 "Photo: Andrew Rogers, Daily Texan Staff")
 "Photo: Andrew Rogers, Daily Texan Staff")
 "Photo: Andrew Rogers, Daily Texan Staff")
 "Photo: Caleb Miller, Daily Texan Staff")
 "Photo: May-Ying Lam, Daily Texan Staff")
 "Photo: May-Ying Lam, Daily Texan Staff")
Big and hot. These were my first impressions of the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
I talked to a lot of my fellow festival-goers on Friday and Saturday, trying to get a consensus on what acts the masses of sweaty revelers were most excited about. Very few names were mentioned more than once. On Friday, Vampire Weekend was a popular choice, and Erykah Badu was a big draw on Saturday, but no particular act was unanimously popular. There were as many people excited about bands like Slightly Stoopid and Man Man as there were looking forward to headliners Beck and the Foo Fighters.
What makes ACL such a crowd pleaser is not the drawing power of any one act but the number and variety of performers. Like I said, ACL is big. But in this mass of sonic artistry, what can performers do to separate themselves from the crowd?
The answer lies in the Texas sun.
The first band I saw on Friday was Yeasayer, a pop-electronic-chant-lead-singer-in-a-dress act from Brooklyn. As I sat in the dirt waiting for their set to begin, I could feel the sweat running down my spine. To excite an audience as the sun bronzes beer bellies and fades tribal tattoos, a band has to do something special.
Later in the day, a friend told me she had previously seen Yeasayer in a small club and thought they were great. In the great outdoors at 1:30 p.m., though, Yeasayer was good but failed to get the early afternoon audience to do much more than sway.
A number of the bands playing the weekend’s early time slots — Vampire Weekend, The Octopus Project, Stars — asked and encouraged their audiences to dance or sing, with most acknowledging this was a tall order given the sweaty, cattle-car conditions. Vampire Weekend, for example, played to a crowd of fans — evidenced by the large amount of lip syncing going on around me — but even when lead singer and Columbia graduate Ezra Koenig prodded his audience to dance and sing along, the crowd seemed content to shuffle their feet and bob their heads, though perhaps with a bit more vigor than before.
The headliners, though, get top billing for a reason. Acts like David Byrne and Beck have been touring long enough to know how to get an audience to respond without having to ask.
Both Beck and Byrne played later in the day, but most of those who came to see them had been sweating and drinking $8 tall boys for at least six hours, so a later start is not as big an advantage as one might think.
On Friday, I got to the stage where Byrne was playing about 15 minutes into his set and immediately regretted staying for the last 15 minutes of Jenny Lewis. Lewis is sexy, and she sounds like a sassier Emmylou Harris, but Byrne was the star of “Stop Making Sense,” one of the greatest concert movies of all time.
Byrne’s showmanship was on full display Friday night. Accompanied by an array of dancers clad in variations of the white uniform he was wearing, Byrne rocked through a number of Talking Heads songs including “Once in a Lifetime” and “Life During Wartime,” never once having to ask the crowd to dance. Apparently all it takes to whip people into a frenzy is choreography, some funky keyboards and 30 years of experience.
After seeing Byrne on Friday, I decided I would see Beck instead of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on Saturday. While the opportunity to see a legend like Robert Plant was hard to pass up, I thought Beck would put on a more exciting show.
On Saturday, I arrived at the AT&T stage where Beck would be performing in time to see Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band. As a fan of the “sad bastard” genre of music, I’ve long considered Oberst as one of my favorite artists.
While Oberst’s songs might sound more upbeat now than they did in his Bright Eyes days, his lyrics maintain the brooding introspection he is known for. The juxtaposition of jangling rhythms with words like “I don’t want to die in the hospital” can be a bit jarring, but Oberst and his band put on a great show nonetheless.
After Oberst, Beck was a bit of a disappointment. From a promising start — the crowd roared and bounced as the first chords of “Loser” rang out through the dusty air — Beck slowed things down for a large portion of his set and then finished at 9:40 p.m. without playing an encore. As roadies began to clear the stage, a murmur of confusion went up from the crowd before people finally began to filter out. Beck’s combination of electronica and rock ‘n’ roll was exciting, but it ended abruptly.
One of the best acts of the festival was not found on either of the main stages. Friday afternoon, the Paul Green School of Rock All-Stars performed on the unfortunately named “Austin Kiddie Limits” stage.
A collection of the best students from Paul Green’s performance-based rock music schools, which are scattered across the country, the All-Stars ranged from 12- to 18-year-olds and performed songs that in some cases were twice as old as the kids performing them.
Long-haired teenagers shrieked and soloed their way through songs such as “Good Times, Bad Times,” “L.A. Woman” and “Call Me.” The area around the stage was not crowded at first, but as passers-by heard the familiar chords of these power-rock ballads, more than a few drifted over to see if Jim Morrison had come back from the dead or Blondie had reunited.
Despite a number of up and coming bands like MGMT and Vampire Weekend drawing big crowds, the best shows at this year’s ACL Fest were put on by old pros. But as Green’s All-Stars proved, the kids are all right.
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