ACL is the Modern Circus
Having the circus come to town was once a yearly highlight for many
Americans. The circus trains would pull up at the city limits, the
tents would be set up, and the animals and acrobats would parade
through town to entice the rubes to spend their shekels at the midway.
Nowadays traveling circuses have fallen out of fashion and music
festivals have replaced them as the chosen portable entertainment
extravaganza. The Austin City Limits Music Festival is one such circus
replacement. But just because the circus is a delight doesn’t mean
that they should be able to occupy the best spot in town for weeks on
end without doing more for the people who would otherwise be using the
spot where that circus sets up shop.
How is ACL like a circus? Instead of the “Big Top,” ACL has the
American Express stage. Instead of train cars full of elephants and
tigers they have tour buses filled with acts like “We Don’t Ride
Llamas” and “Pony Bradshaw.”
To enter the main attraction of ACL you had to brave the sideshow of
Barton Springs Road. I literally stumbled into ACL 2023 through a Shiner
Beer cornhole experience.
Inside ACL the midway was in full rumble. You could get cotton candy
in the shape of a flower, have your tarot cards read or get a
caricature drawn by a sweet artist from Florida in the “Wine Down”
lounge. The magic show was via Google Pixel and their “magic eraser”
that lets you remove pesky strangers from your photos via technology.
The acrobat section of “Cirque ACL” included stilt walkers, bubble
makers and plate spinners at the “Austin Kiddie Limits” stage along
with the antics of method actor Jared Leto bungee jumping 50 feet onto
the stage for his set with “Thirty Seconds to Mars.”
Carnival rides for the mind were also in evidence at ACL. Coca-Cola had a spot you could make a music video guided towards your
musical taste via some scarily accurate AI. Hulu had an escape room
where you had to find the password.
That circus-like atmosphere ensures that ACL has a special place in
many people’s hearts. It’s a place where some feel free to dress up
and experiment with different identities. including cosplaying as say,
a fairy goddess princess or a space cowboy, like two of the costumes
Gracen Kopp, 24, wore at the first weekend of ACL. Most people don’t
get to do that at their day jobs.
“It’s our fav weekend of Austin every year,” Zack Zientek said.
Zientek has been coming to ACL since 2012. In 2020, when there was no
ACL –or much of anything else– he and his friends threw a “Fake ACL”
in their backyards during Covid, complete with lights in trees, dj’s.
custom wristbands, creative koozies and 60 guests.
I can see the appeal of ACL, especially when the weather is as
glorious as it was the first weekend. Especially with events like the
intimate guided sing-along and musical analysis of key musical works
like “Never Gonna Give You Up” at the tiny Bonus Tracks stage with
Dave Grohl, the lead singer of ACL’s headlining band the Foo Fighters
and University of Houston author and researcher Brené Brown.
Yet the considerable pleasures of the few in the portable pleasure
palace of the park shouldn’t outweigh the needs of the entire city.
AC just concluded its two-weekend run in Zilker Park, but it just
isn’t all that Austin-y these days. By definition, a traveling circus can be set
up anywhere.
You might remember the Zilker Vision Plan (R.I.P) , which the Austin
Parks Department spent 600K on. The plan sparked debate hotter than
this summer’s temps when it proposed such idiocy as putting an
amphitheater on the great lawn and installing a three story
underground parking garage. The vision plan getting as far as it did
underscores Zilker’s threadbare state along with how the park needs a
tender loving laying on wheelbarrows full of money for rewilding and
trail maintenance. Tensions are so high that someone from “Save Our Pools” is selling “Save Zilker from ACL” shirts for $23..
ACL has become a juggernaut. Festival-goers are attending “Austin City
Limits Circus Land”–buying t-shirts and blankets and waterbottles
with the festival logo. Discounted early bird tickets to ACL sell out
long before the lineup is released.
Even though the festival still starts with iconic local western swing
act, Asleep at the Wheel, not much else feels local about ACL. So why
is the festival still in poor abused Zilker Park? Maybe because C3
Presents’s rental of the park is still mighty reasonable. Figures from
the Austin Parks Dept indicate that in 2022, the total received by the
Park Dept from C3 was $1,592,026 and the figures are expected to be
similar for this year.
Admission prices for the festival are less reasonable. ACL’s 2023
ticket prices ranged from $375 for a basic general admission weekend
ticket. More amenity-laden weekend options included: (Priced per
ticket, per weekend) : GA + for $725, VIP for $1755, and the
allegedly super-luxurious Platinum pass for $5705. That last one is
about the same as the value of the aging suburban that is my daily
driver. There is even a “Y’all Access” level, which was sold out, and
has price upon request, which roughly translates to “if you have to
ask, you can’t afford it.”
The ticket prices mean the entirety of the park rental expenses can be
covered by just selling fewer than 5,000 general admission tickets for
just one of the weekends. Around 75,000 people attend ACL.
The Austin-ness of ACL is comparable to the difference in taste
between the whiff of flavor hidden inside a Pamplemousse flavored
sparkling water and the vivid flavor of an actual Texas Ruby Red Grapefruit.
There aren’t many area artists performing at the festival and you have
to get up pretty early to see most of them. Dripping Springs resident
Ben Kweller, who went on at 3 p.m. both weekends is a notable
mid-afternoon exception. The once “you can only get it at at ACL” food
treat The Mighty Cone was missing from the festival this year, and
local record store Waterloo Records stopped having their ACL autograph
tent and record store post-pandemic. Luckily my very own personal
hippie bodega, locally based People’s Pharmacy, operated the ACL
Bodega for their 16th year.
In the early years of the festival, concert goers were encouraged to
use the in- and- out feature of their wristbands and cool off in
Barton Springs Pool. You used to see a fair number of bikini tops
paired with wet hair during ACL. Back in the old days, I usually had a bathing suit dripping dry squirreled away somewhere in the park. Looooooooooong lines at the entrance means that’s no longer the case.
Festival visitors might not even realize the chillingly majestic
Barton Springs Pool is nearby.
There are two choices for the future of “Cirque ACL.” One is to ease
the traveling circus on down the road and the other is to help
mitigate the damage the festival inflicts.
Moving Austin City Limits Music Festival out to the actual city limits
makes the most sense as it’s right there in the name.
Or maybe they can try moving ACL out to the Circuit of the Americas
race track? Or to Cedar Park? Or, given how ongoing sprawl has made
the Highway 290 corridor one long swath of development, maybe the
empty Houston Astrodome could offer ACL both air-conditioned space and
plenty of parking?
The Dodgers survived leaving Brooklyn. Antone’s nightclub survived
moving to so many locations that I can carbon -date my personal life
by where Antone’s was when I saw a show. The Grand Ole Opry moved five
times, most recently from the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville
to suburban Opryland.
Multiple people will tell you that watching the headliners while
looking out over the Austin skyline makes the ACL experience special.
That experience can be recreated! After all, The Austin City Limits
PBS television program that licenses its name to the big ACL festival
has always been filmed in a studio, not outside like you might think
while watching it on the telly, (the original version of that skyline in the television program was made with cardboard and Christmas lights!) The ACL television show itself even survived a move from Studio 6A on the University of Texas campus down to a custom built space in Austin’s 2nd Street District.
If the festival stays in the park C3 ought to do more to make parkland
more usable for Austin residents during the twenty zillion weeks Zilker is
closed. Yes, C3 has given 55 million for Austin parks over the nearly
20 years of the festival but I suspect their revenues would allow a
far more generous contribution. I mean, have you seen the beer prices
at ACL?
Instead of just $7.2 million that C3 sent to Austin parks in 2022,
maybe C3 can also use some of the green juice from their cash cow to
donate some swankadelic parkland for use during the multiple weeks
that ACL takes over Zilker Park? They can take an artistic lead from
the art at the Austin airport: maybe put up a few statues of guitars and call it “Main Stage Park!” Live Nation, which owns a controlling interest in
C3 Presents should be able to make it possible. Maybe they can be led to
donate a “Who Let the Dogs Out” dog run?
Austin parks really need the help. According to the Trust for Public Land,
Austin doesn’t even rank in the top 40 cities when judged on park
metrics including “Equity, access, acreage, investment, amenities.”
Live Nation is a billion-dollar entertainment company whose last
quarterly earnings report bragged “Revenue Up 27% to $5.6 Billion.”
Given our awful summers, C3 Presents should also fund keeping the
city’s public swimming pools open through the end of ACL, as it’s
nearly impossible to go swim in Barton Springs pool during the event.
Even better, they should round out that donation with some “boy-howdy”
level funding for Tankproof, a 501c3 non-profit that teaches kids from
underserved communities how to swim, founded by fun local musical act
TheBrosFresh.
For better or worse, ACL is Austin’s modern day circus, one that many
citizens adore and wait all year to stretch their glittery butterfly
wings at. Since that musical circus is held on Austin’s most desirable
public space, ACL needs to do right by all of us, not just those of us
who care enough about ACL that they were willing to throw a DIY
backyard homage to the festival during the pandemic. .
