This is Bonnaroo

It’s just before midnight on Sunday and, after four days without a shower, I’m crammed into a Ferris wheel pod, grinding my way up several stories above the tree line. We’re just high enough that I can’t see people on the ground anymore, but in the darkness I can still see lighters touch glass pipes before the people in the shadows smoke up. I’m clinging to the safety bar with both hands, and I can feel the paint crunching off the metal in my grip. This, is Bonnaroo.

For several days every summer, since 2002, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has drawn crowds of up to 80,000 to a farm about an hour southeast of Nashville. More than 100 bands, ranging from indie rock to hip hop to gospel, entertain the ’Roo faithful.

My companion for the festival is a high school friend, Brandon. He’s now been to five Bonnaroo festivals. He’s sitting to the side of me, far more relaxed, talking with the couple sharing our pod. They’re from Nashville and they have a kid. The father is both concerned and intrigued that his 6-year-old son isn’t into sports, and that the kid may be an artist. Brandon, a film student in New York, confirms some of the signs. His wife, a blonde named Sarah, is wearing cowboy boots and has one foot propped up against the door to our little rocking metal deathtrap. She notices my death-grip and offers me her Gatorade bottle.

“Here, this will help,” she says, passing it to me. I take the cap off the bottle and recognize Captain Morgan in the mix, but it’s not nearly strong enough to help with my rising displeasure – unless the ride takes 20 more minutes, in which case I’ll need the whole bottle. It does, however, give me a little courage to look over the sides.
Off to my right is a massive, open parking lot. Tents and cars alternate colors off in the distance like a refugee camp, and gas-powered, stand-alone streetlights fill some of the dirt roads with limited light. Behind me is the main entrance to the fairgrounds, where spotty bag checks keep out very little illegal material. Sarah is one of thousands of Bonnaroo patrons who smuggled alcohol or drugs past the security checks at the front gate today.

Inside the compound, people smoke pot in the open with the same nonchalance as if they’re checking their cell phones for the time. None of the security staff cares about drugs at the checkpoint: They’re looking for weapons, firearms and SLR cameras – the three gate-check taboos. At the end of the night, stockpiles of smuggled booze are shared; that way there’s nothing to carry on the long walk back to wherever your camp is.

Over the left side of the Ferris wheel lies the rest of the festival: a half-dozen tents and stages erected alongside a sprawling complex. In the center, rows and rows of vendors peddle everything from homemade jewelry to flower power-esque dresses.

Bonnaroo is one of the last holdouts of the post-hippie movement, where the Deadheads all gather to pay tribute to their movement by encouraging everyone to recycle and teaching seminars on how to grow gardens to shrink your carbon footprint.

But I’m admittedly surprised on my last night. The hippie culture isn’t necessarily the dominant culture at Bonnaroo anymore. Mainstream bands draw mainstream audiences – college kids off for the summer who want to enjoy themselves. They’re the driving force, along with parents and teenage children, and, of course, journalists.

I’m already skipping out on press events by Friday morning when Bonnaroo starts to pick up speed. The orientation overlaps with the wait for Conan O’Brien’s comedy set. Brandon heads out early to get a place in line for us.

I’m still in bed when he leaves. The sunlight pours into our RV through the window next to my bunk. I roll over and ignore it for another half hour of restless sleep, before the next RV over decides it’s time to sound the wakeup call with a healthy dose of Primus.

We still don’t have any water in our tank – they’re fixing it, they promise – so I head out of the VIP section with a backpack full of bottled water, feeling grimy and sweaty from Thursday, but smelling of fresh sunscreen, and wishing I could wash my hands.

I’m not the adventurous type. I’m at Bonnaroo 2010 because I broke a promise to Brandon last year: I said I would go and I didn’t, so this year I have no way out.
I should be enjoying myself. I like concerts more than most people. In fact, I love live music, jam bands, and everything about the concert culture.

But I hate camping. I hate long walks on humid summer days, and not being able to go home and sleep in a familiar place at the end of the day. So Bonnaroo could be a fantastic and efficient way for me to see a lot of bands I love, or a miserable four-day sweaty camping nightmare.

This is the silent fear of every mainstream attendant of the festival. The extremists – those diehard fans and groupies who would follow their favorite acts into hell as long as they could find a decent lawn seat for the Eternal Damnation Tour – could care less. Hot, cold, wet, dry, Tennessee, Afghanistan: They’ll be there. After nearly a decade, the ’Roo brings out thousands of stoners, post-hippies, the older generation of Deadheads, the younger generations of Dave Matthews fans and Phish fans, and a decent sampling of other people just looking for live music and a good time. The big-name live performers bring them all together for this one big event.

As I make my way across the festival grounds to the Comedy Tent, I’m bumping into a complete cross-section: girls walk by in bikini tops and shorts, or just bikinis, or just their bare chests painted to look like they’re wearing bikinis. The guys are shirtless, mostly pale and out of shape. A noticeable number have a Camelbak hydration pack strung over their shoulders with not-so-clear liquids running up the long straws as they suck it through their dry lips. Under the few sparse trees around the endless fields, people cram together for the shade. Most are sleeping or passing pipes around.

It rained earlier in the week, and the ground is mushy underfoot. My shoes pick up some mud and dirt just from following the well-tread pathways between stages. Most of the grass is gone, and some of the wet spots smell like a ruptured septic tank. It’s that way all over the festival, and every so often one poor patron who wasn’t watching his footing passes by, covered in mud from head to toe.

The line for Conan snakes back and forth for hundreds of heads. A few people step out of line to toss a Frisbee around. By this point I’m soaked in a new day’s coating of sweat, and the sunscreen running off my forehead stings my eyes.

It’s almost 90 degrees, and the humidity is easily within 10 points of complete saturation. Everyone with a gray T-shirt is sporting dark rings of sweat. Larger people like myself are acquiring unattractive lactation rings. Sweat is beading on my arms, legs, thighs and the backs of my knees. It’s starting to drip down my neck, back and some other places where water retention in the morning means chafing in the afternoon.