Night fell on the Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park this past Sunday under a full moon and over a sea of mud. (It wasn't strictly mud, but more on that in a bit.) Many in the crowd, especially those in the proximity of the Dell stage, responded the only logical way possible - by dancing, or something close to it.
Since the squishy, slippery ground made it a little difficult to move your feet - people weren't so much walking through the grounds at this point as gingerly creeping - Spearhead stepped in to pick up the slack. The Michael Franti-led Bay Area band has never let sizable social conscience interfere with its mission to move the crowd, and its high-energy combination of rap, rock, reggae and R&B (and a little salsa and dancehall) had hands up and bodies moving from note one, and sparked a fascinating phenomenon Aftermath will remember forever after as the "electric mudslide."
For the ten minutes or so we stood on the fringes of the crowd, feet planted up to our ankles in the Zilker muck, a steady stream of people slid by, contorting their bodies to the beat in a parade of live-action stop-motion animation. How they kept their footing we'll never know, but considering Spearhead was sampling Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" at the time, maybe the Gloved One was supplying a little extra equilibrium from above. (We heard a similar phenomenon was happening simultaneously across the way at
Girl Talk, but never made it that far.)
Now, about that "mud." The brown soup that subsumed Zilker Park Sunday was the unfortunate and probably unforeseen byproduct of several factors: years of drought in Central Texas that turned previous ACL fests into airway-choking dust bowls; an ambitious effort by the City of Austin and ACL producers C3 Entertainment to resod the entire Zilker Great Lawn - which, to be fair, did look lovely Friday and may yet again; and the first real rainy day in ACL's history, which drenched the park for the majority of Saturday.
But mostly, Sunday's quagmire was due to the substance the city and C3, which contributed a $2.5 million donation, used in the resodding: something called "Dillo Dirt," a compost of curbside yard clippings and recycled sewage. Hats off to the city for its environmentally conscious efforts, but that didn't exactly lessen Noise's disgust that he and the 65,000 or so other festival-goers on hand spent an entire day trudging through treated human shit.
It smelled like it, too, and the ACL staff scattering bale after bale of hay around the park to shore up the footing only made the atmosphere that much more stable-like. In their post-ACL damage control Monday, the city and C3 were quick to point out that the composting process superheats said sewage to a temperature that destroys any harmful bacteria, but it was still gross. (As of Monday, officials were unsure how much permanent damage the new sod had sustained.)
This "Million Dollar Mud," as a friend called it late Sunday evening, caused entire puddle-strewn sections of the park to be closed off with yellow police tape, and completely destroyed what had been a beautiful expanse of golf-course-caliber grass just a couple of days earlier. Monday, the
Austin American-Statesman reported that the ACL area of Zilker would be closed until at least November for cleanup - after already being closed for the better part of a year to let that ill-fated grass grow in the first place - and that C3 would pay for the damage to the turf as per its contract with the city.
No doubt the outcome of this year's ACL wasn't quite what C3 was hoping for, and the damage is bound to make this the most expensive festival yet, both financially and in terms of public relations; angry commenters were already
coming out of the woodwork Monday morning on the Statesman's Web site. But this weekend was also the most extreme example yet in what is becoming an annual demonstration of the hostile environmental conditions people are willing to endure in the name of three days of almost uninterrupted music.
To be continued...