Austin City Limits: Sufjan Stevens, The Raconteurs, and Cat Power Plus Secret Joanna Newsom Show

One of the definite highlights of being invited to blog The Austin City Limits Festival this year was being invited to three Austin City Limits tapings with Sufjan Stevens, The Raconteurs and Cat Power and the Memphis Rhythm Band. This year will be the popular public television show's 32nd season and will kick off on October 7th on PBS with a performance by former Kink's frontman Ray Davies. Other performances will include Calexico, Van Morrison, KT Tunstall, Alejandro Escovedo, and of course, the three shows I watched, I highly recommend you set your Tivos with a season pass.

Sunday evening I ducked out of the festival early to grab a shower and some food before heading down to the ACL studio on the UT campus to meet up with Scott and Amrit from Stereogum, Chris from Gorilla vs. Bear, and Sunni from Project DU. We somehow ended up being the first group to be invited inside. As we walked through the door they started to hand us beer. We had first choice of where we wanted to sit to see a double billing of Detroit's finest: Sufjan Stevens and The Raconteurs (Yeah, I know The Raconteurs claim to be from Nashville now, but whatevs.)

(I ran into Brendan Benson and Patrick Keeler at Beauty Bar after the taping and they were both kind enough to sign my program. I've met Patrick before in Memphis, although he did not remember...he said both he and Jack had head colds and they might have went a little overboard with the whole redoing songs they thought they could do better. Patrick was a doll to me and I am now quite smitten!)

After picking out three different sets of seats, we finally settled on 4 seats on the front row on stage left, about 4 feet from the stage. Our seats turned out to be great because they were so close, but gave several of my cohorts minor anxiety as we were the group the camera turned on every time they were looking for a crowd reaction shot. I have to say, I have no idea why most bloggers are so adverse to having their picture taken.

Anyway, Sufjan played first. Here's the setlist - held by Mr Stereogum himself who was quick to yank it as soon as the band was done playing.

Sufjan's set was flawless. They did not ask to replay one song. He is as beautiful in person as his voice is on tape. He dedicated "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head" to Jack White (and himself). It was quite surreal to take in the whole experience sitting between his two biggest fans in all of the blogosphere (Scott and Chris).

We weren't supposed to have cameras, but no one seemed to mind us taking pictures as long as we weren't shooting the bands during the taping. Luckily, the people at ACL were nice enough to introduce us to Scott Newton who has been photographing these tapings for all 32 seasons. (If you went to ACL you might have seen his black and white shots of past performers all over the festival!) Anyway, he offered to send us a few shots for our blogs:

After Sufjan, we grabbed some more beer and basked in each others afterglows. Were we really here? Did that really just happen? Are we really about to see The Raconteurs?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Here's a shot of Jack White's guitars:

From Gorilla vs Bear:

The Raconteurs were great as well, and Jack White returned the favor by dedicating "Together" to Sufjan. The band tore through most of Broken Boy Soldiers, and threw in Gram Parsons, Nancy Sinatra, and Flamin' Groovies covers to boot ("The Christian Life," "Bang Bang," and "Headin' for the Texas Border," respectively). The band absolutely killed a face-melting rendition of "Blue Veins," but Jack White, ever the audiophile, wasn't happy with it and made the band do it again. Ah, the magic of television.

The Raconteurs were definitely the highlight for me.

Setlist:

So, if that had been our only taping, I would have been more than happy, but Chris and I were invited back on Monday night to check out the Cat Power taping.

This time my friends Joe and Palli (with whom I crashed this weekend) sat with us. Joe Presti has a new record coming out in October that was produced by Doug Easley, so he and Palli got to pal around all weekend with the band and Chan. When she came out on stage she looked over and acknowledged the guys.

Her setlist was considerably longer than the previous night's performers and until the band left and she started to play a few songs solo, her performance went off without a hitch. It does actually work to her advantage to play with a band full of premiere players like she has in The Memphis Rhythm Band. You don't stop Doug Easley, Teeny Hodges, or Rick Steff in midsong and ask for a monitor to be turned up or down, you just don't.

Like I said, the first portion of the set when she played songs from her latest album, The Greatest, was pretty flawless. She finally lost her forward motion when she was trying to play "House of the Rising Sun." When she started over for the fourth time it was time for me to duck out to head down to The Parish to check out Joanna Newsom who had just booked this show sometime over the weekend.

I went down with Chris who snapped some pics. I thought it would be really annoying if we were both up front taking pictures so I let him do the dirty work as some drunk girl took a nap on his back.

I find Joanna to be a little too precious for my taste, she's good for listening to at the end of a long night as you're trying to go to sleep, but in concert, although all around me I kept hearing people throw out words like, "Amazing!" and "Beautiful," I found the show to be slightly meandering, which means I left my spot at the front and went and finished the show at the bar closer to the beer.

Two members of the Brazilain Girls were also in the house and talked throughout most of the set.

So, in conclusion - Michael Feferman (who hooked me up all weekend) is the coolest person on earth and if he ever needs a kidney I will be the first to offer him one of mine. I would offer him my liver, but I highly doubt he would be willing to take it. Also, muchas gracias to Sunni Thompson for helping to coordinate the whole weekend and "Big Ups" to Capital Sports & Entertainment for inviting me and to AT&T for footing some of the bill.

Still to come, a wrap-up of Sunday's festivities and some other parts of the festival that are totally blog worthy. I know I am late on getting all of this up, but after driving 10 hours on Tuesday back to Memphis, Wednesday was my deadline for my Commerical Appeal column, and then I went to bed at 5 PM Wednesday and didn't make it fully out of bed today until around noon. Telling that to my friend on the phone today, he couldn't beleive I had slept for 17 hours. My reply was, if you can sleep for 17 hours then you probably really needed to. And I did.

On the agenda for this weekend? The 5th Annual Midpoint Music Festival!