“The goal of the people at ACL, is that you leave here and live the rest of your year like there’s no f-king tomorrow,” shouted Wayne Coyne’s digitally super-imposed face, making the actual man in the foreground look meager. Balloons of all colors bounced across the audience; smoke and streamers flew through the air, and naked women danced wildly on the giant semi-circle screen at the back of the stage.
Amidst all the chaos, Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, had summed up the 2010 Austin City Limits Music Festival in that one sentence. Everything that happened at Zilker Park this past weekend came together; every music fan had now learned how to love music harder, and how to live a little more passionately, and to take all the joy, pain, misery, confusion, and love of all the bands they heard with them wherever they go.
The Flaming Lips were preceded by many wonderful bands on Sunday: Portugal, the Man, The Morning Benders, and Rebelution were among them.
John Gourley, of Portugal, The Man, was dressed in a red, white, and blue hoodie, like it wasn’t a hot September day, as he belted it out in a way only his tenor/falsetto voice could. The vibe was just right as the band went through musically delicious renditions of “The Sun” and “The People.” There was also a bit of comedy as Gourley responded to some suggestive card board cut-outs waving in the audience, asking “are those ... spaceships!?”
The Morning Benders were absolutely delighted to take the stage, with ACL being the second stop on their tour to promote their new album, Big Echo. The quartet’s performance was at once tender and powerful, building up to musical climaxes slowly and surprising us at the culmination with massive walls of sound.
Rebelution brought reggae flavor to ACL and sang a memorable ode to weed that ironically was quite the theme song for the festival. They played as The Flaming Lips set up their epic show at the stage next door.
There is no way anyone can fully prepare him or herself for a Flaming Lips show. Even if one has seen one of their spectacles before, watching Coyne and his bandmates climb through a digital woman’s vagina never gets old. And, it's a magical moment when Coyne crowd surfs in his signature plastic bubble, rearing down on the crowd with a wild look of insanity on his face. Within the first few minutes of the show, Coyne had already rocked our world and destroyed our ability to predict what he would do next.
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