Austin City Limits, Part 2

Saturday was less a music festival and more a Monsters of Folk festival. For me, anyway. I skipped out on seeing a number of minor bands that I didn't mind missing in order to stand in line at MOF's autograph table. We were near the end of the line where they cut it off, and I was nervous that I would be the first one NOT to meet the band (which is what had happened at the venue the night before) but it all worked out. The guys were all surprisingly nice, and I got to have a (brief) conversation with each of them.

Afterward, Cliff and I contemplated the decision between seeing half of Broken Bells' set, and being ideally placed for Monsters of Folk's set. As obsessive as this sounds, we chose Monsters of Folk. If it had been The Shins instead of Broken Bells, I think my decision would have gone the other way. I dreamed recently that I got to go back to ACL and see all the bands I didn't see when I was busy seeing other bands. It was excellent, but turned out to be false. If only time travel worked while I was awake.

Anyway, the set was two hours long (they were the only non-headliner to score two hours of stage time), magical and, luckily, a bit different from the previous night's. I won't go into detail, but it was one of the highlights of the actual festival for me. Nevermind that I had to stand next to two annoying Canadian girls who would not stop leaning on me and were snorting something that they haughtily denied was coke, or that the people behind me kept threatening to crush (okay, warp) the record I had in my backpack.

After the show, we sat on a hilltop and watched the end of Matt & Kim's set. It was all flashing red and blue lights and reminded me of the Super Saver Cinema's wall of glass blocks. That was about the most interesting thing about it. We listened to M.I.A. as we left the park and stood in line for one of the shuttles to downtown. "Paper Planes" was the only song I knew, and that from countless mornings of listening to it leak through Amy's bedroom walls in our apartment sophomore year.

The shuttle was kind of remarkable. They funneled people out of the park and up the hill with chainlink fences and, when we were all packed closely enough, loaded city buses 14 at a time, standing room only. And the part that really tells you the volume of people that were there is that we had to repeat this process about five times -- while the majority of the crowd was still inside the park listening to the headliner. Massive amounts of people, for a park that has no parking nearby.

We ended up on 6th street, downtown, where we ate "Korean barbecue tacos" at a roving truck whose location can only be determined their Twitter page. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be delightful. We sat on a bench and ate. We wandered for quite a while and then we ended up at a bar that had been recommended to Cliff by, I think, one of his professors, called Casino El Camino. It was kind of strange, in that everything was lit with red light and there were sort of scary, Mayan-ish murals and sculptures everywhere. We were seated in the courtyard next to a pretty creepy fountain. There was inadequate seating and these two random women ended up sitting with us and talking for quite a while. One of them went home relatively early and the other, after inviting us to a club where she said she could get us into an aftershow for free, on account of being a concessions manager at a related venue, sort of climbed into our taxi uninvited. She also sort of failed at telling the cab driver where she lived, but eventually got out and paid him the beginning of the fare. We continued back to the apartment, where I crashed. Hard.

Sunday was a bit of a trial. We got there early so we could see some of Shearwater's set, but, unlike the first two days, they wouldn't let me bring my camera past the festival gates. I tried several different security people, on the recommendation of the first one who had turned me away, but all of them had the same reaction. Which meant I had to walk back up the hill and leave my camera at the apartment. It also means that I don't have any photos from Sunday, so there aren't any images of some of the things I'd really like to have photographed.

Anyway, I missed Shearwater. By the time I got back down to the park and in the gates, they were being a lot more lax about security -- as I thought. Apparently  my problem was trying to enter the park before there was a rush of people. If I'd waited a bit, maybe my camera could have come in with me, again. There were certainly a lot of bigger, more offensive cameras than mine. Many, many camcorders.

By then it was time to go to the stage Blind Pilot was about to play at. I'd heard a preview of their set Friday morning. I'd also heard them, through the walls of Stubb's as I was waiting for MOF to come out to the van that night.  I was worried that I might be kind of over them by that point in the festival. The set itself, though, did not disappoint.

Afterward, I sat in the grass and half-heartedly listened to Devendra Banhart and the Grogs. I wandered over to the recycling tent and picked up a bag. ACL does this thing where if you fill a (giant) trash bag with recyclable items and bring it back, they'll give you a free ACL t-shirt. So I walked around picking up beer cans and cups and listened to Yeasayer and the Morning Benders while I did so. I got the bag turned in and claimed my t-shirt in time for Midlake. The band had been recommended to me by Grace, someone I met at the Monsters of Folk show in London (how many times can I possibly mention Monsters of Folk in one post?). They were a preponderance of guitars. Seriously, maybe like 6 guitars and a base. It was definitely interesting.

I then had to choose between Band of Horses, on one end of the park, and Flaming Lips on the complete opposite end. Logic told me I should see Band of Horses, since I'd seen Flaming Lips in concert before, but I was in the mood for Flaming Lips. So, after having stood at Band of Horses' stage for a while, I extricated myself from the crowd and walked all the way across the park to see the Lips. Who were, of course, insane. And a little disappointed at the crowd, seemingly, for not being loud or enthusiastic enough. Everyone around me was smoking, and none of them had seemingly ever heard of the Flaming Lips. Wayne Coyne did his hamster-ball routine, where he basically climbs into a giant transparent beach ball, inflates it around him, and crowd surfs in it. He encouraged us to impersonate things like bears and motorcycles. He told us that the whole point of a music festival was that you would leave so full of energy that you would live your whole next year better, somehow. He was probably stoned.

Immediately following the Flaming Lips was The National. By now it was getting dark. I was exhausted and I wanted to see the Eagles headlining, but I didn't really care about the National. I went because of the hype surrounding it -- which had let me down, regarding the Black Keys. I really enjoyed the National's set, though, and by the time it was over, felt none of the desperate fatigue that had confronted me circa Midlake.

I walked all the way across the park again, and picked my way through what seemed like a mile of people camped out for the Eagles. Lawn chairs are allowed in the park, but only after a certain distance away from the stage. Unfortunately, there are no rules about leaving an aisle, or any walking space at all, between the chairs, so you end up with these vast islands of grouped lawn chairs that sometimes make the way impassable. In the dark, this is more complicated. I eventually made it past the chair cut-off line and everything was easier, then. I didn't get super close, but they had giant video screens set up so that we could see what was going on.

The Eagles played all their hits. Which is a shocking number of songs when you have them all played one after the other. I had a lot of fun. Their musicianship was a lot better than their collective sense of humor, and some of the videos they chose to display behind them were kind of cheesy. The crowd was, in general, very happy to be there.

I walked out of the park with the rest of the masses and up the hill to the apartment. There was a guy walking near me who kept screaming about how none of us were living in the fast lane. It was a strange mix of endearing and obnoxious.

We decided it was pointless to fight traffic out of the city and, exhausted, make the sixish hour drive back to Norman. We slept. We woke up and left the apartment at 6, picked up Grae and a tank of gas, and got on the highway just in time to hit some traffic on the way out of the city. We made it to Norman in time for me to go to work, but not to any of my Monday classes.

It's always surreal to get back home after a trip like that. I spent the next week in a fog, always anxious that there might be something playing on another stage that I should have been seeing. It made no sense. But there it is.