Features | Festivals
Bonnaroo 2007: The Year Barack Obama Scared All the Hippies Away
By Dom Sinacola | 20 August 2007
A month since Bonnaroo and what's left? Who stuck around to clean up our mess? (Or more appropriately, what persists?)
The sixth Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival happened over a stained weekend in the middle of June. By now the dates don't really matter and by now I've caught up on sleep, sought out the music I was turned onto, spit up that last ropey vestige of Tennessee dust. I've taken account of my dignity and brain cells, what's left of those; sat in my tub in tepid water scrubbing my skin 'til it burned. I've peeled off the marginal tan I acquired whenever I gave up and accepted the sun for what it was: fucking brutal, that unforgiving wretch that seemed to swallow whatever cloud happened by. But mostly I've come to recognize and live with my own insignificance, taking each day like the one before and understanding objectively, in pictures and in the tales of the media, just to what extent the sun, drugs, the drunk Lily Allen's, Sting galloping all fey across giant monitors, the lean hipsters with more tattoos, the naked, painted pixies -- daisies on each nipple -- and barren farm all dwarfed my ego. It's been a month since Bonnaroo and I'm still not sure how I feel about the festival. I'm still not sure how I feel about myself.
Surely, we've got a phenomenon for our generation, whatever that means for whoever we are, and Bonnaroo is as appropriately nebulous, making genres obligatory talking points, embroiled within its own hyper-sensitive correctness and liberalness, riding trends while bucking the norms behind vapid talk about dolphin cartoons on little unassuming tabs or about however one's reached the point of tripping face. It's a simple conceit to admit that who we are, who went, is what Bonnaroo means, and what Bonnaroo means somehow paints an exciting, if grim, future for the zeitgeist of the next eleven months. Thank HBO or Apple or Microsoft, Trojan, SPIN, Citibank, Lifeway Foods, Warner Brothers or the MLB, or American Spirits or Onitsuka or Gibson or Sobe or Sierra Nevada. They took care of at least 80,000 people (although one person died, which happens every year, from a hybrid of the heat and the use of a donkey's worth of narcotics) and that kind of junk takes an enormous amount of money, money that only big corporate hands can palm. What's more, I never actually felt pressured to shop or buy in, to behave under the looming presence of AT&T this or Garnier (who maintained shower trailers throughout the camping stock) that. It just so happened that more people wanted to spend some time at the fringes of society than ever before, and it takes a lot of help to allow that to happen; so, the fringes expand and populate until everything that probably defined us, our region, our demogaphic, even if once defined by being in opposition, becomes useless. And we wander, us hungry white middling-Americans, praying for cultural cues to show us the way again.
There was the Flaming Lips set, and the Police or Tool sets, but mostly the Flaming Lips set that gave us the most to uniformly stand in awe before. It was most talked-about, but when was this? We learned that it was most-talked-about two hours before, at the tail-end of a swamped What Stage adorned by Sting and an undoubtedly embarrassed Stewart Copeland. Is this how word travels, or was our campsite, tucked into the asshole of the Ghostbusters area, out of the loop? Tool didn't allow photos; Friday night I heard them sound like Tool from a distance while I was possibly dropping acid from under a tarp. The Police played their hits and my buddy Eric dreamed they'd play "King of Pain," which they did; Sting looked like Buck Rogers and his voice had noticeably aged a bit, but then they tagged "Roxanne" and every walk of life talked openly about being satisfied. And the Flaming Lips set was at midnight on the last of the midnights, was during the last time the sun would truly disappear. Dressing the stage took too long, much too long on mushrooms, and to allay the chronologically impaired masses the band "sound checked" a full production of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs.” Only a preamble: soon, when our giggling subsided and a rare, breathless calm took over, the Lips' twenty-minute intro shot into our tunnel vision, lasers and smoke seeping from the periphery, and a light rig that emerged as a flying saucer lowered to the stage, pulsing like a freakish solar anomaly, to shat out everyone but Wayne Coyne. He was birthed by the top of the spaceship into some rubber cocoon, did some ringmaster jig, and rolled off the side of the ship onto the audience. Meanwhile Supermen and Santa Clauses clustered on stage, laser pointers lit up the dark top of the set like bloodlusting sperm, confetti cannoned into the first twenty rows of the audience, and my brainstem hemorrhaged.
If there's something all of Bonnaroo can get behind, it's a spectacle. But in between the plastic absurdity and overexplained lyrics to "Fight Test" or "Do You Realize?" and Coyne proselytizing about voting percentages or how Bush is a bad president, the spectacle was suddenly everywhere, filling in every crack, and when everything is a spectacle Bonnaroo becomes cinematic, which means everyone wants to be the star and everyone wants to come away having learned something or experienced something wholly unique. And if Mark Abraham and some fellow writers allow me to mooch a point they made recently about the Flaming Lips: no band like the Lips have so utterly fallen ass backwards into genius (The Soft Bulletin, even though I think that album's a sham) only to reveal themselves with subsequent releases as a shallow bunch of Dada antagonists who clearly fell ass backwards into genius. But you can't say that to a Lips fan just like you can't say that to a Phish fan; they define themselves based on the effort put into being a fan of a under-cultural icon and so making fun of the band is making fun of that devotion, that fan him- or herself. Calling the Flaming Lips set overwhelming and obnoxious is calling Bonnaroo the same, and that kind of rejection can haunt a critic, so when I turned to a kid from Seattle who, chest nude, faux-Italian mustache oiled, and wearing a bowler hat, was obviously loving every minute of his hallucination-cum-reality and asked him how much he thought Warner Brothers was shelling out for this show, and when he responded, "Who cares, man? You gotta live every day trip to trip," I thought: What the fuck does that even mean?
It doesn't mean anything besides just demonstrate the common roar of the night crowd. The denizens of Centeroo's nightlife were those costumed hoots that slept, fucked, and got stoned in their tents during the day to save up for the unapologetic bliss of the dark, where they fucked and got stoned in front of people that didn't care; this stuff didn't bode well during the day. Next to my campsite was a fifty-something year-old pharmaceutical representative chaperoning his sixteen year-old son, nervously circling his grill and counting the minutes until Sunday afternoon. Next to them were three University of Michigan college grads, girls that complained of the dust and smoke and arrived simply to see the Decemberists, retiring to their cots after dinner. The girls ignored our conversation by talking shrilly. So, during the day I mourned the absence of the hippie, once a noble, naïve people that limned Bonnaroo in myth now reduced to ghost stories and puffs of smoke. And during the night I avoided stepping on their arms or legs, because they were everywhere dotting the landscape, shells of consciousness more than just hippies, but shells of full on freaks so selfishly consumed by whatever emaciated their posture and thoughts that, simply, the mantra exhausted of all other implications resolved, Anything goes.
During the day, Tortoise leveled the heat into discernible rhythms. It was the third time I'd seen them play, and they stuck to the same parlor tricks, the showy double drum kits and the shocking versatility of their talent, but they seemed genuinely appreciated by the scant audience. They also closed with "Senaca," a song I'd only known as an indelible opener, and the gimmicky twist in logic carried them off stage sweetly. Tortoise was followed by Hot Chip, a band that extended their songs by twice the length of the studio versions, exploiting the somnabulance of the heat to make the ADD post-Tortoise crowd believe that no second was wasted, that every song should have been so long because repetition demanded so. "The smell of repetition really is on you" as are so many other smells, making for uncomfortable waits between sets, awkward poses to prevent lumbar aches.
During the day on Saturday, the Slip hawked Wilco-lite weirdness in order to tragically suck and the Annuals feigned ignorance over sound problems to just end up stupidly indie, but the Hold Steady was the prayer and the answer. Craig Finn wore his heart and his alcoholism on his sleeves, around his collar. He was strung up like a puppet, gibbering wordlessly between choruses, dancing gracelessly but convincingly, completely possessed by joy. I don't like the Holy Steady -- predictable, I know -- but I loved their set because the band did too. And everyone who watched it loved their set. And everyone who watched the Hold Steady set who stuck around to battle the typical Leviathan plague of Spoon fans loved the asshole Spoon fans too, and loved asshole Britt Daniel too cool for school spanking out masterful pop shrapnel from the rainbow glee of an hour before. You see, we may joke about Bonnaroo miracles, but they're real, and the Hold Steady made something palpable out of all the wasted ideals of past Bonnaroos. The hippies had elixirs of their own, now we, the true victims of the fringe, had something to toast.
Because Bonnaroo doesn't belong to the hippies anymore. It belongs to their stereotypes, sure, but their stereotypes, now, are the only things anyone can understand about them, reduced to two things: a lack of hygiene and drug use. That just means that at night no one was judged, but no one was anything but a primal vessel anyway, part of a community of weregoldfish braying at the surface of the fishbowl and forgetting why. Waiting in line for three hours, winding through Manchester into the farm that would serve as our locus of orgy, I was reminded of just how far most of us had traveled before planting tired dogs on the gravel of Highway 42. Compared to last year, the 2006 that channeled Radiohead's popularity into an inimitable scope for Bonnaroo (Lollapalooza has nothing to hang its hat on, what with its urban constrictions), this year brought towering SUVs with Barack Obama bumper stickers, windows rolled up and bug-white eyes staring out at the heat from inside. A braless girl with beehive red hair hanging from the empty wheel-mount of a packed van; some gap-toothed Huckleberry Finn in cutely unbuttoned overalls carrying a coffee tin of cigarettes in order to flirt with the line and simultaneously, sympathetically curb his jones; the Jehovah's Witness passing out Watchtowers with a tattooed forearm, speaking quietly through a feral beard and never blinking behind Lennon sunglasses: these were no longer expected Bonnaroo goers, they were oddities to be avoided from mobile outposts. Fuck unity, we were coming to town to civilize these savages, relieving a bit of our animal libidos in the process. Satiate a bit of anthropological curiosity before stomping out the species forever.
And the hippies can blame corporatism all they want, but Rupert Murdoch's the least of their worries. All their vague ideals about brotherhood and togetherness have been disseminated into mass consumption, coming back to fuck 'em. Everyone wants a bite of a weekend that's defiantly pro-human; now it's just a weekend sentiment that's frighteningly easy to contain. Does Barack Obama have any hardline stances? Well, he's a comforting alternative, a figurehead to admire without any radical repercussions. He's genuinely digestible, and so are the Police, so is Tool, so is Widespread Panic and DJ Shadow, El-P, and all the shows that devolved into a sugary wall of lights and beats and vaguely poignant stage presences. Reluctantly, I found myself part of this onslaught on free love, not because I came to suck up all the detritus of the '60s without actually believing any of the movements behind that crap, but because I was so willingly faceless and ready to absorb a new kind of safety at the festival.
We were fed safe statistics: Last year, 250 tons of garbage -- 56% of total waste -- were recycled, 25,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel replaced diesel for all non-music-stage generators, and since 2002, Clean Vibes, the crew behind Bonnaroo's green work, has diverted over 500 tons of festival waste from landfills. In addition, a study conducted by Dr. Murat Arik of Middle Tennessee State University in 2005 stated that "the festival had brought over $14 million of business revenue to Coffee County, and over 190 new jobs." This information was and is readily available, quoted from the tidy, bound GUIDE handed to every attendee at least twice. Awareness and the insistent acceptance of variety in whatever form haunted Manchester. God knows what would result if no one got in line, if no one was scared of an unbridled, wasteful Bonnaroo. Panels on global warming and sustainable living bolstered the calls to recycle, gave a friendly validity to the sudden saturation of snake-eating-snake reuse symbols postered to every dirty corner. Porto-potties sustained mind-boggling cleanliness. LaLa.com held ground as a music store and artist signing headquarters; Budweiser fostered shade in the guise of the Troo Music Lounge by the main What Stage; Koss Stereophones made for entertaining benders, watching lithe sweaty Princess Leias grind the recesses of the night, their burlap-wet foot paddlings the only sound we can hear outside the Silent Disco; Blue Note erected the Somethin' Else Jazz Tent, splayed smokey atmosphere all over the inside to recreate a deep gray parlor feel, and brought in the Ravi Coltrane Quartet, Lou Donaldson, organist Dr. Donnie Smith, and even the Philadelphia Experiment, ?uestlove's seemingly improvisational side project with bassist Christian McBride and keyboardist Uri Caine (who, during their 1:30 a.m. Sunday performance brought out, um, Gina Gershon on a, um, nose harp). There was even a burlesque funhouse from which I naturally shied. Then again, I'm just a bland nobody limping down 3rd Avenue; a cadre of bland "mes" can disrupt the very boundaries of former Bonnaroo goodwill.
During one pathetic drunk or another, I was reminded of something I'd heard about Stanley Kubrick, how when he was starting to put together The Shining he called Stephen King, ignoring the time change, waking the hungover writer, and in that shit-eating Brooklyn accent asking, "Don't you think ghost stories are inherently positive because they assert the connection between the physical world and the spiritual?" which is a quote I don't really have any desire to track down or fact-check. Better left as myth. Just, when someone asks me how Bonnaroo was I can only really tell them that it was haunted. By corporatism, by the assimilated values of fading tree-huggers and their jam culture, by individuality left to float away on an ice floe quickly melting inside the press tent, I'm not sure. When I went to find mushrooms Saturday morning, I waltzed sheepishly through my old Ferris Buehler stomping grounds and got dubious looks. Almost ready to give up, I stopped by a duffel bag bloated with handmade pins. One was of a young Bob Dylan, and the hirsute pile that tried to sell me it talked Dylan up like a prophet. "Mr. Zimmerman," I said half-heartedly, not wanting the button but just wanting fungus, and the dude had no idea what I was spouting, even though "Zimmerman" was scrawled almost fully at the top of the graphic. Then an equally weighty girl in equally tangled frocks lured me behind an old pickup truck to display her wares, letting me in on an omen all "We're suspicious around here. Twice already I've seen undercover cops tackle a deal in-progress." Tackle? "Motherfucking clothesline the poor saps." Predictably, I imagined being torn from my sandals and tipped into the grill of the pickup, my brains dripping from the corrugated metal. I thanked her for the heads-up and ran.
A few hours later, waiting for Regina Spektor and fleeing from the Slip, I slunk to the shade of a tree only to have my friend Phil point out the sign, handmade, warning of poison ivy. I sighed, rolled a few feet away, but watched a shirtless punk begin to doze against the same tree's trunk. Maybe he'd regret it later when his back exploded into boils, or maybe I was gullible and getting laughed at over some ridiculously simple joke. I had no idea, and regretted not remembering the pictures of poisonous flora from my Cub Scouts manual, but I did feel suddenly, significantly alone, just a sour target for some good humor surviving in the face of a million other caveats about the weather and our health. I timidly found a place to buy a quesadilla.
Everyone was buying a quesadilla; everyone was laughing at me, at you, and everyone was getting laughed at. Ya know, whoopee, we were sheared of a hierarchy, sifted into an unblinking mass of hedonists even when cops, uniforms, the environment, and the elderly seemed to stick around to propagate the dreaded rules. Like a good ghost story, Bonnaroo was and still is inherently positive, but as convenience, waste, and propaganda crossed fingers to help the loyal Bonnaroo adherent stay safe and free of obstacles I felt wholly small as a human being. Not to mention one that got the privilege of avoiding blowing 250 bucks on a ticket. I resigned my hopeful condoms to melting in my travel bag.
Bonnaroo sells itself as the grandest of patchworks, a utopian fissure in the midst of our general conservative veneer, and those that attend talk about it as a haven. That's why it's haunted, because the seams of its conflated cultures and regions, sociological realities, and stereotypes are showing, mostly because everything is accepted and everything goes. The cards are on the table -- why judge the hands? In fact, Bonnaroo's only come to where it was originally headed. Still, hippies, I told you so: you no longer matter. You've been whited out and replaced with something infinitely more accessible. You've been replaced by fear.
The festival's experienced its sea change, and I state that like a veteran mostly because the festival is a harrowing experience, something to survive and describe poorly later, losing the thread of one's point deep at the base of the throat. Which, turns out, is where much of its story takes place, where the dust and smoke and rotten groves of dirt collect and where the humidity goes to congeal the rest, or where -- reluctantly I call this a story, although it's more a fable, situations compressed and urged to a resolution -- a taste of bile is enough to drop the bulkiest of partiers into a heap beside a trash can. If U2 or Pink Floyd (with Roger Waters) headlines 2008, so be it. What's bound to come will; the sun will weigh as much as ever and the night will still unleash doe-eyed zombies under the chocolate fountain. But saddest of all, we're losing something that could have defined us before we even knew who "us" was, much like Intonation promised for Chicago before it went on hiatus. Only, Bonnaroo is strong. And all that muscle's got to come from somewhere.
The sixth Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival happened over a stained weekend in the middle of June. By now the dates don't really matter and by now I've caught up on sleep, sought out the music I was turned onto, spit up that last ropey vestige of Tennessee dust. I've taken account of my dignity and brain cells, what's left of those; sat in my tub in tepid water scrubbing my skin 'til it burned. I've peeled off the marginal tan I acquired whenever I gave up and accepted the sun for what it was: fucking brutal, that unforgiving wretch that seemed to swallow whatever cloud happened by. But mostly I've come to recognize and live with my own insignificance, taking each day like the one before and understanding objectively, in pictures and in the tales of the media, just to what extent the sun, drugs, the drunk Lily Allen's, Sting galloping all fey across giant monitors, the lean hipsters with more tattoos, the naked, painted pixies -- daisies on each nipple -- and barren farm all dwarfed my ego. It's been a month since Bonnaroo and I'm still not sure how I feel about the festival. I'm still not sure how I feel about myself.
Surely, we've got a phenomenon for our generation, whatever that means for whoever we are, and Bonnaroo is as appropriately nebulous, making genres obligatory talking points, embroiled within its own hyper-sensitive correctness and liberalness, riding trends while bucking the norms behind vapid talk about dolphin cartoons on little unassuming tabs or about however one's reached the point of tripping face. It's a simple conceit to admit that who we are, who went, is what Bonnaroo means, and what Bonnaroo means somehow paints an exciting, if grim, future for the zeitgeist of the next eleven months. Thank HBO or Apple or Microsoft, Trojan, SPIN, Citibank, Lifeway Foods, Warner Brothers or the MLB, or American Spirits or Onitsuka or Gibson or Sobe or Sierra Nevada. They took care of at least 80,000 people (although one person died, which happens every year, from a hybrid of the heat and the use of a donkey's worth of narcotics) and that kind of junk takes an enormous amount of money, money that only big corporate hands can palm. What's more, I never actually felt pressured to shop or buy in, to behave under the looming presence of AT&T this or Garnier (who maintained shower trailers throughout the camping stock) that. It just so happened that more people wanted to spend some time at the fringes of society than ever before, and it takes a lot of help to allow that to happen; so, the fringes expand and populate until everything that probably defined us, our region, our demogaphic, even if once defined by being in opposition, becomes useless. And we wander, us hungry white middling-Americans, praying for cultural cues to show us the way again.
There was the Flaming Lips set, and the Police or Tool sets, but mostly the Flaming Lips set that gave us the most to uniformly stand in awe before. It was most talked-about, but when was this? We learned that it was most-talked-about two hours before, at the tail-end of a swamped What Stage adorned by Sting and an undoubtedly embarrassed Stewart Copeland. Is this how word travels, or was our campsite, tucked into the asshole of the Ghostbusters area, out of the loop? Tool didn't allow photos; Friday night I heard them sound like Tool from a distance while I was possibly dropping acid from under a tarp. The Police played their hits and my buddy Eric dreamed they'd play "King of Pain," which they did; Sting looked like Buck Rogers and his voice had noticeably aged a bit, but then they tagged "Roxanne" and every walk of life talked openly about being satisfied. And the Flaming Lips set was at midnight on the last of the midnights, was during the last time the sun would truly disappear. Dressing the stage took too long, much too long on mushrooms, and to allay the chronologically impaired masses the band "sound checked" a full production of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs.” Only a preamble: soon, when our giggling subsided and a rare, breathless calm took over, the Lips' twenty-minute intro shot into our tunnel vision, lasers and smoke seeping from the periphery, and a light rig that emerged as a flying saucer lowered to the stage, pulsing like a freakish solar anomaly, to shat out everyone but Wayne Coyne. He was birthed by the top of the spaceship into some rubber cocoon, did some ringmaster jig, and rolled off the side of the ship onto the audience. Meanwhile Supermen and Santa Clauses clustered on stage, laser pointers lit up the dark top of the set like bloodlusting sperm, confetti cannoned into the first twenty rows of the audience, and my brainstem hemorrhaged.
If there's something all of Bonnaroo can get behind, it's a spectacle. But in between the plastic absurdity and overexplained lyrics to "Fight Test" or "Do You Realize?" and Coyne proselytizing about voting percentages or how Bush is a bad president, the spectacle was suddenly everywhere, filling in every crack, and when everything is a spectacle Bonnaroo becomes cinematic, which means everyone wants to be the star and everyone wants to come away having learned something or experienced something wholly unique. And if Mark Abraham and some fellow writers allow me to mooch a point they made recently about the Flaming Lips: no band like the Lips have so utterly fallen ass backwards into genius (The Soft Bulletin, even though I think that album's a sham) only to reveal themselves with subsequent releases as a shallow bunch of Dada antagonists who clearly fell ass backwards into genius. But you can't say that to a Lips fan just like you can't say that to a Phish fan; they define themselves based on the effort put into being a fan of a under-cultural icon and so making fun of the band is making fun of that devotion, that fan him- or herself. Calling the Flaming Lips set overwhelming and obnoxious is calling Bonnaroo the same, and that kind of rejection can haunt a critic, so when I turned to a kid from Seattle who, chest nude, faux-Italian mustache oiled, and wearing a bowler hat, was obviously loving every minute of his hallucination-cum-reality and asked him how much he thought Warner Brothers was shelling out for this show, and when he responded, "Who cares, man? You gotta live every day trip to trip," I thought: What the fuck does that even mean?
It doesn't mean anything besides just demonstrate the common roar of the night crowd. The denizens of Centeroo's nightlife were those costumed hoots that slept, fucked, and got stoned in their tents during the day to save up for the unapologetic bliss of the dark, where they fucked and got stoned in front of people that didn't care; this stuff didn't bode well during the day. Next to my campsite was a fifty-something year-old pharmaceutical representative chaperoning his sixteen year-old son, nervously circling his grill and counting the minutes until Sunday afternoon. Next to them were three University of Michigan college grads, girls that complained of the dust and smoke and arrived simply to see the Decemberists, retiring to their cots after dinner. The girls ignored our conversation by talking shrilly. So, during the day I mourned the absence of the hippie, once a noble, naïve people that limned Bonnaroo in myth now reduced to ghost stories and puffs of smoke. And during the night I avoided stepping on their arms or legs, because they were everywhere dotting the landscape, shells of consciousness more than just hippies, but shells of full on freaks so selfishly consumed by whatever emaciated their posture and thoughts that, simply, the mantra exhausted of all other implications resolved, Anything goes.
During the day, Tortoise leveled the heat into discernible rhythms. It was the third time I'd seen them play, and they stuck to the same parlor tricks, the showy double drum kits and the shocking versatility of their talent, but they seemed genuinely appreciated by the scant audience. They also closed with "Senaca," a song I'd only known as an indelible opener, and the gimmicky twist in logic carried them off stage sweetly. Tortoise was followed by Hot Chip, a band that extended their songs by twice the length of the studio versions, exploiting the somnabulance of the heat to make the ADD post-Tortoise crowd believe that no second was wasted, that every song should have been so long because repetition demanded so. "The smell of repetition really is on you" as are so many other smells, making for uncomfortable waits between sets, awkward poses to prevent lumbar aches.
During the day on Saturday, the Slip hawked Wilco-lite weirdness in order to tragically suck and the Annuals feigned ignorance over sound problems to just end up stupidly indie, but the Hold Steady was the prayer and the answer. Craig Finn wore his heart and his alcoholism on his sleeves, around his collar. He was strung up like a puppet, gibbering wordlessly between choruses, dancing gracelessly but convincingly, completely possessed by joy. I don't like the Holy Steady -- predictable, I know -- but I loved their set because the band did too. And everyone who watched it loved their set. And everyone who watched the Hold Steady set who stuck around to battle the typical Leviathan plague of Spoon fans loved the asshole Spoon fans too, and loved asshole Britt Daniel too cool for school spanking out masterful pop shrapnel from the rainbow glee of an hour before. You see, we may joke about Bonnaroo miracles, but they're real, and the Hold Steady made something palpable out of all the wasted ideals of past Bonnaroos. The hippies had elixirs of their own, now we, the true victims of the fringe, had something to toast.
Because Bonnaroo doesn't belong to the hippies anymore. It belongs to their stereotypes, sure, but their stereotypes, now, are the only things anyone can understand about them, reduced to two things: a lack of hygiene and drug use. That just means that at night no one was judged, but no one was anything but a primal vessel anyway, part of a community of weregoldfish braying at the surface of the fishbowl and forgetting why. Waiting in line for three hours, winding through Manchester into the farm that would serve as our locus of orgy, I was reminded of just how far most of us had traveled before planting tired dogs on the gravel of Highway 42. Compared to last year, the 2006 that channeled Radiohead's popularity into an inimitable scope for Bonnaroo (Lollapalooza has nothing to hang its hat on, what with its urban constrictions), this year brought towering SUVs with Barack Obama bumper stickers, windows rolled up and bug-white eyes staring out at the heat from inside. A braless girl with beehive red hair hanging from the empty wheel-mount of a packed van; some gap-toothed Huckleberry Finn in cutely unbuttoned overalls carrying a coffee tin of cigarettes in order to flirt with the line and simultaneously, sympathetically curb his jones; the Jehovah's Witness passing out Watchtowers with a tattooed forearm, speaking quietly through a feral beard and never blinking behind Lennon sunglasses: these were no longer expected Bonnaroo goers, they were oddities to be avoided from mobile outposts. Fuck unity, we were coming to town to civilize these savages, relieving a bit of our animal libidos in the process. Satiate a bit of anthropological curiosity before stomping out the species forever.
And the hippies can blame corporatism all they want, but Rupert Murdoch's the least of their worries. All their vague ideals about brotherhood and togetherness have been disseminated into mass consumption, coming back to fuck 'em. Everyone wants a bite of a weekend that's defiantly pro-human; now it's just a weekend sentiment that's frighteningly easy to contain. Does Barack Obama have any hardline stances? Well, he's a comforting alternative, a figurehead to admire without any radical repercussions. He's genuinely digestible, and so are the Police, so is Tool, so is Widespread Panic and DJ Shadow, El-P, and all the shows that devolved into a sugary wall of lights and beats and vaguely poignant stage presences. Reluctantly, I found myself part of this onslaught on free love, not because I came to suck up all the detritus of the '60s without actually believing any of the movements behind that crap, but because I was so willingly faceless and ready to absorb a new kind of safety at the festival.
We were fed safe statistics: Last year, 250 tons of garbage -- 56% of total waste -- were recycled, 25,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel replaced diesel for all non-music-stage generators, and since 2002, Clean Vibes, the crew behind Bonnaroo's green work, has diverted over 500 tons of festival waste from landfills. In addition, a study conducted by Dr. Murat Arik of Middle Tennessee State University in 2005 stated that "the festival had brought over $14 million of business revenue to Coffee County, and over 190 new jobs." This information was and is readily available, quoted from the tidy, bound GUIDE handed to every attendee at least twice. Awareness and the insistent acceptance of variety in whatever form haunted Manchester. God knows what would result if no one got in line, if no one was scared of an unbridled, wasteful Bonnaroo. Panels on global warming and sustainable living bolstered the calls to recycle, gave a friendly validity to the sudden saturation of snake-eating-snake reuse symbols postered to every dirty corner. Porto-potties sustained mind-boggling cleanliness. LaLa.com held ground as a music store and artist signing headquarters; Budweiser fostered shade in the guise of the Troo Music Lounge by the main What Stage; Koss Stereophones made for entertaining benders, watching lithe sweaty Princess Leias grind the recesses of the night, their burlap-wet foot paddlings the only sound we can hear outside the Silent Disco; Blue Note erected the Somethin' Else Jazz Tent, splayed smokey atmosphere all over the inside to recreate a deep gray parlor feel, and brought in the Ravi Coltrane Quartet, Lou Donaldson, organist Dr. Donnie Smith, and even the Philadelphia Experiment, ?uestlove's seemingly improvisational side project with bassist Christian McBride and keyboardist Uri Caine (who, during their 1:30 a.m. Sunday performance brought out, um, Gina Gershon on a, um, nose harp). There was even a burlesque funhouse from which I naturally shied. Then again, I'm just a bland nobody limping down 3rd Avenue; a cadre of bland "mes" can disrupt the very boundaries of former Bonnaroo goodwill.
During one pathetic drunk or another, I was reminded of something I'd heard about Stanley Kubrick, how when he was starting to put together The Shining he called Stephen King, ignoring the time change, waking the hungover writer, and in that shit-eating Brooklyn accent asking, "Don't you think ghost stories are inherently positive because they assert the connection between the physical world and the spiritual?" which is a quote I don't really have any desire to track down or fact-check. Better left as myth. Just, when someone asks me how Bonnaroo was I can only really tell them that it was haunted. By corporatism, by the assimilated values of fading tree-huggers and their jam culture, by individuality left to float away on an ice floe quickly melting inside the press tent, I'm not sure. When I went to find mushrooms Saturday morning, I waltzed sheepishly through my old Ferris Buehler stomping grounds and got dubious looks. Almost ready to give up, I stopped by a duffel bag bloated with handmade pins. One was of a young Bob Dylan, and the hirsute pile that tried to sell me it talked Dylan up like a prophet. "Mr. Zimmerman," I said half-heartedly, not wanting the button but just wanting fungus, and the dude had no idea what I was spouting, even though "Zimmerman" was scrawled almost fully at the top of the graphic. Then an equally weighty girl in equally tangled frocks lured me behind an old pickup truck to display her wares, letting me in on an omen all "We're suspicious around here. Twice already I've seen undercover cops tackle a deal in-progress." Tackle? "Motherfucking clothesline the poor saps." Predictably, I imagined being torn from my sandals and tipped into the grill of the pickup, my brains dripping from the corrugated metal. I thanked her for the heads-up and ran.
A few hours later, waiting for Regina Spektor and fleeing from the Slip, I slunk to the shade of a tree only to have my friend Phil point out the sign, handmade, warning of poison ivy. I sighed, rolled a few feet away, but watched a shirtless punk begin to doze against the same tree's trunk. Maybe he'd regret it later when his back exploded into boils, or maybe I was gullible and getting laughed at over some ridiculously simple joke. I had no idea, and regretted not remembering the pictures of poisonous flora from my Cub Scouts manual, but I did feel suddenly, significantly alone, just a sour target for some good humor surviving in the face of a million other caveats about the weather and our health. I timidly found a place to buy a quesadilla.
Everyone was buying a quesadilla; everyone was laughing at me, at you, and everyone was getting laughed at. Ya know, whoopee, we were sheared of a hierarchy, sifted into an unblinking mass of hedonists even when cops, uniforms, the environment, and the elderly seemed to stick around to propagate the dreaded rules. Like a good ghost story, Bonnaroo was and still is inherently positive, but as convenience, waste, and propaganda crossed fingers to help the loyal Bonnaroo adherent stay safe and free of obstacles I felt wholly small as a human being. Not to mention one that got the privilege of avoiding blowing 250 bucks on a ticket. I resigned my hopeful condoms to melting in my travel bag.
Bonnaroo sells itself as the grandest of patchworks, a utopian fissure in the midst of our general conservative veneer, and those that attend talk about it as a haven. That's why it's haunted, because the seams of its conflated cultures and regions, sociological realities, and stereotypes are showing, mostly because everything is accepted and everything goes. The cards are on the table -- why judge the hands? In fact, Bonnaroo's only come to where it was originally headed. Still, hippies, I told you so: you no longer matter. You've been whited out and replaced with something infinitely more accessible. You've been replaced by fear.
The festival's experienced its sea change, and I state that like a veteran mostly because the festival is a harrowing experience, something to survive and describe poorly later, losing the thread of one's point deep at the base of the throat. Which, turns out, is where much of its story takes place, where the dust and smoke and rotten groves of dirt collect and where the humidity goes to congeal the rest, or where -- reluctantly I call this a story, although it's more a fable, situations compressed and urged to a resolution -- a taste of bile is enough to drop the bulkiest of partiers into a heap beside a trash can. If U2 or Pink Floyd (with Roger Waters) headlines 2008, so be it. What's bound to come will; the sun will weigh as much as ever and the night will still unleash doe-eyed zombies under the chocolate fountain. But saddest of all, we're losing something that could have defined us before we even knew who "us" was, much like Intonation promised for Chicago before it went on hiatus. Only, Bonnaroo is strong. And all that muscle's got to come from somewhere.