Bonnaroo 2008 Saturday (Day 3): Thirty Epic Hours
Bonnaroo always has a momentum all its own and no matter how you imagine your weekend to go, it ends up being a completely different experience. Saturday morning I woke up around 4am in the morning after sleeping through crazy thunderstorms that wrecked our camp. Most of the people in my crew were coming back from seeing late night shows and we hung out and talked about our Friday experiences. The rain continued on and off for the rest of the morning, so I had some beers for breakfast and chilled out under our shelters that hadn’t been destroyed. I caught an hour power nap around 9am, and then headed out for the day. I walked around the campgrounds for a while taking in the atmosphere. The rain had died out mostly by then, and people were out and about in the muddy conditions.
I headed to the press area and did some blogging. This time I caught one the press conferences going on, with a couple guys from Ozomatli, comedian Brian Posehn, some people I didn’t really know, and Phil Lesh and Jackie Greene came in halfway through. The questions the moderator was asking were sort of lame, but there was a funny part where one of the dudes was talking about how scared he was of someone dosing him with LSD, and how he freaked out when someone in the crowd sprayed him with a water gun.
The rain that had started this day off had yielded to hot sun by the time I emerged from the media tent. Before leaving the press area, I interviewed Dead Confederate. Their debut full-length is finished and coming out September 16th so I’m pretty excited. I’ll have that interview video up soon, but they were really cool.
After that I went to see Atlanta’s Mastodon. They put on a typical killer show, unveiling some new material. There wasn’t really a mosh pit, but the ‘roo metalhead contigent crowd was pumped up for it.
I went back to the press area for a minute to see what was shaking, and I had just missed another press conference with Ben Folds and Jack Johnson:
After that I caught the very last song from nu-Cat Power, and it sucked as is typical now. She hung out on the stage for about 5 minutes or so after her set throwing flowers to the audience and doing silly looney tunes style poses. Seeing her now is like seeing an ex-girlfriend.
Iron & Wine came on next doing his 8-piece that sound like a two-piece underwhelming stuff. The more somber stuff I like best of his was limited or converted into more upbeat, hippie-friendlier stuff and while it was still very enjoyable, it just wasn’t as good as listening to his albums. I really want to just see him by himself instead of all this other junk distracting the listener from the pure beautiful songwriting he creates.
After once again stopping by the press area and seeing very little going on, I decided to go brave the Jack Johnson show to get a good spot for Pearl Jam and go ahead and give the dude who I’ve been trashing all year a fair shake. It was more awful then I had anticipated. His lameness was so potent that it made Eddie Vedder seem lame during his guest appearance. “Double J” is just amazingly terrible.
The horrors of that show drove me to get working on some liquor drinks fast and I was properly buzzed again for what I think was my favourite show of the weekend from Pearl Jam. I’m so glad Bonnaroo finally convinced them to play there, because they are just the perfect sort of band for this festival. I’ll take Mike McCready over almost any jamband wanker. Their song selection was probably my least favourite of the 3 times I’ve seen them, and they still blew me away. They are just so damn good.
By the time I made it over to Sigur Ros I was blotto for the second time in one day and listened to the show while napping. While I can barely remember much of it, I do remember having a really crazy dream with Sigur Ros as the soundtrack. Being that everyone else at the festival is on drugs that keep you awake, and alcohol is a depressant, keeping up with all the kids at an intense party atmosphere like this is a constant war for me, and unfortunately this year I lost a couple of key battles.
As soon as that was over, I regained consciousness to the wild scene that is Centeroo late night. After boncing around with my intoxicated crew, we finally got to the main stage again to catch the Kanye West “Glow In The Dark” late night set. Originally schedued for 2:45 am, it wasn’t until about 4:30 am tha he finally came out on stage. People waiting were booing intermittently while everyone lost their buzz and got angrier and the crowd got smaller and smaller. I had heard that Phil Lesh got shutdown an hour earlier than scheduled due to Kanye West, so even the hippies were pissed off.
I’m not sure exactly why I had high expectations about this show, but it was not very impressive. I mean Kanye‘s stage presence was fine and the songs sounded much better than your average hip-hop show, but the “Glow In The Dark” show appeared to just be a small video screen behind him showing some cliche’ sorts of video imagery. Then he had some silly science-fiction theme where he was talking to his spaceship named Jane between songs. It was like the worst episode of Battlestar Galactica I’ve ever seen. And for being such a baller, he sure had a broke-ass spaceship. So finally, I headed back to camp and hung out with everyone else who made it through the entire night, and even had some nightcaps with the folks waking up for the last day. It was a long, hard day of booze and bands, but it is crazy and intense days like these that make me come back to this festival again and again.
- Posted by Davy Minor on June 16, 2008 at 6:48 pm
