Brief overview of Day 2 at the Austin City Limits Music Festival (here’s Austinist’s take).
The experience can thus far be summed up in two words: hot and crowded. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve heard some good music, but over the past two days, no matter where we sit, people keep walking right through us on their way somewhere else. At one point during The Killers on Friday night, and again during Arcade Fire’s set last night, people around us just stopped letting the cruisers wander through their spot.
The alternative is to let people step on you, on your stuff, etc., and even as I sit here typing, knowing we’ll be heading back out there in a few hours, I’m wondering if tonight will be the night I snap and go off on someone who bumps into me because they can’t be bothered to pay attention to where they’re going. It gets more annoying as the day goes on and the frat boys who’ve been drinking beer all day and are now drunk and dehydrated start stumbling around in the dark.
Then, of course, there was the incident last night where one of the aforementioned drunk frat boys materialized next to Ray, and said after a very large man walked in front of us, “Dude, that guy’s bigger than you.” :faint: To say Ray was not amused would be a slight understatement, and the guy vanished quickly after that.
The fact that it’s been in the mid-90s with no clouds (the weather people have given up on the whole “80s and partly cloudy” thing they were promising as late as Thursday) hasn’t helped. Even though, in the grand scheme of things, 93 isn’t really that hot, it is when you’re sitting out in the direct sun with no cover. Ray and I hit one of the local sporting goods stores yesterday to invest in a 62 inch golf umbrella which helped … somewhat … yesterday. We smuggled in more than our allotment of bottled water, and intend to do so again today. It kind of goes without saying that prices at the park are something of a rip-off. :irked:
Anyway. On to the nitty gritty.
The Cold War Kids.
I’d never heard of this group before, but then I heard a lot of people talking about them on the walk to the park (which did seem a little shorter today … at least on the way in). They were pretty good, and I’ll need to check them out at some point in the future when I’m near an iTunes connection. They rocked out pretty hard, even though the stage they were on was in full sun at that point in the early afternoon. At some point, the bass player lost his shirt, and from the way the lead singer reacted it sounded like we were happy not to be that close to the stage. 
We were joined by our friends Lee and Hillary, who put down their blanket for all the cruisers-by to step on over the course of the afternoon:
Blue October played after Cold War Kids. Blue October are from San Marcos, a little town about 20 miles down the road, and so they considered this a “home” show. We’ve seen them before, and I dunno if it was that the sound system on our side of the stage had crapped out or if they just weren’t playing well, but we could barely hear them, and what we could hear didn’t sound very good. Lee and Hillary went up toward the stage and said that it was shady over there, but the sound still wasn’t that great.
To the left in the above picture (not the guy in the red bandana, the one to the left of him) is the totally hot guy that Ray, Hillary, and I kept staring at all afternoon. Unlike a lot of the other totally hot guys that we saw, this one seemed to not be aware of his total hotness, which made him hotter … and me uncomfortably aware of the fact that I don’t even remotely look anything like that. *sigh*
Let’s see, who next. Oh, right. Andrew Bird.
Another really good act – completely out of nowhere. He was bound and determined to have a good time, and make sure that the audience was having a good time — and it worked! Even though he was playing during the hot, ugh-ish stretch of the afternoon when the sun is slanting and umbrellas don’t work anymore and the humidity was up and there were no clouds in the sky, everyone really seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Arctic Monkeys: same problem as Blue October. We were in the wrong place, and the crowd … well, at least where we were … they seemed not to be paying attention to the show.
After that, we moved, so we missed a good chunk of the set by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but we were in an optimal spot for The Arcade Fire. I’m not a huge fan of The Arcade Fire, but they were having such fun up there that it was hard not to be pulled in to the crowd’s energy.
And so … day 2 comes to a close. In a while, Day 3 will begin …
