We caught the first day of Austin City Limits Festival to close the trip last week. We had a great time but I left with the goal of figuring out any zoom on my phone, which we know is otherwise one of the best cheap picture-taking cellphones. Got sky? It had me covered. But.

My favorite band of the day was the first one we saw, the Strange Boys. Strokes meets Mersey Beat meets Dylan meets Frogman Henry.

Or as the Austin Chronicle put it, in an ACL quick take: "Strange Boys vocalist Ryan Sambol looks and sounds like a little boy. The slurred squeak of his voice bleats unique and quite frankly endearing, and its seeming innocence, along with the local quartet's youthful looks and thin, noisy sound, invites comparison to another young garage rock band, Black Lips. The Strange Boys don't possess the Lips' anarchic punk energy, substituting instead an unconcerned ennui that seems rooted in lazy front-porch blues."

Listen on their MySpace page. It doesn't have their awesome live cover of James Brown's Think, but you can probably get the same feeling I did — you'd like to have them playing in your car, now.

I wondered how Jakob Dylan would sound at ACL when I heard he got no love in Denver. He turned out to sound pretty much like himself but working very hard to stay low key, singing his soft "mountain" music with his new band. That interpretation could have been wrong. Maybe those Wallflowers had made him work very hard to stay louder.

It may have been overly harsh initially to see the set and tunes were a vanity project. But the revival of Three Marlenas was more enjoyable than the rest. I did feel sorry for him some with the shadow of his dad. All Jakob did was put on a hat and sunglasses and play in a band with a guy with big hair,  and all I could think was, "A hat? Sunglasses? Big hair? Really? Hasn't Bob kinda done that?" I'd never leave the house.

After catching some of the wackiness of Gogol Bordello (Wikipedia: "Phill Jupitus has once described the band as 'a bit like The Clash and The Pogues having a fight … in Eastern Europe,' while Kenneth Partridge of the Hartford Courant described lead singer Eugene Hütz's voice as 'somewhere between that of Borat and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog' "), Mates of State didn't do much for me. Sorry. Crowd position may have affected things. But after trading txts most of the day, finally met up with Sazerac and her Louisiana friends there.

First time seeing Jenny Lewis. Missed David Byrne to see her. I heard Byrne was great, but Lewis was just my speed in a Work Out Fine way.

(Aside: Awesomely ridiculous live Tina performance of the song here: part one, part two. YouTube also has a Springsteen take — Bottom Line boots are historic, never great sounding but the shaggy dogs make up for it, here in "Skeevotz Manniello gets married" form – and quickly returning to the land of the awesome ridiculous, a cover by The Matadors, "one of the finest R&B bands ever to emerge from Eastern Europe," according to one source. You make the call. Please.)

Lewis ACL '08 on YouTube: Carpetbagger, See Fernando, Jack Killed Mom.

Gonzaga note: Carpetbagger feats. Lewis boyfriend Johnathan Rice '01. 

The day ended with parts of Alejandro Escovedo, Mars Volta and Manu Chao, whom we only heard by accident but sadly was not playing King of the Bongo when we did. Thanks to Joel and Lou, who know how to have a good time at these things, and my best to Heineken keg cans, Zilker Park dirt, SPF 70 sunscreen, and pulled-pork sandwiches.

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