Austin City Limits Music Festival
There were times during the seventh annual Austin City Limits Music Festival when I wondered, really wondered, what the hell I was doing there. Most of the bands I could conceivably want to see were bands I had seen before, in multiple settings, and I didn’t have to breathe acres of dust, stand for hours in enhanced interrogation positions, or roam a wilderness of lawn chairs and stoned and supine teenagers to find a clear space in the fierce sun to do so. And then I remembered why: 60,000 fellow humans were deliriously happy to get to do the same, and I’m one of them, and we’re part of something that gets at why so much of our lives revolves around music.
For 2008, the festival made the somewhat obvious, yet previously unattempted, move to push back a week later, and that resulted in comparatively cooler temperatures, especially in the evenings, with only a few clouds and a constant, God-sent breeze. It’s been a dry, hot summer in Austin, and the grass at Zilker Park suffered for it, but while surgical masks and dust-filtering bandanas abounded, I saw no medical emergencies, no pale tourists dropping to the dirt.
My Friday began with a disappointing and vague set from supposedly soul-influenced singer Dan Dyer, so I quickly relocated for one artist I hadn’t seen before and had barely heard rumors about: Christopher Denny. With jeans tucked into boots, bandanas and chains around a black western shirt, and mussed pompadour, the young Arkansan singer and songwriter looked like a stocky Joe Strummer, but phrased like a cross between Elvis Perkins and Lou Reed, if higher than the former and less deadpan than the latter. His songs, even with a pickup band from Austin (he ditched his previous touring outfit just weeks before the festival), unfurled with wit and reflection; they were stories that had no clear beginning, middle or end, just conviction in the delivery from start to finish. Denny isn’t trying to reinvent his influences (Dylan and Cohen), but he sounds like he knows how to find his place among them.
Seeing Denny meant missing Rodney Crowell; seeing Jakob Dylan, sans Wallflowers, meant missing Vampire Weekend. But with the solo Seeing Things, Dylan seems to be at some kind of crossroads, knowing his star power has waned, and that makes him all the more interesting. In a fedora that could have been borrowed from his dad or Indiana Jones, he stood with a big old Martin guitar, fronting a small combo of electric guitar, bass and drums; the quartet closed ranks, as if they wanted to get closer to the strange, often beautiful ruminations of his songs. Dylan has never been a riveting performer but he can be a riveting singer, and the way he delivered “Evil Is Alive And Well” and “Empire Of My Mind”, perhaps his best song, suggested that his best years as an artist are still ahead of him.
Over at the covered WaMu stage, the techs were sound-checking for M. Ward, who I hoped would try out a full band. I’d never seen this particular stage so packed, and Ward barely acknowledged the crowd. After Ward played a few hard, finger-picked opening numbers, the band joined him, including two drummers. They pushed through a set of his strongest material, including “Sad, Sad Song” and “Chinese Translation”, and sounded unconventional and folksy at once. Jenny Lewis followed, wearing a denim jump suit and with red bangs spilling over her shades, taking to the piano first and then prowling the stage as her slide guitar player drove the swampy, ’70s southern rock sound of her newer material. She closed out the strong set with a gorgeous duet with her guitarist on “Love Hurts”.
Day one ended with the Swell Season, an act supremely unsuited to such a festival. Though the stage hands did manage to keep Marketa Irglova’s grand piano in tune, its keys stuck all night, sending guitarist Glen Hansard into a fury at one point; he staggered back to the piano and pounded the top out of frustration. Even the giant screens broke down, displaying the band in blood red through the night. But the set was still gorgeous, sometimes harrowingly so, with welcome violin support from Colm Mac Con Iomaire, and one seemingly unscripted, solo acoustic version of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”. Hansard slashed at his now iconic, gouged Takamine guitar like he was daring it to fly to pieces. A sing-along to “Go With Happiness” dispelled the fury; the set, even with the distractions, felt as honest and intimate as any of the weekend.
On Saturday, I was surprised by the Beach-Boys-meets-the-Incredible-String-Band beauty of the Fleet Foxes’ set, and was also struck by the musical grace (not to mention the groove) of a very pregnant Erykah Badu. But mostly I was stunned by the presence of Sharon Jones, who worked a 20,000-strong crowd like a drill sergeant. I had seen the Dap-Kings earlier in the year, but this time, even without bass player and leader Bosco Mann (no explanation for his absence was given), the band had to work, really work, to hold an audience, most of whom had likely never seen a singer and dancer of Jones’ power before. They burned through their standard set, horns locked tight, rhythms steady and supple, as Jones pulled dancers from the stage-side audience, tossed off her shoes and earrings, and schooled the crowd on the African and Native American origins of her life-affirming, freedom-declaring movements. The set built toward James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s World” and the Dap-Kings’ own “100 Days, 100 Nights”, and by the end I wasn’t alone in begging for an encore that couldn’t be.
A confession: I’d never seen John Fogerty before. I had opportunities, but never took them. Never again. Forget, for a moment, that he is one of the few rock ‘n’ roll songwriters that one can modestly compare to Chuck Berry, and forget that CCR was a definitive band. This afternoon, Fogerty and his band, featuring Billy Burnette on rhythm guitar, conveyed a timeless excitement, with sing-along hit after sing-along hit. The energy of his phrasing and the heat of his guitar playing (he took every solo) made it well worth hearing him in the flesh for the first time.
Between Saturday’s much-anticipated headliners, Beck and Alison Krauss & Robert Plant, I chose the latter; any band with those two singers, guitarists T Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller, and a maestro such as Stuart Duncan is as likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime act as any imaginable. Before a background of flowing drapes, illuminated from orange to red to yellow to blue, Burnett, dressed like a hipster Methodist minister on some midnight mission, stood before a lineup of small Fender amps, as Miller smiled from across the stage. Krauss and Plant entered slowly from opposite wings, taking separate microphones, barely looking at each other, as they sang the set opener, “Rich Woman”.
Their voices may have an uncanny chemistry, but there’s something discomforting and uneasy, even tense, about their presence together onstage. Plant is at pains to never upstage Krauss, even though he knows the thrall that the Zeppelin songs they covered (“Black Dog”, “The Battle Of Evermore”) hold for the rock masses. Krauss, in a sleek, strapless black top and flowing black slacks, never quite knows how to carry herself in this world. The band mostly thunders, with Miller especially loud and heavy on guitar, and the spell was only broken once, when Krauss stood alone to sing a haunting a cappella version of “Down To The River To Pray”. Burnett, Plant and Duncan joined her to sing soft harmonies, but it was Krauss’ moment, and the crowd was silent as one.
Sunday, the last day of the festival, is inevitably something of a come-down and a relief. But this year held one discovery: the Belleville Outfit, an Austin band that captures the best of the hippie-friendly roots string band zeitgeist, without succumbing to it. Joined on the BMI stage by Austin fiddler Warren Hood, the ensemble focused on some fine piano and even finer fiddling from their own ace, Phoebe Hunt. They handled swing, jazz, blues and Band-esque country-rock with a lively, never indulgent feel. This really is a band to watch.
I lazed about well in advance of Gillian Welch‘s afternoon set, a performance I attended out of obligation and respect, neither of which are good enough reasons. But there wasn’t a better songwriter at the festival, and a chance to hear unrecorded songs, even if only three (this afternoon the duo played “Throw Me a Rope”, “Knuckleball Catcher”, and the absurd shaggy blues number “Sweet Tooth”), compelled me.
David Rawlings fought his finicky old guitar throughout the set, finding and losing tunings mid-song, and the feedback from the acoustic mics nearly sank the performance. (According to reports, the sound bleed from a neighboring stage had doomed Patty Griffin on Friday.) But the two endured. And toward the end of the set, Welch called on a “friend” she had worked with on a soundtrack. Out came Krauss, sheepish as ever, and the three sang “Go to Sleep Little Baby”, with Rawlings handling Emmylou Harris’s parts or so Welch warned. No one minded the lyric sheet. Their voices together were pure sweetness and happiness.
Neko Case followed two hours later, but even with support from Jon Rauhouse on steel and Kelly Hogan on harmonies, the great singer couldn’t overcome her own slow-burn midtempo rhythms. For the first time all weekend, I felt like napping. A cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me”, however, snapped me out of my haze.
After a punkish, frenzied Gnarls Barkley set no string section for this tour, just hard, weird garage soul I found a spot for the Band Of Horses. It was strange to think about seeing them, pre-Sub Pop debut, in the corner of a tiny record store in Austin three years ago at SXSW. They now perform like they have hopes at “great American band” status, and Ben Bridwell has both the voice and the songs to make that hope concrete. With new keyboard player and harmony singer Ryan Monroe, the band played an ecstatic set, opening with “The First Song” and punctuating with “Great Salt Lake”, “Weed Party” and a crashing, lifting “Funeral”. They offered one new song, a pop soul duet between Monroe on Bridwell that has radio-hit written across the chorus, and a final grand soul cover of Them Two’s “Am I Good Man”. Bridwell, who I’ve never heard sing with such spirit and joy, bounded off the stage and hugged and kissed the whole front row. He knew he was a very lucky man. And we all knew it, too.