It’s midnight on June 15, and I’m at Bonnaroo with friends. We are at The Other Tent, where the anticipation is high for SuperJam, a three-hour Jam session between John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Ben Harper, and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson (The Roots). All of a sudden, the stage glows pink, and a wall of sound free in ecstasy blows from the speakers. Tens of thousands of people are screaming, hooting, kissing, and tripping. I have never seen something more beautiful in my life, I think, until I realize as I walk around a little later that at the same time String Cheese Incident is playing a light show and jam session at Which Stage, STS9 is beating out orgasmic rhythms in That Tent, and a group of concertgoers are carrying around a glow stick man as tall as four people standing on each others’ shoulders. I end up wandering back to my tent at 2:30 in the morning, listening to DJ Shadow serenade everybody into a stoned trance. As I sit with my friends in our tent site, I laugh and cry at the same time, trying to take in the fact that this festival, in the middle of a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tenn., is actually real.
Bonnaroo got its foot off the ground in 2002 and has kept on running. How could it be stopped, with music ranging from the great bluegrass twang of Old Crow Medicine Show, the crooning voice of Regina Spektor, and even Damien Rice and Franz Ferdinand—all on the same stage? The list goes on, each act as varied and talented as the one preceding it.
When not caught in a mosh pit, there were plenty of activities to keep attendees amused. There were two shakedown streets for every type of drug, clothing, and paraphernalia you could imagine. There was Miss Lolly Pop’s Burlesque Show, full of lovely ladies, and the comedy tent, which had the gut-busting acts of Lewis Black and Dave Attell.
Even when I got separated from my friends at the Police’s performance on Saturday night, I still managed to have a blast by swaying to the New Orleans jam fest that is Galactic, and stumbled into a rave hosted by Sasha and Digweed that went from 1 a.m. till 6:30 in the morning.
I’m counting down the days till Bonnaroo ’08, and so should you.
Leave a Reply