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 …

Well, it’s eight million degrees and the skeeters are out, so naturally that means that it must be time for the Austin City Limits Music Festival!

Ray and I have never been to ACL Fest, which invades Zilker Park every year in September, and he was really thrilled about the lineup and found us 3-day passes. Me, I just wanted to see Crowded House.

So, yesterday was the first day of the festival, and Ray’s pal Joanna scored us a parking pass in a garage next to the park. Let me clarify: the garage is next to the park. ACL Fest, however, is in a subset of the park, that isn’t adjacent to the garage, however, the alternative is to join the hordes who either pay through their noses for a spot in the neighborhood, or park in downtown Austin and take the shuttles in. So we walk it – it’s about a half hour in each direction.

The Weather Channel was promising highs in the mid-80s all weekend, and so we were a little surprised-nay, bummed-to get out of the car and start walking only to discover that we’d surpassed the mid-80s by 9 am and were on our way to the mid-90s, which feels much hotter when you’re sitting out in the direct sunlight, all of the shade having been co-opted by the crazy insane people who showed up at 9 am.

Even when we got there, around noon, it was still pretty sparse:

And so. We hung around for a group we’d never heard of called the Heartless Bastards, and all I shall say there is that after a couple of songs, Joanna leaned over and asked me, “Is she singing in English?” Ouch.

After that, we moved on to the main stage at the other end of the park – the AT&T stage, not to be confused with the AT&T Blue Room stage–where Pete Yorn was on. Joanna’s a big fan. So, we get over there and Pete — we’re on a first name basis, me and Pete — starts playing and gets immediately upstaged by The Fire:

A propane tank exploded, and apparently several people were critically injured. Pete Yorn was eventually replaced on the stage by one of the security guys who asked everyone to move over to allow the Fire Department to do their business, which was probably just as well, because by that point no one was looking at the stage anyway:

People moved, Pete finished his set, and then it was on to Peter Björn and John, a group whose recordings I don’t mind, but I’d heard they weren’t that good live and … well, what I heard wasn’t wrong.

It wasn’t that they were bad, it was that it sounded like they didn’t have anyone controlling the sound – it all sounded flat and kind of muffled.

We were initially planning to stay for a bit and then move over to get good seats for Crowded House, but we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to make our way through the crowd with all of our stuff. That turned out to be not such a worry, since by the time we were ready to go, a lot of other people had been ready and already left.

Sorry, guys, better luck next time.

I adore Crowded House, and even though Ray and Joanna only knew one song each (“Don’t Dream it’s Over” – the song everyone knows), I made them stay for the entire set because Crowded House was the only act I was really excited about seeing the entire weekend. Bah. They’re a lovely live band, and had I known we’d have a better view 100 feet to the left, we might have moved, but …

By this point, the crowd was kicking and it was pretty packed – as the evening goes on, the names get bigger and the number of acts gets smaller, so it becomes harder to fend for a space in the crowd:

Anyway, to round out the night were Queens of the Stone Age … eh … and The Killers, who were headlining opposite Björk on the other side of the park. I know that Shin will find it horribly shocking that we didn’t go see Björk, but Joanna and Ray are both big fans of The Killers and they were really good, even to someone like me who only knew the 2 songs that get played on the radio.

Overall, a lot of fun, expensive food, hot boys shirtless (and, unfortunately, a lot of really not hot boys shirtless as well. Straight men have absolutely no concept of body consciousness, do they?), and good music. And so, we trudged back to the car dutifully afterwards, exhausted, sweaty, and covered in bug repellent and sunscreen. Ray has already pared back the schedule for the next two days so as to minimize our time in the heat and/or movement about the park — it was really brutal, and we’re both sluggish this morning in getting ready to head down there again.

And that was my Friday. It doesn’t involve an iPhone, naturally, but still a change from the norm.