Besame Mucho Festival
photo by David Brendan Hall, posted Mar. 5, 2024. #1 of 80 photos.
Booked like first-year Lollapalooza and staged á la ACL Fest, Circuit of the Americas’ Latin music eclipse, Besame Mucho on March 2, manifested a first for Austin and who knows where else: an alternate reality.
Brown music for brown people, tens of thousands of them, of US – ustedes, nosotros – in every size and shape and skin tone, and not one dressed down for an all-star Spanish-language spectacle as deep and vast as a Hill Country night.
Running 11am-11pm and listing 84 acts on four stages, the racetrack concert site still comes off as largely inhospitable. As far back as Mayhem Fest one apocalyptic August in 2013 at the then-Austin360 Amphitheater, the terrain blew a cloud of dust and grit akin to festival staging in a rock quarry. A decade hasn’t improved conditions much, but the footprint for Besame Mucho proved largely brilliant.
(Read Raoul Hernandez's full review of the one-day festival.)
