Dateline: Friday, July 18, 1997.
Carpool to the SF show with Mike Chen, Kris Martin, "Cousin Kim", and "Kim from Minneapolis". We hand out flyers to everyone in line and as they walk in the door. We end up getting pretty close to the front - about 3 people back (it was general admission). When Tim sees me, he yells "JAV!" We had met the week before in Santa Barbara. He yells "JAV!" again later in the performance.
The show was pretty great, like all their shows. Michael ordered walked to the bar and ordered drinks, and freaked everyone out when he climbed a huge tower of speakers. Near the end of the performance, I noticed that someone had stolen my backstage pass off of me. Fortunately I met a friend of Michael's nephew in Santa Barbara and he recoginzed me and have me his backstage pass (he had a VIP pass). I saw Tim backstage. We did the usual hellos. I told him that I had an envelope for Garry with PowerBook 3400 specs (I had talked to Garry in Santa Barbara, and he told me his existing PowerBook had been smushed). So Tim takes me back to the very exclusive dressing room area to meet Garry. He also tells me to take lots of pictures for the web sites.
So I talk with Garry and do the Apple sales thing (Look! Stereo audio input and output jacks, 12x CD ROM, 240 MHz!). I then go into one of the dressing rooms and Garry introduces me to Jon. I spend some time talking "Macintosh" to Jon (he has a pile in his house), and then take some interesting photos of him. I then start trying to take some pictures of Garry. There's little light, so we play "take pictures by the candles" game. At one point we break out in song, "Don't burn your hand! Cause I don't have any bandages for ya!" (sung to Don't Lose Your Head). I also get some candle pictures of Shelley the background singer and then Shelley takes a picture of Garry and I together (holding candles).
I then go to another dressing room. There can be found Kirk, Michael, JD the background singer, Nick Egan (director of Searching video and others) and other people. The crowd is really impressed by my digital camera. Everyone is posing. I get some good pictures of Michael. Michael also tries out the camera and tries to take some photos of Kirk. This is the first time that I really meet Michael. After taking a bunch of photos of Michael, he says to me "Thanks, man." And I say, "What for?" And he says, "Just for being you." I tell him, "I'm sorry, I've got to do the fan thing and say that you should play 'To Look At You'. You haven't played it for a long time." There was a bit of silence, and I said, "Sorry for ruining such a good time by mixing business and pleasure." Then he said, "No, no, there are a lot of songs we should be playing."
So shortly later I excuse myself since my fellow concert goers were still outside in backstage. Apparently while I was in the dressing room area, Tim had been real nice and talked to them, signed their T-shirts, and brought them beers. Kim from Minneapolis still has hers - the Tim Beer!
Dateline: Saturday, July 19, 1997.
We all go to the Saturday show as well, except for Mike Chen who couldn't make it. Tim had offered him tickets the night before, but Mike had made some other plans with non-INXS-fan friends. The show was almost better - we were all in the front row except me who was behind Kim from Minneapolis doing crowd control (Kim escaped before encore the night before because of excessive squashing). Kris and Kim from Minneapolis wanted it to be known that Kim held Michael's hand while Kris "touched" him. Michael did a couple of the same things. This time he climbed up the the balcony, and he climbed on the speakers again. During the usual "stop and wait for encore" bit, Michael was stuck on top of the speakers, so they didn't do the little rest and kept on playing.
On the way to backstage after the show, I met up with Mary Woods. She said that she was looking for me before the show, and Kirk had said that he wanted me to be taking pictures of him (from the side of the stage I guess) while the band performed. Unfortunately we couldn't get together in time. We then went backstage again (I didn't put on my backstage pass until the end). Only Kirk came out backstage, and the band left the building soon afterwards. We learned of a party the band may be going to, so we went there. They didn't show up. I called the hotel and got Kirk's room, but he wasn't in it. So we then went to the hotel where they were staying, and found the band in the lounge. Kim from Minneapolis got her t-shirt signed by Michael, and also got a poster signed for Amy Thompson (thanks Kim!). Kris, Kim, and I chatted with Michael for a while. Michael seemed amazed by the t-shirt I was wearing - I had made a t-shirt of the fan club membership card I had from the old Phoenix fan club. While there I also got my picture with JD the backup singer.
Before we left, Mary Woods said that she got an interview with Andrew set up for the next day, and invited Kris to do it since Kris is a journalist and writer.
Dateline: Sunday, July 20, 1997.
We go over to Mary Woods place and Kris gets to do a 45 minute telephone interview with Andrew. She does a good job, and sticks to real "it's all about the music" topics. Mary finds out where the Searching video shoot is, but unfortunately she can only take me along. It's in some warehouse in San Francisco. So we go there. I meet a bunch of the guys again: Andrew, Kirk, Tim. When we go inside, I meet Jon again. Jon has a new digital video camera, and he asks me to video tape the video shoot for him, but "only if it's OK with you." Of course I happily agree. So Mary and I are covering the entire video shoot, swapping between Jon's video camera, my digital camera, and Kris's conventional camera. The video also features the tour background singers, and Lara, the album model.
After the video shoot, one of the crew gives Mary and I each a pair of drum sticks that Jon used during the filming. This is good since I'm a real avid air-drummer. Mary also had a 45 of We Are The Vegetables. Kirk and I played, "name the guys on the cover". They looked a lot different way back then (was it 1979?).
Dateline: Monday, July 21, 1997.
I get 2 messages on my voicemail at work from Tim. I'm able to call him back, but when I call him he was in his hotel room sleeping (sorry Tim!).