Just back from the annual MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. This year marked Berklee’s fifth MacWorld appearance and third in San Francisco. We’re invited out by the show organizers to do music-related presentations on the convention floor, setting up under the banner “Dream Studios: Making Music with the Mac.” A total of seven Berklee people were on hand performing various tasks. Mike Carerra, Bill D’Agostino and I were primarily responsible for setting up and manning our exhibit area. Mike is the main presenter, handling the duties for two, one hour-plus demonstrations each day.
Monday was setup day. We spent most of the day getting all of the gear unpacked and setup on and around the stage. This year the Dream Studio pavilion was on the convention floor in Moscone West, downstairs from where the keynote would be held on Tuesday. The convention floor in West centered around music, gaming, and digital imaging and included a podcast stage and a training area.
Late Monday night we headed out to the North Beach area of the city for something to eat. On the way back there was some commotion on the sidewalk behind us as two people on Segway’s were making their way down the hill. As they got closer, I heard Mike say “How you doing, Mr. Wozniak?” Yup. THAT Steve Wozniak. He continued by and I also said hello; both greetings earned a polite “very good, thank you” (or something like that) and he and his companion continued their way down the hill. I tried to get a quick movie on the Treo, but it didn’t come out all that great; it’s got kind of an “X-Files”/Loch Ness monster quailty to it.
Tuesday morning we joined several thousand other folks for the show kickoff: Steve Jobs keynote address. Some people started to wait in line almost a full day before the keynote and by 8 a.m. the line was already snaked through the convention floor, out the side door, down one side of the convention center and then around the length of the front of the building. The keynote went well, with the introduction of an updated AppleTV and iTunes movie rentals and the unveiling of the ultra-thin MacBook Air.
After the keynote, we were back at the booth. Mike kicked off the day with the Dream Studios presentation (”what you need and what to get,” as they put it on the signage). Tony Marvuglio followed with an hour on using the Mac with the guitar and Mike finished off the day with the “putting it all together” demonstration, where he built the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believing” one instrument track at a time. Bill jumps in on that presentation, giving a virtual drums demo and then playing the “Don’t Stop” drum track. Each presentation drew dozens of people to the booth, with folks filling the seats and standing in the aisles to listen in.
That night, the MacWorld folks hosted a party not too far from the convention center with the band Devo headlining. The crowd was mostly made up of covention attendess, many in red plastic Devo flower pot hats, but there was a strong contingent of diehard fans of the band. Mike, Bill and I found ourselves a spot on the lower level of the floor and at one point were about five people back from the stage. The band tore through an hour-long set that included the iconic “Whip It” and “Jocko Homo” (Are we not men? We are D-E-V-O).
After our demonstrations wrapped up on Wednesday, we headed over to the south hall to a Harman International invitation-only event. (Harman was the main sponsor of the Berklee booth this year.) Harman was set up In a small room at the end of a corridor off the main convention floor. Inside, 80s rockers Jack Blades (Night Ranger) and Tommy Shaw (Styx) were performing a live acoustic set. Rather than setup amps and speakers, Harman piped the whole performance out via wireless AKG headphones. The room was jammed with about 40 headphone wearing folks, some spilling out into the hallway. The setlist featured some classic rock staples and included “Time Of The Season,” “Lucky Man,” “I Am A Rock,” and “High Enough,” which the pair wrote with Ted Nugent during their time together in Damn Yankees. After Shaw sang Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” Blades explained that drummer Kelly Keagy’s original lyrics referred to his sister, Christy. After Keagy played the song for the band the first time, they convinced him to change the lyrics from “Christy” to “Christian.” Blades said that the song has been interepted a lot of different ways over the years, including one woman at a grocery checkout line in Minnesota who asked if the song was about a drug dealing nun.
By mid-week we managed to find a few free moments to check out the rest of the show, most notably the areas in the other hall. The convention floor in Moscone South was, as usual, dominated by the Apple booth at its center. Dozens of the new MacBook Air laptops were on display and convention goers queued two and three deep to get their hands on them. (A contrast to last year when two sole iPhones twirled inside of guarded glass pillars, out of the reach and touch of the drooling masses.) Apple has a ton of employees on the show floor: each demo computer has an Apple employee standing next to it to answer questions. At the same time, they have stages and seating areas where live Leopard and other software demonstrations are going on all day.
With the show wrapped up on Friday, we had the weekend to explore the city. Saturday afternoon we made the trip out to Alcatraz and did the self-guided audio tour. On the boat on the way back from Alcatraz we ran into long-time Mac enthusiast and author, Andy Ihnaktho. We chatted him up about the show, the keynote, the iPhone and other Mac/geek related topics. (Andy has a great set of annotated photos he took of his personal tour of Alcatraz over at his Flickr site.)
Later that night we made a return trip to the restaurant Tres Agaves, which is co-owned by rocker Sammy Hagar. It’s an authentic Mexican restaurant featuring a full tequila bar. And it’s not done up like a Planet Hollywood or a Hard Rock Cafe. You wouldn’t know that Sammy Hagar had anything to do with it: no guitars on the wall or other rock memorabilia in site. Just great food and kick-ass margaritas.
Sunday the three of us made the early trek out to a sports bar to check out the Patriots-San Diego game. The three-oclock Foxborough start translated into a noon start in San Francisco. It’s a little weird ordering breakfast 20 minutes before kickoff. The game was good for the few Patriots fans in the bar (me, Mike and about five other people), but the rest of the crowd was cheering on San Diego.
That night we headed back to North Beach for dinner and then made a stop at the Beat Museum. The museum chronicled the Beat writers (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, et al.) and traced their rise through the 50s and 60s. The museum exhibits covered most of the writers, with much of the space devoted to Kerouac and Ginsburg. The first exhibit features Neal Cassady who was the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s “On The Road” and later drove Ken Kensey’s bus as it crisscrossed the country (as documented in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”). Cassady, as the museum guide explained, can be noted for his appearance at the dawn of the Beats and bridging the gap with the counter-culture generation that followed. The museum’s displays (filling four rooms on two floors) are stocked with original manuscipts, early editions and newspaper and magazines chronicling the authors. The museum store had a ton of well-curated books (as you would imagine), dozens of original prints and photographs, t-shirts, post cards, DVDs and more.
And with that, we wrapped up our stay. All in all, a good week to be in San Francisco.
(If you’re on a Mac and want to see some pictures from our week in San Francisco, point your OS X Screen Saver to my .Mac account “jvalerio”. There’s about 90 slides there, hitting all of the major events of the week.)
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