The Daily O’Collegian

AUSTIN, Texas — Green panties with flashing orange lights swayed left to right and bounced as tortillas floated back to the earth like leaves.

The bearded man in the black cowboy shirt stood with his guitar, his sunken eyes observing the spectacle.

“Are you guys throwing tortillas?” he asked like a teacher scolding his students. A roar from the crowd acted as an admission of guilt.

“Are those underwear up there?” he asked, referring to the flagpole draped in the undergarment, his voice reaching a high and concerned squeal.

“Are they green, and were they white before?”

With this matter aside, Wilco went on performing like it was any other day, but it was not.

It was the Austin City Limits Music Festival and it was unlike anything in the world.

The three-day, eight-stage, 130-band extravaganza drew 65,000 people to Zilker Metropolitan Park.

A fire welcomed many people to the festival on Friday as flames climbed the trees behind the ranks of portable toilets. Within minutes the fire was extinguished and Pete Yorn resumed his set.

M.I.A. had the crowd’s attention the moment she took the stage. Her euro-funk beats pounded the muddy lawn of the Dell stage as fists pumped at the air.

“Paper Planes,” a song she performed on David Letterman the night before, highlighted her set. She told the crowd how the Late Show producers made her take out the gunshots in the chorus. “This one is for you, David,” she said as gunshots rang out.

Before her final song, she explained how she needed some dancers on stage, as she appeared to point out a few takers from the crowd. As the chosen ones made their way to the front, she had a better idea.

“Everybody get on stage,” she said. Hundreds of fans jumped the steel barricade like track stars running hurdles. The mob filled the stage within seconds, and M.I.A. was nowhere to be seen.

She quickly realized she had no space to continue her show and asked everyone to get down. The moment was short-lived, but it underlined her desire to give all people in the festival-sized crowd their money’s worth.

With 90 degree temperatures, Saturday had a stronger lineup than Friday.

Steve Earle’s performance started strong. He told of Townes Van Zandt, “the greatest songwriter ever,” and tore through the brilliant “Ft. Worth Blues” and the visually assaulting “Rich Man’s War.”

The first half of the show featured only Earle on various stringed instruments, performing his signature alt-country, pinko tunes. The formula worked well.

Then things changed.

Earle’s disc jockey took the stage. Yes, Steve Earle, country music’s one-time savior turned prison-hardened felon, has a DJ. Playing songs from the upcoming Washington Square Serenade, Earle proved that his lyrics were as strong as ever. Unfortunately, the pounding hip-hop beats and record scratches were too much, way too much, for anti-war lyrics and fragile guitar picking.

Laughter could be heard as Earle and his DJ struggled through the new songs. By the end of the show, he had outstayed his welcome, which says a lot for an hour-long set.

From the bizarre video intro of a female preacher exclaiming, “If your engine isn’t revving up, then you need a holy ghost enema, right up your rear,” to the closing notes of “Wake Up,” Arcade Fire owned Austin.

Win Butler dedicated “Intervention,” an anti-war song about “working for the church while your family dies,” to “Gov. George Bush.” The left-leaning Austin crowd met the gesture with cheers.

The band showed why it is considered one of the best live bands around as it closed Saturday’s shows.

Chants of “Nosebleed” kicked off Ben Kweller’s set as the Sunday crowd reminded him of his 2006 ACL performance ending early because of his unexplained bloody nose.

“I’m back,” he said. “There’s no blood in my nose this year.”

With that, he commenced a solid set of signature power-pop anthems.

In a rare sedated moment, Kweller and his piano kept the crowd silent with “Thirteen,” a song about falling in love.

“It was in the back of a taxi when you told me you loved me/and that I wasn’t alone,” he crooned as the giant TV next to the stage zoomed in on his wedding ring.

Less than a quarter of a mile away, a different musical style was taking shape.

Common was given the undesirable task of entertaining a crowd expecting Rodrigo Y Gabriela, who canceled days before the festival.

If there were any nerves in his 6-foot-1-inch frame, he hid them well.

Storming the stage armed with a microphone, a drummer and a DJ, he strutted with the conviction of a Baptist preacher trying to fix social injustice with one pump of the fist. The crowd awkwardly swayed and spanked the air as only a group of white people with too much sun could.

As the final day of the festival started to wind down, a crowd formed across the park for Wilco’s show.

Wilco’s performance was the sonic-fuzz freak-out fans expect from the Chicago band. Opening with “You Are My Face,” the band set the mood for the experimental rock to come.

Jeff Tweedy started the song with a whisper about his “mother’s sister’s husband’s brother/working in the goldmine full time/filling in for sunshine.” By the end of the song, guitarist Nels Cline had worked up a sweat from beating his guitar strings silly.

Tweedy fronted a group of musicians at the top of its game.

The hushed genius of the lyrically sprawling “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” showed a different side of the band in musical terms. The restrained guitar of Cline showed his and the band’s musical maturity.

Wilco knows it can rock, but it also knows it does not always have to.

That awareness put it head and shoulders above most of the bands at ACL, and above many in the world.