A Musical Adventure: The Mountain Goats and Austin City Limits (Part 1: Friday)

 Last Wednesday night, the Mountain Goats played a show in Oklahoma City at the UCO Performance Lab on their way down to Austin. I anticipated getting to see them at the festival -- this was destined to end in heartbreak. However, I had the good sense to buy a ticket for the OKC show anyway, and I was rewarded with a brilliant set of my old favorites.

John Darnielle puts on an amazing show. I was worried that it would be a low-energy set, since most of his songs are written for the acoustic guitar. I was pleased to be wrong.

He's accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, neither of whom do any talking, but appear to be into it. John's stage banter is pretty fabulous -- stories about inadvertently inviting a troop of tweakers into one's small apartment and having them destroy your antique maple-top desk by imprinting it with their tweaker poetry, for example. You can tell he loves his work -- he smiles while he plays, in that uncontainable way, and he plays barefoot.

At some point during the encore, he was standing on the edge of the stage singing a track from "The Life of the World to Come", and I took the opportunity to get a picture. He shoved his glasses at my camera, told me to put it down, and sang the rest of the song while making uncomfortably constant eye contact with me. This is the photo that resulted from his glasses-attack.

Akiko, Cierra, Noel, Yosef and I waited around for a little bit after the show, hoping the band would come out to the van we suspected was theirs. At some point I realized I was a real person with a real job to go to at 8:30 the next morning and we drove home.

The day passed in a haze. I went to work in the morning and in the afternoon I had an anatomy lecture and a dogshark and a necturus to dissect in the lab. We got out a little early, and I showered to prevent smelling like a zoology student all the way to Texas, and we got on the way.

I drove down with Cliff and a friend from his Kerouac book group, whose name is Grae. We left town around five, and got to Ardmore around the time it sounded like a good idea to stop at Whataburger. What I keep remembering, ever since returning from France, is how vast America is. It was about six hours to Austin, and I kept trying to think about how much of France I would have crossed in six hours. Akiko had pointed out to me on the way to the Mountain Goats show how much manicured, purposeless grass we have lining the sides of highways in America. These are the things you never notice, but here I am, noticing them.

We listened to a lot of music on the drive down. That's one of my favorite parts about road trips, these days. I so rarely have time to sit down and listen, undistracted, to a new album for the first time like I'd like.

We got to Austin pretty late. Maybe it was about midnight. I'd been up for a long time and hadn't gotten enough sleep in several consecutive nights, so I was feeling pretty tired. We dropped Grae off and went to check in at the apartment where we were staying. Fortunately for us, Cliff has some pretty awesome friends that he met while on a bike tour in Paris this spring who happen to live about a ten minute walk from Zilker Park. They were kind enough to let us stay with them during the festival, and after we'd gotten kind of settled we went in search of some food at the Magnolia Café, which is one of Cliff's favorite places in Austin.

 We crashed. The next morning, bright and early, there was an fundraising event at the Four Seasons that was benefiting cancer research, and they'd invited a couple of bands to play mini-sets live on a broadcast for the KUT radio station. We went to see Blind Pilot and Spoon, but there were several other bands playing that morning. They had breakfast tacos and coffee and bloody marys (maries? mary's?) for sale. The morning was gorgeous. See Cliff, lying in the grass? That's how nice it was.

What made it better was, of course, live music. Blind Pilot only played about five songs, but it was a really fun set. And, unbeknownst to me, I would later meet the lead singer, Israel, while wandering in the dark on Red River Street, downtown.

Spoon played even fewer songs than Blind Pilot and were, to me, less inspiring. I'd seen Spoon play at Cain's in Tulsa before, and I think they're one of those rare bands that come across just as well, if not better,  recorded. Even the stills are probably better than the live -- because Britt Daniel just looks so cool, even with the teal sunglasses.

We left the Four Seasons and went to the original (at least, I think it's the original) Whole Foods store and a record store called Waterloo, where I bought a copy of the Monsters of Folk record on vinyl, on the off chance that I got to get it signed the next day.
We went to eat at a Tex-Mex place called Trudy's for lunch. Trudy's is the home of the (apparently) famous "Mexican martini," which tastes suspiciously like a margarita with some olives. Which is not to say that it's not tasty. I had some tasty vegetarian enchiladas which had, interestingly, various kinds of mushrooms in them.

At some point during the meal, however, I became aware that the Mountain Goats' Austin City Limits set was at 2 p.m. on Friday instead of on Sunday, like I'd thought. And this is where the heartbreak sets in. Despite finishing in nearly record time and leaving Trudy's, it took us over a half hour to get home through Austin City Limits traffic and the University of Texas campus, which was exactly as busy on Friday at 1 p.m. as you might expect it to be.

We got home at about 2 p.m. and, after frantically applying sunscreen and grabbing my camera, I walked as fast as I could down the hill to the park. The most agonizing thing about this walk was that I could hear the Mountain Goats set -- clearly enough to understand the lyrics -- from the door of the apartment. It faded in and out, because depending on where I was in relation to the park, I could hear either Sublime or Mountain Goats. I got to the festival gates at 2:45, and was faced with deciding whether I should just wait outside and listen, or try to get into the gate, since in line I couldn't hear their set. I decided to try and get in -- and finally managed to get my wristband at 3:01. I got into the festival, but there wasn't anything I was interested in seeing for quite a while. I let myself be sad for a few minutes before I decided I had seen them two nights prior and there were plenty of interesting things going on.

At this point, Cliff was still waiting to meet up with the guy he was buying his pass off of, so I was just kind of wandering around seeing what there was to see. I saw a guy named Miike Snow, who probably would have been a lot better if I had been closer to the stage, and it had been dark. I met some guys from Minneapolis who had gone to Berkeley together, and talked about the Mountain Goats set I had just missed and the Hold Steady, who are from Minneapolis, and how they relate to each other. I saw the Black Keys, about whom everyone seemed to be very excited. I'm not wild about them, but they were a good way to pass the time.

That was the weirdest thing about the festival to me, since I'm such an avid music fan and, in general, kind of obsessive about my concert-going habits. There is simply too much music to see it all, and definitely too much of it to care about it all. Some shows you just kind of have to hang back and admire from afar. What you'll notice when you do that is the absurd number of flags people bring to mark their position in the crowd. I thought this was silly until I realized my phone didn't work at all within the festival grounds -- all the circuits were tied up, definitely for data, but sometimes even for voice. It was a pain. I dislike being made to live without a phone, especially when trying to connect with a few people in a crowd of about 70,000 people.

Anyway, I watched Beach House from afar and then I walked back up the hill to my car and left for downtown, to see Monsters of Folk at a venue called Stubb's. Stubb's is a barbecue restaurant combination concert venue, and they have indoor and outdoor shows. I paid some guys at a food stand down the street to park my car -- they told me I had until 4 a.m. -- and went to get in line. I was there only a few minutes 'til doors opened, and fans were lined up around the block to get in the door. Security told me I couldn't have my camera, so I had to walk back to the car, and I ended up a good thirty feet back from the stage. It turned out fine, though, because I turned out to be standing next to a very nice local musician called Brendan Shea (you'll come up with his music site if you google him) and we exchanged concert stories until the show started.

The opener was called Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and he was probably in his seventies. His adult son was playing rhythm guitar, and they covered some old folk-rock-y songs in addition to playing some originals. He said that he used to record sometimes with Mudhoney, but I haven't checked into that. You may know him as "Smokey" from The Big Lebowski.

Monsters of Folk played an amazing set. As I was without my camera, there are no pictures to post. Until I post about Saturday, for which I was allowed to have a camera. That said, I am going to post horrible iPhone photos anyway. Bear with me.

The set was almost three hours long, and, as usual, they played the whole eponymous album and a bunch of retooled songs from their individual back catalogs, which I really enjoyed. One of the highlights was "Spring Cleaning", from the Bright Eyes/Neva Dinova split that was recently re-released -- but everything was fantabulous.

After the show, I waited around outside the back door with a bunch of people interested in getting autographs or meeting the band. The Stubb's staff were all jerks, but the Monsters of Folk road crew were repeatedly walking outside, to where the instrument cases were stored, and back inside, and they were all very nice. I talked with Phil Schaffart again, the guitar tech I met at the show in London last winter, on the last leg of their first and maybe only real tour. He was nice, too.

There was a guy waiting with us who had been really hostile and strange. Normally when you're hanging around with a bunch of fans at something like this, everyone's reasonably friendly. They're mostly drunk or at least in a good mood from the show. We finally found out that it was his job to get autographs from people. He sold them for a living. It seems like the least satisfying thing in the world to purchase an autograph from someone, and maybe that was reflected in how unhappy he seemed to be. He eventually gave up and went home. The Stubb's staffer who was apparently his friend told us, basically, to piss off and that they weren't coming out until around 1:30.

At 12:40, the band came out. I was one person from the front of the makeshift line, but the girl in front of me sort of panicked and stared with this deer-in-the-headlights look. The guys signed one thing, shook a few hands, and piled back in the van. That was fine with me -- I was mostly waiting around because it was fun to meet the other fans and the crew. Well, with the exception of the verbal abuse from the staff and the autograph hunter.

After the band drove off, I walked down Red River with two of my new friends, who asked the guys at the barbecue stand where I'd parked my car to recommend a bar. They asked us what we liked, and we said, rather confusedly, folk music. They pointed us to a bar called Barbarella, where we went in. It turned out to be what I would describe as an 80s music video club. There was Madonna. And Michael Jackson. And any number of other things I've only heard in movies or played in that way people play old, uncool pop music. It was a lot of fun.

Eventually we all went home. We walked out to find an ambulance and a bunch of police cars in the street, and I still don't know what that was about. I think I made it back to the apartment at about 3 a.m., and fell onto my air mattress and slept like the dead until about 10 a.m.