ACL Day Three: LET’S GET READY TO DAD-ROCK!!!!! (Also: Ted Leo, Frank Turner, White Rabbits and Warpaint Recaps.)

Just hours before some serious dad-rock sets out to swoon ACL 2010 into that good night, the weekend’s deepest pool of day-timers is going full-tilt. Worthy options Shearwater and Warpaint split the early crowd difference in the earliest hours, then Ted Leo & The Pharmacists and White Rabbits drew the crowds in. At press time, each of the six stages currently going has respectable crowds just eating shit up.

Frank Turner in particular riled, wafting a collective us vs. collective
them atmosphere, then praising Texas, then teasing with a story about a
German crowd’s enthusiasm. Maybe heavy-handed, but he was enjoying the
crap out of himself and the crowd was, too, with Turner’s fiery
American-looking Brit-punk boiling the cauldron.

But maybe it was just a punk rock morning: Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
kicked the Budweiser main stage off with a few jabs at The Eagles stuck
between the Jersey punk’s big-picture angst. He and his
happy-to-be-here-even-if-it-means-playing-this-early backing three woke
the crowd up–not unlike the way White Rabbits had its crowd
a-toe-tappin’ across the pitch with its Spoon Lite. Foals warmed with its enveloping arrangements and nimble musicianship, Warpaint billowed over gawking, bopping audience and Blind Pilot crooned for fan swoons.

Diverse stuff, no doubt, and only casting a wider net with Gayngs, Morning Benders, Yeasayer, Midlake, Henry Clay People, The Relatives, The Constellations, Edwarde Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Band of Horses, Flaming Lips, Switchfoot (…right?), The National, Cage the Elephant Norah Jones, Richard Thompson and Misters Take It Easy Themselves.

Diversity indeed. Diversity worth anyone’s excitement. Ah, there’s the rhubarb.