Third and Fourth SXSW days (Thursday and Friday)
(Please excuse any typos: this was all done on my phone! Also, pictures'll come later.) Thursday was B-Day; the Boss was in the house. Our call time was at 8 am, so my dad dragged my tired self out of bed and threw me into the shower by 6:10. By the time I was leaving, my dad decided he wanted to come with me (probably partly since it was still dark out and it's a half hour walk, too). Right outside of our hotel, still on Red River, there was already a huge gaggle of teenagers lined up for a band. As we walked towards them, one of them separated from the crowd to cross the street, and when he passed, he casually held out a bag of gummies. "Fruit snacks?" he offered while passing by. We declined, giggling, but my dad extracted from him that all the kids were waiting for Asking Alexandria.
Out of all the rooms, Bruce asked for the least; without really knowing anything about him besides his superstar "The Boss" status, I was extremely charmed to find him to be so low maintenance.
I helped Lana a lot, as we set up for the dressing rooms. In the midst of the busyness of running errands for the bands from her, Elle sent me to the convention center a few blocks away, to say hi to James and get a yellow communications badge for her that just tells her all the important people's contact info. It was a nice walk, and the day was perfect for being outside. I went into the Badge Hall, where James said I could find him, and was blown over by the amount of people buying tickets for Bruce's show. James was standing at the side of one of the lines, and we got in a few minutes of conversation about how the jobs have been going for both us while we waited for the badge. On the way back, I was texting Elle that I had the badge, and she was more concerned with whether I got to say hi and chat with James. :) When I came back, Elle went into a meeting and I had some down time. After only a short while though, I was back on my feet and working with Lana again. She had to leave around 5 to go to her other job, and I ran various errands for the East Street band and singers. During a slow point, I was standing in the hospitality closet, sort of zoning out and waiting for Oona to give me orders. I had passed an accordion player who was practicing in the hallway and said good afternoon to him, and since the door was open, I was listening to the pretty little melody he was playing. Someone joined him with a guitar and a voice a few moments later, and I enjoyed standing and listening for a little while. I left the room to go check something on the floor in the house for second, and when I came back, they are both still standing in the hallway working out chords. The result was this text to Ema a few minutes later: "Definitely just walked into a hallway where Bruce Springsteen was standing there singing and playing guitar, before smiling at me and stopping. It seriously took me looking up a picture of him on google to figure out who that was... " ...And then I felt dumb. I printed some run lists and input lists for Elle, and spent a ton of time in Billy's office printing Bomba Estereo's (a band for the next day) eleven page input list and making five copies of it. Elle gave me my first, purple "Crew" sticker to get me backstage, and when the shows started, things slowed down significantly. There were little odds and ends to do, like take a case of Miller Lite into Low Anthem and Alejandro's small, shared, makeshift drape dressing room, and refilling the All Day Beverage fridge. By the time Bruce's set rolled around and the thirty minute loading time for his equipment was almost over, the pace picked back up again when the tour manager realized no one had printed the bajillion of set lists they needed. Billy made me sprint upstairs and grab a giant stack of paper to fill the empty printer. They started printing the set lists in bulk. Billy told Sarah and I that he had a special place we could sit and watch the show from that we'd enjoy, and once we'd gotten the O-K from Elle that I didn't have any more tasks to do, Billy led us onto the floor. He took us to the light and sound board, just behind the crowd on the floor, but elevated about six feet in the air, and found us some chairs to sit ourselves in. Bruce was about half an hour late getting on stage, and I passed the time watching the crowd get routier and routier and the lights guy get his instructions in order. Bruce came out on stage, and Sarah and I sat in a moment of bewildered confusion as the crowd began to boo, long and resonating. It went on for a little too long before Sarah and I realized something was a little off about it; suddenly, the guys directly behind us started up anew, and we heard a distinctive sibilant sound at the end. Simultaneously, we looked at each other and said "They're saying 'Bruce!'", and we giggled. They started the set with the house lights up and Bruce and the E. St ensemble standing, instruments down, at the edge of the stage and singing I Ain't Got No Home acapella. For the next three hours, I sat mesmerized by the Boss himself. I've figured something out about concerts: As much as I want to remember the show through videos and pictures and the merch, I always end up regretting how much time I spend behind my camera and how /little/ time I savor actually feeling and living the music. On Bruce's night, it wasn't a choice; I was immobilized and sat drinking it all in. Bruce can command a stage and capture an audience like no one I've ever seen before. I established that Bruce Springsteen is a religious experience in and of himself. I was in love by the third song, and straight up blown away by the end, and had no idea how three hours had already zoomed by. I thanked Billy sincerely for the seat and walked in a daze back to back stage, where Elle told me to take a hike (sweetly, of course ;)). I stood next to Tom Morello for a minute from Rage Against the Machine, who'd played guitar on stage with Bruce for a good 10 songs, and we watched Bruce work the room backstage. Good guys. Turned out my parents were awfully close, so I left the venue with a smile on my lips and the stories already falling out of my mouth, and we went into a snazzy bar called Halycon. I yammered about my night and ate a fantastic panini, and we enjoyed the DJ and his live violinist, mixing and spinning melodies into each other. My dad bought me a peanut butter hot chocolate that I savored while we mosied home, excited at the prospect of warm beds. 8 am the next morning rolled around far to quickly for my taste, but by 9:10 I was awake and on my way through the Austin morning. Elle text me right when I arrived at Austin Java saying she'd be a little late, so I took a few extra minutes with my Farmer's French Toast. One of the best things about people watching is seeing how people watch other people. There was a young guy sitting outside of the window, sizing up every guy and girl that walked by. I had fun guessing who he'd care about and who he wouldn't until Elle text me, asking me to be on the dock in 10 minutes with a loading cart, so I hurried my way on over there. I was a little weirded out to find a practically empty-of-crew-and-interns venue when I walked in, and so was Elle when I met her downstairs a few minutes later. She'd had sort of a rough morning, but was only a little less sunny than normal. My first order of the day was to tidy up and label Magnetic Fields' music stands, and after that it was a matter of grinning to myself as Juanes' crew yelled to each other in rapid Spanish. To my great surprise, the tour manager approached me and asked a question in perfect, barely accented English; I should've assumed they'd all be fluently /at least/ bilingual. It turned out about half of our own crew spoke good Spanish, too. You learn something new every day, I suppose. After I met the tour manager, Elle had me follow her as she took him on a walk-through, and I wrote down all the dressing room assignments. The next task was to go up and make dressing room signs without the template, so Elle told me to just throw a googled SXSW logo on there to make it look official. I spent a lot of time making the signs because of our 4 dressing rooms and draped room, too. I was rather proud of hanging them up by the time I was done. Elle told me she liked them later, too. It was time to do the hospitality runs after that, although that required a lot of waiting because Zack was out buying all the foods. When he got back, it turned out the $500 Oona had given him was $40 short of what he needed, so we took all the bought groceries from him and he drove back to Whole Foods to buy the rest. While we waited, a man and a woman who said they worked with C3 (whoever that is) showed up hauling backpacks full of stuff. I watched, mildly confused, as Oona practically buzzed in her chair, full of excitement, when they said they were there to give out shots of B12 (by shot I do mean needle, of course). Elle came over, jovial as usual, and made me get a shot, too. It only stung a little, but I felt the effects almost immediately. For those of you who don't know what B12 is, it's a vitamin that's like a super power boost, like eating a huge, fantastically nutritious meal. I was a bouncing psycho for awhile, to say the least. It took quite a stretch of time to get all of the dressing rooms set up. After I'd walked one of Juanes' band members to his dressing room with barely concealed stars in my eyes, I had to walk past their room several times because of how much stuff I needed to move from the hospitality closet and into War on Drugs and Magnetic Fields' rooms. Finally, another band member stepped out and introduced himself, asking my name so that he could know the girl who'd zoomed back and forth a few times. For some reason, I threw in that I spoke Spanish, and off he went. Our entire conversation was in Spanish then, besides a few sentences he tossed out randomly in english. Turns out Richard (Bravo, bongo player) is a professor at the University of Miami and has an adorable eleven year old daughter (Allana, I believe). He loves to travel, he told me, and is from Venezuela. We talked about my future for a little while and how I had learned Spanish, and then I told him I should finish doing my job. He promised to come find me, in either language, if they needed anything, and I bounced away giddily. Sarah and I had a few spare moments between everything, and even though I had used most of my free time that day reading Maya Angelou's "Heart of a Woman", we took a second to watch Bomba Estereo's soundcheck. I decided they could be as high maintenance as they wanted to when I heard how rocking there music was. Not too long after that-- during Juanes' soundcheck, actually--, I was sitting and reading and pretending not to fangirl over Juanes, and Elle came over and told me that I should go wander around Austin because they wouldn't need me until doors opened. I text my parents and we figured that they there'd be a reasonable meeting place between us, and once we'd found each other, we stopped at my dad's favorite crepe's place and ate. I had a delicious salmon crepe and strong black coffee. Nice mix. We laughed when we realized out waitress had left the restaurant for the day, and we spent the rest of our time together meandering around Austin and talking about everything under the sun, but mostly all of the everythings in Austin and the venue I worked at. 7:00 pm rolled around leisurely, I gave the Señor and M a hug, and ran inside to Elle. There was a flurry of motion, but not a ton for Sarah and I to do still. I hauled one small cooler of ice to War On Drugs room, greeted with a chorus of Aussie-accented cheers for the ice lady, and did a beer count for Elle at one point, but otherwise, there was a lot of waiting around. Elle did take me down to the box office with her though, just as doors were opening. Several people approached me asking questions about the bands playing that night and what wrist bands or badges could get them in. It was interesting, standing on the other side of the roped off area at a concert this time, watching people stare at my backstage pass and Elle's mountain of badges around her neck. I was texting my parents on the side to let them know their badges alone would get them into the show just fine, and Elle and I returned to backstage after a good 20 minutes feeling out the crowd coming in. I had put my professional face back on in light of my discovery that Juanes makes me a crazy fangirl; it quickly disintegrated when I got backstage and there was nothing to do again, and Sarah and I ended up playing hour long games of hangman and pictionary. By the time it was 10:30, I had too many pages of my notebook filled with weird faces, half drawn pieces of frying bacon, and random phrases like 'fanny pack' and 'tuna'. Bomba Estereo was on, and Elle told me to go enjoy some time with my parents, so we texted and found each other in the crowd and they came to join me on the floor. Imagine my surprise when I saw a compact little Spanish gal running around, completely owning the stage and spitting raps into her microphone, considering I had seen only men in Bomba Estereo's room all day. There or not, she knew what she was doing, and though I only understood about 50% of the words, we jammed with it. My dad danced up behind an unassuming, unmoving Asian man, and Sarah came up to us yelling about some rumor that Nas would have guest stars Eminem and 50 Cent the next night, but a rumor it remained. When Bomba's set was over, I felt a little paranoid that I was missing a few instructions from Elle; I was only greeted with her big Bambi smile, shooing me off to go watch Juanes' set again, to which I happily bounced back to the floor. On my way, I passed by his and his band's dressing rooms, and someone was leading the man himself to the stage. I kept my game face on, even as he caught my eye and gave me a smirk, but when I had passed by with a polite smile of my own, I'm pretty sure I squeaked. So much for staying calm. I only have two of Juanes', like, 7 albums, and I've only ever listened intensively to one. He played Ámame, La Camisa Negra, Yerbatero, and tons of others I'd never heard before. He's wonderful live, and he plays with the crowd well. My parents seemed to enjoy him to and my dad said he was impressed at how tight their band was. Our schedule backstage said he was supposed to play from 11:30 to 12:30, but I was still a little surprised when they were walking off stage on time. I told my parents to wait while I found out if I was needed, and sought out Elle on left side-stage. She seriously was the sweetest thing. She asked if I'd enjoyed the show, if my parents had, and made me give her a hug because, she said, I'd been super helpful all day. Out of nowhere, a hand grabbed my shoulder and a deep voice said in my ear, "¿Te gustó? Did you enjoy it?" It was Richard, my Spanish friend from earlier, and we chatted briefly about their set. Elle quickly got my attention again, and softly said, "Do you maybe want to take a picture with Juanes?" She laughed at my resulting expression. She took me through backstage and introduced me to Juanes' (what I assumed was) tour manager, who was completely chill about letting me into his room for a picture. Elle and I squealed at each other all down the hallway, but turned into smiley professionals when we entered his dressing room again. When his friend snagged him by the arm and said "Juan, this is Elle, the stage manager," and Juanes answered in decent English. Elle grabbed me and pushed me forward slightly, introducing me as her personal assistant. I managed a meek, "Hi, I'm Kayla!" and he shook my hand, saying he thought it was a lovely name. We then posed for a picture, said our goodbyes and good-to-meet-yous, and off we went. Elle was already posting the picture to Instagram and sending me the link. We hugged hard again before she sent me on my way. Michele and my dad were smiling as big as I was when I came out, and we wandered around until we found some good street pizza. I chattered and they chattered and we ate food and watched people and the day was pretty fantastic all together. I'd felt a little guilty earlier on in the day; my parents had forgone an awesome band we all love, that they'd waited an hour or more for, to come eat with me. Sweet parents, I'm lucky to have.