Cracking Spines
Bonnaroooooo - day 3
At Bonnaroo, the notion of time is an extremely relative concept. During a bad set, a five-minute song may seem like thirty. Conversely, an energetic three-hour performance, like Phish’s on Friday, might be too short. Time spent waiting for a band to take the stage is always elongated, the minutes turning into hours. By the third day of the festival, sleep deprivation begins to add to time’s elasticity – it becomes an accordian, now expanding, now contracting, music leaking out no matter what. So Decider spent Saturday partly unaware of temporal matters, getting sucked in and spit out performances as through a time warp.
Bon Iver (3:30)
Some of the more interesting shows at Bonnaroo have been put on by seemingly intimate artists, now playing outdoor venues packed with thousands of fans. One imagines that it’s difficult for an artist prone to a quiet, sometimes mournful, style to project his subdued songs to a crowd that stretches for about two hundred yards beyond the stage. But Bon Iver did exactly that. “Creature Fear” and “Skinny Love” – the first two songs they played – both broke down into fairly heavy electric guitar riffs, front man Justin Vernon quickly working up a sweat. So it was immediately apparent that he could get loud. What was more impressive, though, was Bon Iver’s ability to forge a close relationship with the audience such that their calmer pieces – which Vernon kept calm – were just as captivating. On “For Emma,” a quartet of horns came out to lay a subtle, brassy foundation beneath the piece. The best was saved for last, though. On “The Wolves (Act I and II),” Vernon implored the audience to sing along with the song’s nostalgic fade-out verse, “What might have been lost.” For three solid minutes, the entire crowd chanted the line over and over, louder and louder, culminating in a unified scream that sucked everyone into the concert’s deceptively un-private realm.
Of Montreal (5:15)
Of Montreal is like an effeminate, more musically inclined version of Gwar. Both bands take their stages in elaborate costumes, and have puppet shows enacted during their set. Yesterday afternoon, people dressed as pigs and survivors of a nuclear holocaust danced around the musicians on This Stage in some indecipherable drama. Ostensibly there was a connection between the costumed dancers and the music, but discerning that link is pretty much impossible. That doesn’t matter, though, because Of Montreal’s set was pretty fantastic. Their bass-heavy repertoire got the crowd moving, even in the 90-degree heat. Something about the syncopated rhythms mixed with singer Kevin Barnes’ whiny-but-fluid voice is infectious, impossible to ignore, and great to dance to.
Bruce Springsteen (9:00)
Is The Boss more like a Chevy or a Ford? Undoubtedly the comparison of Springsteen to a pick-up truck has been made before. But it’s so damn apt. He’s tough, rugged, dependable, and undoubtedly American. He seemed an odd pick to headline this year’s Bonnaroo, which until recently has been billed as a hippy fest. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of fans gathered on the lawn of the What Stage to hear The Boss play. The downside of his being truck-like is that his set was a little predictable, his songs sounding exactly like they’re supposed to sound, and Springsteen himself performing with a typically heavy dose fist-pumping and high-fiving. But at this point maybe no one wants Springsteen to change. We want him to deliver exactly what we expect from him, with little deviation (although a rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” was well-received). He’s a utilitarian musician – his songs seem built from bricks rather than crafted from emotion. Likewise, his performance was a solid structure, something to appreciate like the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore, a distinctly American edifice that even native tourists should pass by at least once.
Yeasayer (1:00am)
It was a short set that seemed even shorter than it was. Slotted only forty-five minutes for a late night (one a.m.) performance, Yeasayer made the most of it, slotting in several fast-paced songs to a crowd full of fans covered in psychedelic body paint. But they slotted in a few slow-paced songs, too, and there were times that the audience didn’t quite know how to dance to the deliberately unsteady rhythms. Yeasayer has established themselves on experimental grounds, and there’s no doubt that they played their show exactly as they wanted to play it. But the lulls were too immobilizing for a nocturnal crowd that just wanted to groove.
