Diatribe Of The Day: Bonnaroo Is Only One Week Away!
We make a big deal about Bonnaroo here at Ohmpark. For me personally, it is the highlight of my year, the thing I look forward to constantly, my Christmas. It’s more than just a festival that puts together amazing line-ups every year. It is one of the most important and influential institutions of music this decade. Every year it means something different and serves as a barometer for where music is going in times that are very different than the rest of rock/pop music’s history and fairly mysterious as to where things are going to go next.
Luckily for me, I’ve been able to attend every year of Bonnaroo so far, and I thought I might tell some tales from those 5 years here as I get hyped up for next week. When I first came to college I hung out with a lot of hippies and got turned on to jambands fairly early. It was just pure chance that I ended up going to the first one, because it was advertised almost entirely by word of mouth. Phish had been blowing up and that scene was at a watermark so high that they could literally get 70,000 (give or take) people in a field to party through nothing but email. It’s kind of cliche’ to say how the first one was so much different than the rest, but it’s the truth. There were literally tables set up in the campgrounds with huge bags of weed and scales sitting right out with a crowd of customers hovering around to buy it up. Laws ceased to exist almost entirely for 4 days in Tennessee. The festival was the pinnacle of the post-Grateful Dead jamband scene (with the exception of maybe Phish at Big Cypress) and was a once in a lifetime sort of event. I don’t know if you could compare it to Woodstock because the cultural significance of that single festival was so broadly spanning into pop culture, but there is something almost more special about that first year of the ‘roo because it occurred in such obscurity; The greatest party of the millennium happened and no one would really even know about it until years later, except for those of us who went.
The second year was when Bonnaroo upped the ante and went from being the greatest jamband fest to becoming America’s greatest festival period. They expanded the genre limitations of the first year and paved the way for a world where the multitude of styles could unite under one flag, just straight up great music, anyway you like it. The very last time I tripped in my life, happened to be the very first time I saw one of my now favourite bands, Sonic Youth. That experience will be in mind until I die as one of the best I’ve ever had. Mushrooms and Sonic Youth are just an unbeatable combination. The afternoon was so spectacular that I decided to never take psychedelics again because nothing could ever top that.
Year three exposed me to amazing artists such as Yo La Tengo, Primus, Wilco, Grandaddy, Praxis, and Danger Mouse live for the first time. The best show of this Bonnaroo for me would be Material. At one point in the set, Buckethead would build up an amazing solo, and right as it exploded, lightning struck, thunder shook the ground, and rain clouds opened up to a pour. It was one of the most surreal concert experiences of my life.
The fourth year (2005) was probably my favourite overall. It started bad as the front gate security took away much of my beer, we got parked in a very far away spot, and the smallest group I had ever taken included someone really lame who wanted to just complain constantly. But it turned around fast. The Thursday night I went to watch my favourite basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs, play the Detroit Pistons in Game 1 of the NBA finals. Of the 500 or so people in the cinema tent watching the game, there were only four of us Spurs fans. The entire game was a Pistons blowout with everyone in the tent going crazy…until the fourth quarter. The Spurs eventually would win the game and was the turning point for the entire weekend. The next day before watching the unbelievably amazing late-night The Mars Volta show, Me, Sleo, and Biggie C were able to “mysteriously acquire” all-access passes to the fest. We spent the rest of the weekend backstage drinking free alcohol and stalking our favourite artists. That weekend was one of the best in my life.
Last year we volunteered to work at the ‘roo. We got to start camping on Tuesday on our way back from Coparusa so it was interesting to be hanging out at the fest with only the other employees. I waited 6 hours or so in one spot to watch the epic Radiohead show, but it was a small price to pay. I think last year the most interesting thing for me was to be able to watch how the fest is run behind the scenes. Bonnaroo 2006 concluded with me getting to shake Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth‘s hand as we both waited to get on stage for the Phil Lesh and Friends show.
I could literally go on for hours and hours about my experiences at this fest. I’ll spare you for now, but I urge you to get tickets now if you don’t have them. If you can’t make it, we’ll be covering the fest around the clock both here and at Camura.
- Posted by Davy Minor on June 7, 2007 at 1:02 am
