Getting To Know Austin Via Cab

I was promised flat stretches of desert landscape. Not by anyone in particular, besides maybe cartoons I'd watched as a kid or something, or some jumbled memory I'd had of Texan friends from further west that I'd gone and associated with Austin. You fly in over this city and, as it turns out, there's a lot of green. This is my first time in Texas and I'm realizing I must've held a bunch of misconceptions about what this place looked like, and I'm realizing I must've never even done a Google image search on Austin, which is bizarre to think about. It's sort of nice to be surprised about what a place looks like in 2013.

As for the other things, the stuff actual people actually promised me about Austin and its tight-knit but open community and amazing food and creativity, those promises come to fruition. I'm introduced to the place by the driver Fun Fun Fun Fest sends to pick me up at the airport, a guy named Joey Cortez who's also the guitarist in a metal band called the Pushmen. He's a burly dude, with tattoos lining his arms, a big dark beard, and the sides of his head buzzed so he has a kind of bed-head salt-and-pepper pseudo-mohawk. After describing him to someone later that day, I'm told I've just described "all of the men in Austin," which makes me think the place is basically Bushwick filtered through Sons of Anarchy. He's known Graham Williams, the founder of Fun Fun Fun Fest, since they were teenagers, and goes way back with a lot of others involved in the Transmission Events family. He tells me stories of how they all met at punk and metal shows back in the '90s, during youths spent in Houston and Austin and connected by a mutual devotion to an underground arts scene. "We were just a couple of weird kids back then," he muses, trailing off without finishing the thought because he doesn't have to. The rest is implied: Now look at it. It's Austin. The other Brooklyn, right? As we pull into my hotel's parking lot, he gestures across the highway to the festival grounds, from which we can already hear bands playing. Leaving out a handful of connecting thoughts in between, he offers up one more: "Not bad for someone who started out booking a few random house parties."

Cut Copy

The same cycle occurs each time. Someone says I should go to this or that festival, I look up the bill and get excited to see all these artists, and then I set foot on the grounds on the first day and that's when I remember that I hate festivals. The compressed sets, the futility of bands playing their greatest hits in an open field in the bright sun of mid-afternoon. The terrible, flattened sound. All the people. The fact that most are in the summer and oppressively hot but the fact that even a comparatively cooler one like FFF Fest starts to acquire a certain undesirable smell of many thousands of people blending with the dirt by the third afternoon. How wrecked your body feels by the end of it. And yet, as wearying as I find it all, for some reason I keep coming back to them. I guess by the time the end of each festival rolls around I've been swayed back, or I'm too tired to think straight about it. And so the cycle goes on.

On the first day, Cut Copy's set seems to simultaneously represent all my hangups as well as the qualities that eventually allow excitement to supplant the irritants. I love this band, and I've been waiting a long time to see them live, but knew going into this that I should be seeing them in an indoor club-sized venue, not a park (even if the Summer of Love trappings of their new album Free Your Mind seems to reach for the latter). This is a band with impeccable taste in how they layer sound, and I'm predictably disappointed with how dead they sound from the festival's main stage. Something shifts about halfway through, when the band launches into the pulsating synths of the Free Your Mind standout "Let Me Show You Love." Suddenly where there was lifelessness before the beats now seem monolithic, the synths elemental currents washing out over the field. There it is. They've pulled me back in.

Hearing RJD2 Play "A Beautiful Mine" (The Mad Men Theme) While Eating Something Called A Jackalope

People had told there's great food in Austin, and it's not that I didn't believe them, it's just that I knew my trip would be confined to the festival grounds and, well, the last festival I went to was Ultra and they basically had dried out burgers and bland chicken fingers. Not so at Fun Fun Fun Fest. Back in the artist/press area, there's a trailer for a place called Cazamance. It looks like a real hippie health food kind of place, with a vaguely psychedelic logo of a tree coming out of a house, a selection of employees who wouldn't necessarily look out of place at Camp Bisco, and stuff about how they approach their food as artwork. Turns out it's not all empty philosophizing, though: a lot of Cazamance's food mixes West African elements with more indigenous Mexican or Southwest stylings, and that turns out to be an excellent combination. I keep getting a lamb taco that's topped with monterey jack cheese, spinach, and tomato relish. A lot of people leave Cazamance's stand drinking from fresh coconuts.

Next to Cazamance was Frank, which I'm repeatedly told is a well-loved local gourmet hot dog place. Frank has themed hot dogs for each night; the first night it's the Snoop Dog, priced at $24.20 because it has malt liquor mustard, hemp cheese, and edible 24 karat gold dust, whatever the hell any of that is. On Sunday it's the Slayer Dog, priced at $6.66 and loaded up with enough spices and habanero so it's, you know, like hellfire. I got the Jackalope, which is a hot dog made of smoked rabbit, antelope, and pork, and topped with cranberry compote, and sriracha aioli. I mean, all this stuff would be an interesting experience on any given day at any place, but it's pretty awesome to have access to it in a situation where it's usually the most basic of the basic. Other festivals: step your game up.

Artisanal Travel

Another thing unique to a festival in Austin: when you leave at the end of the night, you're greeted by a line of pedicabs outside the festival grounds awaiting concertgoers who want a ride back to their hotels. There's a whole spectrum of these, with people customizing how their bikes and cabs look. The ones I encounter are mostly creative by looking retro, but I'm told there are Darth Vader and Game of Thrones themed pedicabs around town. I'm also told they technically only work on a tip or "donation" system and they'll really gouge you. I don't ever wind up taking one of these, but if I did I would've definitely gone with the guy blasting A Tribe Called Quest's "Jazz."

Anti-Aircraft Taco Machinery

I'd seen this thing called Taco Cannon on the schedule, but I guess I didn't really believe it was supposed to be literal. "What does it shoot?" I ask our photographer, Daniel, as we walk to see it for the first time. "Tacos, man, fucking lunch!" he answers.

When they roll the Taco Cannon out, it's like you've temporarily entered another plane of existence. The thing looks like a military weapon, made up of something like a dozen or fifteen black barrels that look like they could launch missiles as well as lunch. About twenty people flood the stage. "Who's ready for tacos?" some dude asks. Another waves a flag that says "Come and take it!" Everyone onstage is dancing to house music that's blasting over the PA. There's also someone in a "Twinkie the Kid" costume — which is a giant smiling Twinkie with a cowboy hat on — accompanied by a bunch of Hostess reps throwing free Twinkies into the crowd in between volleys of tacos. (Free Twinkies are a recurring and welcome theme of the weekend.) I wouldn't say it's aggressive necessarily, but people don't mess around in their attempts to catch a taco each time the cannon jettisons a bunch out over us. One guy is holding a skateboard above his head, trying to bat them out of the air, and I just can't see anything good coming out of that situation. After the Taco Cannon is over people start to enjoy their spoils as A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin' Problems" plays over the PA. A girl around two years old is pirouetting next to me, which at first I think is hilarious and then I realize it's also a little dark.

After the Taco Cannon I move to another stage and run into Ned Russin, an old high school friend of mine and the bassist/vocalist for Title Fight. He tells me about how they ask artists if they want to participate in the Taco Cannon. "They come up to me and they're just like 'Do you like tacos?'" he begins, "And I'm like, 'Yeah, man, I like tacos!' And next they ask 'Do you like shooting?' 'Uh, to be honest, I'm not really into shooting.' 'Well, how do you feel about SHOOTING TACOS?!' I don't know man, it sounds a little weird."

Sad Songs For Grey Texan Afternoons

Maybe the best thing about festivals—barring your rare moment where someone has that famous, transcendent performance, and it's amplified by the communal nature a festival — is the chance of random discovery. On Saturday afternoon, I stood on the side of the Orange Stage, Fun Fun Fun Fest's main stage, for Merchandise and Chelsea Light Moving, two bands whose names I've seen quite a bit and have meant to check out, but just haven't gotten around to. For some reason, I'd been led to believe Merchandise were really abrasive. The fact that they actually traffic in '80s mope-rock came as a big surprise, but far from an unwelcome one. They take a genre that can often be associated with three or four minute bursts of sad pop, and extend it out into serpentine mood pieces. This made their pairing with Chelsea Light Moving more logical than I'd initially expected it to be. As for Thurston Moore's new outfit, I get the nostalgia dredged up for some older fans seeing him onstage post-Sonic Youth, but any chance to see him play guitar is well worth it. He broke two strings, the first within their opening song, and nonchalantly took forever to replace it, sitting on the drum riser as casually as if he was on his couch at home.

After Chelsea Light Moving, I walked over to the Blue Stage, which mostly alternated between electronic-oriented acts and rap artists, for Chromatics. The first time I saw Chromatics they were opening for Pulp in New York, and they did a pretty guitar-heavy, shoegaze-y set. In comparison, this set accentuated their synth-pop side, opening with the now-indelible groove of "Tick of the Clock" (made famous after it was used in Drive and mimed mercilessly thereafter). It seemed to demand a seductively lit nightclub, but Saturday's overcast murkiness worked well enough.

M.I.A.

I wouldn't necessarily say M.I.A. is a great performer, but her show is perfectly executed if you take it more as an overall aesthetic experience. M.I.A. gets a lot of ... liberal help from backing tracks. I think she was singing or rapping a lot of the time, but it wasn't always so easy to tell due to the mix. For all intents and purposes, it's more like she's a functioning icon on that stage, more of a ringleader at the center of her musical/visual project than a touring musician. Before she comes onstage, the percussive sound of helicopter blades echoes in and out accompanied by oscillating white lights lining the as yet unlit Matangi backdrop ; it comes across as representing the harsh political realities of her life and her art rattling around the spiritual core of her new music from Matangi. Then she appears, in glittering outfits of gold and silver, a mic in one hand and a fan in the other. As her DJ cues up "Bring the Noize," the sound is physically overpowering, the bass and drums vibrating up through your feet and reverberating through your skull and throat. The pulse feels militant in one way — it forces you to let it reorient you — but as one groove bleeds into the next it's also trance-inducing.

Of course, it's also party music. The popularity of "Paper Planes" spanned the time from when I was finishing high school to when I was starting college, which means I'm of the age where for a time Kala was inescapable any time I was around people drinking or dancing in any situation whatsoever. Much of the crowd comes from a similar experience, giddily throwing beach balls around throughout a set that dutifully touched on "Galang" and "Bad Girls." It's still a little bizarre to see a field of white Americans miming gun hands to the chorus of "Paper Planes," but it's just one in a whole network of contradictions that M.I.A. herself exploits. Seeing M.I.A. is an odd experience, one where you can get lost in thought and confronted by as many ideas as rhythms. But isn't one you can look away from, really, and it might leave you thinking longer than you anticipated.

Bleached Playing "Hybrid Moments"

After M.I.A.'s headlining set concludes, I head to a venue called the North Door for a night show comprised of Hunters, Bleached, and The Men. Hunters put on a good show, and they're a pretty visually distinctive bunch, with the contrast of a pink-haired frontwoman, a guitarist with an errant nest of dreads shooting off in all directions from his head, and a drummer who, from a distance, looks like Pornstache from Orange is the New Black. During their set, there's a movie playing on a giant screen on one wall for no apparent reason. I couldn't identify it but it seemed to include a young Brooke Shields and a lot of policemen. Bleached also has a pink-haired frontwoman, but in their instance the music is far too earworm-y to allow for visual distractions. Their night set — like their afternoon set before Merchandise — leans heavily on material from their recent debut Ride Your Heart, a collection of garage rock gems that flit between sugary and bristly. They also cover the Misfits' "Hybrid Moments," turning it on its head without the faux-male-bravado of Glenn Danzig's bellow. Between shows the bar played "Good Vibrations" and one man got very upset when a guy didn't wash his hands in the restroom and proceeded to tell everyone within earshot "I don't want to touch that guy." The Men closed the night with a ferocious set that leaned much more heavily towards their punk roots than you might've expected from the Americana-tinged grunge of their most recent album, New Moon. As they thrashed away, one member was relegated to playing a nearly inaudible lap-steel in the midst of the maelstrom. The whole presentation is almost enough to make you wonder if their stylistic expansion is their idea of some kind of joke.

The Wrestlers

When I get to the festival grounds on Sunday, I have two hours and change before there are any bands I want to see. So naturally I wind up at a wrestling ring. At this early point in the day, the theme is a sort of cartoonish tag-team thing. There are four teams of two. One team just looks like concertgoers plucked from the nearby Black Stage: black t-shirted metalheads, basically. The announcer sardonically describes another team as having gone to the "Ricky Martin School of Wrestling" so you can just about imagine what that looks like. Another team is reggae themed. It's two white guys, one with a fake Rastafarian stereotype thing going on, between the knit hat, dreads wig, and the fact that he struts out to his wrestling match smoking a fake blunt. Somewhat ironically, it's this team that's actually in good shape.

The bell rings and everything just goes mad for a second. I had lost interest for a moment and had turned to watch the skateboarders in the adjacent half pipe; when I turn back, the reggae dude has removed his dreads wig and is strangling his opponent with it, while all the others are flailing around at each other in the background. Every now and then they ham it up for the audience and bring the fight onto the ground in front of us. Again, somewhat ironically, the reggae dudes become the winners. The formerly be-dreaded fighter delivers the final blow by jumping off the ring and kicking both of his remaining opponents while uttering the battle cry: "Smoke weed every day!"

The Men

Let's talk about The Men a little more. Having had to leave halfway through their show Saturday night, I decide to check them out again Sunday afternoon. The full forty minute set is unwaveringly blistering ; even when they play newer, comparatively mellower songs like "I Saw Her Face," they dirty it up with a whole lot of fuzz and grit. A song like "Turn It Around" is driving as is, but the catchiness of these more recent Men songs is almost purposefully obscured by the scuzzy pummel they've come to favor onstage. And they just look the part so well, like grungey rockers of the first order, in the most endearing way. They've got the two guys in flannel shirts with dark greasy hair, the bassist bearing his tattooed arms and smoking onstage. During their set I sit against the fence and listen to the conversation of about a dozen people outside who seem to have been enjoying the whole festival from the street outside. They discuss the best vantage points from which to watch the shows from outside the gates and how best to approach Slayer later that day. Towards the end of The Men's set a guy walks over and passes a cigarette through a hole in the screen and has a smoke with his friend on the outside.

The Men's name proclaims them as what they intend to be, and their rock is of a harder, matured muscularity. The next band up, Cloud Nothings, is, on the other hand, jittery and angst-ridden in a more youthful way, even as their set was similarly propulsive. Where The Men favor a charging, inevitable wall of distortion, Cloud Nothings are a more frenetic ball of energy. Their drummer looks and plays like a particularly tall kid on a sugar rush. Singer Dylan Baldi has a more permanently haggard rasp live, making the refrain "I thought I would be more than this" not the eventual roar it achieves on record, but more of a ragged bleat. It still works ; the desperation has just become more defeated than enraged.

Washed Out

So then, on the other end of things. After all the sharp angles and burning edges of The Men and Cloud Nothings, I walk back over to the Orange Stage for Washed Out. They've got the stage decked out in flowers and it's immediately easy to roll your eyes and assume you're in for some hippie-dippie nonsense and wonder whether the band members have been working over at the Cazamance stand in their downtime before soundcheck. The attractiveness of the crowd goes up quite a few notches from the Black Stage to the Orange Stage, though, so I guess you have to give them credit for that. Washed Out live is as glossy and amorphous as you'd expect from an artist that lived through chillwave's brief moment in the sun and has gone on to purvey blissed out psychedelia. But as primed as I am to write off their performance, the lushness becomes overwhelming, and the handful of Washed Out's songs that actually move turn into infectious, danceable synth-pop crowd-pleasers — closer "Amor Fati" perhaps being the best example. It earns your attention far more than Washed Out's occasionally pleasing but mostly ephemeral studio work. Eventually the crowd started to become populated by the kinds of people where you can just tell by looking at them that they still think MGMT is brilliant — like the dude wearing clip-on sunglass lenses on a pair of sunglasses — so I had to get the hell out of there.

KILLER MIKE RAPPED ON A HALF PIPE! ALMOST!

I was all set to have an entry here that just read "KILLER MIKE RAPPED ON TOP OF A HALF PIPE" and leave it at that, except, well, it didn't happen. Running late on my way over from the Orange Stage, I arrive at the mini skate-park to find Killer Mike standing up there addressing the crowd. "We're gonna try to get this mic fixed right quick and then we'll promptly try to burn this motherfucker down." Apparently they'd already been plagued by sound issues, the mic constantly feeding back. Throughout, he keeps a good sense of humor about it, killing time by letting everyone know "I fuck with the skate crowd, because you're hardcore motherfuckers," and then announcing "If you have mushrooms, I encourage you to do them. It'll make the next forty minutes absolutely amazing." They give a few shots at starting the set, getting about a minute into the R.A.P. Music opener "Big Beast" before the soundsystem continues to malfunction. The whole thing's a huge disappointment, but it's also endearing for how hard Mike is trying to make this work, at one point giving up on the mic and rapping a bit of "Big Beast" a cappella. Those technical issues never do get resolved, and he promises that if they could arrange a venue he'd do a show in Austin later that night. He ends by announcing he's coming down from the half pipe to smoke some weed with his fans.

The Tobacco Illuminati

Here's another thing I'd never seen at a festival: smoking lounges. There's a Marlboro one that's just kind of a black structure with some seating areas around it, a small Camel one in an aluminum-plated trailer with the brand name lit up in little lines of light bulbs, and the one I eventually enter, American Spirit's weird tropical cabin. As if the existence of these things wasn't confusing enough, they're incredibly uptight about access. As you might imagine, these "lounges" actually turn out to be more or less marketing ploys. They're very strict about you not taking photos of the exterior or the interior of the lounges. They're also very strict about letting you in. One guy checks your ID very carefully, then they stamp your hand, then you have to wait at the door until an American Spirit Associate (they didn't call them this, but it seems apt) has you sit down with them on one of their cozy little couches (because it's a lounge!). While at the door, a hostess asks me if I'm a "full-time smoker."

"Uh, no," I answer, "I just wanted to see the inside for an article I'm writing."

"You need to be a full-time smoker to enter."

"Is this a legal thing?"

"Yes," she responds surreptitiously.

"Oh, uh, OK, I'm a 'full-time smoker.'"

Anyway, then they sit you down with an American Spirit Associate who asks to see your ID again, which they then photograph. They ask you for all your info, ostensibly so they can send you coupons but I'm pretty sure it's just because they're looking for people to consider inducting into the Tobacco Illuminati. After that they try to be all 21st century and green-corporate and have you put your thumb in green ink and press it to a map of Texas and they promise you a tree will be planted in Austin in your name. They give you a coupon to buy a pack for a dollar, and a little milk carton of water emblazoned with the slogan "Boxed Water is Better!" and the stipulation "Best by 8/26/14" before they send you on your way.

The Jambulance

By Sunday, the Jambulance has become a thing of legend, beginning to seem apocryphal for how often its name appears in conversation with various other press members even as it remains impossible to locate. Nestled between the back of the Yellow Stage — which is actually a tent, primarily used for the comedy acts — and some vendors, the Jambulance is an ambulance converted into a party van. Oh, and it's Van Halen themed. Like the whole thing is painted like Eddie Van Halen's guitar. Inside, there are strobe lights and a smoke machine and a TV playing "Welcome to the Jungle." The owner of the Jambulance is a dude named Kelly Knapper, who ties his long dark hair back with a black paisley bandanna. "How many times are you going to have fun in an ambulance?" he says when describing his idea to make a party bus out of an emergency vehicle.

The reason the Jambulance had become a thing of legend — or so the hearsay goes, because things have become quite a bit more tame by the time I find the thing on Sunday — was because different comedians had been reserving it and throwing ridiculous backstage parties. Throughout all of Friday a thick haze hung around the van that may or may not — but definitely didn't — have anything to do with the smoke machine as a bunch of different artists came by to hang out. The nearby cops didn't seem to care. By way of explanation, another Jambulance employee offers up: "It's called Fun Fest, motherfucker!"

Slayer

Let's be honest: how do we live in a universe where MGMT opens for Slayer? Or, the bigger question: how is this band still in existence to begin with? Why do we still need to hear about them? And why are they headlining festivals? I'm going to go ahead and assume this was a smirk on the part of Fun Fun Fun Fest's organizers. We're going to lull all the MGMT fans into a false sense of security before Slayer comes out and rips the Earth up from its moorings. I mean, come on, MGMT looks like a bunch of fey hipster elves and the staff dude assigned to guard Slayer's bus had an eyepatch. An eyepatch! Slayer's a band comprised of four Balrogs, easy.

Look, Oracular Spectacular came out towards the end of my time in high school. I get it. Some of it. "Kids" and "Electric Feel" were solid pop-leaning indie tracks for their day, but it's really annoying if you're at a party now and they come on, right? "Time for Pretend" is still good, and is for better or worse one of the songs of my generation. But MGMT's performance of it is so limp, so uninterested, it's like you're getting whacked upside the head with cynicism in aural form: you know these guys probably resent that there are these three songs that are all anyone cares about them playing, and that these people don't give a damn about hearing their new forced-weird tracks, because even the people who still think MGMT is brilliant probably realize they suck. Well, actually, I guess I just answered my question: the reason MGMT is still around and we still have to hear about them and they still headline festivals is because you hear attractive women saying things like "When they play 'Kids,' I'm going to be like 'WOOOOO!'"

I was right up in front for the beginning of Slayer, and it was every bit as catastrophic as I'd been promised. Upside down crosses hung above the stage, which within the context of the festival seemed a hilarious slap in the face to all those that'd hung around since Washed Out's fanciful garden a few hours ago. That vibrating in your head thing from M.I.A.? That happens again with Slayer, only it's more guttural, more violent. It's not a dance beat, but the pulverizing march of a double bass drum assault. In a lot of ways, it seems Fun Fun Fun Fest has been building towards this moment. There's a crowd ranging from fifteen year olds to fifty-five year olds that are all losing it together. A guy in a wheelchair crowdsurfs. I duck away for fifteen minutes to catch a few excellent songs by Jurassic 5, and as well-attended as their set is, there is a gravitational pull back towards the Orange Stage, back towards Slayer. While lingering at the entrance to the grounds as Slayer's set draws to a close, I realize I need to get back and start writing. As I enter the lobby of my hotel, I can hear the dying strains of "Reign in Blood" echoing out from across the highway.