Page Two

The phone rings. It is 6am in the morning, mid-March 1987. I am 36 years old. I'm still living like a graduate student, a bed, a chair, a homemade table for a desk, cinderblock-and-raw-board bookcases. Records are stacked in every direction, sprawling across the floor - it is 1987, before CDs. I'm sleeping in this wretched bed but not really sleeping, staring at the ceiling, tense. I answer the phone. "It begins in a few hours." It is Roland Swenson. It is the first day of the first South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival and no one has any idea at all what is to come.

I'm lying in bed dressed, waiting. I've met the woman I'm going to marry, my life is going to change, the Chronicle is eventually going to be successful (which neither seems likely nor is the issue at this time), SXSW is going to be a smash right out of the gate. We thought, hoped, dreamed that maybe 150-300 people would show up. SXSW '87 featured 200 bands and had 700 registrants. But lying there in that drab, cold, dark one-bedroom back-half of a house off of Reflector Alley near 37th Street, I have no idea. I am just cold and wired. "Yeah, I know." We both hang up.

It is the evening, a day before the third year. We are at the old offices on 27th Street. Now, I'm married, I live in a different house, I drive a new car (it's used, but new to me). We're standing outside staring at the sky, letting the night soak into our skin. We've been working non-stop for days, SXSW has grown large, quickly. This year there will be 400 bands and close to 1,400 registrants. We listen in the dark, hearing a sound we don't recognize. Staring into the night, glazed and dazed, drifting along, listening, we begin to recognize the sound. The dirty grumbling noise of hundreds of vans, packed with musicians and equipment, their headlights pointed to Austin, as they drive this night from all over the country to get here to play SXSW. We could hear their engines. We could smell their dreams and their excitement as they race down highways and bump along backroads, as they cruise through Texas' cities and small towns, stopping for strings and fast food. We're standing there on this balcony and suddenly we can see the near future, the next few days, the hundred of bands, the enormity of the dreams. We haven't slept in a long time and we haven't slept either well or very much in a longer time but there on the edge of the evening we can taste this thing that has become so big in our lives, this SXSW Music Conference.

The day after it is over, I awake at home to find my new used car gone. Not stolen, it turns out; the dealer had it on consignment and never paid the owner. It's been repossessed. My wife calls lawyers. We get the car back, it smells of hay and pot. A few weeks later at Liberty Lunch, I meet the people whose truck the dealer sold to get the money to pay me back. I don't know if they ever got their money. Later, the dealer tries to rob a bank.

It is March 11, 1994. In a few hours the very first South by Southwest Film and Interactive Conference and Festival is going to begin at the Hyatt. This is something Chronicle publisher Nick Barbaro and I have always wanted to do, put on an Austin film festival, a festival full of new films of vision and intelligence. We've lucked into Nancy Schafer who does all the work while Nick and I sit around having good ideas. Managing director Roland Swenson and director Louis Jay Meyers are very involved in this new venture (Meyers has since left SXSW). Somewhere in the house, a three-year-old sleeps. I am awake and want to call Nancy and tell her that it begins today. It is 6am. I don't call. I have no idea what to expect.

It is the eve of SXSW `98. There is a seven-year-old off at school, there is a 17-year-old (The Austin Chronicle), a 16-year-old (the Austin Music Awards), a 12-year-old (SXSW Music) and the 5-year-old twins (SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive) and I have precious little control over any of them. At least I know what to expect: The next days will be flooded with music, media, films, ideas, people, talk, and food. Everything will move in slow motion until it begins, then we will tumble into it and before we know it we will be out the other side with a surrealistic memory of the explosive eloquence of American popular culture.

Yesterday, on the cusp of SXSW, I walked by the Stop and Shop, which was fine. Later, I drove by the Stop and Shop, which was much better because I had my radio on. I was hearing the music and I was listening to all the songs of SXSW, all the songs over all the years, all the songs whether they were music, or interactive, or films, or words, or just dreams. They all came out the radio, driving by that supermarket. I was reminded that though SXSW had grown and changed and was bigger, it was still about the same thing it had always been about - creative people in control of their own work. It was great music, great films, great webpages, great games, but it wasn't just about the art; it was also about the business. Not glorified power seeking or greedy moneymaking but the skills and knowledge to take care of yourself and your work. Then I stopped thinking and listened to the music, it was like listening to those vans a decade before, a sweet strong song that was as much sound and passion as it was music.

I drove by the Stop and Shop the other morning, just like I used to - I must have been going a thousand miles an hour, with the radio on. Radio on!

Welcome to SXSW `98. Contrary to what the daily paper would like you to think, these events are sponsored by The Austin Chronicle, which couldn't be prouder. It's going to be a hell of a party and a hell of a year. You are all invited.