There seemed to be three different "tracks," if you will, one could take in ACL Fest programming. You could see either jam bands, hipster rock bands or alt-country/Americana bands. You could chose to dabble in all three, I suppose, but most people seemed to stick to one genre. Well, until the last day, but I'm getting way ahead of myself there.

Dennis and I, of course, chose the twangy path. We started our day on Friday with the only band that was playing at the time, The Damnations. I'm not sure what we expected, but we didn't like what we heard. It was sort of a bad Indigo Girls vibe. In fairness to them, I read later that they had some sound problems and kicked it into high gear later in their set. We, however, didn't wait around.

Instead we moved to one of the two huge stages (there were four smaller ones) to await Shawn Colvin. Neither of us were too excited to see Colvin, but we knew that we needed to stake out a place by the stage for the later acts. To our surprise, they opened up a makeshift wheelchair section about, oh, two feet from the stage. It was a pretty amazing vantage point. Shawn was fine. Perfectly unobjectionable and enjoyable. She honored her friend Rosanne Cash (who understandably cancelled her set at the Festival) by playing a pretty good cover of "Seven Year Ache" and also called a bunch of little girls onstage to dance with her. I won't be buying any of her records, or anything, but I wouldn't go out of my way to avoid her in the future.

Next up was our beloved Steve Earle. Steve put on a pretty great set but we both were concerned about his weight. Steve is normally, um, portly. Not any longer. He's pretty darn thin, in fact. I'll have pictures up tomorrow to illustrate. According to the Austin paper it's the ol' Atkins Diet. I'm not sure, though. He's probably lost at least 50 pounds in the few months since I last saw him. Fingers crossed...

We then stayed in place to see The Mavericks. I'm not a huge fan but they put on a great show complete with a horn section. Note to Raul Malo: you're fat and sweaty. Don't wear a white gauzy shirt. Thanks.

Robert Earl Keen then turned the crowd into a bunch of sing-along frat boys. It was pretty intolerable, actually. He wasn't awful but the crowd most certainly was. I described him to Dennis as the Jimmy Buffett of Texas which I think is pretty much dead on and certainly not a compliment. Oh, and he waved at me. Yep. A great big goofy "look at the crip!" wave. Yipes. I just noticed that he's playing two nights here at Irving Plaza. I have no words...

I didn't really expect much from the night's headliner, Dwight Yoakam. I know his hits and knew that he supposedly put on a good show but I really didn't expect to love it. In fact, we had a hard time deciding between Dwight and the other stage's headliner, Al Green. Well, we made the right choice. Dwight put on an amazing rapid-fire show. I don't think he stopped to take a breath in his 90 minute set. At the end they literally had to bring a cop on stage so that he'd honor the curfew of 10:00 p.m. and leave the stage. A great cap to a great day.

Oh, and at some point I got a flat tire. That's a story for tomorrow. Pictures, too. If I haven't already bored you to tears...