Austin, Texas is so overflowing with live music now that the city throws together an eighty-band festival in its sleep. So it was for the Fun Fun Fun Festival, whose biggest handicap might be its goofy name.
The lineup wasn’t holding it back: four stages with all brands of music and chicanery (Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show, opening with the song “Diarrhea”, falls into the latter category), plenty of it good, some of it amazing. Although indie rock, alt-country, hip hop, and DJ music were all well represented, at the end of the day, this was, to my mind, a punk festival.
If you’re a hardcore/punk fan living anywhere in Texas and you missed the Fun Fun Fun Fest, you’ll be sitting slump-shouldering and crying in your Dropkick Murphys t-shirt for a long time. Sad.
Audience dress code for the four stages broke down like this:
Stage One: Sneakers that aren’t really running shoes but aren’t really dress shoes either + ironic and/or vintage t-shirts
Stage Two: Prize-winning beards and aviator sunglasses
Stage Three: Black t-shirts, black pants, chains, and dangerous hair
Stage Four: Anything goes
All of us were covered in a fine layer of dust – it’s been a dry year in Austin, and by about 4pm on both days Waterloo Park turned into a punk rock Dorothea Lange picture. Bandanas over the face were popular; during the boring sets, we all made plans to rob a stagecoach.
Last things first: Sunday night Bad Brains closed out the festival (simultaneously with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or, as I like to call them, Clap Your Hands I’m Definitely Going to See Bad Brains Instead, No Disrespect Meant). Dr. Know and Darryl Jenifer were positively murderous, but would a 2008 crowd put up with HR’s dainty, spaced out delivery if they didn’t already know he was, well, HR? I wonder.
At any rate, we do know, we were there to see Bad Brains, the crowd wasn’t derailed by any of the reggae jams, and when HR whispered, “this next song is called Pay…” no one heard the rest because the place exploded.
In fact stage three was in frenzy all weekend; the only time I saw that crowd relatively still was during Scared of Chaka’s set. No one was Scared of Chaka, maybe because Leftover Crack had just worn out the crowd. During Leftover Crack’s set I had this conversation with a cop working the festival:
Me: What do you think about that song title?
Cop: I try not to listen. What’s it called?
Me: “One dead cop”
Cop: Very nice.
The first time I wandered over to stage three was to check out local boys the Krum Bums; lead singer Dave Tejas punted a beer into the crowd, climbed the scaffolding, hung upside down and screamed the rest of his song from there. This was 2:30 in the afternoon. Krum Bums killed. It was hard not to feel a little wimpy standing at stage one and hearing the bleed from DOA or Killdozer while nodding along thoughtfully with Centromatic.