Austin City Limits Music Festival Day 1

One cool thing about College Station and Bryan are the proximity to some of the other cities in Texas. One of those other cities is Austin. A town known for many things, one of which, close to me is music. So when Dawn suggested we go the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and was able to find reasonably priced three day passes, we decided to go.

Day 1:

We get to downtown Austin and find a spot to park at a meter at 3:30, and this is cool because we can fill the parking meter to take us to 5:30 which is when they stop checking the meters.

The festival worked with the city's transportation services to run shuttles from a downtown park to the festival grounds, I'll just say the operation of these shuttles was incredibly efficient, and we often spent more time walking to the point to catch shuttles rather then actually waiting for the shuttles. That was very cool, and much better organized then other shuttle services I've seen.

But really, this is not a blog entry about busses, it's about the festival.

Upon getting to the grounds, the first act we have time to see is Del the Funky Homosapien, who I knew from Gorillaz. Dawn and I sat in the back of the crowd to get the lay of the land, and make it easy for us to get to the Patty Griffin Stage.

We also decide to try and document ourselves each day.

We did start far away from Patty Griffin, but we eventually moved ourselves closer to try and block out sound spill over from other stages, most notably the Austin Ventures stage by the food tent. The shows there were routinely too loud all weekend long. I felt Patty put on a good show, and I was excited about the next acts we wanted to see, G. Love and the special sauce, and David Byrne.

After the Patty Griffin show, we started making our way across the park to the other stages. That's when we got our first view of how ow many people would be at the festival over the weekend. It also means that we were too far back from the G. Love stage to enjoy the music. Onto David Byrne.

Now, I had heard that Byrne dosen't do the Talking Heads music any more, so needless to say, I was more than pleasantly surprised to hear Life During War Time, I Zimbra, and Once in a Life Time, among other Byrne and Talking Heads songs. Byrne, being the art school guy he his, had dancers in a number of his songs. Their routines though sparked a debate between Dawn and I. Dawn was not pleased with some of the choreography, I thought the geeky dance moves were of Byrne's creation, and meant to invoke the Stop Making Sense concert movie. Turns out David Byrne address the dancing in his own blog. So, maybe I am a sucker.

I really felt like that was going to be the highlight of the night, but we went to two more shows, the Swell Season, (famous for the song Falling Slowly,) but they experienced multiple sound issues, both from their own equipment and spill over from....Austin Ventures Stage! We decided we would need to see them again sometime.

So, we decided to end the night with Donavon Frankenreiter. That to me was the biggest surprise of the night. I really enjoyed the show, and there was a lot of crowd energy and interactions. Plus, G. Love joined him at the end of his set to play a few songs. So, we got to see G. Love anyway.

A good start for the Weekend.