Photograph by Candice Lawler for RollingStone.com
With fat dark clouds lurking overhead, there was a sense at the beginning of Day Three of the Austin City Limits Festival that, if it rains again, we’re all doomed. It didn’t rain. But we were all doomed. By mid-afternoon, when the clouds had cleared for good the festival grounds metastasized into a fetid swamp, with a layer of mud on top of the mud, and a layer of lost or abandoned flip-flops on top of that.

And yet, somehow, we survived, muddier, of course, but no worse for the wear. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears had plenty to do with that. The first set of the afternoon found Lewis, an R&B showman of the old school, blending grizzled blues riffs with Motown horn blasts for a set that at its best recalled Otis Redding or the old Stax Revues.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

The B-52s‘ Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson emerged in matching teal dresses, which clashed nicely with Pierson’s supernaturally orange hair. They stuck to a series of low-impact sock-hop dance moves, looking like twin Martian queens out of some old ’50s sci-fi movie. Fred Schneider mostly kept behind the microphone—he delivered his lines sternly, like an angry schoolmaster barking directions. (more…)

For the last 17 years, the going story on Pearl Jam was that they were a band that prided themselves on a willful disregard for expectations. The bullet-points are so frequently recited they can almost be announced in unison: their repudiation of the music video, their now-legendary tussle with Ticketmaster, their insistence on releasing their records on vinyl a week before they came out on CD. Lately, the group shucked the whole major label system, releasing their latest album, Backspacer, on their own, with exclusive distribution in Target and several small independent outlets. Commercial fallout be damned, Pearl Jam built their reputation on a stubborn insistence to follow their own muse.

All of which only served to make their crowd-pleasing festival-closing set Sunday at Austin City Limits that much more astonishing. Abandoning any impulse to confound or to frustrate, the group instead delivered a jaw-dropping, white-hot two-hour cavalcade of hits, one that served to aggressively reassert their relevance while casting a clean light on their past. It was — by any measure — the best show of the weekend. “We’ve been here three days,” Eddie Vedder said early in the evening, “and in those three days we’ve received many, many gifts. So we’re going to do our best to return the favor.” (Check out video from the band’s set, plus footage of the Dead Weather, above.)

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos. (more…)

At the end of the day, and especially at the end of this day at Austin City Limits, the crowd wanted the Dave Matthews Band they’ve known for the past 15 years or so. After slogging through an insistent downpour and the resulting thick, oozing mud, the guys trading chest bumps and girls woo-hooing with the regularity (and irritation) of a snooze alarm would have accepted the DMB on auto-pilot. They needed no spectacle. (Watch footage from their set above).

Dave Matthews Band, for certain, are not about spectacle. The closest they came was when a handful of red balls bounced over the crowd during “You Might Die Trying,” as the stage was bathed in matching red light. That was pretty much that. Matthews took the stage one song earlier looking, more or less, like he always has forever (gray button-up with sleeves rolled up, black pants); daring stage wear for him is a T-shirt and jeans. The band looked the same, too, or at least the same as it has been since saxophone player LeRoi Moore’s death last year: horn players Jeff Coffin and Rashawn Ross and guitarist Tim Reynolds, joining stalwarts Boyd Tinsley (violin), Carter Beauford (drums), and Stefan Lessard (bass). But the Dave Matthews Band was different on Saturday night. Or, at least it tried to be. And, at its most successful, it was.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos. (more…)

There was a tie for Most Significant Special Effect on Day Two of the Austin City Limits Festival. The first contender was Austin’s own Ghostland Observatory, whose agitated dance music took a back seat to a breathtaking light show. The stage shot sharp, endless beams of green light over the heads of festivalgoers, occasionally filling in the spaces between the eerie beacons with cloudlike LED patterns. The stage itself was almost entirely obscured by smoke and bathed in neon purple lights, frontman Aaron Behrens (in a cowboy hat, hair in pigtails) and instrumentalist Thomas Turner (in a lit-up vampire cape) often hidden completely. The group sent up multicolored cubes and triangles, and endless series of neon-brite colors that made Zilker Park feel like the inside of a nightclub in the early ’90s. It was like if Tool suddenly cheered up and went day-glo while simultaneously discovering Daft Punk records. (Watch footage from their set above).

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

The second contender for showstopping spectacle, unfortunately, was Mother Nature. Saturday was plagued by insistent, often torrential downpours, which rendered much of the day a muddy and, occasionally, miserable mess. (more…)

Photo: Miller/FilmMagic

There was a large eyeball suspended at the rear of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ stage setup Friday night, a fitting prop for a band that prides itself on spectacle. The band’s Austin City Limits show was the second for which they stepped in as a replacement for the ailing Beastie Boys (the first was Lollapalooza), and if some of their typical razor sharpness had been blunted from all the subbing, that just meant that they were merely the fourth best live band around.

See Day One of Austin City Limits in photos.

In fact, the greatest casualty of the YYYs’ rigorous schedule is O’s voice. Normally a shrill and vibrant shriek, on Friday it was shocking in its bluntness — more grunt than tone. But O used the gruffness to her advantage, scuffing up some of the prettier numbers from the group’s largely electronic It’s Blitz! to lend them a kind of violent power. (more…)

Photograph by Brian Birzer

The Austin City Limits Festival, held in Austin’s Zilker Park and currently in its seventh year, boasts a bill that roams the stylistic spectrum, but its first day proved a fine opportunity to get a good, long look at the changing face of country.

See Day One of Austin City Limits in photos.

Cool breezes won out against the blazing sun on Friday, which was the perfect complement to the afternoon’s more tranquil music, like fiddler Sara Watkins, late of Nickel Creek, who played an early afternoon set as long on charm and good manners as it was on winsome, airy country. She sounded positively bereft singing “I didn’t lie, but I withheld the truth,” on the quietly aching “Same Mistakes.” This wasn’t music for singing along — it was music for sighing along.

See backstage photos of Phoenix, the Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more from Day One of ACL.

If Watkins was reserved and traditional, the Avett Brothers were a thrilling study in contrasts, pitting spare and simple instrumentation — acoustic guitar, banjo — against brothers Scott and Seth’s hoarse, violent hollering. Their aggression wasn’t just vocal: the band pogo’d like young punks during “Paranoia in Bb Major” while “Salina” built to a panicky conclusion. If Scott is the sturdy frontman, Seth is the jack-of-all-trades. He moved effortlessly from guitar to piano to drums, and attacked his vocals on “Distraction #74″ with an actor’s intensity, miming out the lyrics with his hands.

(more…)

Photo: Miller/FilmMagic
Austin City Limits 2009 is happening right now, and Rolling Stone is already on the ground in Texas, soaking up barbeque sauce and getting ready to catch some of the last big festival sets of the year (we’ve even provided you with a handy guide to 30 of them). Stick with RS all weekend for live reports, photos of all the action, video from the hottest bands and a look behind the scenes as Kings of Leon, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam bring the noise.

But wait, there’s more: look back at all of 2009’s great fests from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza and All Points West in our Essential Summer Festival Coverage.