I was promised flat stretches of desert landscape. Not by anyone in particular, besides maybe cartoons I’d watched as a kid or something, or some jumbled memory I’d had of Texan friends from further west that I’d gone and associated with Austin. You fly in over this city and, as it turns out, there’s a lot of green. This is my first time in Texas and I’m realizing I must’ve held a bunch of misconceptions about what this place looked like, and I’m realizing I must’ve never even done a Google image search on Austin, which is bizarre to think about. It’s sort of nice to be surprised about what a place looks like in 2013.

As for the other things, the stuff actual people actually promised me about Austin and its tight-knit but open community and amazing food and creativity, those promises come to fruition. I’m introduced to the place by the driver Fun Fun Fun Fest sends to pick me up at the airport, a guy named Joey Cortez who’s also the guitarist in a metal band called the Pushmen. He’s a burly dude, with tattoos lining his arms, a big dark beard, and the sides of his head buzzed so he has a kind of bed-head salt-and-pepper pseudo-mohawk. After describing him to someone later that day, I’m told I’ve just described “all of the men in Austin,” which makes me think the place is basically Bushwick filtered through Sons of Anarchy. He’s known Graham Williams, the founder of Fun Fun Fun Fest, since they were teenagers, and goes way back with a lot of others involved in the Transmission Events family. He tells me stories of how they all met at punk and metal shows back in the ’90s, during youths spent in Houston and Austin and connected by a mutual devotion to an underground arts scene. “We were just a couple of weird kids back then,” he muses, trailing off without finishing the thought because he doesn’t have to. The rest is implied: Now look at it. It’s Austin. The other Brooklyn, right? As we pull into my hotel’s parking lot, he gestures across the highway to the festival grounds, from which we can already hear bands playing. Leaving out a handful of connecting thoughts in between, he offers up one more: “Not bad for someone who started out booking a few random house parties.”