This is Bonnaroo

I find Brandon in front of one of the tent entrances. A mix-up about VIP privileges gets us in the front of the second line for the Conan tent. When they finally open the gates, we race in and manage to snag front-center seats. Conan’s show is incredible. It’s one of only a handful all weekend that I’m able to watch start to finish because the lineup for Bonnaroo is so jammed full of good acts that most of them overlap. It’s also the only time during Bonnaroo that I manage to get so close to an act because the most avid fans fill in 100 yards deep an hour before every show.

In the afternoon we kill a few hours in the RV before heading out to see the folksy duo She and Him. We catch the last half, and I have to skip the band OK Go so we can grab good lawn seats in the VIP section for Tenacious D. It’s my first main stage act, and the crowd fills in quickly close to the stage. Brandon wants to be up front, but I’m exhausted from six hours of constant sunlight, and I need to sit down.

He’s right though: They’re not as good from off to the side. But after half of the set, he comes back and sits down with me, exhausted. By the time they’ve finished, we’ve emptied most of the bottled water we’ve carried with us. Then we drag ourselves across the festival grounds again to catch Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers playing some fantastic bluegrass. We get to watch four of their numbers before they end their set – including an amazing encore performance of “King Tut” from Martin’s early hosting days on “Saturday Night Live” – but this one’s in bluegrass form.

The whole afternoon feels like a scavenger hunt, reading maps and racing across the sprawl trying to beat the clock and other fans for the best view.
Before the night acts start, we make a quick stop at the RV for some food, Red Bull, beer, and Gold Bond – lots of Gold Bond. The problem is that after a day of discomfort, and with only a small closet of a bathroom to stand in, we’re struggling to apply the Gold Bond to all of the necessary areas. Once I’ve finally carpet bombed myself with medicated powder, I make an unfortunate realization: No water means no way to wash the powder from my hands.

Now Brandon and I are cracking open our precious stock of bottled water to wash our hands and faces, and we can hear Kings of Leon starting. We still haven’t had food, so we race through dinner in the VIP tent and limp over to find a spot for Kings of Leon.

I’m exhausted. The Red Bull is keeping my mind active, but my body is tired from walking and climbing and sweating, and it wants to rest. And that’s when Brandon reminds me it’s time to leave to get decent seats for The Flaming Lips.

By the time we get there, I’ve given up on standing and tell him to find me in the VIP bleachers. At this point I’m beginning to appreciate the small miracles of the VIP passes, including the right to sit down somewhere within view of the stage – good acoustics or not. I’ve been up for more than 15 hours in the heat, and I can only listen to half a set of Flaming Lips numbers before dragging myself through the crowd, back to the RV and passing out on my bed.

I wake up Saturday and am immediately disgusted with myself. I change clothes and down a bottle of water and another energy drink, hoping I’ll feel more refreshed. Brandon says I missed an awesome second half of the show, and he shows me pictures. Then he reminds me that I forgot about LCD Soundsystem, who began playing sometime after 3 a.m. for everyone who stayed up late enough.

My body is still sore, but I’ve only got a few bands left that I really want to see, so like any over-ambitious vacationer, I start making the hard cuts to my to-do list. I narrow it down to two must-sees for the day: Weezer and the Avett Brothers. They’re playing one after the other on the same stage, so I think I can handle it.
At 5:45 P.M. the Avetts are playing pretty well, but I’m stuck between two food vendors and can only see the show through the latticework of the sound stage that’s set up in the middle of the crowd. Then the worst possible thing happens: After two days of sunlight, rain comes again, soaking down between the people and into the ground. It’s gone in less than half an hour, but now the dirt feels like a sponge and smells like a toilet brush.

But I’m not going anywhere and neither is anyone else. When the rain stops, not many people have moved. The Avetts finish up about 7 p.m. and I’m able to push my way farther into the crowd – within 50 yards of the stage. Now I just have to wait an hour for Weezer.

I pass the time making small talk with people around me. A guy in his 20s is bragging to everyone that his girlfriend accepted his proposal last night at the Flaming Lips show. I congratulate him, and he rewards me with a hug and at least a dozen offers of his pipe over the rest of the afternoon. A few minutes later, a lanky man wearing only a Speedo walks by. He stops long enough to answer questions about the contacts he’s wearing that turn his entire eye blue. Speedo man then climbs over and around the seated members of the crowd in the least comfortable ways possible and moves on.

The show starts around 8 p.m. as Rivers Cuoumo and his bandmates bounce onto stage. Unlike the last (and awesome) Weezer concert I saw in Atlanta half a decade ago, Rivers is an explosive stage dynamo. He’s all over the place, jumping around like a ferret on coke. The crowd’s loving every psychotic thing he says, which is only making him act more bipolar. He loses the beat on a couple of songs because he’s too busy scaling the metal stage scaffolding. I look away for a moment during the first song, and when I look back up he’s made it across the stage and has climbed halfway up one of the stage’s support beams. It’s like that for the next two amazing hours as he rockets off a trampoline onto the drummer’s platform, smashes a speaker because it pissed him off, and carries a small black stage block around, ranting about how these things are always on stages and he never knows what they do. Then he stands on it, and leaps off it again and again during the next two songs.  They end the set with an epic cover of “Kids” by MGMT, which they then transition into “Poker Face” to further blow our minds. Rivers gallops off stage and re-emerges wearing a blond Lady Gaga wig, and he’s a little too into it.

It’s right then – on the tail end of the whole experience, watching the last encore of the last band that really motivated me to drive across three states – that I realize why music festivals draw so many people in year after year. There’s an inherent bond achieved among the survivors from their shared struggles and physical exhaustion – like a club with one meeting a year. When everybody’s making the same sacrifices, living in relatively similar conditions, it doesn’t matter who you are outside the gates. You’re still just one guy with a ticket, and you’re only going to get as good a view of the stage as you’re willing to work for.

It’s not like going to the movies or a golf course – the quality of the facilities is irrelevant in deciding how much fun you have at Bonnaroo. Those things are tailored to provide comfort, but Bonnaroo isn’t; it’s tailored to weed out the nonbelievers. Only the people who drink the Kool-Aid get to step forward. And in a blob of heads and torsos oscillating to a totally rocking live performance, every step forward counts.

Sunday night comes with a long, exhausted sigh of relief for me and a firm wipe of my brow. I passed most of the day in the RV, napping and hydrating. On the final night of Bonnaroo, with the only act left being the Dave Matthews Band, it’s clear that most of the festival grounds are already dark and vacant.

Dave is performing on the main stage, in the far corner of the fairgrounds. I can see the stage well from atop the Bonnaroo Ferris wheel, and the lights are stretching over thousands of people who stretch half a mile from the stage. The band sounds muddy from this distance, and I can’t really tell which song they’re playing, but even with close to 80,000 people cheering Dave at the end of the song, it’s clear that Bonnaroo is winding down. Most of those vendors are packing up shop below, and some of the audience is heading out of the gates early to avoid the end-of-show foot traffic.

I’m still hot, sweaty, tired, sore, a little hung over, probably dehydrated, and remembering my fear of heights about 20 minutes too late. But I’ve survived my first music festival, and I even might have managed to ignore the physical torments of four days of heat, humidity and public bathrooms long enough to actually enjoy myself.
And even if I feel like I didn’t get everything out of these four days that I could have, there’s always next year.

~ Clay Whittaker