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A Word from Alive Festival Coordinator Bill Graening
Sun., Jul. 16. 2006 11:18pm EDT
Karl from ApologetiX here.
Our fans all agree, if ONLY the leader of the festival would have SEEN the ApologetiX performance at the festival, they'd know what the audience really thought. For example, last year at  Cornerstone (first picture), our fans PESTERED them until they let us have a small, early time slot on a small, distant stage. But even though there was no one there before or after we played, the tent was jam packed during our set, with hundreds of people teeming out of the tent trying to peek in. Praise God! We got to play Cornerstone, and even if we never do again, we had a great time. They didn't invite us back. "If only the leaders had seen..."
Well, we played ALIVE fest a couple times several years ago, and then weren't invited back. "Gotta give everybody a try" or "Every year I have to break SOMEBODY'S heart" is what Bill Graening, Alive Fest coordinator, would always tell me when I bumped into him in Nashville.
This year, I sent him an enormously long email with photos of all the other festivals we're either playing, playing for the first time, or playing the mainstage for the first time -- complete with lots of pictures of ApologetiX fans at those performances. Bill took heed and invited us to come to Alive 06.
 If you were there, you might have noticed the commotion before we went on: We'd been told we were playing at noon and told all our fans that, and when we got there, they told us we were playing at 11. That's catastrophic, because we would have been DONE before some people would have arrived to see us. And those people might have made a day's drive to catch the show, or have flown in and/or got a hotel room. So I worked with the staff there, and helped them rearrange the schedule a little and it worked out so that we were still playing at noon and nobody missed the show. AND it was a great crowd! Our friends, family and fans piled into that tent and yelled and yelled. But what few knew, was that lurking in that crowd in cognito was none other than Bill Graening, the leader of Alive! Today I got this email:
Karl;
Thanks for coming to Alive 2006...
sorry about all the schedule mix-ups...that was my fault not my staff's–sorry.
But you all did great.
I heard you and loved it!
The crowd kept chanting, "mainstage...mainstage..." That was very cool!
We will chat!!
Give love to all your band!!
Bill
Thanks, Bill and we can't wait to come back! Mainstage or not!
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