Pages tagged “bonnaroo”

Thursday, June 15, 2006
In a Winnebago near Manchester, Tenn.
2:30 p.m.

A few miles before the exit for Bonnaroo, the air outside and traffic ahead have stagnated, and I begin to sense I’m driving toward my doom. My daughters had been startled and uncharacteristically concerned about my plans to attend the same event as their school’s “laidback, dreadlocked crowd,” having lived with my inability to cope with dirt and disorder, the maniacal dread of not appearing pulled-together, and the personal-product dependency and rigorous underwiring that no doubt contributed to a recent MILF citation. I told them the truth, how I wanted to do something entirely foreign to me, requiring a force of will sufficient to yank me out of my work and interchangeable days, an activity as unlikely as my swimming with dolphins last March. They still look at the pictures and say they can’t believe I did it or that I asked the guide if the things had talons.

Also, alternative music has been one of my middle daughter’s main interests, a way she’s been able to maintain a distinct and private place for herself, something her sisters and I have been alert not to intrude upon—until now, it seems—and so her wariness about how Mom is going to endure 80,000 camping strangers seems tinged with a kind of protective, territorial attitude toward Andrew Bird, Brothers Past, Death Cab for Cutie and other groups scheduled to be here that I’d be thoroughly ignorant of had I not stealthily borrowed from the massive stockpile in her car. In the seventh grade, when she dressed like Hollywood costume designer Edith Head for a report on influential women, the bang I got from her smart independence is so much of what I’ll miss after she’s left for college in eight weeks that a trip like this is also part of a deliberate plan to get myself working outside the house, where she won’t be, where all three of them won’t be, not in some murky future anymore, but within the next year. I’m going to be miserable without them, but this could be a solution—going and doing and writing about it.

3:10 p.m.

My nephew, JD, is driving. Besides the children, I don’t think I’ve let anyone else see how uptight, cynical, critical and pessimistic I can be, frustrated when it’s confused with dormant rage. We’ve been in this RV for nine hours, not talking a great deal because it isn’t necessary after 30 years together. He’s left his real-estate business to come here with me because he does things like what he’s about to do, turning away from the traf?c onto a road he knows will take us directly to the registration site, and because he’s an outstanding person to have in the unknown. He knows I’d rather deal with people in my imagination than in reality, and if it weren’t for him being with me during the writing of my last two novels, it would’ve been all but impossible for me to come out of reclusion once they were done. He took me, for instance, to Larry Flynt’s strip club in New Orleans, a kind of starter experience, and then moved me down the street, in and out of progressively looser establishments, and after another book was turned in, he took me to Las Vegas, where directions for coming out of the shell, mercifully, stay. I worry though about losing him in a crowd, having to ask strangers to help me locate a big Fred Durst-looking dude.

11 p.m.

We checked in, arranged the RV and walked on out toward the amalgamation of shops and causehead booths known as Centeroo, then toward the stages, and what’s already feeling like too, too many people, but there isn’t the sense of danger I’d already ramped up my nerves for. I hadn’t duct-taped my spending money into my brassiere, but I’d been watchful for the pickpockets and sneak thieves generally expected to roam through hordes of distracted people. Everybody, everything seems fairly reasonable, but I came back to the RV after going to only four stages. I was planning to plaster my feet with Band-Aids and return for Tortured Soul, but I see blisters in the morning, so JD cuts on Radio Bonnaroo to hear what we’re missing and drown out the horror of mangled feet hitting salt water.

David Ford and The Wood Brothers brought back memories of going to hear Marshall Crenshaw at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, N.C.—of going around afterward, certain I’d witnessed the real thing on the verge of being the next big thing, then wondering what happened, unaware he may’ve been involved in projects outside my provincial margins. With Ford and The Wood Brothers, I’d also expected to feel some of the elitism that tends to attach itself to any art well-done but not well-known, but both were accessible, and I didn’t detect anyone around me nursing suspicions about why their dreadlocks were being scrutinized by a trendy mom who’d probably borrowed her daughter’s clothes and should’ve known better than to bring a pink beach bag to coat with ?eld dust. I just want to know the reasoning behind the hairdo for white, blonde, American youths, not looking to pick a dispute, but being aware of how absolutely, insultingly Republican it sounds when I even consider asking. I’ll have to look it up on the website where I just learned about the meaning of Mormon underwear, another thing an individual can go around curious about for only so long before it creates interference. JD goes out again and may not be seen until daylight, but there’s no need to worry, as he once lost his jacket to a pack of wild lesbians in an all-night poker game but otherwise made it back to our hotel fine.

Friday Morning

JD was up before me and outside working on the generator when I found him to ask why I’d slept unhappy and hot. We hired a roving repairman, who promised to return with parts, and then I went early to the afternoon’s press conference to take advantage of the tent’s air conditioning and Lewis Black, an old friend with a tour bus and driver who could’ve fixed the generator had he been able to reach us through the maddening cellular network. Ben Folds was also there, and as I sat through the questions, waiting to hop on Lewis before reporters got to him so I could report how in need I was of his guy to lower the temperature—and what JD had begun calling the “whining index” in our Winnebago, it occurred to me that Ben Folds was wearing a toboggan that made the top of my head feel pluperfectly scorched, and since he mentioned he’d lived near me outside Chapel Hill, maybe that allowed enough familiarity to ask him why he would do this in 90-plus-degree weather. All that, in turn, led to a kind of heat-induced fugue, vagaries of thought about the nature of present-day music celebrity and its inherent sex appeal as opposed to my formative listening years, spent fixated on Jim Morrison and then Robert Plant—not to say a lusty charge from Beck or Ben Folds isn’t possible, but the intellect, for certain, sublimates the nether regions when there is too much resemblance to Olive Oyl.

Ill-tempered, I went to Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder ?rst, knowing the sensations of calm reality and ground-in, rooted-down place which invariably attach themselves to bluegrass music and re-create the experience of listening to the Grand Ole Opry with my mother on any Saturday night in the 1960s. Then, we’d watch Ed Sullivan on Sundays, although there hasn’t been anything since to reproduce the initial impression of some large art existing out there along with the blowback that caused me to physically lean backward to give Jim Morrison the space he clearly needed when he seemed to be coming out of the Motorola to light my fire in 1967.

The place was so full now that I retreated to the Troo Music Lounge—the closest thing I found to listening to the radio alone—and more or less sat without moving through Bobby Bare, Jr., Samantha Stollenwerck and Hot Buttered Rum, having erased any desire to walk anywhere again after hiking to the ends of the tent camping grounds and back between Ricky Skaggs’ show and discovering this smaller venue. Desperation, then, had driven us to some of the best music here.

Saturday Afternoon

The heat was so rough today, I had to shut down until dark. Resting outside under a neighbor’s awning, JD introduced me to a New Orleans musician named Pete. When I was down there on a winter book tour, my impression from teachers, musicians and artists I met in the city and in Pass Christian was that each person had been thinking about the one thing they’d most want broadcast on their behalf, like a mantra that went beyond criticism and complaint. I told Pete about the teacher who’d ask me to tell people, “We’re still here,” and he said she was right, they were, and without hesitating he said, “All we need is for people to come to New Orleans and listen to the music again.” He plays regularly at the Banks St. Bar, the Kerry Irish Pub, anywhere as much as possible, having returned to the city and his career, unhesitant after his means of earning a living was destroyed, and still moved by the Tipitina’s Foundation’s practical relief in supplying a set of drums.

When the sun was good and down, we started walking. By the time we were out on the fringe of the crowd at Radiohead, ironies that had been bothering me in small, escapable ways seemed to be everywhere, so I returned to the Troo Lounge, where I could sit, listen and think. Artvandalay, Tishamingo and The Avett Brothers couldn’t have played better soundtracks for what had been on my mind—why I’d come, how alienated I’d felt and how I craved anything able to pull me back into place. There was still something disappointing about looking out from the tent, watching as more people appeared to be wandering aimlessly, dropping trash despite incessant reminders of global responsibility, reminders everywhere that the mission of the ’60s movement—which bound a collective political and social intent with an optimistic insistence on the purifying and instructive nature of music—has degenerated into people hanging out.

When I saw lively market economies for food and water—everything evolving out in the enormous area coated by tents—I thought of stories my girls’ father told me about coming of age in the Haight-Ashbury, with the Free Store and The Diggers—the authentic beginnings of psychedelic experience that couldn’t bear the weight of Manson, Altamont and the deaths of three 27-year-old artists in a year, and which can only be replicated in a too-far-removed way without the tragedies of race and war that inspired them to begin with. But racial tension is always about, and there’s a new war to supply continual spiritual combat, but there’s something disconnected here, as though everyone’s got themselves up for a good-hearted journey to the edge of somewhere, somewhere ultimate and extreme—but, lacking the power authenticity brings, the whole enterprise has settled here, and it becomes the responsibility of music by itself to make the trip relevant and give the days substance, which, without exception, it does.

Sunday Night

When I got back to the Winnebago, I caught up on email and the news, including Nicole Kidman’s wedding announcement, so I put on Lenny Kravitz to celebrate, contemplating how those two weren’t meant to be, his fashion sense and thighs, two things I never found in the otherwise inspirational performances this weekend. I could’ve seen the clothes on Elvis Costello, but I’d seen him in the refrigerated aisle at a quickmart in Oxford recently, and then heard him at a small bar across from where he was recording—the kind of thing that happens in Mississippi—so I was jaded. Checking email and listening, waiting for Deadwood to begin, I heard strains that returned me to World Party’s show, and having been at Bonnaroo—so often feeling myself lifted up and back into other music from other times when my life was supposedly as simple as I’d now have it be—I actually missed being there in the heat with people determined to do it, hear it, see it, play it and have it, whether they were on a mission I’d wanted to impose on them; people, mercifully, still too innocent to bear it, able to hang out for another while.

Radiohead Backstage before the show, Thom Yorke gears up for a long night. “We have to play for two-and-a-half hours!” he says. “Do you have that much material?” I ask. “Barely—maybe we’ll just make some stuff up as we go along.” The highlight of the show for me isn’t the sea of lighters making a phosphorescent wave before the first encore, or the intense glowstick war among 80,000 people, or even Yorke dodging glowsticks and egging the crowd on for more before firing back in fun. No, the highlight was sitting on the side of the stage next to Michele Stodart of the Magic Numbers as she quietly sang in perfect harmony to “Fake Plastic Trees.” You just can’t make this stuff up. —Jay Sweet

Beck At his hit-packed Saturday show, with songs ranging from 1996’s “Where It’s At” to 2002’s “Paper Tiger” and last year’s “Girl,” Beck’s performance was anything but ordinary. First, his band “dined” onstage—with servers—and then played some spontaneous percussion on glasses and plates while Beck did a semi-solo set, including the heartbroken ballad “Lost Cause” and an endearing cover of The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” Later, people in bear costumes kicked Beck and the band offstage. The set was at its quirkiest when puppet versions of Beck and his bandmates starred in a short film that good-heartedly mocked Bonnaroo culture (“I smell hippie!”). Then the real Beck and band returned—just before Thom Yorke and co. took the stage—with their own version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” sung with slightly different lyrics: “I’m a creep / I’m a… puppet!”

Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint Combine Elvis Costell