Notes from the Austin City Limits Music Festival

There’s only one way to describe the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Big, hot, and fucking dusty. Most of the time you think you’re smack dab in the middle of Texas cattle drive, with 30,000 head kicking up the dust so it just chokes your throat and burns your nostrils. Thank God Lone Star beer is cheap and not very potent so you can just suck it down and wash the grit out of your mouth.

With eight stages spread out over I don’t know how many acres, everything is a lot farther away than it seems. Like a mirage floating over the desert, that stage that you think you can get to in a minute or two to catch a couple of songs from some band you’ve always wanted to check out is pretty much out of reach. Once you arrive at the stage you find you’re miles away from the one act you really want to see. We spent a lot of time walking and just waiting sometimes. Time and space are real things at ACL.

The heat is frightful. It just bakes down on the ground and people huddle in the shade, just inside the perimeter where the sunshine ends and the shadow begins like cattle around a almost dry waterhole. (The analogy of cattle is an easy one to make there. It’s Texas, it’s the home of the Longhorns, it just fits.) Lots of people wear these distressed straw cowboy hats. To me, they look like something you’d put on a scarecrow. As much as it felt like my brain was just stewing in its own juices, pride just wouldn’t let me buy one, much less put one on my head. Yee-haw. Look at me, ma, I’m a cowboy. Why did I think that half these people had never even been near a horse, much less on one?

Texans are the friendliest bunch of people you can imagine. They love to talk. And talk and talk and talk…even when the music is playing. They just stand around in groups talking like they’re standing in their own backyards around the barbecue. Texans got this accent—we’ve all heard it—and it’s a particular way of talking that cuts through the loudest sound. The accent itself isn’t loud. It’s not even piercing. It’s real flat so it can sneak in under just about anything including a Jack White guitar solo and make its presence known. It’s sort of flat and clipped so if you’re not paying attention to the words being said the sound of it really does seem to be saying, yakkity, yakkity, yakkity, yakkity, yak, yak, yak.


And did I say these Texans love to talk? At the Patty Griffith set, who seems as sweet and wonderful as I could have imagined, a young woman and two of her friends plopped down on the ground near me and commenced to yakkity-yak. She didn’t give Patty as much as a minute’s notice although she must have said about five times how much Patty Griffith was her favorite artist. She kept referring to her as an artist, but I got the impression this particular woman wouldn’t know an artist if one fell right in her substantial lap.

Anyway, I was giving her my best East Coast glare to shut her the hell up and she saw me and just looked up at me and, not missing a beat gave me a big ole Texas smile and said, “How y’all doin’?” I think she meant it, too.

Austin vs. Boston? Austin, hands-down

I think one of the most pleasant surprises about this trip is seeing just how friendly people are here. Boston is Angry Town, and living there you just live with it, and a lot of times you just think it's you. There's something wrong with you because when the stranger who yells at you, the jerk who cuts you off and gives you the finger on the highway, the T driver or cab driver or shop clerk just gives you a cold shoulder and you think it's you, and you were raised differently and maybe there was some class in worldliness that you just slept through.

Then you come to someplace like Austin, or anywhere else besides Boston, for that matter, and it's just one of those things where you think, no, I was right all along. Boston is Angry Town and Bostonians are, on the whole, a bunch of stiff-necked assholes.

Bus drivers here in Austin, are friendly and helpful. (And the bus costs 50 cents!) Imagine asking a T driver directions. They may tell you, but you won't get a smile for their trouble. People on the street actually stop and engage in conversation. Last night we were turned around and stopped a group of people who just happened to be African American. They stopped everything, we talked, we laughed, and they actually stopped other people who they didn't know to ask them the directions we were looking for. That never would have happened on the streets of Boston.

And the music scene is so prevalent here. I've never understood why you can't walk along the streets in some place like Harvard Square or Central Square and hear music coming out of every other door. I mean, you'd think a hip, trendy place like Boston would have a great music scene, wouldn't you? Well, maybe here's the big secret: Maybe Boston isn't that hip or trendy.

We sat in Stubbs yesterday talking to the Andy, the bartender, as if we were old friends. He was helpful and just so happy to talk about music and I felt like I did when I was a little kid riding in the back seat of my parent's car with my head out the window. I was just gulping in all in to the point where I almost foundered. Here there are people who really know music and are passionate about it and just love to talk about it and enjoy and just take it all in.

Austin City Limits and beyond...

The long-awaited trip to Austin is on, and I can feel the pressures of everyday life just dropping off already, and I haven’t even had my first Bloody Mary on the plane yet. I asked C yesterday at work if ordering a beer on a 6:20 a.m. flight would be inappropriate. I think it might be, even though my favorite Sunday morning breakfast is pancakes and beer.

We—wait a minute, what do you mean, “we”, white man?—forget in Boston that there’s a whole ‘nuther country out there. There’s 3,000 miles between Boston/New York and San Francisco, and most people on the East Coast don’t comprehend what’s out there. I grew up there. Long ago I stopped trying to explain it to my liberal friends in Boston. It’s like pissing in the wind.

We’re not in Kansas anymore—well, Boston, and it’s such a nice feeling. We just flew over the Mississipi River. I grew up in a river city, where the depth of the river was reported nightly on the news. It was a live thing, that people looked at and admired. There was commerce going up and down the river, barges filled with goal and fuel. A thoroughfare that preceded the Interstate system and airplanes and even the railroad, and it looks like it’s still working pretty well still. I saw two big barges churning up the water as we flew over. There’s squared-off farmland on the flood plain, of course. I say of course because that’s what I’d expect to see along a big river if there isn’t a city built there. Even with the Charles River flowing through the middle of the city, my friends back in Boston wouldn’t understand that.

I said in the Memphis airport during a layover, These are the people who scare the Espedrille’s off Europeans. Bubbas everywhere. Fireplug bodies with baseball caps pulled low over beady eyes, the brim rolled, and copious amounts of facial hair, mostly thick goatees. Ill-fitting blue jeans—relaxed fit, I guess is the best way to describe them, scuffing along in boots.

Reading the New York Times at 30,000 feet, the financial crisis is still so real. There’s no forgetting it. No putting your head in the sand. This crisis is so real and there’s a good chance that this country is over, I think. Really over.

Getting ready for Austin

Really getting stoked for the Austin City Limits Music Festival at the end of September. I'll close in The Boys of Winter that Sunday, and Wednesday Sue and I will fly to Austin for some much needed and deserved rest and music.

And there, along with seeing the likes of Alejandro Escovedo, Manu Chao, The Raconteurs, Gillian Welch and a whole host of my favorite musical types, I'm also going to hook up with my old music teacher, Colleen Reilly.

I met Colleen at Jack's Drum Shop over on Boylston Street before it closed. I was just in there killing time that night, and also happened to be looking for a music teacher. She and I got to talking and it was one of those things where you say to yourself, what's to think about? All the good signs are there. I borrowed one of the store's guitars and had my first lesson with her right then and there. And that night, she sent me off with the instructions to go home and write two songs. I'd never written a song in my life, but with Colleen, it's that easy. You just do it.

Which is how, I guess, that she and Dave, her boyfriend and the drummer in her band, just up and moved to Austin.

She's working hard right now, getting out her first CD. Check it out (one of Colleen's favorite phrases; she was always saying, "John, check it out," then she'd zip through this riff or bend a note to it just screamed, and then she'd say, "You do it...lol) When Push Comes to Shove and the solo from Blood Money (hey, where are the lyrics to this one??--Colleen has a great rock voice) and tell me you can't hear the SRV influence. And what I find amazing are the other two tracks on her Myspace page. For DC and the Nardis solo are these straight, sophisticated jazz pieces so you get the idea of what a talent she is because she plays both genres equally well.

Austin City Limits Music Festival

A potential vacation/road trip...maybe Sue's sister, Stacey, could fly in...B might be on his big road trip on his big bike...Juan C could be introduced to his hick roots (yes, bro, you got 'em; we all got 'em).

I've just been needed a break so bad lately, and while this festival is in September, it would work just fine. I know I don't belong in the East anymore, much less the Northeast. I've been told to get my butt out where there's sand and cactus, farther west to Arizona or New Mexico. Arizona maybe; I heard it's a little more working class. I just don't do trendy.