2 Dollar Productions

"All the vampires walking through the Valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard," - Tom Petty, "Free Fallin"

Soon after Tom Petty finished this song to a roaring ovation the rain did indeed start falling down in torrents at the Austin City Limits Music Festival last night.


Petty was the headline act to wrap up the 3-day musical orgy that ran the gamut from Gnarls Barkley to Guy Clark to Son Volt to Ben Harper to Willie Nelson to Jack Ingram to Van Morrison and many more.

Fortunately, the rain slackened within about ten minutes, and after a slight delay to keep the instruments dry, Petty and the Heartbreakers came back to finish a strong set by tearing through "American Girl," "Refugee" and an encore that hit "Running Down a Dream" and "You Wreck Me."


All in all, it was a fitting way to end the weekend because I definitely feel wrecked as I sit on a rainy Monday morning drinking black coffee and trying to make sense of it all.

Festivals have their own special vibe, and also present their own special problems. My hope is always that the musical acts feature enough highlights to make me forget about having to deal with crowds of sweating brutes tramping across open fields from stage to stage.

"It's so hard to find my way
Now that I'm all on my own," - Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"

Luckily, this year's ACL did have enough highlights for me to consider it a success as there is something special about being inside a giant crowd and hearing Van Morrison tear through "Brown-Eyed Girl" as everyone sings along. This same feeling held for Willie Nelson digging into "Whiskey River" and Tom Petty going through "Mary Jane's Last Dance."

It's simply a little bit amazing to be part of that scene, and those 3 songs made the cost of the 3-day pass worth it by themselves.


But like almost anything (with the notable exception of pizza and sex) there was a downside that included such things as:

- If you weren't singing along to a great song, the sheer size of the crowd, which totaled more than 60,000 every single day, got irritating to me in a hurry. It's just not that fun to wait in gigantic food lines and have very little personal space to call your own.
- If you're playing with a glow stick, hackey-sack (sp?) or Frisbee in the park then you're no friend of mine.
- While it wasn't 107 degrees and windy like last year at ACL, it was still pretty damn hot until the rains came down. This causes a lot of flesh to be on display, and it has always been a bizarre phenomenon to me that it's always the people who should cover themselves up who flaunt their flesh like streetwalkers and it's the ones who you wish would walk around buck naked who cover up like it's the Middle East. Strange.
- Port-a-Pots are one of the worse creations on Earth as they were the hottest and most cramped places at the festival, yet they made up for their lack of size by smelling like hot, rotten shit. I feel especially sorry for women who have to use those things because they are just nasty, and I would much rather take a leak in the grass than enter one, and I would if I didn't care about a second ticket for public urination (the first came in college and is not something I care to talk about right now).


With all the good music, it feels a bit ridiculous to dwell on the rough patches, and the festival was definitely worth it even if I feel like I still need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

"Well I wished I was in Austin
In the Chili Parlor bar, drinking Mad Dog Margaritas
And not caring where you are," - Guy Clark, "Dublin Blues"

Clark capped his set with this gem, which perfectly captured how I felt by Sunday at midnight as the hordes streamed through the exits, stepping over plastic water bottles and beer cans and sloshed their way back home.

I wished I could sit inside a quiet bar with a bowl full of chili and a margarita and not care about going to work on Monday or anything else.


It's too bad that life often intrudes on our fantasies as I've got meetings to attend and work to do as the week is only beginning and it's time to forget the 2006 ACL Festival and put the nose to grindstone - or possibly hide under my desk and take a nap.

-BDS