ACL Music Fest: Rockin' Coverage 2002-2011

Austin American-Statesman Staff

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On the Cover:

The crowd cheers for Skrillex at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday Sept.17, 2011. Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Table of Contents

A Note from the Author

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Credits

Ten years of the Austin City Limits Music Festival: 2002-2011

The Austin American-Statesman has been covering the Austin City Limits Music Festival for longer than it has actually been around. From its roots as a two-day shindig full of Texas artists to a three-day party known the world over, some of the biggest names in pop music have played the fest, from Coldplay to Kanye, from Willie Nelson to R.E.M.

This ebook collects most, but not nearly all, of the news stories and reviews the American-Statesman staff and freelancers wrote about ACL for the festival’s first 10 years, from 2002 to 2011. There are many, many more reviews of live sets than there was room for here. To find more, head over to austin360.com and check out our Austin Music Source archives.

We hope this provides a nice time capsule of what Austin was doing, thinking and above all listening to during those 10 fests. Enjoy. -- Joe Gross

Jay Janner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Britt Daniel of Spoon rocks a 2005 ACL house in Zilker Park.

2002

Before the Festival

Austin City Limits Music fest to debut in fall at Zilker Park

By Michael Corcoran

May 1, 2002

Fans of Austin City Limits see the show's musicians perform in front of an artificial backdrop of the Austin skyline. But when the Austin City Limits Music Festival debuts Sept. 28-29 at Zilker Park, the real city lights will be in the background.

In a rare case of solidarity regarding outdoor music, city leaders, the Austin Parks and Recreation Department and neighborhood groups say they support the festival, expected to attract 30,000 music fans a day.

What a glorious joining of two of the things that mean the most in defining who we are, City Council Member Beverly Griffith said Tuesday at a news conference to announce the inaugural fest. "Our music and our parks system are our treasures.

The event, which aims to be a smaller, Austin-centric version of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, with multiple stages and dozens of acts, has been in the planning stages for months. But the project didn't receive the final go-ahead until Parks and Recreation Director Jesus Olivarez met Friday with business owners and neighborhood groups from Barton Hills, Zilker, Bouldin and Rollingwood, Olivarez said. Everybody was in favor of it, said Olivarez, who added that traffic was the main concern. We're going to handle it just like we do Trail of Lights, where we have about 35,000 people a day."

Promoter Charlie Jones of Capital Sports & Entertainment said the lineup and ticket details will be announced in several weeks. He intends to book a mix of local and national talent, with particular emphasis on acts that fit the KLRU show's rootsy format. Jones just returned from a scouting trip to Jazz Fest and said the Austin event also will have a massive food court serving food indigenous to Texas. In heralding the festival for its expected economic benefit, Mayor Gus

Garcia noted that 10 percent of hotel residency in Austin last year was directly attributed to the music scene. Live music has a lot to do with our superior quality of life, he said.

Wendy Morgan, the city's director of music marketing, said the festival should attract fans from far beyond the city limits."

'It's too early to compare it to Jazz Fest, said Austin City Limits" producer Terry Lickona from a small stage near the Zilker Park soccer fields, where the event will be held. But he predicted that the festival bearing his TV show's name would be an instant success.

We've been Austin's best goodwill ambassador for 27 years. We have fans all over the country, he said. Lickona said the two-day fest should pick up where Aqua Fest, which went belly-up in 1998, left off.

Almost every city next to a river has an annual musical event of this sort. It's time we did again, too, he said.

Austin City Limits' festival is music to a skyline's ears

By Michael Corcoran

September 27, 2002

Promoter Charlie Jones of Capital Sports & Entertainment stepped onto the Austin City Limits soundstage, with its glittering faux Austin skyline, and felt his knees go weak. It just hit me, he said after the Sept. 3 press conference to unveil the schedule of the maiden Austin City Limits Music Festival. I was suddenly overwhelmed with how huge this was. I looked at Charles (co-promoter Attal) and said, 'Strap on your helmet; here it comes.'

Here it comes. This weekend, the Austin skyline behind the musicians will be real, and the city will host what Attal has long said it's needed: a weekend-long music festival of top talent in a beautiful park.

You have to wonder why someone hasn't done this sooner, said the lifelong Austinite. But the important thing is someone's doing it now.

As of Thursday, more than 25,000 two-day tickets had been sold, which makes organizers' goal of 35,000 per day likely, unless it rains. The show will go on even in a downpour.

It's not going to rain, Jones said last week from his office in the San Jacinto Tower next to the Four Seasons Hotel. Earlier reports of a possible hurricane, which came nowhere near Austin, had left the 33-year-old undaunted. Rain is not in the script.

Indeed, everything about the festival, embraced by the city, the community, corporate sponsors and national booking agents, has followed a charmed plot thus far.

When ACL, which has been looking into extending its brand recognition, signed on in April, promoters got to draw on the show's 28 years of quality and credibility.

We had been discussing back and forth with the mayor's office and the city manager about doing a fall event that highlights Austin as the live music capital of the world, said City Parks and Recreation Director Jesus Olivares. We'd been approached by some promoters over the last couple years, but it just didn't feel right. After an MTV sports and music fest in 1997 left Zilker looking like the site of a tank battle, Olivares had good reason to be wary.

Then we heard ‘Austin City Limits Music Festival' from Charlie Jones, and we all went, 'Yeah!' Olivares said Mayor Gus Garcia was instrumental in getting the event off the ground, and when the City Council voted unanimously in mid-May to officially sanction the festival, it was all systems go.

A new kind of concert

Not since Aqua Fest went belly up in 1998, after several financially disastrous years, has the city hosted an annual multiday event on Town Lake aimed at the mainstream. But even in Aqua Fest's mid-80s heyday, when upward of 200,000 people passed through the turnstiles over a nine-day run, it was more carnival than concert.

Austin has boasted the South by Southwest Music Festival every March since 1987, but that's a cutting-edge, club-hopping, music industry exhaust-athon, not a balmy day in the park.

From the festival's first public unveiling April 30, Zilker has received co-headlining credit. Our parks and our music are Austin's treasures, then-Council Member Beverly Griffith said at the press conference. But quality music bookings and indigenous food booths would also be important, and more than one speaker referred to the event as an Austin version of New Orleans' wildly popular Jazz & Heritage Festival (better known as Jazz Fest).

Jones and Attal had just gotten back from Jazz Fest, where they were less interested in the music than in how the shuttle system was set up. They noted the line of taxis and stood by the front gate for an hour watching the crowd wade through security checkpoints. Jones made a diagram of how the stages were set up so the sounds wouldn't bleed together. He drew up a facsimile of the food court (which has been almost as big a draw as the music during the festival's 33-year run).

Although Jones had been talking about such a festival for Austin since he successfully produced the A2K event downtown on New Year's Eve 1999, the Austin City Limits Music Festival started to become a reality in January when Bill Stapleton, president of CS&E, introduced the idea to a Future of Austin City Limits committee formed by KLRU, the public television station that owns the show.

We were looking for ways to market the show to younger audiences. Attaching the name to a major music festival seemed perfect, said Stapleton, Lance Armstrong's agent, who expanded into the entertainment field when he merged with Jones' Middleman Productions in August 2001. The pair first worked together in 1999, when Jones was hired to produce the first Armstrong victory parade and celebration at Auditorium Shores with only a week's notice.

When we decided to join forces, the first thing we talked about was putting on a major annual concert that would do justice to Austin, said Stapleton.

Looking to the future

Though ACL Fest organizers won't divulge the talent budget, they put the entire cost of the event at $1.25 million, most of which goes for production expenses. This festival isn't costing the city a penny, said Jones. We're paying for everything. The city parks department, meanwhile, will receive $1 from every ticket for park revitalization.

KLRU doesn't have to put up any money -- the station will receive an undisclosed percentage of the gross -- but Mary Beth Rogers, vice chairwoman of the KLRU board, said there's still a risk to the show's reputation. We want everyone to have a wonderful time in the park listening to music, but if they don't, for whatever reason, it reflects badly on ' Austin City Limits,' she said.

The financial risk falls on the shoulders of promoters CS&E and Charles Attal Presents, but both Jones and Attal contend that logistics, rather that gate receipts, are the biggest concern in this first year. I would rather break even or lose a little money and have everything run smoothly than make money and leave a bunch of fans unhappy because this didn't work or that was a mess, Jones said. Pull this one off, and they'll get to do it again. And again.

We'll know on September 30 whether there'll be an Austin City Limits Music Festival next year, Jones said. CS&E has a three-year deal to use the Austin City Limits name, but the city is waiting to see how this year's fest comes off before committing Zilker next year. A torn-up park or complaints from neighborhood groups about traffic or noise would cause the city to rethink its support, said Olivares, who added that damage is likely to be minimal because all the stages and food booths are set up on the periphery and not in the field.

One entity looking ahead to next year is the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has sold nearly 200 room/tickets packages for this weekend without advertising. "We have a link on the festival's Web site (www.aclfestival.com), said bureau music liaison Wendy Morgan, but there really wasn't enough time to advertise and fully market this thing."

Still, about a third of those attending the festival are from out of town, according to Internet ticket sales, and that puts the event's economic impact at between $3 million and $4 million, Morgan said.

People are always looking for an excuse to come to Austin, and this event has the potential of being a major draw for years to come, she said.

KLRU general manager John McCarroll sees this weekend's festival as a way to bring a much larger number of fans to the live Austin City Limits musical experience than can attend the 400-capacity tapings. Rogers said she's had ticket requests from public television station owners from all over the country. This could become an annual celebration of public television, she said. Also, it's an amazing opportunity for our corporate underwriters to entertain clients and interact with the public. ACL sponsors Schlotzsky's and Chevrolet have underwritten two of the festival's six stages.

Bands? No problem

The ACL musical legacy gave Attal a guideline for which acts to book, but because he had only seven weeks to assemble nearly 70 acts -- most of them national -- he found himself overwhelmed when he started with an empty slate in early May.

I'd never booked anything of this scope before, said Attal, who co-owns Stubb's Bar-B-Q. I was freaking out a little at first. The first band to commit was String Cheese Incident, whose manager Mike Luba is a close friend of Attal's.Luba sent the word out in the jam band community about this cool festival in Austin, and Attal's phones started lighting up.