A Bonnaroo Review: Or the Best Goddamn Most Infrastructurally Challenged with the Greatest Bands You've Heard of and Never Heard of Music Festival on Earth

It was not without some trepidation that I bought my tickets last December.
The lineup has always been impressive, but so were the horror stories: 9 hours waiting in line on the freeway, a campsite about a fifteen minute walk from the music, having to bring or buy almost all your own water, having to wait in endless lines for a shower, dust, mud...the list went on.

But my cousin Robbie had been on me for so long that I finally relented. I started getting really excited about 3 weeks ago while listening to mp3s of the extensive lineup. Lots of famous names, some bands I had heard of but never listened to, and many I had no knowledge of at all. The last category was the most impressive by far. I was most excited to see Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, then Nortec Collective, then Bomba Estero....but more on that later. Here's how it actually played out.

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After packing on wednesday night and leaving Robbie's house by 4am, with a 7 car long caravan of merrymakers in tow, we arrived at the infamous line of cars on the shoulder of I-24 at about 7am. This would be our home for the next 9 hours. I'm not kidding. It was 9 hours and we moved maybe 15 miles. Sitting there in the sun, baking.

As temperatures reached the mid 90s, and mild annoyance gave way to utter disbelief, I decided that I was going to start having fun regardless. So I donned my purple floppy hat with the leopard trim that I bought at Earth to Old City about 5 years ago and the crazy rainbow colored shirt I got twenty years ago in India and started wandering up and down the line of idling vehicles, saying hi to people, chatting about this and that. Every once in a while the line would move and I would find some runner boards or a rear bumper to hop onto and off we'd go...for maybe 200 yards or so. Once I made it back to Robbie's car we started inviting people who had gotten separated from their group somehow to jump onto our runner boards to catch up. Usually it was a woman who'd had to hack through the bush to find a suitably modest place to pee, only to find that the line had moved and their ride was now a few hundred yards ahead.

This potentially horrific experience was actually a lot of fun, but only because of the pluck and cheerfulness of the Bonnarooers. There was no uglyness, no fighting, no nothing. However, I must admit that it was annoying to see quite a few Bonnarooers fly by the line in their packed cars, clearly with hopes of edging in somewhere up ahead.

Now, the fact that we managed to make the best out of this sorry situation doesn't mean that I'm OK with it having happened in the first place. No festival, no mater how big, should ever let, or be allowed to let, a 30 mile long line of cars (no joke, it was at least that long) develop along a major interstate. Hey Bonnaroo organizers (AC and Superfly)- it is a miracle that no one got hit. You dodged a major bullet on Thursday. Your asses would have been in court for major bucks had someone gotten hit. It was irresponsible to let that long of a line develop and you should have had a contingency plan. You got lucky. Don't let it happen again. I saw at least 6 or 7 cars break down due to overheating, a fait which one of the cars in our group avoided only by blasting the heat in order to cool off the engine. Not fun.

Regardless of the causes of the long wait, and there were so many overlapping explanations given for it that it became laughable, there's a simple solution. Set up a staging area in some suitably large field near I24, but not necessarily adjacent to the main Bonnaroo site. Let everyone line up there. Then shuttle cars as needed off to the main check-in/security station. That way people would be safely away from large fast moving pieces of metal. People could turn their cars off, turn their stereos on...hell, you could even set up a DJ and turn it into a pre-party. Vendors could probably make money selling water and the like. But just to drive the point home, A 30 mile long line of cars on the freeway is STUPID. THERE IS NO EXCUSE!
My only other complaint involves water management. I hear Bonnaroo has come a long way on this, but even so, wherever there was water, there was mud and no evidence of any effort to control the water so as to avoid said mud. This wouldn't be hard to do. If you're going to set up some showers or a mist tent, or some water fountains, put down some pallets and on top of that some of those perforated rubber mats like you see in restaurant kitchens. You could probably cover all the sites for under $5k,and unlike sand or gravel, you could easily move and reuse the pallets and mats. Regardless, $5k is not a lot when you consider that the gross take on this festival must be around $14 million.
Oh and another thing: Print out some more god damn programs next time! Our whole car got one (1).

OK now that I've got that out of my system. Once we got into Bonnaroo and set up camp (about 5pm), the fun really got started. The first band I saw was Manchester Orchestra, who were amazing. Jammy heavy, metal-ish at times, but then also some really beautiful and subtly orchestrated, almost minimalist moments. This kind of band is where Bonnaroo really shines. Thanks to the top notch work of AC and Superfly, this festival is packed with mind-blowingly great bands that you've never heard of. Encounters with unsung heroes like Manchester Orchestra continued throughout the next four days. Bands that I had heard of were fantastic, but they were almost always outshined by the ones I hadn't heard of. And get this- no one sucked. Not even close. There was NO BAD OR EVEN SLIGHTLY BAD, OR EVEN JUST OK MUSIC. IT ALL RAWKED!!!! Of course, part of this is due to all the great bands that you have heard of. I won't go on about this, but when Nora Jones is the 12th name on your lineup, and Tori Amos is 25th, you've got a killer bunch of bands to go see.

There is only one other festival I've been to that manages to pull off anything close to what Bonnaroo did this year. High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy CA had, until this past weekend, set the mark for what I thought a music festival should be. No more. Bonnaroo is now the one to beat. (Having said that, High Sierra manages all the infrastructure problems noted above with none of the ineptitude that plagues Bonnaroo.)

Musical highlights- in order of Brain-scorching awesomeness:
The Gossip: I had never heard of them but their effect was on par with what Antony and the Johnsons did to me at the first Big Ears. This short chubby butch pagan goth chick with her highschool pals from Arkansas had me and about 5k others jumping up and down and screaming non-stop for two hours on a hot Friday afternoon. Kind of punk meets club dance, but all live, no electronica.
Bomba Estero: Hair raising trippy dancy live band from Colombia. DAYUM they had us going. These guys and the Gossip MUST COME BACK!!!
Lucero: Never have a seen such soulful sounds coming from a bunch of biker-looking dudes.
Jimmy Cliff: He turned Vietnam into Afghanistan and served us yanks the best sounding tongue lashing I have ever had the pleasure to receive. Nice seeing this one up close.
Damian Marley: Wow. Almost as good as much substance as Cliff. Probably more palate-able to the younger crowd.
Stevie Wonder: He was great, but only slightly greater than I expected.
Drop Kick Murphy's: It took balls to play us “A song about how the North Kicked the South's Ass in the Civil War” Even more balls to make us like it.
Phoenix- I thought France didn't produce great indie bands.
The Young Veins: Too good to be just a bunch of god damn teenagers. F—kers made me feel old sounding as much like the Beatles as they did.
Circa Survive: Janes Addiction meets U2 meets the Sex Pistols. They told us to take off our clothes, and we did.
Temper Trap: Amazing.
Theivery Corporation: Whooooeeee. Such a diverse set.
The Flaming Lips: I'm pretty sure there are new parts of my brain that I can now use, and other parts completely burned out, thanks to this show.
Baaba Maal: Got to see this one up close. Really good.
Kings of Leon: Better than I thought they would be. Sex was indeed on fire.

And these are just the bands I managed to see! I hear Jay Z was way better than anyone imagined and that Dave Mathews was tolerable, but that was the night that I was convinced that I and everyone I was with were time traveling psychic energy vampires(both the good and the bad kind).

And I am so proud that so much of this coolness originates in my hometown. I know that AC is already getting tons of local credit for Bonnaroo and Big Ears (I hear Haslam and his kin have showed up at many a Bonnaroo and been quite impressed), but I think the powers that be still underestimate the impact that AC's great work is having on our fair little burg. Our local titans of industry and finance are locked into 20th century thinking about how a city should develop. Business parks, strip malls, subdivisions. Build it, and they will come, right? They seem to miss the point that we are now almost entirely a service economy, as opposed to one based on manufacturing, and that our town is prospering because people move here, not necessarily to find a job, but because they like it here.
More and more, people can live wherever they want and telecommute to work. Thats what I do. To me, a town with lots of business parks and accompanying sprawl is a town I avoid. Knoxville used to be that kind of town, and much of it still is. But so much has changed in the last couple decades. Now people and businesses seem to be moving here not because of jobs, infrastructure or tax freebies, but because Knoxville is a cool, and ever cooler, community.
I credit much of Knoxville's recent renaissance to its burgeoning arts scene. You can't have a community without the arts. People just don't get out otherwise. There's nothing to see or do. Sure, you can have a bunch of subdivisions, fast food, movie theaters, strip malls and schools strung out along I-40, but thats not a community. A community happens where people can park their car for the whole damn weekend, go see some great music, bump into some smelly kids with dreadlocks singing their hearts out on the street for change, discover some mind blowingly ornate graffiti on a forgotten boarded up wall, have some awesome cheep food, crash at your friends downtown apartment, and wake up two days later wondering where your weekend went. A community grows and is sustained when you have such a great time here that you decide to move here, just by yourself, maybe with your whole family, maybe with your whole damn Fortune 500 company.
You don't get community if you focus on building business parks on the urban fringe, or selling off cheep farmland to well connected real estate developers. You do get community if you nurture the arts much as AC has over the past 30 years that I've spent here in Knoxville. When I moved here in 1980, and even after the World's Fair in 1982, Knoxville was a sleepy town in a spectacularly unappreciated setting, that had somehow managed to become the lamest college town anyone had ever heard of. You moved here only for a job. Market square was dead, decent food hard to find, and good new music was confined to a few dives on the strip.
My how things change. Knoxville is now pretty “cool” and all of us are benefiting from that perception. AC has been there every step of the way, amazingly unwilling to move out to a “cooler” town. From Ella Gurus, to the early Metrpulse, to Sundown, to Bonnaroo, to the rebirth of the Bijou and the Tennessee, to Big Ears(and probably a whole lot else I'm forgetting), AC has helped make Knoxville a cultural destination, and therefore an economic success in this age of the internet, when so many can live wherever they choose. This past weekend when I told people I met at Bonnaroo that I was from Knoxville, I got responses like “Man Knoxville's so cool.” It wouldn't be nearly as cool without AC.
But I digress. Here's the bottom line. Bonnaroo still has some kinks to work out, but it is still the best damn music festival I have ever been to. Critics rave about its cutting edge acts. All the music rags give it high, if not the highest scores. Even NPR sent down an army of reporters to cover it this year. Bonnaroo is the big stuff and getting bigger.
You should go, if only to see the miraculous things that some hometown folks(AC entertainment) and some NOLA folks (Superfly) can do with somewhere on the order of $14 million. You might have to sit in line for quite a while getting in, you might not get a shower for four days, you will be hoofing long distances back to your camp site each night, but you will not regret it. You might even feel compelled to go on about if four pages.