So this time our picks from the first weekend were Jimmie Vaughan, whose barbed guitar leads mingled with Lou Ann Barton's sultry vocals for an hourlong Texas-style R&B clinic Saturday evening, most of all on the house-rockin' "Boom Bapa Boom" and savory ballads "Teeny Weeny Bit of Your Love" and "In the Middle of the Night."

Top discovery this time out was New Orleans' Mia Borders and her gumbo-thick bayou roux of Lenny Kravitz blues-rock, modern soul and old-school funk, while Lil' Brian & the Zydeco Travelers gave us our zydeco fix and a little more funk via an appropriation of George Clinton's mission statement "P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)."

And now, Rocks Off would like to make what seems like our annual request that iFest stagger the start times of at least the Latin and Louisiana stages so they don't directly compete with the Bud Light World Stage. The festival is laid out over a small enough area that it's possible to catch 15-20 minutes of the acts on each stage in any given hour, but that's still a lot of walking around in some awfully humid weather.

And some people are going to stay planted in Sam Houston Park no matter what, but different start times could only have helped draw people over to acts like Borders and Houston's Espantapajaros, whose dense, measured, Black Crowes-like rock en espanol deserved more than the dozen or so people it drew Saturday.

It already works like that for the 29-95 stage on the steps of City Hall, where bands started on the half-hour Saturday instead of the hour. Then again, when a band like Houston's Chango Man is cross-pollinating cumbia with classic-rock warhorses like the Beatles' "Come Together" and Queen's "We Will Rock You," and injecting a little consciousness via its own "Cumbia Revolution," it's worth staying put no matter what else is going on around you.

But there was a lot, so Rocks Off Sr. asked our two youngest writers to come out to iFest and send us their impressions as well. We now yield the floor. Chris Gray