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year we have to have a wish list, "We ought to see if Tom Waits wants to play," and I
said, "Oh, Tom Waits doesn't have any reason to play SXSW. I don't see why he
would be at SXSW, he doesn't have a record blah blah blah blah," I just didn't
see it happening. And Tom Waits' manager called like two weeks out and said,
"Tom wants to play, but he'll only play a theatre, and blah blah blah." So
everybody really worked hard. My favorite thing was, the thing that really sticks
in my mind, the most telling detail, because Tom was really detail oriented and
his manager was also, and his manager was excellent. He'd just gotten contact
lenses, so I got a call a day or two before the show and he said, "Brent can you
get me the name of an optometrist in town who can put Tom's contacts in and
take them out?"
What the hell?
A friend of mine who's also a terrific guitarist in Prescott Curlywolf, Ron Byrd,
he's a doctor, and Ron stays on call during SXSW for musician's concerns. So I
called Ron up and he went down and his sole responsibility was putting Tom's
contacts in and taking them out.
I got contacts when I was 9 - he's a grown man. That's ridiculous. how did you
deal with everyone trying to get tickets to that show?
People that had wristbands could line up, and then we gave them to registrants, and I'd miscounted, I'll admit it. We ended up with a few more tickets than we
thought we had. So what we did with the tickets that were left over - which ,
maybe if I'd been better with math, I'd have a different life anyway - but if I'd
counted right, they wouldn't have been left over. We took them down to the
Paramount the night of the show, and scalpers of course had laid hands on a
number of them, so anybody that approached a scalper, we'd walk up and give
them to them. And did that to the point where every single person that showed up there and hung out long enough that really wanted to see the show, and there
were people that were just huge Tom Waits fans that stayed there all night, got a
ticket. Because we had a few left.
Because you couldn't count!
As a consequence, obviously we had rabid fans in there, and it was a great show.
And I watched that show, I'll confess. I turned off my radio and watched that
show. I was not gonna miss Tom waits.
How did this Bloodshot thing come to be such an integral part of the festival?
We're running a Bloodshot piece our friend Ian wrote in this issue.
I can't even remember when the Bloodshot stuff started. It's been many years
now, I'm gonna say maybe 6 years now. Early on it was real simple, they were
just cool bands. The fact that they were on Bloodshot didn't necessarily mean
anything to us at the time. At SXSW the fit's perfect. The kind of bands that
Bloodshot does are kind of the bands that people at SXSW expect to see, with
the idea of Austin being this rootsy, countryish place with rock'n'roll too. And
Alejandro, who I learned a whole lot about music from - the True Believers,
when I was really starting to work in music, if they weren't the coolest band,

15
Spring 2001