BLURT BLITZES AUSTIN: ACL Festival & Blurt Launch Party
Oct 01, 2008
Band of Horses and James McMurtry kick it out for the Health Alliance For Austin Musicians.
BY ANDY TENNILLE & ALLIE GOOLRICK
Now in its seventh year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival draws 65,000 music fans each September to Zilker Park for three days of music, Lonestar tallboys and relentless Texas sunshine.
2002 was the inaugural year. 2003 found festival organizers scoring their first big headliner with REM. 2004 saw the biggest single-day crowd with more than 75,000 people in attendance on Saturday. Hurricane Rita threatened to invade the 2005 fest, but the real story that year was the "Dust Bowl" as the dry Texas heat baked Zilker Park and attendees kicked up a cloud of dust. 2006 will always be remembered for Ben Kweller getting a mysterious bloody nose during his set and using a tampon thrown to him by an audience member to stop it. 2007's festival was on fire, literally: a propane tank ignited in the service area on Friday, burning down two trailers and several port-o-potties. Later, a second fire broke out onstage during Björk's set.
If there was a theme to ACL 2008, it may very well have been the "Bs". Not the paranoia-inducing killer bees from South Texas or the legendary SNL skit, but Band of Horses, Bill Murray and the BLURT Launch Party, a benefit concert for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians - a local non-profit organization whose mission is to provide access to affordable healthcare for low-income, uninsured working musicians - held Saturday night after the day's music ended at the festival proper.
Hordes of music fans lined the block of Austin's Sixth Street outside the Parish Room anxiously awaiting the doors to open on this highly anticipated event, which a couple of weeks earlier had sold out in a scant two hours. By the time opening act James McMurtry and his Heartless Bastards took the stage, the room was packed and the Austin-based singer songwriter delivered a blistering, hour-long set of Texas blues-rock that left no ears in attendance unrung.
At the stroke of midnight, Band of Horses took the stage to the delighted roar of the capacity crowd for a rare, intimate club set. Having spent the summer touring Europe, Australia and Asia, the band was giving Americans their first chance to see a new lineup with new guitarist Blake Mills (Simon Dawes, Jenny Lewis), he of trashed dressing rooms and killer solos.
Launching straight into "The First Song," the South Carolina sextet played for nearly two hours, covering the majority of the songs off their two fantastic studio albums - Everything All The Time and Cease to Begin - along with a spot-on version of J.J. Cale's "Thirteen Days" and an epic, show-closing take on Them Two's "Am I A Good Man." Two new songs were debuted off the band's forthcoming album, which they begin work on in a few weeks in Muscle Shoals, Alabama: the slow-burner "Trudy," which featured frontman Ben Bridwell on harmonica, and keysman Ryan Monroe's soulful "Older."
"'Older' was a tune I wrote a while back and shared with Ben when I joined the band around Cease to Begin," Monroe said after the show. "We just started messin' with it and tried it out full band style last New Year's Eve at The Earl. We've been jamming it for a while now, so it might be ready when we make the new album."
Post-show, the group's dressing room crammed with wannabe groupies and well-wishers, including current BLURT cover starlet Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, members of the Foo Fighters, Bobby Bare Jr. and actor Bill Murray, who'd caught the end of the band's set and was impressed enough to buy a CD (and stuff some dough into the HAAM donation jar). Whiskey was sipped, beers were slugged and joints were smoked and the BLURT Launch Party raged on into the wee hours of the morning, a monumental night of music benefiting a noble cause.
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On to the festival! With Spanish-bred Manu Chao, Latin psychedelic warriors The Mars Voltas and Texas rocker Alejandro Escovedo atop the bill, Friday night at ACL 2008 took on a decidedly Hispanic vibe. Stellar sets were delivered throughout the day from Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, Jacob Dylan, Del the Funk Homosapien, M. Ward, Gogol Bordello, Jenny Lewis and Delta Spirit. But Friday's highlights had to be David Byrne and Antibalas, the Brooklyn-based Afrobeat group that delivered a stirring set under the cozy confines of the WaMu (or is it Morgan Stanley?) tent.
With a 12:30 p.m. start time, Fleet Foxes had late-night revelers dragging themselves out of bed in order to make it in time for their early afternoon set, but the much-hyped Sub Pop quintet made it all seem worthwhile as their gorgeous harmonies rang out across the hills of Zilker Park. While most folks were amped for highly anticipated headliners Beck and the tag team of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, the real gems of Saturday were found mid-afternoon with soulful sets from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings (minus a conspicuously missing Gabe Roth) and Erykah Badu and the acid-dosed music of Man Man and Jason Pierce's Spiritualized.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings should play Sunday afternoon at every music festival in the world. The long-time duo - who reportedly have a new album in the works - play the kind of soothing music that warms your soul after a debaucherous Saturday night, and this Sunday was no different. Okkervil River, The Kills, Heartless Bastards, White Denim and Gnarls Barkley all turned in solid Sunday sets, but Stars, Band of Horses and The Raconteurs delivered truly inspired performances that bled perfectly into the rock chaos of festival closers Foo Fighters, who many in attendance claimed were the best headliner in this festival's seven-year history. [ANDY TENNILLE]
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My first BLURT trip to ACL was a pleasure-packed 24-hour marathon that brought together my three favorite festival staples: great music, odd celebrity sightings, and of course, as many free drinks as I could imbibe and keep standing. After two early morning flights, countless Bloody Mary's and a very long cab ride, I found myself schlepping my bag of audio gear through the dusty plains of Texas in Austin's Zilker Park, host of the ** Austin City Limits Music Festival. In the 90 degree-heat, Zilker felt more like a Sub-Saharan desert than ‘greenspace,' but native Austiners came prepared: the festival looked more like a beach party than a concert with a good contingent of the female crowd in bikinis and not much else.
Alas, I was confined to the press tent so the show coverage I'll leave to Andy. But the press tent offered a treat in itself, with an eclectic assortment of musicians mingling with reporters, the only shade in the entire park and a free tiki bar hosted by Austin radio station KROX. My first interview was with young Brit blues rockers Back Door Slam. The affable trio of Davy Knowles, Adam Jones and Ross Doyle are probably the only people I will ever meet from the Isle of Man, a tiny island between mainland Britain and Ireland. And judging by the band's proficiency at high-energy, guitar-driven rock n' roll, it looks like there wasn't much to do on the Isle of Man except play music. You can catch my interview with the trio coming soon on the Blurt Radio Player.
Next up was the slightly sardonic Langhorne Slim, who threatened to retire his ubiquitous bowler hat if reporters didn't stop asking him about it. We sipped on margaritas and talked about why he self-titled his latest record, his relationship with the Avett Brothers and what it was like opening for the Trachtenburg Family Sideshow Players. Mason Jennings also made time to talk to BLURT about his friendship with Jack Johnson and why dropping out of school to pursue music at age 16 is a decision he'll never regret. Look for both of those interviews to hit the Blurt Radio player soon!
For those Blurt-ers with kids, we sat down with edgy kid's rocker Uncle Rock, was none too shy in explaining how he translates the Rolling Stone's "You Can't Always Get What you Want" for tots; "It's about ice cream," he jokes on the interview, which will also air in the coming days on the Blurt Radio Player.
With only a few hours to go before the Blurt Launch Party, I managed to squeeze in some time to talk with pint-sized soul diva Sharon Jones, who had just come off the ACL stage and was ready to party. All of two minutes with Jones and you know that she's the real deal-she's got more soul in her little finger than a gospel choir but keeps a lighthearted attitude that makes every performance a ton of fun.
Before long the sun was (thankfully) starting to sink over the festival grounds and I was off to the long-awaited main event, The Blurt Launch Party with Band of Horses and James McMurtry. While a line to get in the venue snaked around the block, the BoH guys, McMurtry and I watched backstage as the UGA dawgs lost abysmally to Alabama-which luckily didn't seem to affect what would be stellar performances on both sides. [ALLIE GOOLRICK]
[Photo of Band Of Horses by Andy Tennille]
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