Thursday, October 8, 2009

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Beer Cans

This past weekend I went to my fourth straight Austin City Limits Festival. I'm still debating whether or not to write a post about my experience there because quite frankly this year paled in comparison to previous years. The lineup was not quite my cup of tea (Dave Matthews Band headlined Saturday night and that just put a stink on the whole festival for me) and heavy rain on Saturday turned the festival grounds into a slimy, smelly mud pit on Sunday. That being said, I did enjoy performances from Them Crooked Vultures, The Parlor Mob, The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Toadies (Yes, The Toadies...if you think they are a one hit wonder band, then you are cheating yourself...all three of their albums are great from start to finish!), Clutch, White Lies, The Heartless Bastards and even rediscovered Coheed and Cambria.

The festival attracts about 65,000 people a day over the course of three days. It is pretty easy to get separated from your friends in a crowd that large, so some folks carry around flag poles (or something resembling a flag pole) that tend to be about 10 - 12 feet high or so that they can stick in the ground when they've staked out some real estate to stand on. That way, they can just tell their friends what stage they are by and all they have to do is simply look for their unique pole. This year, ....And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead played the festival on Sunday and one group of people came up with this rather witty signage:

Pretty damn funny if you ask me, but not nearly as brilliant as the plan that my friends and I utilized in 2007 where whenever any of us got separated from the group or the group split in two, one side would shout "MEGA!" and wait for the other side to respond "DETH!" and repeat this until we found each other in the crowd. Think Marco Polo, but the goal was to find each other. There is a story behind this that involves Megadeth (obviously), BBQ, Jameson, hippies and The String Cheese Incident, but I'll save that for another day.

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