By Nicholas Schreiber
It was a sticky Saturday afternoon at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, and Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips frontman, was running around the backstage village like a tour guide, pointing out all its sideshow perks: the batting cage, the massage parlor, the canopy of Christmas lights, the hammocks and the large wooden bridge that crossed only woodchips. Just a few hours remained until his midnight descent onstage from a gigantic, glowing spaceship. Looking at his watch, Coyne finally ducked under the press tent, sat down and attempted to describe what separates Bonnaroo from the regular gig, and other destination festivals across the globe.
“There are all these elements that make it this bizarre quest,” he said. “Your life at Bonnaroo becomes this grand adventure. Hopefully we’re all having an intense, pleasant — but not always pleasant — experience. We’re going to remember it, for better or worse.”
A few days earlier on Thursday morning, this adventure began in decidedly forgettable fashion. With nearly 90,000 fans expected to flock to a farm 60 miles east of Nashville, police began escorting lines of traffic to a small country road. The road’s name, Altamont, brought to mind another gathering of long-hairs, though this one hopefully wouldn’t end in violence and death. For most Bonnaroo ticket holders, this redirection meant little more than the beginning of a five-hour bout with automobile paralysis. The 12 miles separating the cars and the camping grounds being counted down by inches, not minutes. As concertgoers became impatient, ancient VW vans and hybrid coupes alike began cheating ahead of the sluggish procession in the name of that old hippie adage: Peace, love and illegal lane usage. Many of those who did stay honest had to feel like Enron investors, but they escaped their boredom by tossing Frisbees and footballs on the side of the road. The bizarre adventure had begun.
Once inside the enormous camping grounds, dust swirled and blanketed the vehicles and tents that stretched as far as the eye could see. With a significant push towards legitimacy in recent years, Bonnaroo had injected some indie-rock blood into its counter-culture veins. This year’s lineup would include bands like Wilco, the White Stripes, Spoon, the Flaming Lips, Tool, the Decemberists — and don’t forget the reunited Police — to offset tree-hugging heavyweights such as Widespread Panic, Bob Weir & Ratdog, Ziggy Marley and the String Cheese Incident, to name just a few. But nowhere in the campgrounds was this shift in artists apparent, at least not in hygiene.
At Bonnaroo, hippie is not a dirty word, it’s a dirty person. For four days, all those in attendance were invited to join the ranks of the flower-power generation and refrain from all levels of personal cleanliness. Porta-potties were scattered in the dirt, with no hand sanitizer or sinks to be found anywhere. The only showers were cold, cost up to $20 and required at least an hour of standing in line.
Centeroo, the actual staging grounds for the legions of musicians and comedians, was situated nearly two and a half miles away from the farthest campsite. As the zig-zagging paths veered inefficiently towards its archway entrance, vendors and solicitors (of legal and illegal wares alike) began popping out of tents and trucks under the suspicious eyes of mounted police officers. Like street performers in some European tourist trap, drug dealers were inescapable, walking past the crowds, whispering what enhancement they could offer, but never making eye contact.
When the masses finally navigated through the lineup of extremely friendly but overwhelmingly clueless safety staffers and made it into Centeroo, most were greeted with a new problem: Where the hell are the stages? With names like What Stage, Which Stage, This Tent, That Tent, etc., even official event maps made finding the right act at the right place and time a bizarre and fruitless quest. But good music was plentiful.
Friday boasted some lesser-known powerhouses like the Richard Thompson Band, which rolled through some of Thompson’s most well-known work from his days in Fairport Convention, his partnership with ex-wife Linda, and his recent solo work. Accompanied by drums, a stand-up bass and a saxophone, Thompson spent most of his time getting every possible noise out of every single note on his Stratocaster in a rockabilly set that was half Dire Straits, half Hank Williams — and wholly brilliant.
Across the grass, Tortoise had lured a full house into This Tent with its epic drumming and guitar licks that could be heard even as Thompson closed his set. At first the group seemed intent on dropping anything that audience members could describe as “jazzy” and pushed toward a more shimmering rock sound. But as their set progressed, they found a groove that was just right, providing ample excuses for both dancing and relaxing.
As the day cooled off, the Roots hit the main stage and took full advantage of the hour-and-a-half window. Joined by a horn section, the group defied any sort of lazy critical comparison, jumping from a few re-tooled originals to genre-bending versions of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and interludes of James Brown’s “Super Bad.” With such dynamic performers as ?uestlove and Black Thought constantly displaying their sheer delight at performing music for a living, at Bonnaroo, the Roots once again proved why they are the best and most consistent live band in America.
Representing a darker shade of tie-dye, Tool had difficulty connecting with its audience, and when Tom Morello joined them onstage for a dry version of “Lateralus,” the crowd seemed indifferent. It was the three-hour “Super Jam” between Ben Harper, Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, ?uestlove and Anthony Hamilton that kept people dancing until the wee hours of the morning. Cruising in and out of Zeppelin classics, the mix of musicians seemed reluctant to exit the stage, but at three o’clock they waved goodbye and left a multitude of fans hungry for more.
*****
Saturday’s highlights were scattered. In the Yet Another (Comedy) Tent, Dave Attell openly acknowledged his difficulty connecting with his audience. “I’m an alcoholic in a sea of potheads,” he yelled at the crowd. “Let’s find some common ground!”
Meanwhile, the Hold Steady raced through a batch of songs from their latest album, Boys and Girls in America. The set was received with genuine interest from the newcomer crowd. Craig Finn’s heartland snarl struck a chord with Bonnaroo beer-drinkers, especially during a raucous take on “Stuck Between Stations.”
Disappointing is the best way to describe Spoon’s lackluster onstage perfomance. It was difficult to tell if Britt Daniel was battling technical difficulties or just couldn’t recreate the fuzzy guitar chaos made so effective on 2005’s Gimme Fiction. The good news? Several tracks from their upcoming release Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga were previewed, and if “Don’t Make Me a Target” and “Eddie’s Ragga” are any indication, the Austin-based four-piece may well have a hit on their hands.
In the most anticipated moment of the festival, the Police took the main stage a little after nine o’clock. They were unchallenged by another act, making the prospect of getting anywhere near to the stage an impossibility. Luckily, the Police probably were as underwhelming up close as they were from far away. New arrangements by Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, along with vocal meanderings from Sting, all but ruined every good Police song. Despite bouts of precision and creativity from Copeland and Summers, the show could not escape Sting’s aging vocal range and horrible stage command.
The Flaming Lips had no problem connecting with an equally large crowd during the early portion of their midnight set. Flying saucers, space bubbles and thousands of lasers distributed throughout the crowd before the show made for a stunning visual experience, but fan interest diminished significantly when Wayne Coyne went into his preaching routine, criticizing the war, its political leaders and everyone who voted for them. What began with the excitement of intergalactic communication dwindled into an extended C-SPAN lecture that made Saturday’s conclusion anticlimactic.
*****
The sweltering journey from campgrounds to Centeroo made Sunday morning feel like one giant hangover after the spectacle of Saturday night’s acts. Ticket-holders who apparently could not find their way back to their tents were sprawled in shady ditches underneath rows of shrubs that did little to mask the impending 100-degree temperatures.
Nearing 67, Mavis Staples showed no signs of aging during her brief but fantastic afternoon performance. Switching between old hits and tracks from her excellent new release, We’ll Never Turn Back, she epitomized everything that makes pop music a relevant art form, dipping into stories of social unrest (including when the Staple Singers followed Martin Luther King through a violent South) and belting out soulful lines with more conviction than any preacher or politician could ever hope to achieve.
Later, Staples joined the Decemberists for an updated version of the Band classic, “The Weight,” an honor that left singer Colin Meloy speechless and some audience members in tears. Once she stepped off the stage, the Decemberists turned their attention to Bonnaroo’s jam-band roots, playing each other’s instruments, balancing them on their heads and generally goofing off during a charming rendition of “Chimbley Sweep.”
Wilco’s main stage effort was equally lighthearted, and during a set list dominated by cuts from their gorgeous new album, Sky Blue Sky, they seemed to connect with a new audience. Songs like “Impossible Germany” and “Side with the Seeds” mesmerized the crowd with their melodious and smooth transitions into frenzied guitar-hero territory.
On the other side of the music village, even before Ornette Coleman could show his young audience what the future of jazz actually sounds like, the heat claimed another victim, and Coleman collapsed onstage during the weekend’s most frightening moment. He was rushed to a local hospital and treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration, and is expected to make a full recovery in the coming weeks.
The jazz tent scare could do nothing to stop the White Stripes from dousing themselves in red and kicking off their 2007 North American tour in support of their latest effort, Icky Thump, their first after an extended two-year hiatus. The duo sprinted through their 90 minutes onstage, with heavy distortion and deafening kick drums doing most of the heavy lifting. It was a relatively unsurprising set that seemed content to memorialize past hits like “Hotel Yorba” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” as the Stripes approach their tenth anniversary.
As the sun set on the White Stripes and on the festival, the fun still seemed days away from concluding. The campsite teemed with dark corner deals and truck-bed sing-alongs. While a small parade of cars quickly made their way through the wreckage back toward the interstate, thousands of those in attendance seemed to be planning what came next. For some, the bizarre adventure never ends. But for Bonnaroo, it seemed to end right on time.
