crowds, even little-known acts such as Northern Ireland's Two Door Cinema Club drew spectacularly. Meanwhile, the roots revivalists the Dough Rollers packed the covered Clear 4G Stage, perhaps as much for curiosity (Malcolm Ford and Jack Byrne are the sons of Harrison Ford and Gabriel Byrne) than an old-timey, foot-stompin' sound.

Because of the weather and the wait (tickets and wristbands sold out three months in advance), this year's fest got crazier earlier. Friday afternoon, several thousand exiting Miike Snow fans and twice as many arriving Black Keys fans created a bottleneck that caused some to take about half an hour to walk 100 yards.

Attal said the total attendance in Zilker Park on Friday during the Black Keys crush of humanity was 52,000 - and all seemingly wanted to see the Ohio blues-rock duo, whose latest album, "Brothers," is one of the year's most acclaimed. Attal's figure was derived from ticket and wristband scans at both entrances to ACL.

Sound bleed between the eight stages was a continuing problem, something ACL fans have learned to deal with, if not warmly accept. Illinois singer-songwriter Lissie had fun with the invasion of bass-heavy reggae from across the field, dancing to the beat for a few seconds between her own songs. But charming Scandinavian duo First Aid Kit was almost swallowed whole by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals on one of the two main stages. People in the crowd turned their heads toward the offending bass lines and grimaced, but First Aid Kit continued undaunted and received hearty applause.

Things can get intense behind the scenes, especially with a festival the scope of ACL, but the mood was almost playful Saturday. "We usually give ourselves a couple of days (before the fest) to take care of any unexpected problems," Jones said, "but on Thursday we were all just sitting around, looking at each other."

That C3 seems to have this thing down was apparent to Austin fans Matt Johnson, 32, and Estella Cortez, 33, who have been to most ACL fests.

"We've come to know what to expect," said Johnson. "Same stages, same layout, same food vendors." Cortez said she's noticed more first-time visitors to ACL this year. Once presenting a lineup heavy with roots-rock bands, ACL has expanded its billings to appeal to younger fans. "It's funny to watch people get to Zilker and not know where to go," Cortez said.

If you have to ask which way is the AMD Stage (just follow the bass), you haven't been to ACL.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652

### Soaring high

From the Givers' opening to the Eagles' close, there was an abundance to like

By American-Statesman Staff  
Oct. 11, 2010

Our team has slept and showered in some order, but we're all still thinking about the great and sometimes mind-blowing music we experienced at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Our highlights below.

Top moments: Patrick Caldwell

1. Givers, 11:45 a.m. Friday. The opening slot of the first day of a musical festival is generally a pretty thankless affair, but Lafayette, La., indie darlings Givers attacked the stage with an impressive fervor, churning out bouncy Afrobeat-influenced pop that perfectly complemented the sunny skies and cheerful vibes of the festival's first day.

2. Miike Snow, 3 p.m. Friday. Raucous, sweaty and very, very crowded, Swedish trio Miike Snow's midafternoon set at the Honda Stage was everything a dance party should be. Bonus points for the surprise guest appearance of Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, singing that band's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance."

3. LCD Soundsystem, 6:30 p.m. Saturday. The sun was just beginning to set as LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, rocking a five o'clock shadow and a necessary pair of sunglasses, took the Budweiser stage. Under that perfect atmospheric accompaniment, Murphy burned through the greatest hits of the band's sterling dance-punk that climaxed by taking advantage of the new darkness with a disco ball, a fancy light show and a note-perfect version of "Home," a highlight off this year's "This is Happening."

4. Speak, 12:40 p.m. Sunday. These strapping young Austin synthpop lads might be one of the louder acts to ever play the humble BMI stage, but they were obviously relishing every moment of their performance. Their giddiness and excitement translated so well you could even catch some folks dancing in their chairs.

5. Foals, 1:15 p.m. Sunday. Foals have been an impressive art-rock outfit since their Dave Sitek-produced debut "Antidotes," but their grooves were so propulsive and intricate on the fest's final afternoon that it left you wondering whether someone had put something in the band's water. The songs off this year's sophomore effort, "Total Life Forever," positively erupted with life.

Top moments: Michael Corcoran

1. Robert Randolph and the Family Band, 7:15 p.m. Friday, Clear 4G. If Ryan Bingham weren't so crowded, I would've missed this spiritually powerful set by the best act I saw at the very first ACL. A time for rediscovery amid the fields of up-and-coming acts.

2. Muse, 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Budweiser. These three musicians were at times reminiscent of the three musicians of Led Zeppelin and Queen -- so intricate and yet so explosively tuneful. Didn't expect much and walked away convinced I'd just seen the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world.

3. The Strokes in my left ear, Phish in my right, 8 p.m. Friday, AMD and Budweiser. My work was done for the day, so I crumpled into a chair that seemed to be equidistant from the two main stages. Both acts seemed to be on fire, but after trying to get within the same ZIP code of the Strokes, I headed to Phish, where their amazing musicianship translated from far away.

4. The Relatives, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Clear 4G. Reunited '70s gospel funk band from Dallas blows away more touted Kings Go Forth.

Top moments: Joe Gross

1. Ted Leo delivering wise, thunderous, political punk rock at noon on Sunday. A lovely way to start the day.

2. The revelation that was Warpaint. Their Sunday set was a little inert, but their set the night before opening for Sonic Youth at La Zona Rosa was outstanding, a blend of Bangles harmonies and early '80s-style minimalist dance rock. Even if they are Hollywood show biz kids, they are a blast live.

3. Absolutely everything about the Mountain Goats, all the time, forever.

Top moments: Parry Gettelman

1. Qbeta. This ultra-high-energy Sicilian band puts multiculturalism on the spin cycle to create a distinct and indefinable style of its own.

2. Kinky. From Monterrey, Nuevo León, they brought stadium-sized charisma to the Clear 4G tent with their electrifying fusion of funk, rock, electronica, and a half-dozen other genres.

3. I love Mellow Johnny's for catering to the growing contingent arriving by bike. And the guy who put free air in my tires cracked me up after I told him I had left my good bike at home for fear of thieves. "Safety first, expect the worst," he said with a grin. Words to live by.

4. First Aid Kit. Young Swedish sisters sing in gorgeous harmony, and their songwriting is mature beyond their years. Although, they're a frightening example of how Europeans are more fluent in English than we are.

5. Trombone Shorty: Most likely to headline next time.

6. Richard Thompson: If there weren't about 100 guitar slingers in the audience taking lessons, there should have been.

Top moments: John T. Davis

1. Saturday: Watching young fiddle prodigy Ruby Jane Smith and one of her bandmates in ecstatic communion with the crowd, while everyone danced, whooped and testified to the gospel powerhouse Jones Family Singers. For a moment, the polished performer became just another 15-year-old girl, caught up in the power of the music.

2. Saturday: For all the touted special effects and stage extravaganzas at ACL, one musical embellishment stood out. As Broken Bells performed their set-closing "The Mall and the Misery" on Saturday afternoon, one anonymous juggler out in the vast audience kept perfect time to the music by flipping red juggling pins into the air, over and over. At least on a human scale, it was the best special effect of the weekend.

3. Sunday: I hesitate to call it a highlight, but reading of the death of 70-year-old rock and soul pioneer Solomon Burke today in Amsterdam calls up fond memories of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member's majestic (literally - he performed onstage enthroned, in an ermine cape) set at ACL in 2004. With his daughters singing backup and a full horn section in black tuxes, roaring through hits like "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" and "Cry to Me," while a gaggle of fans scaled the side of the big stage to dance ecstatically, Burke ruled the festival for a memorable hour. ACL isn't just about the next big thing. It always has been and always should be a venue for pioneers and innovators, and Burke was both.

Top moments: Deborah Sengupta Stith

1. Nortec Collective! From the mad scientist beat masters to the relentless instrumentalists, the electro-Norteño ensemble unleashed a barrage of sound that blasted the roof off the Clear 4G tent and left a legion of new fans buzzing for days.

2. The incredible dancers who flanked singer Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya of the Very Best. Busting with some sort of Afro-vogue-pop-lock hybrid they brought an exhilarating energy to the Budweiser stage.

3. Stumbling upon Karl Denson of the Greyboy Allstars sitting in with the electro-percussive outfit Beats Antique. His supremely funky saxophone added great texture to a driving rhythmic groove.

Top moments: Matthew Odam

1. Phish: I am not ashamed to admit that I went to more than my fair share of Phish shows back in the mid-'90s. The Grateful Dead helped introduce me to improvisational music - which led to my nascent interest in jazz - but Phish really extended my appreciation for improvisation, introducing me to a wide range of contemporary bands. I had not seen the band in a decade and was thrilled they were in such fine form Friday night. Following a decade that included an extended hiatus and what seemed to be the end of the band, the Vermont quartet is back in full force. With their set chock full of mostly older classics, they might not have inspired me to drop everything and pack up my car and hit the road, but they did give me a thrill on Night 1 of the fest.

2. Trombone Shorty: Some people like to while away their Sundays in peaceful lazy manner and some like to engage with the spirit. I chose the latter. What's been come to be known as the jazz/gospel tent - Clear 4G was the official name this year \- always features music that resonates with the crowd. Maybe that's because the music at that tent always seems to come from the soul. Such was the case with Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue who transported the sweaty faithful back to New Orleans and Jazz Fest, while slapping some West Coast funk on it that echoed the great Tower of Power.

3. Favorite quote: "I'm Don Henley and these are the Don Henleys." - Shearwater multi-instrumentalist Kevin Schneider kicking off the band's set

Top moments: Chad Swiatecki

1. Two Cow Garage. Not connected to the festival, but I was on after-show duty and saw this Ohio foursome at Red 7 on Wednesday night after the Strokes booted all media from their Stubb's show. Making the best kind of roots-tinged rock, TCG's new "Sweet Saint Me" has three undeniable earworms and is likely my record of the year.

2. The Black Keys. Ohio strikes again, this time with a band that's making the most of its first real creative and commercial sweet spot. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney were pretty much forces of nature Saturday at Stubb's, bending and stylistically expanding their songs any way they pleased.

3. The Black Lips. One part skronky, fuzzed-out garage rock free-for-all, three parts "I might not make it out of here alive," this Atlanta combo is hard to hate and harder to not feel nervous around. Imagine a rock band made up of four Jack Nicholsons as McMurphy from "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and you're there.

Top moments: Matt Shiverdecker

1. Sonic Youth/ ACL Taping. Thursday night, I was fortunate to be in the audience at the legendary KLRU studios as Sonic Youth played an 80-minute set that will be edited down for a Jan. 22 episode of "Austin City Limits." It was an incredibly tight performance with tracks from last year's "The Eternal" mixed in with classics from older albums like "Daydream Nation."

2. Caitlin Rose. A morning set on Saturday from this young Nashville-based singer was one of the weekend's most pleasant surprises. Rose was joined onstage for one song by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who recently had emailed her to say he was a fan.

3. Matt & Kim. I had to miss their set out in the park, but Matt & Kim were one of the friendliest interviews I had all weekend. It was amazing to watch them bounced around the press area doing tons of interviews for their upcoming album "Sidewalks" with endless charm.

4. The Sword. Although I wouldn't consider myself much of a metal fan, the Sword put on one of the most entertaining sets of the entire festival. It didn't hurt that it was also one of the best sets for people-watching. I think the most puzzling moment of the weekend came when I saw two guys with matching Aerosmith tattoos in the middle of their backs cut into the crowd during this set for a better view.

Top moments: Sharon Chapman

1. Monsters of Folk after-show, Friday night at Stubb's. I got there late and wondered whether I should have just gone home to sleep. Then I heard Jim James and the sweet sounds of "Golden" while walking up and knew I was exactly where I needed to be. The talent, the passion for music and the affection for each other among the Monsters creates magic.

2. Saturday morning across Zilker Park. 10 minutes of First Aid Kit, 15 of Lissie and 20 of the Very Best start Day 2 with an appropriately Austin-like mix of music.

3. Black Keys aftershow, Saturday night. I last saw them live two years ago, at Colorado's Red Rocks. They were good then; this week, wow. And what Chad said above. The first time I've seen the Stubb's crowd (mostly) shut up for a band. Bonus: My first time hearing Foals live - go see this energetic, intense and smart band from England wherever you can.

Top moments: Kathy Blackwell

1. The walk-up. I was able to walk right up close to the stage to watch moments of greatness from Sonic Youth, Monsters of Folk doing My Morning Jacket's "Smokin' From Shootin'" and Local Natives' Saturday afternoon California harmonies. Made up for when I could barely see the Black Keys.

2. Black Keys after-show at Stubb's. Holy smokes. That's all I have to say about that experience.

3. Warpaint. My brother-in-law from Los Angeles recommended this four-woman group so highly that I was at the park by 11:45 a.m. on Sunday. I now love my BIL even more.

4. The food. Options seemed even better this year. Baked potato with okra creole from Olivia, fish sandwich from Bess, steak 'n' frit sandwich from Aquarelle, steak skewers from Lonesome Dove and Salt Lick's sloppy nachos. See you on the trail!

5. Watching South Carolina beat No. 1 Alabama in the much-appreciated Rock Island hideaway.

Top moments: Michael Barnes

1. The contrast between the profoundly relaxed setting at the Austin Music Lounge -- with its lawn games, product booths, patio chairs, massage therapist, hairdresser and cast members from "My Generation" -- and the boiling sea of humanity at the Lady Bird Lake gate inside Zilker Park, when fans from the AMD and Honda stages merged to unintentionally block those coming in.

2. The first rising of the moon balloon at the field's center on Friday, as Austin's jeweled skyline glinted against the setting sun and the vast masses assembling for Phish looked like a post-Soviet soft revolution -- flags, swaying, uncoiled euphoria.

3. The realization that, on Saturday, if all went as well as it had so far, there would be, for the first time in nine years, no ACL survivor bonding; no social merit badge for having made it through the mud, dust, heat or rain; no grim sense of ultimate endurance; the gorgeous weather instead ushering Austin back into the laps of the Lotus Eaters.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

LCD Soundsystem at the 2010 ACL Fest.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals at ACL Fest 2010.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The Eagles bring their peaceful, easy feeling to the last ACL Fest show of 2010.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Fans cheer for Deadmau5 at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2010.

They're awake for the opening set

By Brian T. Atkinson  
Sept. 16, 2011

Ray Benson has witnessed the Austin City Limits Music Festival's evolution from Day One. The longtime Austin resident and his band Asleep at the Wheel, who launched the "ACL" television series in 1974, are the only performers to play every year.

The Western swing outfit owns a lock the opening set (12:25 p.m. today on the AMD stage). "I tell people, 'Come to our show,'" Benson says. " 'The grass is green. There ain't no dust.' We're first on and the weather's still cool. Nobody's heard a note of music. They're really jazzed."

**American-Statesman:** What does it mean to open the festival every year?

**Benson:** You've got to have some sort of tradition (laughs). They do very little country music, so it's really an honor for Asleep at the Wheel. Over the years we've created a really cool following, (even though) we're not the kind of band that they book on this festival. Which Asleep at the Wheel set stands out from the first decade? The year that Johnny Cash passed away (2003), I led a jam and we talked about Johnny and how important he was to not just music but as a personality who stood up for what was right. I can't remember all the people we had, but I think (it was) Tift Merritt and myself and the North Mississippi All-Stars.

Do you typically check out other bands at the festival?

I'm a fan. I walk around and see other bands, the legacy bands like (Bob) Dylan, the Eagles. (The 2004 festival) was the last time I saw (late soul singer) Solomon Burke. I'd seen Solomon many times, but on a big stage it was incredible. I remember seeing Ryan Bingham (in 2010) on a small stage just rocking the house. I liked the Flaming Lips with the big balloons (in 2010). I didn't love the music, but the show was incredible.

Which legacy band impressed you most?

The Eagles show (in 2010) was pretty amazing, only because it sounded just like the record! Another great show was Tom Petty (in 2006) when it rained. He stopped for 30 minutes and said, "I'll be back." He came back and did an incredible show.

Do you have a most memorable encounter?

I got to have lunch with Van Morrison (in 2006). I was supposed to produce an album (for him) but it never happened.

What's the single best show you've seen?

(In 2003), Al Green kicked my (expletive)! I loved that.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Fans get lost in the music and atmosphere of ACL Fest 2011.

Elizabeth McQueen

Six years ago, vocalist Elizabeth McQueen entered into Asleep at the Wheel's tradition at ACL. She weighs in with thoughts on the festival's growth and memories from her first years performing with the band:

"I love the fact that we have two really big music-related events in Austin with South by Southwest in March and ACL in September. The town becomes a mecca for music fans. South by Southwest and ACL have become so big that even five years ago neither was so gargantuan, but I like the energy that they bring to town a couple times a year. You can feel it and taste and touch it. Austin's pretty laid back most of the time, then you get, 'Hey, everything's happening right here and it's awesome!'

"The year ( ACL festival) had Dylan (2007), his set was great and in the middle of it you had these flying paper balloons that were lit by fire. So, there was an element of danger and no one was really sure what was going on, but it was gorgeous and beautiful and Dylan was killing it. That was one of my favorite ACL moments. Also, seeing the Flaming Lips. I got to go onstage with my sister. I heart those guys and they put on such an amazing show. It was like, 'I'm up here watching the Flaming Lips from above!'

"I had been in New Mexico the day before Elvis Costello performed (in 2004) and had driven straight 14 hours to get into town. I got backstage 15 minutes before Elvis was going to play and I got Dave and then there was a line a mile and a half long to get up to the little watching area. I asked the guy if there was any chance I could get up there and the guy was like, 'No,' but he did end up letting us go up there, which was awesome of him. He didn't have to. Elvis Costello is my all-time greatest favorite, so that was cool."

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips rides in his space bubble at ACL Fest 2011.

David Sanger

Asleep at the Wheel's David Sanger has played every ACL with the group. The drummer, who's married to band mate McQueen, notes pros and cons of the festival's changes since 2002:

"One of my favorite drummers was playing with (Elvis Costello and the Imposters), so it really was great. We barely got onstage to see him. At the very first ones, basically anyone could go up onstage if you had any pass and mull around backstage and watch any show. There wasn't a problem. Then maybe six, seven years ago, all of a sudden they started segregating the backstage (area): One side is for the sponsors and one side is for the artists.

"We whine about not having our places to watch the bands, but, man, we've always had a bus there. When we started playing, it was so hot that I would just look at the people out there and go, 'I don't know how these people do it.' Frankly, most of the time I don't know why they do it. It's hard for me to deal with the heat. I suppose if I was younger and wanted to see all these bands, I would find a way. "Both ACL and South by Southwest don't belong to Austin anymore; they belong to the world. People come from all over, and it's not a backyard party so much. So, it's lost a little of that hometown feel, but the positive side is that it's really a professionally run deal.

It's like clockwork: Everything is on time. You see what's going on back there and there's so much logistics that have to happen and it's pretty impressive that it's run so well. Obviously, if a festival like that is not run well, people are not going to keep showing up."

### 10th ACL Fest is 'off to a banner start'

Brief showers bring relief from heat  
to fans stoked to hear Coldplay, Kanye

By Peter Mongillo  
Sept. 17, 2011

A surprise appearance by a brief rain shower excited crowds at Zilker Park on Friday as the Austin City Limits Music Festival kicked off its 10th year.

The rain, which lasted only a few minutes, brought cheers across the park, which had been bracing for more of the unrelenting heat that the region has experienced throughout the summer. Instead, temperatures remained in the low 90s as the sun remained hidden behind clouds for much of an afternoon filled with mellow crowds and plenty of music. "God bless Texas and this lovely weather," Matthew Vasquez of Delta Spirit said from the stage, summing up the vibe of day one. "It's finally cooling down."

By early Friday evening, the biggest problem for most people at the sold-out crowd of 65,000 seemed to be whether to go to Coldplay's or Kanye West's headlining -- and competing -- sets. Hayley Phillips and Anthony DeArman, who have been to all nine previous festivals, were waiting until the last minute to decide. "We're still kind of torn between the two," Phillips said. "It'll come down to a coin flip."

West made one of the more dramatic entrances in ACL Festival history, emerging in the center of the audience on an elevated platform, and then walking to the stage through the crowd.

Steven Lane, who flew in from Chicago, and friend Tassa Nelson, who carried a "Harry Potter"-themed "Hogwarts" flag, were planning to see Brit rockers Coldplay. "I'm most excited for Stevie though," said Nelson, referring to tonight's headliner, Stevie Wonder. Lindsay Hoffman, spokeswoman for festival producers C3 Presents, said that things were going smoothly so far. "The festival is off to a banner start," Hoffman said. "Everyone is doing a great job beating the heat."

Medical crews said they had treated about 100 people, mostly for heat-related illnesses, by 7 p.m. "It's hot, it's been hot, you can't get away from that," said Tannifer Ayres with the South West Emergency Action Team. She warned festival-goers to stay hydrated and not take open food and drinks from strangers.

Crowds increased as the day wore on, with festival-goers who entered around 5 p.m. getting blasted with intense drum and bass from British artist Beardyman . A big crowd gathered for "Pumped Up Kicks" buzz band Foster the People , who played on one of the smaller stages. Similarly, Gary Clark Jr. played before a large hometown audience. Clark played the first ACL Fest in 2002, when he was a student at Austin High School.

People were reminded of the wildfires across Central Texas. Boots were passed through the crowds to gather donations for volunteer firefighters, and Do Good Bus, the traveling philanthropic organization, parked outside the entrance to collect money for the Texas Wildfire Relief Fund and the Red Cross. C3 Presents pledged to match every dollar raised.

Additional material from Gary Dinges, Matthew Odam and John T. Davis.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Foster the People performs at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2011.

### HOW SWEET IT WAS

Legendary performances, spirited crowd leave good vibes

Sept. 19, 2011

Check "done" on the 10th Austin City Limits Music Festival. This year's three-day orgy of music, weather and chicken cones brought things both rare -- rain, Stevie Wonder -- and usual -- vastly different experiences of the same set -- to Zilker Park. Here are the highlights from our team.

Peter Mongillo

* Kanye West. Standout moments included an over-the-top entrance from the center of the crowd in which the rapper rose above Zilker on an elevated platform. A troupe of ballerinas gave the Bud Light stage a touch of Broadway, and supercharged versions of West's older material, including "The Good Life," "Jesus Walks" and "Stronger," were a fine way to end the first day.

* Phosphorescent. The Alabama-via-Brooklyn country rock band was led by Matthew Houck, whose understated, weary voice coupled with pedal steel guitar on songs including "Mermaid Parade." Any question that the set would lull the crowd to sleep (or succumb to painful sound bleed from the AMD stage) with too many Neil Young-style ballads was answered with perfect moments of classic rock crescendo from the six-member band.

* Stevie Wonder. Wonder delivered with his hits -- "Superstition," "Higher Ground," Living For the City" -- and a couple of covers, including the pumped-up opener "How Sweet Iit Is" and Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel." The latter had the whole place dancing, except the folks driven away by what they said was bad sound in the back.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Kanye West does it as only Kanye can do at ACL Fest 2011.

Parry Gettelman

* The jubilant Preservation Hall Jazz Band/Del McCoury Band show had fans young and old hollering themselves hoarse and beaming around at strangers as though they were long-lost friends.

* Raindrops! When the rain started, you could tell right away who was from Texas -- the ones with their hands in the air and wondering smiles on their faces.

* Alison Krauss and Union Station's sublime set was emotionally rich as well as masterful in its musicianship.

* Noelle Scaggs and Michael Fitzpatrick of Fitz and the Tantrums delivered musically while working hard to loosen up the audience and finally prevailing in their determination to instigate a dance party.

* The Lee Boys' funk-soul revival/wild-and-crazy dance party.

Joe Gross

* TV on the Radio playing "Young Liars," a song that can go anywhere, an emotional blowout in the tradition of the MC5's "Black to Comm," Yo La Tengo's "Blue Line Swinger" or U2's "Bad." They reminded that, at their best, they are absolutely America's Radiohead.

* Kurt Vile's three guitar, drums and no bass setup. Miles of hair playing nothing but treble on the Austin Ventures stage, consistently the most sonically underrated place at the festival.

* Hearing the opening notes of My Morning Jacket's inviting-yet-menacing "Victory Dance" streaking over the park at the top of their set. The band sounded phenomenal -- a little too phenomenal for a lot of people trying to listen to Stevie Wonder.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

TV on the Radio perform at ACL Fest 2011.

Chad Swiatecki

* Stevie Wonder. Hits paraded. Humanity affirmed. Bucket list lightened considerably.

* Charles Bradley. If Stevie's a flowing faucet of love and affirmation, soulman Bradley is a surging fire hydrant -- a growling, hip-shaking fire hydrant.

* Santigold. More artists should find a way to have as much fun on stage as Santi White. That stuff is contagious, and so are her bouncy, beat-filled songs.

* Arcade Fire. Familiar songs muscled up and deepened, maligned "headliners" proved themselves and left everything on the stage.

Sharon Chapman

* Theophilus London. One of my favorite opening sets ever: A cool cat delivers dance rap with a side of raindrops.

* It was a blast to walk between the simultaneous dance parties in front of Skrillex and Fitz and the Tantrums on Saturday. One of my favorite things in general: how music in a big field gets thousands of people grooving together as one.

* Stevie Wonder! Standing in one of the sweet spots in the field, I was moved to tears more than once by the glorious music and the positive message.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The crowd cheers for Skrillex at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday Sept.17, 2011.

Kathy Blackwell

* Gary Clark Jr. I was blown away when I walked up to the normally chill BMI stage and saw the massive crowd dancing to Austin's guitar phenom, who was just stunning.

* Kanye West. Unlike headliners in the past who've phoned it in, Kanye brought everything he had, and we still wanted more.

* The Cults. I missed their Friday morning set, but their aftershow at the Parish that night was haunting and seductive, from the moment the "Twin Peaks" theme song brought them on to stage to the last note.

Patrick Caldwell

* Big Boi. All eyes were on Kanye's headlining set on Friday, and Yeezy didn't disappoint, but I had more fun at Big Boi, who shredded madly through a perfect hour of material drawn from both his exceptional "Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty" and his days in OutKast.

* Aloe Blacc and the Grand Scheme. In a year filled with funk and soul - Cee-Lo Green, Charles Bradley, Fitz and the Tantrums, a young up-and-comer by the name of Stevie Wonder -- Blacc put on the smoothest, slickest, funnest show of them all.

* The early booking in general. This might be the first festival where I've showed up at 12:30 p.m. or earlier every day. If you wanted to catch some of the best acts this year \-- the aforementioned Aloe Blacc, Cults, Theophilus London, Mariachi El Bronx, Ruby Jane, the Antlers -- you had to wake up bright and early.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Ruby Jane Smith tears it up at the 2011 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Michael Barnes

* The widespread, ecstatic response each time the rain commenced, followed by a sort of resigned sigh when people realized that everything would be wet for hours, then another burst of group energy once that funk had passed.

* Succumbing to the joyous, dancing hordes jazzed by electronica magician Pretty Lights, after a personal feeling of crowd panic, and despite some poor concert citizenship nearby.

* Realizing that acts that I'd merely admired \-- Iron and Wine, Bright Eyes, Kanye West -- were infinitely more charismatic live, performing in an epic setting.

* Basking in the outflow of love for local acts such as Gary Clark Jr., Patrice Pike and Electric Touch -- they deserve it.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Dark clouds threatened at the ACL Fest in 2011, but only a few rain drops fell.

John T. Davis

* Those first magic drops of moisture descending from the heavens early on Friday afternoon - and the reactions to them.

* The abrupt and bracing transition of going from 10,000 people singing along with Foster the People's summer pop hit "Pumped-Up Kicks" into the master's seminar on blues, soul and R&B that Charles Bradley was conducting in the dark and sweaty Vista Equity tent. It was like going from Venice Beach to the Fifth Ward of Houston in a heartbeat.

* The sight of one dad alternating between his young son and daughter, taking turns swinging them in circles and tossing them up and down on Saturday morning to their giddy hearts' content as the Belle Brigade pumped out a sweet, Fleetwood Mac-inspired pop soundtrack in the background as the sun beamed down. How few perfect moments in life are there, when all is said and done?

### True headliners naturally emerge in ACL Fest of Wonder, West

By Peter Mongillo  
Sept. 20, 2011

When this year's Austin City Limits Music Festival lineup was released, the reaction from many was that Saturday headliner Stevie Wonder was the true headliner for the whole fest and better suited for Sunday night, when he wouldn't have to compete with another act. Sunday headliner Arcade Fire is popular but doesn't have the same far-reaching fan base or the decades of hits and legend status.

Despite the difference in stature, the Montreal indie rock act put on a headliner-worthy show to close out the festival Sunday night. Judging by reports of how small the crowd was for Saturday co-headliner My Morning Jacket - and the people lining up early in front of Stevie's stage - Wonder drew a fest-closing size crowd on Saturday night. It was so large that people who weren't close to the stage had a hard time hearing the legendary singer. Sound was bad enough toward the middle of the crowd and farther back that some fans decided to leave early. C3 Presents declined to comment on the issue, which sparked a hearty debate, even among our own team covering the fest, at austin360.com.

Though the crowd for Arcade Fire on Sunday night wasn't as big as Wonder's Saturday audience, it was filled with passionate fans. Those who chose the Arcade Fire set over going home experienced a band at the peak of its creative energy delivering one heck of a show. It was a performance that made the May show at the Backyard, also packed with energized versions of songs from the group's three albums, feel average in comparison.

"We love Austin, we love playing here, we had to beg them to let us play and we're happy to be back," lead singer Winn Butler said from the stage. Song after song, that sentiment showed, especially when a supercharged "Month of May" steamed forward like a freight train, and "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" inspired a spontaneous dance party behind the soundboard.

Stevie Wonder said during his set that he would like to play the festival again; here's hoping the same holds true with the Arcade Fire.

Laura Skelding/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Stevie Wonder showed everyone at the 2011 ACL Fest why he is a legend.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Arcade Fire was another hot draw for the 2011 edition of the festival.

Other fest highs and lows:

The headliners: As mentioned above, Sunday headliner the Arcade Fire brought it, but so did first-ever hip-hop headliner Kanye West, whose mixture of talent and absurdity was at worst a spectacle and at best one of the more mesmerizing ACL Fest acts in recent years. Wonder's show was in many ways the opposite of West's. Except for a few moments of political/spiritual banter, Wonder showed why he is so loved, with hits - "Higher Ground," "I Wish," "Superstition" - and inspired covers, including opener "How Sweet It Is" and Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel."

Get on your feet: A surprisingly crazy set from hardcore-musician-turned DJ Sonny Moore, aka Skrillex, had what seemed like the entire crowd at the Google+ stage moving around dinner-time Saturday.

The weather: It rained! Not much, but we'll take what we can get. And the clouds kept things on the cool (well, cool for Austin) side. Too much fun? The medical tent saw a steady stream of 100-150 patients each day, with the most common issues being "suspected overdose" and dehydration, according to the Austin-Travis County EMS. A few festgoers commented that the event seemed a little more alcohol-fueled than usual, a hard thing to measure, of course.

Scan-a-palooza: Three-day passholders were required to scan their wristbands as they entered and left the park. Leave without scanning and you might get the third degree at a special security table after trying to re-enter. I ended up there Sunday, where people were getting asked about when they had left, what time they had arrived and how long they had been at the fest. Crying happened.

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Aaron Bruno of AWOLNATION jumps into the crowd during his performance in 2011.

###

CREDITS: ACL MUSIC FESTIVAL - ROCKIN' COVERAGE 2002-2011

Edited by Joe Gross  
Photo editing by Jay Janner  
Produced by TJ McLarty

Contributing writers:

Michael Barnes  
Patrick Beach  
Kathy Blackwell  
Patrick Caldwell  
Sharon Chapman  
Michael Corcoran  
Ed Crowell  
Alex Daniel  
John T. Davis  
John DeFore  
Josh Eells  
Jeremy Egner  
Mike Elliott  
V. Marc Fort  
Marques G. Harper  
Parry Gettelman  
Joe Gross  
Pamela LeBlanc  
Melissa Ludwig  
Michelle M. Martinez  
Lynne Margolis  
Jeff McCrary  
Melissa Mixon  
Peter Mongillo  
Matthew Odam  
Tony Plohetski  
Renuka Rayasam  
Jeff Salamon  
Stephen Scheibal  
Jean Scheidnes  
Deborah Sengupta Stith  
Chad Swiatecki  
Ben Wear

Contributing photographers:

Jay Janner  
Laura Skelding  
Kelly West  
Larry Kolvoord  
Taylor Johnson  
Brian K. Diggs  
Ricardo B. Brazziell
