Valley native a key player in one of America’s largest, edgiest music festivals Classic Online TV Entertainment Zone

Feb 13

Valley native a key player in one of America’s largest, edgiest music festivals

TERRE HAUTE — Even for a little kid, the experience of watching iconic pop music acts haul in their equipment, set up and perform in your parents’ theater can make an impression.

Elliott Usrey was a 9-year-old when his folks opened a dinner theater at the historic Sherman House on the Sullivan town square. During the next four years, Reed and Twila Usrey brought in classic groups such as the Ink Spots, The Drifters, The Platters and Gary Lewis and the Playboys, among others. The youngster helped set tables, clean the dressing rooms, serve popcorn and drinks at the concession stand and meals to the performers, and study the sound crew. Sometimes, the singers hung around afterward and talked with the Usreys.

“Elliott was always around, and just sort of absorbed all of this,” Twila recalled, “apparently more than we thought.”

Live music still occupies a big place in Elliott Usrey’s life.

Fittingly, he now works for one of America’s largest, edgiest music festivals in a city that calls itself “the live music capital of the world.” At age 24, Usrey considers his job ideal — as the technical coordinator for the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas.

That event attracts more than 13,000 people in the music industry and thousands more music fans and celebrities for five days of trade shows by day and concerts by 2,000 up-and-coming bands in 90 different venues in downtown Austin by night.

“There’s just absolutely no way that it can be explained,” Usrey said of the event.

“It’s like watching the Indianapolis 500 on TV, and then actually being there,” he said, attempting a description. “It’s a whole different monster.”

The South By Southwest Music Festival marks its 25th anniversary this year, running from March 16 to 20. Three guys from the Austin Chronicle and a booking agent founded the festival in 1987, drawing a larger-than-expected crowd of 700 registrants. Since then, it’s spawned separately scheduled South By Southwest film and interactive festivals. Actor Bill Murray might be spotted tending bar at a local club. Legendary guitarist Pete Townshend might stroll down popular Sixth Street.

Usrey got his first taste of SXSW, as it’s known, last year, working as an intern from the Indiana State University music business program.

“The first time I went out those convention center doors and went down the street, I saw those massive amounts of people,” he recalled by telephone last week.

That internship presented Usrey with a big decision. In the home stretch of his senior year at ISU, he needed an internship to help him land a music industry job after graduation. Paid internships, especially in last spring’s job market, were hard to find. When an ISU alum already working for the South By Southwest Music Festival — James Shinault — called the music business department to see if any students were interested in an internship, unpaid, Usrey began thinking.

“I could go sell guitars [as an internship] and be paid, or get an incredible experience [at South By Southwest] and not be paid,” he said of his choice.

Usrey chose the incredible experience, and interned last spring in Austin, working under Shinault, who handles SXSW music festival staffing, production and booking. Usrey led a crew of 100 volunteers through the 2010 festival and returned home to Sullivan in time to walk through his ISU graduation ceremony. A couple months later, South By Southwest offered him a full-time, year-round job, and he accepted.

“After that internship was over, I knew this was the place I wanted to be,” Usrey said of Austin.

The capital city of Texas is home to 786,386 people. Music is central to its culture. The nation’s longest-running live music TV show, PBS’ “Austin City Limits,” is filmed on the University of Texas campus.

“The downtown area of Austin is littered with venues and clubs,” said Shinault, a 27-year-old who also became a SXSW staffer after serving as an intern from ISU.

“It’s not like the rest of Texas,” Twila Usrey said. “The city is very progressive, very Bohemian. You’ve got old hippies. You’ve got the Drag Rats [Austin’s panhandlers]. And it’s somewhat liberal.”

She clearly remembers dropping her Hoosier-born son off in central Texas to work for South By Southwest. “It wasn’t easy leaving him there, 1,100 miles away,” Twila said, “but he was in his element.”

Elliott knows live music from a variety of angles, including those beyond his parents’ former dinner theater shows and his ISU music business education.

After seeing his sister learn guitar, Elliott asked his parents for one, too, and wound up learning, quickly, to play bass guitar as an eighth-grader. Soon, he started singing, to his family’s surprise, in the Sullivan Junior High choir. By high school, Usrey was the lead singer in the band Situs, tutored by his cousin, Marc Rogers, a former Nashville session guitarist who will be inducted today in the 2011 Wabash Valley Musicians Hall of Fame.

Situs recorded a couple of well-received independent albums, and drew healthy crowds at Wabash Valley shows. “That was a lot of fun, and showed us the industry and what it was like for a [do-it-yourself] band,” Usrey said. After four years, he decided to leave the group to focus on his ISU courses and future plans.

Now, with South By Southwest, he’s working with bands trying to jump from regional notoriety to national recognition. Nearly 10,000 bands apply to perform at the festival, and only 2,000 make the cut. This year, the Terre Haute band Yearbook Committee earned a spot in the lineup, adding to the 2011 festival’s Wabash Valley flavor. (Along with Usrey and Shinault, the SXSW staff includes fellow ISU grad Meaghan Herrmann.)

A successful performance at SXSW can launch a band’s career. The White Stripes, for example, turned heads with their South By Southwest debut a decade ago. Bands “get here, and they just explode in the industry,” Usrey said.

His duties, in addition to his work as a technical liaison, include listening to demos by prospective South By Southwest performers, who come from countries across the globe and from a variety of musical genres. “He’s taken on a lot of responsibility for a first-year employee,” Shinault said of Usrey, “and he’s done a really good job with it.”

As the 2011 festival approaches, the schedule gets busier, with the staff now working six-day weeks, Shinault said.

Usrey has enjoyed the pace and setting, ever since his internship last spring. “I hit the ground running,” he said, “and I was surrounded by hundreds of people, all here for what we do.”

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