Bonnaroo Music Festival returns for another year

By Christopher Campbell
Western Herald

Every highway leading into the Bonnaroo Music Festival was mercilessly clogged.

Temperatures flirted with 100 and tens of thousands of cars inched down the blistering shoulder of Tennessee’s section of I-24.

The line was 30 miles long – nearly the distance from Western Michigan University to Lake Michigan.

Toasting in Jeeps and Jettas, cooking in Camrys and Caravans, people simply hopped out of their vehicles. People tossed the Frisbee. One kid put on Pikachu garb. Others walked alongside the congestion, chatting.

Many tromped through bushes for an appropriate place to unload at-capacity bladders.

“The wait was too damn long, but the people and music make you instantly forget all the bad,” said Bonnaroo attendee Vannessa Goff, 26, from Louisville, Ky.

“After finally getting into the campgrounds, the first thing I saw was Mario and Luigi,” said Katey Rissi, 21, from Ada, Mich.

“It was two dudes wearing clean, pristine Super Mario Brothers costumes. There they were, under the sweaty sun, Mario and Luigi problem-solving their tent situation,” Rissi said.

As people filed in, camps went up quick. In the end, the tent city’s population far exceeded that of Kalamazoo.

Kalamazoo has street signs. Bonnaroo has balloons and one needs only look to the sky for direction where in the cloudless blue float giant balloons, each one varying in color and number.

Attendees use the balloons to find Centeroo, where different flavors of music await like different flavors of ice cream.

All the venues in Centeroo have kooky names, adding to the welcomed confusion. There is “The What Stage,” “The Which Stage,” “This Tent,” “That Tent” and “The Other Tent.”

There are many different types of people at Bonnaroo but everybody travels on a few similar wavelengths. Everyone is both a music lover and a heat warrior.

“Lovely people this year at Roo. People would stop by our campsite all the time just to share a train of thought. I love the community Bonnaroo offers every year,” said Matt Phillips, a 20-year-old Penn State University student.

Only rarely did this sweet intimacy contain a hint of sour.

“You know what’s great?” said Leah Nicole Bradford, 18, from Gadsen, Ala. “Out of 100,000 people here at Bonnaroo, seeing the only boy who has broken my heart. Twice. The best part is not even giving a damn!”

Thursday evening at Roo offered two standouts: Miike Snow and The Dodos.
Snow’s sound was a flood of fast, eerie dance beats. The band members all donned creepy, plain white masks; their strobe lights kissed foreheads with sharp, electric lips.

The Dodos’ sound is fast, clean and pristine. At Bonnaroo, however, The Dodos got grubby.

Frontman Meric Long was carried to his microphone, and once deposited, he didn’t look back. The Dodos’ xylophonist clasped four mallets between knuckles and thwack! Thwack! Thwacked!

Bonnaroo’s Friday night lineup was stocked. The Flaming Lips, Black Keys and Kid Cudi all roared simultaneously into the Tennessee night.

The aggressively orange Flaming Lips were deliciously weird. The Lips did not walk onto stage; they were birthed into it.

The band emerged from a screen, on it which was projected an image of a woman giving birth.

After frontman Wayne Coyne’s birthing, it wasn’t long before he was running atop the crowd’s heads inside his signature, man-sized hamster bubble. His cranium stroll occurred amidst a confetti blizzard and vibrant lemonade lights and loads of huge balloons being bumped everywhere.

After playing an hour from their own repertoire, the Lips performed the Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in its entirety.

“The Flaming Lips and the Black Keys following [The Kings of Leon] capped Friday night off for me. It was the best couple hours of live music I’ve seen at Bonnaroo,” said three-time Roo attendee Matt Phillips, 20, a student at Penn State University.

The Dead Weather, Jack White’s latest venture, was the first, and only, to rip open Tennessee’s brittle sky during the 4-day fest.

“I don’t want you to forget which band brought the rain to you tonight. I called in three weeks ahead for that,” said Jack White to the crowd during a 10-minute dampening sprinkle.

Jack White and frontwoman Allison Mosshart departed from the whole peace-and-love vibe and gave the audience a compelling dose of the dark.

White and Mosshart spent a good chunk of performance time locked into a staring match. The murky duo both oozed and shattered; their style ripped through the air like bullets through drywall.

“The Dead Weather blew my mind [on Saturday], and when Weezer pulled out MGMT’s ‘Kids’ for their encore, it was ecstasy,” Phillips said.

Another Bonnaroo favorite was Deadmau5.

“When he [Deadmau5] first started back in the day his mouse head would light up around the ears and the eyes would blink, but now it’s totally electronic, and was just like having a mouse head TV screen attached to him,” said Brittney LeighAnn Cope, 21, from Diamond Bar, N.C.

“There was one part that tripped me out so bad, where the head ended up having eyes and a mouth and would start talking with the song that was playing,” Cope said.

“Lights were shooting out of every direction, and the whole show, my heart rate was beating out of control.”

Stevie Wonder, Michael Franti & Spearhead, She & Him, Tenacious D, The National, Norah Jones, Damian Marley & Nas, Jimmy Cliff, Jay-Z, Regina Spektor, The Disco Biscuits, Gossip, Phoenix, Les Claypool and The Dave Matthews Band all were given mad kudos by anyone who attended their shows.

“At the Disco Biscuits there was an inflatable alligator passing atop the crowd’s hands. Next time I looked over, there was a dude laying on it like a supermodel would at the beach,” said Cameron Culbertson, 25, from Louisville, Ky.

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Posted by kleonard on Jun 20 2010. Filed under A & E. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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