A weeklyish column about Vermont's jamband super group; art by Phil Bardi.
For the past eight years, I’ve avoided getting sucked into the musical glamour of Bonnaroo. The majority of my friends have attended at least once, some of them several times, and all extol its stupefying virtues like they’re the ones trying to sell me a ticket.
It’s not as if I haven’t done the big festival thing. I journeyed to the far Northeast for two separate Phish fests. I’ve done three Langerado’s (may that festival rest in peace), the last with four stages spread out over a huge piece of land in the Everglades (the same place where Phish held its renowned NYE concerts). I’ve flown up to Chicago and wandered across the Grant Park stretches at Lollapalooza. I’ve driven to New Orleans and traipsed up and down the festival grounds at the NOLA Jazz and Heritage Fest.
But I could never really muster up enough interest in Bonnaroo to offset my misgivings about it. From its inception, the ‘roo was an overgrown behemoth with too many obstacles standing in the way of me enjoying it: umpteen hours waiting in a line of traffic stretched out for miles due to more than 60,000 people traveling from all over the United States to the same landlocked town in the middle of Nowhere, Tennessee; more hours wasted waiting to get in and get to a site, to camp on a farm in the muggy summer heat and surrounded on all sides by bodies ripening to musky fruition; walking miles to and from the concert area to your campsite, then hoofing it from stage to stage, back and forth, here then there, all throughout the day for four days in a row; having to choose between seeing two acts you really, really love, a decision you have to make over and over again; the godawful mud magically appearing in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, rain or no rain, musky people splashing around in it, because they’re musky anyway, right?
But over the course of several months, Phish has made me re-think my never-gonna-go-to-the-‘roo stance. See, their upcoming Summer Tour includes a headlining slot at the fest and in addition to a regular show, Phish is playing one of the legendary late night slots. A 2 a.m.-set shrouded in mystery and held under the stars by four men who are renowned for coming up with excellent musical surprises, and playing who knows what for Buddha knows how long? I have to tell you, if anything is tempting me to go, it’s that paired with a stellar lineup of other acts I adore or have been dying to see.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2009.