A Trip to Austin to perform at Austin City Limits and Willie Nelsons Ranch

NOTE: This post was copied from the old Axel.me blog in Feb of 2018..

I suppose I'm in the habit now of taking a lot of photos. Ever since I became a dad I am pretty shameless with my camera. Life is too short to not get good photos of the fun stuff. That being said, I was a little over-cautious taking photos of some the 'insider' stuff, like Tito's secret backstage area, that had a Prohibition vibe and massage chairs and free vodka drinks. I still got some photos but it was even bigger than it looks. I did get a bunch of shots at Willie's ranch, because they bussed in the visitors and then promptly bussed them out so we had the place to ourselves a bit more than at ACL which was totally insane with crowds of people. The whole photo album is on Google photos if you want to take a look. Below are the highlights.

A big shout-out to my buddy Shawn Pander, who called me up to sit in on his ACL gig because his main keyboard guy was in Italy.

Most of the buildings were put up in the 80's for a movie that Willie did. The story goes that he loved them all so much that he had the script changed so that they wouldn't have to be burned down at the end of the movie.

After 2 great sets at Luck Ranch we started getting ready for our show at Austin City Limits. We performed on the Tito stage, who I met briefly and seemed like a very cool guy. He certainly takes care of his employees and his performers and he is quite rightly a big deal in the Austin music and business community.

Tito of course has a killer backstage area set up for his artists and their friends, as well as his own entourage. It had a roaring 20's/prohibition vibe which was pretty cool.

You know it's a big stage when you have to shoot a panoramic just to see the whole thing. Note the lack of crowd at the beginning.