A Dream Austin City Limits Weekend For Houston

Craig Hlavaty

Coldplay at The Woodlands, July 2009

​Summer is creeping in, which means the fall concert calendars are filling up fast, and we should know which Austin City Limits Music Festival artists will book side dates in our area sooner rather than later. The standard disclaimer: Rocks Off is not a promoter, and we have no inside knowledge whatsoever that any of these shows are even close to being a reality. What we do know is that, as of right now, they could happen.

As far as we know, on each given day, all the venues below have an open date while each ACL artist is booked in Zilker on one of the other days of the festival. By the law of averages, some of the artists below will show up in this area around that weekend - based on years past, Houston figures on getting a couple of big shed-filling names, and enough mid-card artists to keep local theaters and clubs full all weekend.

But who? And where? What follows is Rocks Off's absolute best-case scenario, how we'd bring the cream of this year's ACL crop to the Bayou City. As John Nova Lomax alluded to in this week's cover story, Houston is a lot closer to catching up with our neighbors to the northwest than a lot of people realize. True, maybe not quite this close...yet. Some of these are obviously pipe dreams, others maybe not so much. Get cracking, promoters.

Jim Bricker

The Walkmen at Fitz, March 2011

​THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

Continental Club: Charles Bradley, Gary Clark Jr.

Fitzgerald's (upstairs): The Walkmen, Smith Westerns, The Antlers

Reliant Arena: Manu Chao La Ventura, Cee-Lo Green, Nas & Damien "Jr. Gong" Marley

Warehouse Live (Ballroom): Gomez, J. Roddy Walston & the Business

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

Blanco's: Nick 13

Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion: Allison Krauss & Union Station, Gillian Welch, Court Yard Hounds

House of Blues (Main Room): Social Distortion, Wanda Jackson

Jones Hall: Randy Newman, Iron & Wine

Numbers: My Morning Jacket, The Head & the Heart

Rich's Houston: Skrillex

Warehouse Live (Ballroom): Cut Copy, Chromeo