terrylickona_acltv

James Brown!! And of course we tried to book him to (not enough $$$).

We're lucky because we're PBS so we can cry poor and say that we can't afford ANYTHING that they typically ask for in their riders. We do provide some basic backstage catering and liquid refreshments. No hookers or blow, though

It helps to have a major university with 50,000 students looking for entertainment, and a warm southern climate - that's for starters! Plus Austin is a very progressive city where people are into all kinds of different things and open to new and adventurous music.

It's a long list, but #1 is Bruce Springsteen...don't understand why he's never done it, but we keep trying - year after year after year. Others include Prince and Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and James Taylor. The "classic" artists seem to be the most difficult to pin down. Not sure why.

The second and last Stevie Ray Vaughan performance ranks as my favorite. He was at the top of his game, and it was one of his last performances ever on TV before he died in the helicopter crash. Others include Tom Waits, Ray Charles, B. B. King, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Esperanza Spalding, Merle Haggard, and the list goes on and on!

I think we realized that the show had "made it" in terms of its financial stability around the time of our 25th anniversary (with the launch of ACL Festival). In terms of talent, I think being able to book legendary artists like Ray Charles and B. B. King and Neil Young made it feel like we had been accepted by the artist community and music biz types.

We are digitizing our entire library (a very complicated, expensive and time-consuming task!). Our goal is to some day make everything accessible to anyone who wants to view a particular episode or song, but we still need to figure out how that would work. There are issues with licensing the music, and paying the musicians for any other usage besides PBS.