If one artist, of the 20 or so I saw at Bonnaroo 2007, could sum it all up in just one tossed-off sentence, leave it to the furiously flowing Def Jux wordsmith Aesop Rock. As he bid farewell to the crowd after the absolute best set-closer I saw all weekend — “Daylight,” from his 2001 album Labor Days, which had everyone singing along with the chorus (“All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day/Put the pieces back together my way”) — “Have a great Bonnaroo weekend,” he said, pausing for a second before jubilantly proclaiming: “Do whatever you wanna do!”
And we did. We walked around and drank and smoked and laughed and danced and barely slept and sweated (oh, how profusely we sweated) and lay down in the grass when our tired legs couldn’t hold us up for another second.
PART I: FRIDAY
I almost didn’t make it to Manchester this year. Last year, despite the fact that I’d applied for a press pass and received one, I had to be coaxed into the car after many protests related to a) the heat, b) the crowds, c) the lack of modern plumbing. Thank goodness Karin and Craig were the pushers, because Bonnaroo 2006 turned out to be one of the best weekends ever. This year, I was literally handed a pair of free tickets two weeks before the big weekend, so although I had already planned on not going and skipped applying for a press pass, I pleaded out for one half-day off (Friday afternoon) and scrambled to find a ride. My resourceful friend with many friends, Stratton, eventually helped me connect with super-friendly Pour House bartender Mindy and her ‘94 Jetta. We had no CD/tape player, and heard a number of classic one-hitters on the way up (“Straight Up,” “Seether”) and two Red Hot Chili Peppers songs that sounded the same. The gods smiled upon us as we hit the last stretch, through the Smoky Mountains, and “What Is and What Should Never Be” came on and we dutifully screamed along.
We pulled up to the gates at 8:55 p.m. CST, five minutes before Tool was set to start. After a brief discussion with a pessimistic and oddly bitter volunteer (“There’s no way you’re going to make it! I’m stuck out here and I can’t see it, either.”) we parked about a mile away and did some Olympian speedwalking while I tried not to whine as we heard them ripping up “46 & 2″ and “Schism.” On our speedwalk, Mindy, a festival veteran, said “I feel like I recognize every face I see at these things,” and it’s true — when you’re in a crowd that massive, everyone’s your friend.
Mindy skillfully weaved through the field full of people, eventually getting us close enough on the right side that I could see bassist Justin Chancellor’s face and a few of Danny Carey’s bagillion cymbals. Maynard Keenan was singing from a platform near the back of the stage, so we couldn’t see him, but between projecting his unreal bombastic and beautiful voice over the rapt crowd in song, he was chattier than I’d ever seen him on the Lateralus tour. When they got to the lengthy bridge of the title track from the 2001 album, Maynard introduced former tourmate (ca. 1992!) Tom Morello, who had played earlier in the day as his acoustic alter ego, The Nightwatchman. Morello came out and played a gnarly solo for about four minutes, ending by lifting his guitar up to his face and playing with his teeth! (Watch Morello’s axe skills, oral and otherwise, in this video I found on YouTube. The teeth-playing starts around 3:26.)
During the show, Mindy and I witnessed our first bits of Bonnaroo insanity: a middle-aged metalhead couple, both with long hair and wearing TOOL T-shirts, came toward us from the front of the stage, and the man was carrying a naked baby (!); a few minutes later, a tall, naked man came stumbling through the crowd and pausing every few seconds to spread his ass cheeks as if to take a giant dump in the middle of 80,000 people – but whenever he started this nonsense, someone (usually a large, disgusted man) would shove him toward the periphery of the crowd. Eventually he got to the waist-high fence, fell over it, landed square on his head, and scrambled out of (my) sight.
Here’s a few truths I’ve gleaned in my two years at this festival:
1. If you like drugs, you’ll like Bonnaroo.
2. If you like live music, you’ll like Bonnaroo.
3. If you like drugs and live music, Bonnaroo is a four-day pass to a too-temporary nirvana — in other words, you’ll love Bonnaroo.
However, you’ve got to know your limits, man! Naked shitting dude liked the drugs a little too much.
After Tool, I met up with some of my favorite awesome people, my sister and old friends from Nashville, and we headed to This Tent for Aesop Rock. It seemed like the majority of the crowd split to either Sound Tribe Sector Nine, the John Paul Jones/Ben Harper/?uestlove superjam, or tent city, leaving a moderate amount of Ace Rizzle fans amped up on Tool and god-knows-what as they waited for him to go on. One of the best things about being at Bonnaroo with 79,999 other people is that no matter who’s playing at what stage at what time, there are going to be people there who really enjoy that artist. And they’re bringing the party. That’s exactly what happened at Aesop Rock, as everyone under the tent went berserk when he emerged with fellow Def Jux MC Rob Sonic and they launched into “Fast Cars Danger Fire and Knives” (the title track from Aesop’s tiiiiiiiiight 2005 EP), followed immediately by “Holy Smokes” from the same album. They did a song or two from 2003’s Bazooka Tooth, the artistic-nerds-rule anthem “No Regrets,” a few songs from his upcoming album (August 28!) including “None Shall Pass,” a perfect soundtrack for mistreated 20somethings ready to stick pins into voodoo dolls of their incompetent superiors. And then there was “Daylight.” Aes and Rob were visibly grateful and seemed surprised by the enthusiasm of the hundreds of people singing every word and shouting along with every call-and-response throughout the set. Here’s another YouTube video, this is the entire performance of “Daylight”:
This was the second time I’ve seen Aesop Rock and it confirmed my belief that he’s one of the best — if not THE best — hip-hop performers working today. Not only does he have a sick flow and a great rapport with a crowd, he doesn’t need a slew of hype men to pick up when he trails off. Because he DOESN’T TRAIL OFF. Can’t say the same for his labelmate El-P, who came on immediately afterward surrounded by four or five dudes — all of them dressed in matching camo outfits in a nod to the highly politicized lyrics from El-P’s latest album, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.
Between Ace Rock and El-P, I wandered over to the tightly-packed Superjam at That Tent. I got bored at the fringes and turned around to watch a group of five or six people scream-sing along with “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the silent disco when I felt this strange, familiar pulse thumping through my chest. For the Superjam, they somehow amplified JPJ’s bass so that it was less like a rock-n-roll accoutrement and more like a nearly-silent siren call of vibration that must’ve spanned over half of the center of the ‘roo, and what I’d felt were the unmistakable first notes of “Dazed and Confused,” which JPJ, ?uestlove, and Harper (providing vocals) transformed into an even more serpentine, trippy, acid-jazzy version of the original. (?uestlove is apparently an internet junkie; you can find him on MOG, MySpace (do yourself a favor and check out his informed, insightful blogs, especially “Blog 95: Brother You See King The Police,” about some seriously bunk-ass racial profiling/harassment he endured at an airport in Buffalo, N.Y.), and YouTube, where he posted a video of the Superjammers rehearsing “Dazed and Confused” — check it out below):
There was no way you could’ve been standing anywhere near That Tent and not been pulled toward that thundering bass, so I floated back into the throngs until the song was over, when I headed back to the silent disco for a tic. I started thinking about last year, when I videotaped a bunch of people singing along to “Walk This Way”, and then heard people singing the familiar refrain. Wacky. I took it as a sign to get away from that damn mesmerizing silent disco and headed back to my sister and El-P.
El-P was technically sound but couldn’t hold my attention — possibly due to a ridonkulous amount of anticipation for DJ Shadow, who was up after him. Right after El-P ended, Sally (sister) and I had to head back to her (far-away) camp to put a bad-trippin’ friend to bed, and on the way there we could hear the eerie piano and operatic voice at the beginning of “Building Steam With A Grain of Salt” (from Endtroducing…) as DJ Shadow took the stage. It was torture, not being able to follow that haunting riff back to That Tent immediately, but Sal and I eventually got back to Centeroo with enough time to catch the final two blocks of Shadow’s set. He had a set-up of probably six turntables in front of him, with laptops augmenting, which he rushed between as appropriately mind-fucking visuals flashed on the huge screen behind him. It was probably 5 a.m. at this point, and Sally and I swayed slowly as DJ Shadow gradually built up to the big finale: “Midnight in a Perfect World,” accompanied by rapidly switching sets of human eyes and a wild roar from the audience. After the final “now approaching midnight!” he left the stage and the crowd followed suit. Sal and I stepped over and around the literally thousands of people who chose the dry, hard Centeroo grounds as their pallets for the night and grudgingly headed back to the tent. I watched the sun rise over the Tennessee hills on our way back, cursing myself for gypping my body out of so much sleep but totally high on all the truly amazing shows I’d seen already — Tool, Aesop Rock, the Superjam, DJ Shadow — in less than 12 hours on Bonnaroo grounds!
TOMORROW, a recap of Saturday: Dr. Dog, perfect midday hangover cure; discovering whether or not the Hold Steady can excite sweaty hippies at 4 in the afternoon just as easily as they can rile up a whiskey-drunk group of barflies.
–sm
