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With fat dark clouds lurking overhead, there was a sense at the beginning of Day Three of the Austin City Limits Festival that, if it rains again, we’re all doomed. It didn’t rain. But we were all doomed. By mid-afternoon, when the clouds had cleared for good the festival grounds metastasized into a fetid swamp, with a layer of mud on top of the mud, and a layer of lost or abandoned flip-flops on top of that.

And yet, somehow, we survived, muddier, of course, but no worse for the wear. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears had plenty to do with that. The first set of the afternoon found Lewis, an R&B showman of the old school, blending grizzled blues riffs with Motown horn blasts for a set that at its best recalled Otis Redding or the old Stax Revues.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

The B-52s‘ Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson emerged in matching teal dresses, which clashed nicely with Pierson’s supernaturally orange hair. They stuck to a series of low-impact sock-hop dance moves, looking like twin Martian queens out of some old ’50s sci-fi movie. Fred Schneider mostly kept behind the microphone—he delivered his lines sternly, like an angry schoolmaster barking directions. Keith Strickland’s riffs (many of them obviously by late original guitarist Ricky Wilson) are still nasty, and on the best numbers—like “Mesopotamia”—they’re still the weirdest band around. Best line: Schneider introduced a totally fine version of “Love Shack” by saying, “And this is a song I learned at karaoke.” (Watch footage of the B’s and Heartless Bastards below.)

The B-52s might be the weirdest, but apart from Them Crooked Vultures, Clutch was the heaviest band on the entire bill at this year’s festival. Singer Neil Fallon has a threatening drawl, the same kind Glenn Danzig had until he got out of shape, and he uses it to great effect on songs like “Devil & Me”—making everyone feel just a little less badass in his presence.

Check out backstage photos of Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more at ACL.

Immediately following Clutch’s set, Heartless Bastards had the same gameplan. Their records may have softened lately, but live they’re still snarling. Erika Hennerstrom kicked out 200-ton blues riffs, and every song felt monstrous and massive. Her voice is worn a bit from all the touring, but that only made the songs sound that much more desperate.

Passion Pit vocalist Michael Angelakos’ voice is strained, too, but the huge crowd was proof of how this band has grown. Where most dance music prizes a steady, insistent beat, Passion Pit are stingy with the big payoffs, letting the verses simmer and then kicking in with the chorus. They’re songs where the promise of payoff is more rewarding than the payoff itself. “Little Secret” was an early highlight, a sea of hands going into the air as the pre-recorded children’s choir chanted “higher and higher and higher!” The set ignited with “Sleepyhead”—cheers and massive, massive movement up front, the whole audience suddenly came to life. (Catch up with Passion Pit backstage in the video below.)

You forget how snide and nasty half of the Arctic Monkeys‘ songs are until you hear them live. After a long summer of touring, the Monkeys have finally figured out a way to seamlessly integrate the darker, edgier songs from Humbug with their more direct older material. “You all look like you could use some Arctic Monkeys,” Turner said early in the set and then launched into a convulsing version of “Crying Lightning,” working that see-saw riff for all it was worth. “The View From the Afternoon” was more frantic, guitars going bananas behind Turner’s wry delivery. They’ve built little changes into the songs—they strung out the break at the end of “Flourescent Adolescent” so that when the chorus kicked back in at last it felt more triumphant. “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” still kills, even in a matter-of-fact version, even if no one looked good on this dancefloor, and the dancefloor looked worse.

Ben Harper and the Relentless7 delivered a hard-charging set where even the slower songs were driving, big thanks to drummer Jordan Richardson. “Relentless” is actually the best word, with a reenergized Harper, not that he necessarily was a prime candidate for revitalization, urged on by his younger Texan bandmates as they played songs off their debut, White Lies for Dark Times.

Speaking of, people keep calling the Dead Weather “Jack White’s new band,” but they should really be calling it Allison Mossheart’s new band. She owns this outfit, prowling the stage with her jet-black hair, gray shirt, and blood-red lips. This was non-commercial music that allowed no compromise, a tangle of gnarled, steaming blues riffs as jagged as cut sheet metal. They deconstruct the blues even more than the White Stripes, stripping it back not just to its basic chords, but its basic feel—there’s a danger and a darkness and a primacy to this music. Mossheart was electric on stage, flinging her skinny body around, draping herself over the mike stand, walking to the front of the stage to testify straight at the audience. They opened with “60 Feet Tall,” Mossheart hissing, “You’ve got the kind of loving/I need constantly.”

White took vocals for “You Just Can’t Win” and he delivered it all worked up, sounding like a man on the brink. But the best moments were when he and Mossheart sang together, as on “Horehound.” The two of them bring out the worst in each other, in the best possible way—he the panicked, accusatory victim; she the icy vampiress. (Check out footage of the band’s set — and some killer footage of headliners Pearl Jam — below.)

And then there was Girl Talk’s de facto headlining set (no one was scheduled against Pearl Jam) a few hundred yards away. It may have said “NOT A DJ” on the screen as Gregg Gillis and his plastic-wrapped laptop kicked off with a sped-up swatch of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” but it’s semantics: while he doesn’t play other people’s songs so much as he makes new songs out of them, live that distinction is as easily lost as the hundreds of flip-flops left behind in the mud. With his usual crowd of fans onstage, Gillis and his chop shop of samples manipulated the giant throng in front of the stage expertly, constantly making lefts turns and right choices. What he does is efficient, if not brilliant, taking the best parts of songs and shit-canning the rest.

The best match was Dorrough’s “Ice Cream Paint Job” backed by the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” (someone needs to commission that official remix immediately), barely beating the G-Spot Boyz’s “Do Da Stanky Legg” laid on top of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” As he took the stage, the sun went down and the temperature cooled, as if knowing what Gillis had in store; perhaps he was manipulating that, too. “This feels good—we all right?” he said early on. Finally, yes.

More Austin City Limits:

• Pearl Jam Rule Austin City Limits With Ferocious Closing Set Featuring Ben Harper, Perry Farrell
• Dave Matthews Band Mix Whiskey With Jams
• Levon Helm, Zac Brown Band, Deer Tick and More Battle the Mud at Austin City Limits Day Two
• Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Wrap Austin City Limits Day One
• Them Crooked Vultures Jolt Austin City Limits, Plus Phoenix, Avett Brothers Rock Day One

Look back at the best of Rolling Stone’s summer festival coverage

For the last 17 years, the going story on Pearl Jam was that they were a band that prided themselves on a willful disregard for expectations. The bullet-points are so frequently recited they can almost be announced in unison: their repudiation of the music video, their now-legendary tussle with Ticketmaster, their insistence on releasing their records on vinyl a week before they came out on CD. Lately, the group shucked the whole major label system, releasing their latest album, Backspacer, on their own, with exclusive distribution in Target and several small independent outlets. Commercial fallout be damned, Pearl Jam built their reputation on a stubborn insistence to follow their own muse.

All of which only served to make their crowd-pleasing festival-closing set Sunday at Austin City Limits that much more astonishing. Abandoning any impulse to confound or to frustrate, the group instead delivered a jaw-dropping, white-hot two-hour cavalcade of hits, one that served to aggressively reassert their relevance while casting a clean light on their past. It was — by any measure — the best show of the weekend. “We’ve been here three days,” Eddie Vedder said early in the evening, “and in those three days we’ve received many, many gifts. So we’re going to do our best to return the favor.” (Check out video from the band’s set, plus footage of the Dead Weather, above.)

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

Vedder laced a series of steely guitar runs through opener “Why Go?” and slashed a jagged path up the center of “Corduroy.” What was most breathtaking about the set was its brute, blunt force, and the ferocity with which the band tore into the songs. “Hail, Hail” and “Even Flow” — on which Mike McCready heaved his guitar behind his head and peeled off an endless, blistering solo — operated at almost twice their usual speed, Vedder hurling his body across the stage, punctuating verses with punches and leaps. If Vedder is the group’s outspoken firebrand, McCready is their (not so) secret weapon. His playing on Sunday was adroit without being flashy, setting the punkier numbers ablaze with nimble, looping solos.

The group’s reliance on classic material afforded an opportunity to see how much they’ve grown. Taken on its own “The Fixer,” the sterling new single from Backspacer, is a charmer, Vedder wandering through the world and setting aright all of the things that seem askew (”When something’s cold/let me put a little fire on it”). But coming as it did between a scorching “State of Love and Trust” and a volcanic, borderline-hardcore take on “Go,” the song’s steely optimism felt that much more earned.

Check out backstage photos of Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more at ACL.

For a band with a new record to flog — and a good one, at that — the band went light on recent songs, the best of which, the taut, hammering “Got Some” found Vedder frantically barking out lyrics. Despite their affinity for the guitar solo, Pearl Jam’s best songs operate at warp speed, and display a cannier knack for the nuances of melody than many of their supposed disciples. On Sunday it was their roots in punk rock that felt the most pronounced, with songs like “Do the Evolution” little more than grizzled hunks of sound.

Vedder remained chatty and good-natured. He tossed the refrain of former opening act Sleater-Kinney’s “Modern Girl” at the end of “Not for You” (a song that sounded even nastier and more confrontational now then when it was released) and shared a rambling anecdote about how he and Ben Harper had been up until 8:30 that morning, during which they had figured out the solution to the world’s problems (”We wrote it down. The trouble is, it’s just scribble — you can’t read it”). Harper later joined the group on stage, lacing up “Red Mosquito” with snarling lap steel.

The set was so inspired that it was easy to forgive the band for ending on a note of shameless nostalgia. First, they were joined by Perry Farrell — who Vedder announced as “a guy who invented everything we’re doing up here, and probably most of what you’re doing out there” — for a thundering take on Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song.” And, like they’ve done for years, the show ended with a ragged run through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” It was a safe bet, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying — which, of course, is part of the perfect paradox of Pearl Jam: the only band in the business that confounds expectations by fulfilling them.

Set list:

“Why Go?”
“Corduroy”
“Got Some”
“Not For You”
“Modern Girl” (Sleater-Kinney Cover, Partial)
“Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”
“Given to Fly”
“World Wide Suicide”
“Even Flow”
“Unthought Known”
“Daughter”
“WMA” (Partial)
“Hail, Hail”
“Insignificance”
“Present Tense”
“State of Love & Trust”
“The Fixer”
“Go”
“Red Mosquito” (w/ Ben Harper)
“Do the Evolution”
“The Real Me” (The Who Cover)
“Alive”
“Mountain Song” (Jane’s Addiction cover w/ Perry Farrel)
“Rockin’ in the Free World”

More Austin City Limits:

• Dave Matthews Band Mix Whiskey With Jams
• Levon Helm, Zac Brown Band, Deer Tick and More Battle the Mud at Austin City Limits Day Two
• Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Wrap Austin City Limits Day One
• Them Crooked Vultures Jolt Austin City Limits, Plus Phoenix, Avett Brothers Rock Day One

Look back at the best of Rolling Stone’s summer festival coverage

For the last 17 years, the going story on Pearl Jam was that they were a band that prided themselves on a willful disregard for expectations. The bullet-points are so frequently recited they can almost be announced in unison: their repudiation of the music video, their now-legendary tussle with Ticketmaster, their insistence on releasing their records on vinyl a week before they came out on CD. Lately, the group shucked the whole major label system, releasing their latest album, Backspacer, on their own, with exclusive distribution in Target and several small independent outlets. Commercial fallout be damned, Pearl Jam built their reputation on a stubborn insistence to follow their own muse.

All of which only served to make their crowd-pleasing festival-closing set Sunday at Austin City Limits that much more astonishing. Abandoning any impulse to confound or to frustrate, the group instead delivered a jaw-dropping, white-hot two-hour cavalcade of hits, one that served to aggressively reassert their relevance while casting a clean light on their past. It was — by any measure — the best show of the weekend. “We’ve been here three days,” Eddie Vedder said early in the evening, “and in those three days we’ve received many, many gifts. So we’re going to do our best to return the favor.” (Check out video from the band’s set, plus footage of the Dead Weather, above.)

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

Vedder laced a series of steely guitar runs through opener “Why Go?” and slashed a jagged path up the center of “Corduroy.” What was most breathtaking about the set was its brute, blunt force, and the ferocity with which the band tore into the songs. “Hail, Hail” and “Even Flow” — on which Mike McCready heaved his guitar behind his head and peeled off an endless, blistering solo — operated at almost twice their usual speed, Vedder hurling his body across the stage, punctuating verses with punches and leaps. If Vedder is the group’s outspoken firebrand, McCready is their (not so) secret weapon. His playing on Sunday was adroit without being flashy, setting the punkier numbers ablaze with nimble, looping solos.

The group’s reliance on classic material afforded an opportunity to see how much they’ve grown. Taken on its own “The Fixer,” the sterling new single from Backspacer, is a charmer, Vedder wandering through the world and setting aright all of the things that seem askew (”When something’s cold/let me put a little fire on it”). But coming as it did between a scorching “State of Love and Trust” and a volcanic, borderline-hardcore take on “Go,” the song’s steely optimism felt that much more earned.

Check out backstage photos of Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more at ACL.

For a band with a new record to flog — and a good one, at that — the band went light on recent songs, the best of which, the taut, hammering “Got Some” found Vedder frantically barking out lyrics. Despite their affinity for the guitar solo, Pearl Jam’s best songs operate at warp speed, and display a cannier knack for the nuances of melody than many of their supposed disciples. On Sunday it was their roots in punk rock that felt the most pronounced, with songs like “Do the Evolution” little more than grizzled hunks of sound.

Vedder remained chatty and good-natured. He tossed the refrain of former opening act Sleater-Kinney’s “Modern Girl” at the end of “Not for You” (a song that sounded even nastier and more confrontational now then when it was released) and shared a rambling anecdote about how he and Ben Harper had been up until 8:30 that morning, during which they had figured out the solution to the world’s problems (”We wrote it down. The trouble is, it’s just scribble — you can’t read it”). Harper later joined the group on stage, lacing up “Red Mosquito” with snarling lap steel.

The set was so inspired that it was easy to forgive the band for ending on a note of shameless nostalgia. First, they were joined by Perry Farrell — who Vedder announced as “a guy who invented everything we’re doing up here, and probably most of what you’re doing out there” — for a thundering take on Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song.” And, like they’ve done for years, the show ended with a ragged run through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” It was a safe bet, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying — which, of course, is part of the perfect paradox of Pearl Jam: the only band in the business that confounds expectations by fulfilling them.

Set list:

“Why Go?”
“Corduroy”
“Got Some”
“Not For You”
“Modern Girl” (Sleater-Kinney Cover, Partial)
“Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”
“Given to Fly”
“World Wide Suicide”
“Even Flow”
“Unthought Known”
“Daughter”
“WMA” (Partial)
“Hail, Hail”
“Insignificance”
“Present Tense”
“State of Love & Trust”
“The Fixer”
“Go”
“Red Mosquito” (w/ Ben Harper)
“Do the Evolution”
“The Real Me” (The Who Cover)
“Alive”
“Mountain Song” (Jane’s Addiction cover w/ Perry Farrel)
“Rockin’ in the Free World”

More Austin City Limits:

• Dave Matthews Band Mix Whiskey With Jams
• Levon Helm, Zac Brown Band, Deer Tick and More Battle the Mud at Austin City Limits Day Two
• Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Wrap Austin City Limits Day One
• Them Crooked Vultures Jolt Austin City Limits, Plus Phoenix, Avett Brothers Rock Day One

Look back at the best of Rolling Stone’s summer festival coverage

For the last 17 years, the going story on Pearl Jam was that they were a band that prided themselves on a willful disregard for expectations. The bullet-points are so frequently recited they can almost be announced in unison: their repudiation of the music video, their now-legendary tussle with Ticketmaster, their insistence on releasing their records on vinyl a week before they came out on CD. Lately, the group shucked the whole major label system, releasing their latest album, Backspacer, on their own, with exclusive distribution in Target and several small independent outlets. Commercial fallout be damned, Pearl Jam built their reputation on a stubborn insistence to follow their own muse.

All of which only served to make their crowd-pleasing festival-closing set Sunday at Austin City Limits that much more astonishing. Abandoning any impulse to confound or to frustrate, the group instead delivered a jaw-dropping, white-hot two-hour cavalcade of hits, one that served to aggressively reassert their relevance while casting a clean light on their past. It was — by any measure — the best show of the weekend. “We’ve been here three days,” Eddie Vedder said early in the evening, “and in those three days we’ve received many, many gifts. So we’re going to do our best to return the favor.” (Check out video from the band’s set, plus footage of the Dead Weather, above.)

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

Vedder laced a series of steely guitar runs through opener “Why Go?” and slashed a jagged path up the center of “Corduroy.” What was most breathtaking about the set was its brute, blunt force, and the ferocity with which the band tore into the songs. “Hail, Hail” and “Even Flow” — on which Mike McCready heaved his guitar behind his head and peeled off an endless, blistering solo — operated at almost twice their usual speed, Vedder hurling his body across the stage, punctuating verses with punches and leaps. If Vedder is the group’s outspoken firebrand, McCready is their (not so) secret weapon. His playing on Sunday was adroit without being flashy, setting the punkier numbers ablaze with nimble, looping solos.

The group’s reliance on classic material afforded an opportunity to see how much they’ve grown. Taken on its own “The Fixer,” the sterling new single from Backspacer, is a charmer, Vedder wandering through the world and setting aright all of the things that seem askew (”When something’s cold/let me put a little fire on it”). But coming as it did between a scorching “State of Love and Trust” and a volcanic, borderline-hardcore take on “Go,” the song’s steely optimism felt that much more earned.

Check out backstage photos of Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more at ACL.

For a band with a new record to flog — and a good one, at that — the band went light on recent songs, the best of which, the taut, hammering “Got Some” found Vedder frantically barking out lyrics. Despite their affinity for the guitar solo, Pearl Jam’s best songs operate at warp speed, and display a cannier knack for the nuances of melody than many of their supposed disciples. On Sunday it was their roots in punk rock that felt the most pronounced, with songs like “Do the Evolution” little more than grizzled hunks of sound.

Vedder remained chatty and good-natured. He tossed the refrain of former opening act Sleater-Kinney’s “Modern Girl” at the end of “Not for You” (a song that sounded even nastier and more confrontational now then when it was released) and shared a rambling anecdote about how he and Ben Harper had been up until 8:30 that morning, during which they had figured out the solution to the world’s problems (”We wrote it down. The trouble is, it’s just scribble — you can’t read it”). Harper later joined the group on stage, lacing up “Red Mosquito” with snarling lap steel.

The set was so inspired that it was easy to forgive the band for ending on a note of shameless nostalgia. First, they were joined by Perry Farrell — who Vedder announced as “a guy who invented everything we’re doing up here, and probably most of what you’re doing out there” — for a thundering take on Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song.” And, like they’ve done for years, the show ended with a ragged run through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” It was a safe bet, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying — which, of course, is part of the perfect paradox of Pearl Jam: the only band in the business that confounds expectations by fulfilling them.

Set list:

“Why Go?”
“Corduroy”
“Got Some”
“Not For You”
“Modern Girl” (Sleater-Kinney Cover, Partial)
“Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”
“Given to Fly”
“World Wide Suicide”
“Even Flow”
“Unthought Known”
“Daughter”
“WMA” (Partial)
“Hail, Hail”
“Insignificance”
“Present Tense”
“State of Love & Trust”
“The Fixer”
“Go”
“Red Mosquito” (w/ Ben Harper)
“Do the Evolution”
“The Real Me” (The Who Cover)
“Alive”
“Mountain Song” (Jane’s Addiction cover w/ Perry Farrel)
“Rockin’ in the Free World”

More Austin City Limits:

• Dave Matthews Band Mix Whiskey With Jams
• Levon Helm, Zac Brown Band, Deer Tick and More Battle the Mud at Austin City Limits Day Two
• Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Wrap Austin City Limits Day One
• Them Crooked Vultures Jolt Austin City Limits, Plus Phoenix, Avett Brothers Rock Day One

Look back at the best of Rolling Stone’s summer festival coverage

At the end of the day, and especially at the end of this day at Austin City Limits, the crowd wanted the Dave Matthews Band they’ve known for the past 15 years or so. After slogging through an insistent downpour and the resulting thick, oozing mud, the guys trading chest bumps and girls woo-hooing with the regularity (and irritation) of a snooze alarm would have accepted the DMB on auto-pilot. They needed no spectacle. (Watch footage from their set above).

Dave Matthews Band, for certain, are not about spectacle. The closest they came was when a handful of red balls bounced over the crowd during “You Might Die Trying,” as the stage was bathed in matching red light. That was pretty much that. Matthews took the stage one song earlier looking, more or less, like he always has forever (gray button-up with sleeves rolled up, black pants); daring stage wear for him is a T-shirt and jeans. The band looked the same, too, or at least the same as it has been since saxophone player LeRoi Moore’s death last year: horn players Jeff Coffin and Rashawn Ross and guitarist Tim Reynolds, joining stalwarts Boyd Tinsley (violin), Carter Beauford (drums), and Stefan Lessard (bass). But the Dave Matthews Band was different on Saturday night. Or, at least it tried to be. And, at its most successful, it was.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

Hidden in the middle of a sprawling — yet abrupt by DMB standards — set, there was another Dave Matthews Band. A world inside the world, as Don DeLillo might say, populated by a economical rock band that played songs with definitive beginnings, middles, and ends instead of never-ending series of middles, and middles to those middles, and so on. Playing four songs (”Funny the Way It Is,” “Seven,” “Shake Me Like a Monkey,” and “Why I Am”) from this summer’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King bunched one after the other — only broken up by similar-in-spirit “So Damn Lucky” from Matthews’ solo record, Some Devil — the group proved they need not extend every song merely for the sake of doing so. They maybe even shouldn’t.

The band attacked “You Might Die Trying” (from 2005’s Stand Up) with a menace, and that continued through its early reliance on GrooGrux King material. But that tight coil was eventually pulled loose by the clock-stopping jams that paid for the band’s houses. Coming on the heels of the punch, defiant “Why I Am,” the Tinsley-propelled “Jimi Thing” turned into the long, “introduce the band” jam where everyone gets their beak wet. The over-long, solo-trading version grew tedious but it was salvaged by a take on Prince’s “Sexy MF,” or at least the “sexy motherfucker shakin’ that ass” chorus. It was a tip of the hat, of sorts, to the DMB’s Minneapolis fascination: GrooGrux King’s “Shake Me Like a Monkey,” with its leering lyrics and horny horns, isn’t a Morris Day & The Time cover, but it could be.

Check out backstage photos of Phoenix, Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more at ACL.

People started trickling out at that point, and it was a good time to go. The economical rock band from before had left for good, only showing back up for a note-for-note cover of Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” Better that it stayed away; that was a song that could have used any trace of the more familiar Dave Matthews Band. Matthews didn’t even sound like himself. He made up for that with the rinse-and-repeat rest of the set (familiar readings of “So Much to Say” and “Ants Marching”), which was fine. It was what the people who braved the rain and the much and everything else came for. But I would have like another glance at the world inside the world. That’s the right kind of spectacle.

More Austin City Limits:

• Levon Helm, Zac Brown Band, Deer Tick and More Battle the Mud at Austin City Limits Day Two
• Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Wrap Austin City Limits Day One
• Them Crooked Vultures Jolt Austin City Limits, Plus Phoenix, Avett Brothers Rock Day One

Look back at the best of Rolling Stone’s summer festival coverage