Bonnaroo!

Now entering its tenth anniversary, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival might finally be worth the trip, especially for those of us who travel extensively in small circles of New England venues. After this year’s exhaustive and comprehensive lineup, Bonnaroo is now established as America’s answer to large European festivals like Glastonbury and midwest gatherings like Wakarusa. Bonnaroo, tweaked and primed after nine years in the business, presents a tidy live music machine for the masses, a discreet and collapsible city that turns mad profit within a week. Because it’s gotten so huge, Bonnaroo provides a forum for two groups: those needing to dance maniacally for days on end, sleeplessly stumbling from stage to stage, and those seeking to fill a massive live-music-festival fix, without burning away to a crisp.

Bonnaroo lives up to its claims of musical variety: this year’s headliners included Jay Z, Stevie Wonder, Kings of Leon and the Dave Matthews Band, while elsewhere the crowd raged electronically to LCD Soundsystem, The Crystal Method, DJ Logic, Daryl Hall & Chromeo. Elsewhere, Kris Kristofferson, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Steve Martin’s triumphant return to the banjo, and John Prine represented the country and western idiom; Weezer, Ween, the Black Keys, Clutch, Tenacious D, John Fogerty, and Jack White’s new band, The Dead Weather played raucous, expectable rock riffs and shtick. Modern rock saint Jack White looks and acts more like Lou Reed every day, and his new band is fronted by a Janis Joplin-lookalike, who sang lines from Jim Morrison’s notebooks, over chords that sounded like King Crimson outtakes. No wonder it was the only time it rained all weekend.

Or maybe it rained because, a few stages away, the bass was so loud during the Avett Brothers that it shook water free from the clouds. While the live sound engineer finally got it right between “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promises” and “When I Drink,” a staggeringly honest duet, the Avett Brothers, for all of their country-rock crossover appeal, proved musicality, and sheer energy will always triumph. Showing off new levels of musical prowess, the Avetts (and friend Dave Mayfield, “of the Mayfield family”) switched instruments often, and enjoyably; most songs held in their core a furiously-strummed banjo line, and the crowd bobbed appropriately. “The Perfect Space,” a song from their recent collaboration with Rick Rubin, featured electric guitar, piano, bass, and perfectly rambunctious drums. The crowd of sunburnt, rain-washed, youthful fans swayed and sang, and were especially loud with the lyric: “I wanna have pride like my mother has/and not like the kind in the Bible that turns you bad.” Other acts wallowed in black-clad gloom, while the Avetts literally rocked the crowd into backwoods stomping, head-swinging madness and southern yelps.

The other most-resonant lyric I picked up on came as John Prine played to a surprisingly-ecstatic and youthful crowd, picking away at “Blow Up Your TV”; this generation, too, it seems, wants to “plant a little garden/eat a lot of peaches/we’ll all find Jesus/on our own.” Complemented by authentic outfits like the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Dr. Dog, all of whom strum like G Love and wail like Merle Haggard, Bonnaroo’s lineup helped further and galvanize the growing 21st century live roots music movement: a new stand-up bass brand of authentic American roots music continued to take shape over the weekend, without direct appeal to mainstream country or top 40 “rock.”

My largest critique comes from Bonnaroo being less than seventy miles from Nashville, and the engineers seemed least adept at amplifying traditional bluegrass: after horrible feedback interrupted the fiddle player’s solo during Steve Martin’s bluegrass opener, he smiled and joked to the crowd, “how’dya like that high-pitched squeal?” Often, stages competed with each other for volume, as perhaps festival organizers planned to pump the bass on everything, always giving the teenyboppers something to rattle their bones with: Multiple-Grammy winner John McEuen, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s legendary banjo and guitar picker, joked that he had just written a song on the banjo, to be played when there’s a rock band booming next door. He grinned and grimaced as he picked, perhaps the only legend on par with Stevie Wonder throughout the weekend, having been an integral influence for decades, in many genres. As he riffed inside of the Dirt Band’s tight drums and keys, the crowd went nuts: “I’m going to play the banjo in Tennessee now, which is something I like,” he laughed.

Especially tender musical moments could be found on the small Solar Stage, where my festival favorite, Diane Birch, played alone on an electric piano, describing how her Pentecostal upbringing had merged with her Suzuki/by-ear piano technique, to produce her recent debut, Bible Belt. She looked like an angel, played piano riffs in the style of Elton John and Ben Folds, and sang jazzy alto lines about love and God and “Hallelujah/I got water, I got air/I got flowers in my hair.” Located in Planet Roo, a gathering booths and tents featuring socially-conscious organizations like The Mountain Coalition, Greenpeace and Ford, The Solar Stage featured short interviews and acoustic performances by larger acts as well—not to mention phenomenal African drumming by Mawre and Company, a father-mother-son-daughter team who led the crowd astumbling through dance steps, on all three nights of the festival.

Electronica, however, ruled the day, and the nights were injected constantly by the bass thumps of distant raves over the hill-- like it or not. The most notable of this late-night ilk was the far-out noise produced by Dan Deacon’s 14-piece ensemble. The soundcheck was extensive: live drums, two synthesizer stations, three marimba/percussion players, guitars, and, teetering between mixers, headphones, and a glowing skull, the essential instrument, Dan Deacon himself. He spoke to the house engineers and the crowd in the same insistent manner—do what I say, that we may go on with this. The result of the efforts sounded like tracks by the early Philip Glass Ensemble, adding in Deacon’s thin, crispy vocals, that usually rose through a song, above and against the revolutionary arpeggios of the marimbas, usually ending in a full-out rock scream. Though gaining a reputation for audience participation and a sense of humor, I was excited to find an autographed copy of the sheet music the band used at their Bonnaroo show, donated to a charity’s silent auction taking place on the grounds. There’s only one other artist wrote sheet music and threw dance contests during performances (Zappa), so I’m excited to see what Dan Deacon gets good at doing next.

The XX, Crystal Method, LCD Soundsystem kept the main grounds thumping into the wee Tennessee hours of morning, always in competition for attention with the trance of the all-night DJs. There was some rock at night—the Disco Biscuits did their thing, and GWAR ridiculed Margaret Cho at 5 AM on Sunday morning, spraying the audience with fake blood. Deadmau5, a DJ who mentions champagne and Red Bull on his Twitter feed, and whose gimmick is to wear a giant mouse head while spinning, was especially popular—enough to be the site of the only death at Bonnaroo this year. The fellow had been camped a few tents over from mine, and had been taken to the medical tent during the early-Sunday-morning performance, running a temperature of 108. By 3 AM he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Buzz in the lot said he had taken ecstasy and molly, a pure form of the compound MDMA. Those of us who had camped around him—friends now, all of us having braved the long days’ heat and short nights together—remembered him as best we could, another t-shirted kid with a Shakedown St. sticker across the tinted back window of his Honda, another body pushing forward; we had all been pushing toward the same stage hours before.

As the sun went down on Sunday evening, and our tents grew shadows and became silhouettes together for the last time in the Tennessee heat, I spoke with Coffee County Deputy Sheriff Frank Watkins, as his team gathered the dead fellow’s tent and belongings and stowed them in the Honda. Frank was a tall man in a gray t-shirt, and he spoke in a patient, sober, southern drawl. “I don’t mean to brag,” he said, as he stared into the distance, “but the meth we recover in this county is between 95 and 99 percent pure.” He admitted that his agency’s primary focus is to target those selling hard drugs—heroin, opium, crack, ecstasy—and that “if all it was was pot, I’d open a corn dog stand.” During their set of original music, to precede their epic live cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Wayne Coyne—patron saint and longtime veteran of Bonnaroo—challenged the crowd to work to legalize marijuana over the next year: twice, between firing off confetti rockets and orchestrated psychedelic video montages, Wayne called to the audience, saying “I thought I’d smell more pot smoke at a Flaming Lips show.”

From-the-stage activism was slim: some graffiti sought to blame different modern presidents for the encroaching oil slick, while few artists took sides on much of anything (“there’s no oil spill here,” one performer noted). Baba Maal, a Senegalese bandleader whose ensemble provided some of the finest, most-even tempered music on Sunday morning, called for peace between UK and US World Cup fans, asking that we support “the best team on the ground.” In this economy, performers are wise to not alienate fans with politics; for espousing challenges to the status quo of drug prohibition, from the stage and from the event’s commemorative t-shirt (“be a nice person/legalize marijuana”), the Flaming Lips once again rise to a new level of greatness—no matter that Wayne’s calls for legalization caught the crowd at a moment when they were too zonked to agree.

In a different era, the average demographic at Bonnaroo would have appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand; the group of six friends from Connecticut camped beside me had to leave on Sunday morning—to miss Dave Matthews’ lovely solo encore opener, Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done”—so they could return home to graduate from high school. On Sunday night in the main concert area (“Centeroo”), there were still plenty of wide-eyed, suntanned southerners standing shoulder-to-shoulder with legions of frat boys, who had chugged seven-dollar beers all weekend, and yelled loudly to each other when their favorite songs came on. The dredlocked hippie type, both of my generation and the about-to-retire one, pocked the crowd with tie-dye, dredlocks and electrified glowsticks and flashing light sabers. We all wore shorts; we all gathered under trees, for the chance to be a few degrees cooler in the shade; we all rejoiced, however briefly, when the sun ducked behind passing clouds in the southern sky. Many took naps on the ground at some point; late at night, safety team members roamed the concert areas between acts, prodding us awake.

Bonnaroo is one day longer, and offers four times as many acts, as the original Woodstock festival in 1969. Only the crowd is smaller, one third the size—but you wouldn’t know it. There’s enough to keep over 80,000 people entertained, and not in one place at one time: besides one mammoth stage for evening headliners, there were four airplane-hangar-sized tent stages, a smaller Lunar Stage that, this year, featured the aforementioned eternal and inescapable dance music.

The spiritual connection to live music may be strengthening, and the tide of respect for performance may be growing—I met a rep from Sony Music whose sole task is “grassroots, bottom-up, hands-on marketing campaigns.” Most folks I talked with claimed to be in a band, though I’ve seen more parking-lot performance at a Phish show lot than I did this year at Bonnaroo. I heard someone appreciate how Jay Z actually performed with a band this year, and not just to some backing tracks. He hyped the crowd up before his appearance, using a ten minute countdown and a playlist that pandered to the crowd’s shallow roots: Notorious B.I.G., Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Til Brooklyn.”

The most universally-accepted moment at Bonnaroo this year may have been Jeff Beck, and his majestic cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Without gimmick or effect, Mr. Beck made each note count, in a way that wasn’t always apparent at Bonnaroo: arpeggios, whether from a banjo, Akai MPC sequencer, or within the Flaming Lips’ complex presentation of Dark Side of the Moon.

If Bonnaroo 2010 had a patron saint, it was Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. During the Friday afternoon press conference, he rambled prophetically about the purpose of the event: not the individual bands, but to be a part of a triumphant and beautiful experience: to be “here with your friends having one of the great experiences of your young life.” Surprisingly, as Wayne himself called for a ‘short’ opening set of Flaming Lips music to precede Dark Side, the Lips relished in recent originals—nothing earlier than a few tracks from Yoshimi. I spoke with Wayne, and thanked him for the vinyl re-release of their 1990s epic The Soft Bulletin; he spoke nervously about the night’s impending live cover of Dark Side: “I hope it’s not too weird,” he said.

It wasn’t, and neither were the giant inflated balloons containing dollar bills that Wayne threw into the crowd during the Pink Floyd classic rock staple “Money.” As the balloons bounced around, as Wayne himself had done, inside a giant plastic ball to open the show, each eventually popped, showering the crowd with something there was plenty of at Bonnaroo: cash. There were no riots, no trampling; in this economy, I was proud to see how long each balloon stayed aloft, and wondered what Wayne expected to happen. Musically, the Lips, alongside Wayne’s nephew’s band, all under the extreme direction of Steven Drozd, delivered a magical rendition of the Pink Floyd masterwork, replete with themed video sequences, pre-recorded “I’m mad/I’ve always been mad” babble, and a heartbeat that resonates with me now. The performance ended with all the flair, smoke, mirrors and lasers of the greatest stadium rock performances, and we were suddenly thrust into an eerie dark. The houselights rose on us (“all that we eat/everyone we meet” still ringing in my ears), and, quietly, a graceful, less-than-good quality digital copy of “What a Wonderful World,” by Louie Armstrong, began to play.

The Lips, and so many others at Bonnaroo, knew so well what they were doing to entertain an audience; on Sunday afternoon, after so many bedraggled hours in the sun, Ween could not have chosen a better motivating cover than David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” Like life, there’s too much to see at Bonnaroo, too much entertainment in general—which makes it worth the expense, the hassle, the unexpected adventure of it all.