Day 2 of ACL is here and I’ve decided to keep things a little more laid back than yesterday.
Now that I know where everything is I don’t have to run around as much. Not to mention that this festival and foreign foliage has caused me to have a major allergy attack (from my personal blog):
The first day of ACL is over, it was a blast but by the end of the night there was so much crap in the air (smoke, dust, dirt) that my nose and throat almost completely closed up. It’s never happened to me before, I’m still recovering but I have to go back out there again. If you looked inside me right now it would look like someone dumped a couple ashtrays into my lungs. When I blew my nose nothing but black gunk came out. Two more days of this and I’ll need lung transplants.
Jose Gonzalez
The first act I saw today was Jose Gonzalez who opened solo, playing his guitar the way it was intended and also as a drum with his long, sharp fingernails.
By his third song “In Our Nature” he was joined by two band mates, one on bongos and keyboard and the other with backup vocals.
Everyone in the crowd cheered when they realized that he was about to play his great cover version of “Heartbeats” by The Knife.
Drive-By Truckers
After Jose Gonzalez, I made my way over to see Drive-by Truckers, who put on a great show, starting immediately as they came out on stage. The sound, in terms of volume levels, was better than some of the other bands I saw yesterday.
The band played song after song, not stopping to pause in between them.
I’ve never really gotten into Drive-by Truckers and I’ve always thought that their fans were just a bit too . . . fanatical, but after seeing them live I can see where that admiration is coming from.
Not feeling too well, I decided to skip Man Man and go back to the press lounge to rest a little bit and eat some free food.
I caught a few minutes of some other acts when I got back out there but there wasn’t much that was really great, that is, until The Black Keys (Web, Myspace).
The Perfect Ending
I was eager to see The Black Keys because I’ve never seen them before or heard much of their music, but everyone seems to like them. Immediately after The Black Keys, Allison Krauss and Robert Plant were going to play on a stage next to them. The crowd around the two stages was intense. It was one solid mass of people so large that after The Black Keys were done all the people had to do was turn around and they would then be the audience for Robert Plant and Allison Krauss. I was closer to The Black Keys’s stage than the other, but was still too far away to enjoy the show. People around me were shouting “Turn it up!” because we couldn’t hear the music that well. The people around me and I decided to worm our way through the crowd away from The Black Keys and toward the other stage. Around this time I got my second wind, and didn’t feel bad anymore so I was ready to push my way through, and determined that I would make it. If four years of high school taught me one thing, it was how to find holes. I muscled my way through thousands of people who seemed unaware that there was going to even be a concert on that stage. I managed to get ridiculously close, which created a perfect ending to this day where I pretty much felt terrible throughout.
Robert Plant & Allison Krauss
I’m just going to come right out and say it, this concert, was AMAZING. I’m not sure I can describe it any other way. One of the first songs they sang was “Black Dog”, from Plant’s Led Zeppelin, I have a video of part of that, but I’ll link to it in my final overview.
A great thing about Plant and Krauss is that not every song is a duet, each has their own songs which they sing 95% by themselves, with the other providing simple background vocals most of the time.
Their backing band is outstanding as well, and you could tell that each member knew exactly what was coming, and that they really enjoyed playing. On guitar for the whole concert was the legendary T-Bone Burnett (Web) who I had never even seen before, let alone live. He performed a song solo about halfway through the set, a slow folk tune that he said he thought he could get away with since he was in Austin, Texas, however the majority of the audience wasn’t interested and used that time as an intermission.
Overall I can honestly say that it was the greatest concert I’ve ever been to, and the best one out of the past two days. Next time they come around I’m going to have to see them again.
Tomorrow I leave early, so I’ll try to get in as much as I can, but I doubt anything can top what I saw tonight.
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