Cracking Spines

Bonnaroo Day 4

originally published, in slightly different form, by decider

There’s an old proverb – sometimes attributed to Ben Franklin, sometimes to Oscar Wilde – that says, ‘After three days guests, like fish, begin to smell.’ The same can safely be applied to Bonnaroo attendees. By Sunday afternoon, there was a subtle but pervasive odor throughout the farm that can only be described as weak deodorant overwhelmed by sweaty crotch. Scents emanating from the Port-O-Sans banks were somewhat worse.

In addition to smelling bad, festival-goers were visibly tired. They still did their strange, jellyfish-like dances, but were oscillating at something like 72 beats per minute as opposed to the 200 bpm they’d been at for the past few days. Likewise, the music slated for this last evening was somewhat quieter. But not any less powerful than what had come before.

Andrew Bird
Yeah, he can sing and play guitar as well as most singer-songwriters of his generation and genre. That’s not what makes Andrew Bird distinctive, though. It’s that he adds solid violin riffs and virtuosic whistling into his tool belt. If you’ve never seen Bird live before, it’s easy to believe that the whistling on his album is just studio magic, chirps spliced together to make an unbroken croon. Such is not the case. Even live, his whistling is fluid – a single note might be held for a full fifteen seconds. Tonight’s was a low-key set. In the five o’clock heat, a good chunk of the fans opted to sit or lie in what four days ago had been grass but was now mostly mud. Bird played songs that were irrevocably pleasant: cheery and melodious but in a quiet way. Had this been a Friday set he might (rightly) be criticized for not performing with enough energy. But as it was, he served as a perfect harbinger, his tamped-down music reminding us that, even though we were at a concert, the festival was coming to an end.

Snoop Dogg
Snoop threatened to pull a Kanye West. For the uninformed, at last year’s Bonnaroo, Kanye, slotted for two in the morning, didn’t come on stage until almost five, and played for only fifty minutes or so. This year, Snoop was scheduled for six o’clock. At six-fifteen, there was an announcement saying he was five miles away. He wasn’t even on the premises! Though we were promised that he’d go on as soon as he got here, I translated the five-mile distance (which, let’s face it, was probably ten) into a forty-five minute wait. On a strict schedule – my group had plans to begin our drive home as soon as Phish ended their set – I went back to my campground to break down my tent. About fifteen minutes later, Snoop was on stage doing his verse from “The Next Episode.” Unlike Kanye, whose three-hour delay went unexplained, the crowd seemed all right with Snoop’s tardiness, if only because they got a candid excuse. Midway through his set he brought out Erykah Badu, and later played House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” (The song’s second incarnation at Bonnaroo, as The Knux had played it on Thursday night.) From afar, it seemed like a solid set. Nothing that would change anyone’s perception of Snoop or of the festival, but nothing that would detract from it, either.

Phish
Devout Phish fans were afraid that the jam band had blown its wad on Friday night with their insanely energetic, insider-friendly show. And, indeed, Sunday night’s set started out slowly, as they played a few songs that heads often deem second-tier – “Bathtub Gin” and “Gotta Jiboo.” By the time they started the jam-heavy “Tweezer,” a decent portion of the audience, while anything but unhappy, had begun to sit in the grass-mud. But then they brought out The Boss.

After the show, everyone said they’d seen it coming. Of course Phish was going to bring out Bruce Springsteen. Whatever. Nobody knew, and it was a terrific surprise. Bossman and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio traded riffs on “Mustang Sally,” stretching the song out so the chorus repeated four times over the course of ten minutes. With Phish endorsing him, the crowd seemed much more excited to see Springsteen play than they had on his solo set Saturday night. Together they then played a couple Springsteen songs off “Born In The U.S.A.” (Sorry, that’s as specific as I can get, though I’m sure it’s on Twitter or something somewhere.)

There was a brief set break, and then Phish was back at it again. With energy more reminiscent of their Friday night set, they powered through “Silent in the Morning,” “Prince Caspian,” and the new, but powerful, “Backwards Down the Number Line,” which culminated in a fireworks display. It’s difficult to imagine a better way for a notoriously hippyish festival to end. Placid smiles on their faces, the ‘Rooers stumbled back to their tents. My group made our way to our car, driving off, happy to get away from the smell, a little sad to be leaving the sounds.