Ok, so its time to spill the beans on what happened to old Jawbone on those eventful days in Tennessee we all cherish every year. I’m not gonna do this like i did my Wanee review since it just wasn’t the same kind of weekend. I’ll do this a bit more organized; mostly musical reviews with brief narrations and stories in between, a lot shorter and a bunch of pictures! Here goes:
Campsite scene: I’ll be honest when i say that this was the biggest draw for me going into the festival. The lineup of artists this year wasn’t much to my liking. I mean there was a lot of shows i was excited for but not like past years where the lineup has been filled with all my favorite artists. This year i originally planned on skipping the festival altogether for the reasons of the lineup consisting of less and less bands i really like and that i was just so satisfied with the past 3 years and my bank account is getting over it that i just figured it would be interesting to take a year off. My brother and his girlfriend (who have at least been part of my B-roo crew each of the 4 years we’ve gone) were excited for it as always and were excited to have a couple of their friends going. I wasn’t the least bit excited for their friends going since the one friend that was making his Bonnaroo debut went to Coventry with us and bitched the whole time nearly ruining our grooves. But then i found out that a great handful of my friends from Ft Lauderdale were going too so i jumped at the chance to make it great for everybody and combine the 2 parties, especially thinking about what it would be like for all these people that i know at Bonnaroo without me and me sitting home with nothing to do because all my friends are where i usually am. So i went. The assholes in the camp did a lot of bitching and wound up leaving on Saturday morning. Up until that point for unrelating reasons i was having doubts about my being there; thoughts like “i think i’ve outgrown this” and such but by Saturday all of that had turned around and the groove was back. I think the 2 might have gone hadn in hand but not specifically responsible for each other. The rest of us (we had about a dozen folks at our camp) had a great time. We made good friends with out neighbors from Louisville but originally form NOLA who brought a lot of help and fun to the mix and only made it more interesting since we already had half of the camp getting to know the other half who had never met each other before (i was the only person at our camp that knew everybody) and now i had new strangers to make new friends. We were all such good neighbors that we’re all going to try to keep in touch to neighbor again at future Bonnaroos. Easily the best campsite scene we’ve had of our 4 Bonnaroos.
so that’s the basic overview of what our living situations were for the weekend. Now, onto the music! (in chronological order):
Apollo Sunshine: This was the first act we saw at Bonnaroo. They played the smallest stage in Centeroo on Thursday night. A really energetic burst of excitement on stage. They said that we were by far the largest crowd they had played to and they didn’t dissapoint. I don’t even remember what they sounded like but i remember them as being something esle for sure. Everybody on stage played every instrument possible and at one point it escalated into a giant drum circle on stage. It was cool but at the same time i can’t help but realize that they carry the flaw i see in a lot of the better bands of the day in as much as they just seem to try too hard to impress or be something great instead of just being and being great. Either way, it was a lot of fun watching them.
Friday was spent mostly at the campsite with my brother and his girlfriend listening to their friends bitch about the heat and dust while all my friends were down at the stages checking things out. I kind of wanted to go with them but there wasn’t much to see early on Friday so i decided to go down there with them all day Saturday instead. I went down to the stage late friday afternoon with my brother and his girlfriend for something we knew little about but were oddly excited for and it turned out to be one of the better sets of the weekend…
Manu Chao: I had never heard of him before the lineup announcement but his high placement on the bill, the biography they put up on the website and the song they put on the website got my expectations up for sure and i wasn’t let down. He’s from Europe somewhere, i think either Spain or France but he plays a music that has a lot of reggae in it as well as punk rock and spanish influences making it something truly unique. He would sing in english and spanish at the same time during a chill reggae groove and then it would get nuts and all fast and heavy and everybody would start jumping around and yelling and then right back into the groove. He was really captivating. See, anybody could just marinate on a generic reggae groove for a couple hours and all the preppy hippies would sit there and get high and act all cool and shit but Manu Chao is somebody that plays music that he loves because he loves it and that’s why it stands out and that’s why its different and that’s why its great. I’m keeping my eyes out for a live album of his because that’s how i think he should be heard. He just had too much energy for the studio.
Tool: What can i say? i was a little skeptical about this one, as i’m sure a lot of people were and for good reason. Tool is a great band and i really agree with the fact that they exist on such a high level like they do and i can totally understand why a lot of people i know love them as much as any of us love Phish. And they’ve got a great sound and spot on musicianship in the studio and on the stage. With that being said, i think they were in the wrong place at Bonnaroo. There…i said it. In the most basic terms i’d like to point out that the whole point of Bonnaroo is that its there to be a euphoric positive environment for people to bond and share an experience together. And Tool is a band that refuses to share anything with anybody. They had to put their own shit up on the jumbotron instead of letting themselves be videotaped like everyone else, they completely disconnected themselves from the audience, barelty even proving that they were on the stage at all other than just seeing their over indulgent silouhettes up on the backdrop and chiming in from time to time with some sarcastic remark about everybody being smelly hippies or something and on top of that their music is entirely anger-fueled and in a completely different realm as what Bonnaroo is meant to fill in people. I’m sorry if this seems harsh, most of my thoughts on this has built up over the past week thinking about it a whole lot. At the time i was just bored but i finally figured out why i’ve always been bored with Tool. They have no range. No range. And its not so much that every song sounds the same so much as every song IS the same. Bouncing bass riff with heavy reverb and distortion on the guitar and the double bass drum charging while the guy moans about shit. That’s all. There’s no wistful or celebratory or uplifting songs. Its all harsh. Sorry to sound like such a hippy scenster but this is just how i feel about it. A festival is a place where “moments” should happen. Something where the line between artist and audience is blurred by the connection and Tool did just the opposite. I probably will get slammed as an ignorant prick for saying these things but i just felt like it was the pink elephant in the room. It was cool with all the bright lights and loud noises but they should really keep it in the arenas from now on.
We left Tool a few songs early and took advantage of the short lines in the rest of Centeroo as a little more than half the festival was watching Tool and the other half was at their campsites wating for the late night sets. We (brother, me and brother’s girlfriend) got rid of the urge in the back of our minds once and for all and rode the ferris wheel. That was pretty fuckin’ sweet.
The String Cheese Incident: probably the definitive “jamband.” Not the best but they’re what i think of when i think of jambands and lets not forget that Bonnaroo is a jamband festival. So when in Rome, be in Rome so we grabbed some pale ales and watched the String Cheese Incident and damn did it feel good. We had just been over at the main stage for Tool watching half the crowd freak out and the other fall asleep and nobody was smiling and we couldn’t help but wonder where the fuck we were. SCI reminded us that we were in the happiest place on earth. There’s my fuckin’ headies! Bust out those hoola hoops dammit and make 'em shine! I didn’t think that a late night Cheese set would work, especially after Tool but damn was i wrong there. They were just what the doctor ordered. I could have stayed there all night but i’m just much too curious of an individual so we left after just short of an hour.
STS9: In my defense this is what we originally left Cheese for. STS9 is just the essential late night band; something that could go on for all hours of the night until dawn and you don’t even notice the time passing. But alas, we had an obligation and we had to leave them too.
Medeski & Martin in some small ass tent?: Medeski Martin & Wood is easily one of my favorite live bands. Seen them nearly a dozen times and i’ve never been let down. So we had to see what it would be like as just a duo. But Bonnaroo did something weird and built a small jazz bar at the festival and put one (2 if you count them individually) of the biggest names in jazz in there and only let 300 people in to see them of 80,000 people that paid for their tickets. That’s fucking whack. But we got in. My brother’s girlfriend was #297, my brother was #298, i was #299 and our friend was #300 and they shut the gate (they eventually let more people in and filled in the spaces as people left). It was weird. It really looked like an old jazz bar, really intimate and clean. But we were at a festival on a sweletering farm in the middle of the country. It was entirely dissilusioning but it was cool to see the boys again, even without Wood. And it was pretty much that; MMW without the W. But still cool, just not all the way as awesome as normal, and we were all so fucking exhausted by that point. We stayed for a little over an hour but it goes down in history as the only time i’ve ever walked away from John Medeski and/or Billy Martin.
crashed out.
Please note that a lot of my complaining about Friday had a lot to do with all the stuff i was talking about earlier what with not finding my groove right away and questioning my being there and the negativity and all that. But that would soon change on Saturday.
