Saturday, August 8, 2026

A Festival Before The Festival

By EDDIE RIVERA

Students tour Brookside ahead of Head in the Clouds

Head in the Clouds is two days away. The grass at Brookside is still green. The stage is still steel bones. The loudest sound on the field belongs to a portable speaker, slung from one hand.

That hand belongs to Tim Le, festival director for Goldenvoice, who spent Thursday morning walking the production lot with a microphone raised, narrating the guts of a music festival for about 25 high schoolers who had never seen one from this close. Behind him trailed forklifts, box trucks, a loader parked near the Arroyo Grill, and a line of students in matching lanyards trying to keep pace.

The event was Career Exploration Day, part of AEG Futures, a program run through the company’s Community Affairs and social impact teams in partnership with Goldenvoice and 88rising, the creative force behind Head in the Clouds. Students came from Crowell Family YMCA, Boys & Girls Club Pasadena, Pacific Bridge Arts, and the Koreatown Youth Community Center. Most had grown up close enough to the Rose Bowl to know it only from a football broadcast or a concert they watched from the outside.

Jacqueline Aguirre, youth leadership specialist at KYCC, said the invitation landed in her inbox and she forwarded it to her students without much deliberation. She runs the organization’s high school program, where teenagers are placed in classrooms to mentor younger kids while building what she calls hard and soft skills. “Any opportunity that comes our way that allows our students to get out of KYCC’s bubble and learn more about other career opportunities, we try to take it,” she said. “So what I did was I just, once I got this opportunity, I sent it to all of my students and saw who was interested in learning more careers and learning about AEG and what you guys do at the festival.”

Her colleague Emily Gomez, a KYCC supervisor, put it more simply. “We do a lot of events,” she said. “We just cater to learning about new career pathways and informing ourselves in different careers that we could take.”

By mid-morning the group had traded the parking lot for a walk across the outfield. They passed a telehandler lifting steel decking toward the stage rigging. They passed rows of portable toilets staged for a weekend crowd. They stopped in a horseshoe on the lawn while Le briefed them, the San Gabriel foothills sitting hazy and gold at their backs, before the tour pushed on toward the tunnels toward the Rose Bowl field.

Inside, the day shifted from steel to conversation. In a ballroom set with round tables and chandeliers, students moved through speed mentoring roundtables with AEG and Goldenvoice staff. In the afternoon, they broke into groups to design their own festival concepts and pitch them to a panel of Goldenvoice executives.

Annette Padilla, senior director of social impact at AEG, said the program is meant to widen a door that has stayed narrow for a long time. Her office partners with Goldenvoice, she explained, to bring students out to festivals so they can see the full range of jobs the industry runs on, not just the ones which require a loud guitar.

“For years, AEG and Goldenvoice have worked with high schools and community organizations around Pasadena to bring them to the Rose Bowl to experience our festivals behind the scenes, as a chance for them to learn about careers in live entertainment,” she said.

By 2:30, the students were gone, clutching merchandise and a survey. The grounds went back to being just a festival site, two days out from opening its gates to a very different crowd. But for one morning, before the wristbands and the lines at the merch tent, Brookside belonged to a few dozen teenagers from across the San Gabriel Valley, learning that somebody has to build the stage before anyone gets to stand on it.

Head in the Clouds is Saturday, August 8, at Brookside at the Rose Bowl. More information on the festival is available at la.hitcfestival.com.