ACL FEST 2007

Back at the studio...

Show tapings for legendary PBS series have been hot tickets long before festival

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, September 14, 2007

Meanwhile, on the University of Texas campus, they're loading in amps and guitars, too.

It's Thursday morning. The reconstituted mid-'80s to mid-'90s pop band Crowded House is making its way to Austin from Atlanta for a taping of "Austin City Limits" at the KLRU-TV studios. On the eve of a weekend when tens of thousands of people will swarm Zilker Park daily to see some 130 acts — including, no coincidence, Crowded House — at the festival named for the much-venerated show, it's business as usual, albeit busier, at the more intimate venue where the brand began more than 30 years ago. They'll tape seven acts for the upcoming season over the next six days.

Before the night is over, the band — led by the good-humored Kiwi Neil Finn, who's written some of the catchiest and most maddeningly hummable odes to dread and melancholia ever — will serve up a bracing 90-minute set, about half old songs and half new, for a full house of 320 people lucky enough to get free tickets. And another episode of "ACL" will be in the can.

This is how it happens.

2 p.m.: The band is running late. Sound check was supposed to be at 1 p.m., followed by camera rehearsal. Now they'll combine the two. A camera operator passes the time doing his Rodney Dangerfield impression.

2:30:The band arrives and plugs in. Like most mortals, it appears rock stars have given up caring much about their appearance when they travel. Finn, almost 50 now but looking like a slightly grayer version of himself in Split Enz, the band he formed with his brother Tim, is wearing a black T-shirt and flip-flops and playing a gold Les Paul. There's tentative applause from the crew and hangers-on after each song.

The room hasn't changed much since the show first aired in 1976.

"It's essentially the same black box we've been in since the beginning," longtime producer Terry Lickona says. "It's like being in a time warp."

The fake Austin skyline, cobbled together out of plywood and Christmas lights, though not an original part of the set, is still there, and it still fools TV viewers into thinking the show is shot outside on the edge of the Hill Country. When "ACL" moves to the Block 21 development in a few years, an Austin skyline will still serve as the backdrop.

"We'll rebuild it," Lickona says. "This one wouldn't survive a move."

3:10 p.m.: They're rolling in kegs of Budweiser products — Anheuser-Busch being a "proud sponsor" of "ACL" and all — into the hallway outside the studios. Fans can grab a beer once they get off the sixth-floor elevator before heading inside. Lickona says that with free tickets and free beer, an "ACL" taping can be regarded as the cheapest date on campus.

This is one of the constants of "ACL." Another is its staff. With almost comically low turnover, the show has a wide and deep living institutional memory it will take with it, along with the old performance photos of Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Dixie Chicks to the new venue. This is Lickona's 30th year. Gary Menotti has been directing for 26 years and working the show for 32, having started as a 19-year-old sophomore.

"I've grown up around these people," Menotti says.

Audio director David Hough was here even earlier — a year before they shot the pilot that begat the series that begat the festival that begat the line of CDs and DVDs that begat the partnership with Waterloo Records that begat the "ACL"-Waterloo store that opened this week at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

"I used to say nobody would leave the show unless they died," Lickona says. "Unfortunately, over three decades, a few have."

3:25 p.m.:The rehearsal includes "Don't Dream it's Over," the huge international hit from the band's 1986 debut and the one song everyone knows tonight's crowd won't let them leave without playing. An addition to the four-man band, the bearded guy playing the acoustic guitar in back, is Liam Finn, Tim's son. The three- and four-part harmonies are gorgeous — there's little sign of road-weariness, although the band is two dates away from the end of its tour.

The band, Menotti and "ACL" staff go over a proposed set list. When showtime comes, Menotti, who's been studying a stack of Crowded House CDs, will attempt to tell the story of the music in visual terms from the control room, ordering camera operators into different places in the studio: "Neil's going to the keyboards. I need to show the continuity ... good work." At one point he will order a camera on "the acoustic guy."

"That's his son, you know."

"Yeah," Menotti will say, "I know."

They're shooting the show in high definition this season.

"Luckily most of the artists have been young so they don't care," Menotti says. "Sometimes the sweat really stands out."

When the show is done, Menotti will get what's called a quint split, a tape and DVD of the show from the five cameras' perspectives, from which he will edit the show with Lickona's and the band's input. There will, of course, be crowd reaction shots, although those shots won't necessarily be from the same show. Menotti sometimes runs short of crowd shots so he has to dig into the archives. This has led to more than one instance of viewers watching "ACL" on TV, seeing themselves in the crowd and saying, "Hey, I wasn't at that show." (Famously, the first time longtime fan Lyle Lovett played "ACL," they cut a crowd shot with Lovett seeming to be watching himself.)

After rehearsal, it's back to the hotel for the band while the light crew sets colors and otherwise fine-tunes the lighting palette. When the show airs in January, the room will look bigger, the fake vegetation less plastic, the people prettier.

Shortly after the band departs, a fire alarm goes off. Somebody is steam-ironing clothes. The steam is mistaken for smoke.

4:30 p.m.: A crowd of 25 or so fans already is lined up outside. Staff members and volunteers will start dispensing line numbers at 5 p.m. Fans have been known to camp out overnight. Lickona says, "We try not to encourage that."

7 p.m.:The band has been in makeup for 15 minutes or so when the studio opens and fans start filing in. Inside are Shane and Kim Macguire, he a soccer coach at St. Stephen's, she a photographer.

"You get bands that play in front of 50,000 people playing for 300," says Shane, 34. "It's incredible."

"It's just a great Austin thing to do," Kim says.

Behind them are Paulina Flores and Coleman Davis, interns at LatinWorks, the ad agency downtown. They're too young to remember much about the band's heyday and are mostly here because they scored free tickets.

"Do you have the playlist?" Davis asks. "Where's that 'hey now, hey now' song?"

(That would be "Don't Dream it's Over.")

Because the studio is small, "ACL" has long been known as the hottest ticket in town, frustrating visitors anxious to take part in something they've only seen on television. One of the lucky exceptions is Maggie Dixon of Edmond, Okla., who bought tickets to this weekend's festival when she saw that Crowded House was booked and managed to add on a ticket to Thursday's taping.

She's what you'd call a huge Neil Finn fan.

"It was a fabulous show," she will say after the 90-minute set. "He seemed really happy. Neil Finn is the only person I've taken the time to travel to see. I've seen him in New York and L.A. and Chicago — and Lawrence, Kansas. I'm not insane. ... I've seen him in a variety of venues. How could you beat the enthusiasm, the intimacy, the warmth of the crowd?"

8 p.m.:Lickona has been juggling duties all day: booking Austin's favorite comeback kid, Roky Erickson, for the current season's final taping, checking messages ("Lucinda (Williams) will not be at rehearsal but will have a stand-in") and, especially this week, enduring a barrage of ticket requests for the full schedule of tapings.

But now it's showtime. At the dot of eight, he gets on stage to applause and begins speaking into a microphone, only to have the crowd start yelling, "Can't hear you!" The stage monitors are working but the audio isn't. Then it is. He says:

"This is a show we never thought we'd have a chance to do. This is a night we've been waiting for, for a long time, so please make them feel welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, Crowded House."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603