I am perched at the end of the bar, my notebook and pen resting in front of me, while I wait for Jesse Elliot, of These United States, to finish his game of pool. He’d offered to start the interview when I first arrived at Al’s Bar, but asked if I’d mind if he finished a “very important game.” I can see the pool table from the bar, and I’m able to look on as Jesse plays Cutthroat against one of the bartenders and a little person. This is the nature of Boomslang. There are no boundaries between fans and bands, schedules are loosely followed and it’s impossible to predict what you are going to see next.

The day before my interview with Jesse, I found myself driving through a part of Lexington in which I’d never been; an industrial center surrounded by construction equipment and mounds of gravel. Eventually, I would find Buster’s buried amongst the surrounding warehouses, thanks in large part to the hectic workers loading and unloading their gear. It was late afternoon, but thick clouds and rain created the illusion of nightfall.

I had arrived two hours before the shows were scheduled to begin on Friday, but the downtime was not short of entertainment. With the roar of a sound-check blaring behind me, I sat at a giant spool of a table and nursed a ginger ale, while WRFL volunteers raced around wrapping up last minute projects.

Eventually the pieces seemed to fall into place, albeit an hour behind schedule, and Atlas Sound took the main stage at Buster’s.

As Atlas Sound, or Bradford Cox, stomped away at his foot pedal, layering acoustic loops atop one another, the crowd was motionless, except of course the twenty-something man in front of me who pulled a tape deck from his satchel and plugged it into an outlet at the base of a nearby pillar. He was making a bootleg, a practice not uncommon at events such as this. Later that evening I watched as he threw a suitcase on the ground and opened it, proudly showcasing his hundreds of bootleg tapes to a group of onlookers.

Atlas Sound seemed to notice the crowd’s stoicism as well. While he unsuccessfully attempted to tune his guitar, he looked up to the small crowd and expressed his displeasure.

“I can’t read you guys at all. You’re like a f***ing 1987 issue of ‘The Economist.’ “

It was a trend that would continue throughout the festival, as crowds seemed to study the music, unable to express their enjoyment until it was over, at which point they would roar into applause.

When I got home that night, my ears were ringing and my head was pounding. Event coordinator Saraya Brewer had told me, “never a dull moment.” She wasn’t lying.

Saturday afternoon, after a 20 minute search for a parking spot, I arrived at the Boomslang Carnival held in the parking lot next to Buster’s. Swimming through the sea of burlesque girls and sideshow acts, I made my way to the stage to watch a carnival-themed fashion show. I was interrupted by a call from Kyle Hunt of the Black Angels informing me they’d just gotten in to town and our interview may be a little behind schedule. As I was about to hang up, he asked if I knew where they were supposed to unload their stuff.

Their van pulled up moments later, but the caution tape blocking off the parking lot hadn’t been taken down. I ran over to the tree around which the tape was looped and feverishly unraveled it in an attempt to calm the traffic that had built up behind the band.

It wasn’t until after their soundcheck that Black Angels guitarist Christian Bland met me in the billiards room of Buster’s for the interview.

“That tape was wrapped around that tree like a hundred times,” he said as he shook my hand and took a seat at the booth.

The Black Angels are no strangers to big music events. They’ve played at Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, but Bland said there is something special about the smaller, multi-venue festivals.

“I think this feels more like SouthBySouthWest to me, you know, a big festival but in smaller venues. I actually prefer that. I mean big festivals are fun but not as intimate,” Bland said.

Bland said he has been able to see SouthBySouthWest, a large music festival in The Black Angel’s home state of Texas, grow over time but emphasized that growth often comes with a consequence.

“It’s weird but I guess that’s the nature of what happens with most festivals,” Bland said. “SouthBySouthWest was homegrown in Austin but then after 15 years, corporate people saw how popular it was so they wanted to get involved and ended up taking over, and sadly it kind of takes away from the creativity of the whole thing.”

After we finished our interview, I braved the cold to see what had drawn a crowd to the carnival outside. I arrived just in time to wriggle with discomfort as a man drove two 6-inch nails into each of his nostrils, and then allowed a volunteer to pull the nails back out. Despite the warm air and music attempting to lure me inside, it was impossible to look away from the circus-style sideshow that went on in that parking lot for the next 45 minutes.

The show ended, breaking my trance, at which point it was time to head to Al’s Bar for my interview with Jesse.

Jesse has just finished his game and takes a seat next to me at the bar. He complains about spending the early part of the day at a Meineke in Louisville as he waited for the brakes on the band’s van to be repaired.

The bartender asks if he’d like a beer.

“Yeah, can I get one of those bourbon flavored beers? Which I guess is just bourbon,” Jesse says.

Half of the original members of These United Sates are from Lexington. So the band is familiar with the town.

“We’ve played here a time or two, but we’re at the level now where there are always people who haven’t heard us, who we want to win over in some sense,” Jesse says.

I ask him if the band has been working on a new album. Jesse smiles and takes a sip of his drink before answering.

“I lost the laptop that the entire album was on, lost the next album and the next few after that, so it breaks my heart and I try not to think about it everyday but I do anyway, somehow. I’m kind of slowly reconstructing some of the songs that I had ready to go for that album,” he says.

I can’t tell if the pain on his face is comedic or genuine. My guess is a little bit of both.

As he finishes his story, I realize it’s the blurred boundaries that make Boomslang special. Artists aren’t afraid to loiter in the crowd with fans because they are fans themselves, perhaps because they too never know what they are going to see next. They don’t care about the money or the fame. They care about the art. So please, just give Jesse his laptop back.

For more about Boomslang, check out the other Kernel articles on the event. Sight, sound showcased in festival art and Revealing Lexington’s Hidden Gems and and a  Q&A with WRFL’s Past and Current leaders .