Stages

I have an odd hobby. I'm a stage sampler.

Using tactics that can be described between sneaky and blatant, I find my way onto performance stages.

It's not simply some fantasy/hero worship. I've had official access to many stages and during The Lost Years when I helped manage some performers, I stood on stages with various performers to argue not over who went before an audience in what order, but who conducted sound check in what order. I understand stage pettiness.

And although I've been on stages with thousands of people out front and gazed upon the adoring throngs, I'm not so enamored with that either. To me, I guess it's like a history lesson.

I look from blank stages out onto the audience site and try to remember the vision for when I'm on the other side. I trace backstage to dressing rooms and consider the ingress and egress of musicians. I look closely at the backdrop and note the vast difference between the flimsiness you see in immediacy and the falsity from an audience. I consider the floor and review whatever is in my memory of the footsteps and perspiration of performers I know have worked and played in that spot.

Some of those stages are ones anyone can access, like Gruene Hall and Luckenbach. Although I was lucky enough at Luckenbach to find a posted set list from the previous night's Pat Green show, which I stole.

Some just take the right timing, like the Austin Music Hall and La Zona Rosa. Although those were as much fun for the ragged room/nasty couch backstages into which I sneaked.

Some are just pure luck and timing, like The Erwin Center when I walked in the wrong door at the right time.

But without doubt, my favorite is Austin City Limits. I was in the building on a Saturday morning to do a public television show as an alleged watcher of the economy. Like lots of television and movies, it was a bunch of hurry up and wait. So I wandered. And in an adjacent studio, I got into ACL.

The famous backdrop and the corridor through which so many unbelievable performers had passed to applause growing in their ears. The simplicity of it all. The boards that had supported a score of names I reviewed in my mind. And the view all those people had of the simple bleachers in front of them.

I'm glad I squeezed that one in. As we speak, a new studio is being constructed for ACL in downtown Austin, ensuring it will be engulfed in the shadow of all the condo buildings that are so not Austin it makes the famous ACL backdrop have to be either misrepresentative or pointless. I always laugh at venues which move and carry the stage itself or a piece to the new spot. It's kind of like carrying around a lock of a child's hair in your pocket. It's not the smile or scent or complete package that creates the whole, it's a false sense of connection.

So I get to carry all those complete stages in my mind's eye, especially ACL. What's next, Madison Square Garden?