Bonnaroo 2012: Two Layers of Dirt+Food Poisoning+3 Days of Great Tunes= One Memorable Weekend

The last time I wrote on this blog, liberals still respected President Obama and his attempts to change the country.  The last time I wrote a blog, I was a student,  The last time I wrote a blog, I was single.  Well now I'm married (in this blog, my wife will officially be known as Dr. Burkhart or Dr. B.).  I graduated with a Master's Degree, and have accepted a job as a middle school band director (some people don't like hyper kids-- I am not one of those people).  And our man B.O. hasn't changed much except to have an oddly large influence on the educational system (and not in a way teachers were anticipating).  But none of things will be discussed here because they are either too boring (graduating), too personal (marriage), or I don't know jack about them so I don't deserve to have an opinion (Obama and marriage).

Well Bonnaroo to you my friends.  When I first starting jotting notes down for this column I was sitting in one of the only cities in the United States that only exists for a weekend a year.  A small community of 80,000 people are living next to their cars or in big tents and finding creative ways to define the word "shower."  There are several FAQs that future hopefuls of the Bonnaroo experience have.  So I thought I would take a cue from one of my favorite Internet writers  (Bill Simmons) and one of the worst writers I have ever had to read (some book on sex and marriage I had to read for marriage counseling) by doing a question and answer session where I ask myself questions and answer them as if they were asked by someone else.  Enjoy:

So what acts did you see at Bonnaroo?
The lame answer to this question is "What acts didn't I see?" but that is stupid.  There was a TON I didn't see (more on why later), but Dr. Burkhart and I definitely did our best to see as much as we could.  The groups we officially saw were groups where we actually stayed and listened to at least two tunes.  So here is the list in chronological order of when we saw them:

The Applebutter Express, Rollin' In The Hay, The Dirty Guv'nahs, Rubblebucket, Mariachi El Bronx, Danny Brown, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Yelawolf, Alabama Shakes, The Soul Rebels, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Hey Rosetta! (twice), The Avett Brothers, Fitz & The Tantrums, Feist, Ludacris, St. Vincent, Sara Watkins, Rodrigo y Gabriela and C.U.B.A., Radiohead, Black Star, The Main Squeeze, The Devil Makes Three, Blind Pilot, Das Racist, Bad Brains, Flogging Molly, Battles, Khaira Arby and Her Band, Punch Brothers, Gary Clark Jr., Art Vs. Science, Red Baraat, The Roots, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Superjam w/Questlove and Special Guests (oh you just wait), Alice Cooper, Skrillex.

That's the list.  38 acts in three days.  You will notice some major absences.

So when I saw the lineup for this year's Bonnaroo and found out you were going, I knew who you were gonna see: Radiohead, The Roots, Sharon Jones, The Beach Boys, Bon Iver, and The Shins.  Also, I thought it was a four day festival.  So... what happened?


Food Poisoning.  Or a GI Tract infection.  Either way I think Skrillex literally hit the brown note sometime during his 1:30am set Sunday morning because I woke up and actually wanted to go to the porta potty.  A couple hours and a couple naps later, Dr. B. and I decided I wouldn't be able to make it through the 2 miles both ways walk and multiples hours of standing that the day required.  This was a worthy compromise because there will be other opportunities for those other three acts.  Bon Iver is already covered because I have seen them in concert with Dr. B. and they did pretty much the same show.  The Shins will hopefully come to the area again soon.  The real loss here is the Beach Boys, and trust me when I say that they were a major motivation for us taking so long to make our decision to leave.  I have no regrets about my Bonnaroo experience, but I would be lying if I said I don't have a shade or melancholy about being able to listen to The Beach Boys run through their droopy summer anthem tunes.

OK, give me the honest truth.  How easy is it to get drugs at Bonnaroo?

To quote a recent article from Billboard.com , " marijuana deals were made in broad daylight."  I was offered weed twice that I can remember; Dr. B. remembers more. Das Racist dedicated a song to anyone taking ketamine and got a very enthusiastic response.  One man was looking for his friends Sunday night because he heard they were freaking out on mushrooms.  When we moved up closer for The Roots show we ended up in a section where every single group of people were smoking weed.  We felt a bit too white bread, but the music kept us focused, and there was certainly plenty to do for those who didn't want to do that.

Don't take this commentary for a commentary on marijuana use.  It's just something I don't do.  Now don't take that statement for me condoning any kind of drug use, but that is not the point of Bonnaroo-- to condone or not to condone.  The point is for everything to be cool (whether moral or legal) and for you to treat your neighbor with respect and a dash of hippy love.

So did you have trouble getting along with your neighbors considering you and your wife were dorky teetotalers and didn't even bring a tent?


First off, how did you know we didn't bring a tent?  The xBox (my Scion) is a superior machine in many ways (including keeping the Indy Tire mechanics in business) and one of those ways is room.  We slept in there just fine with the windows cracked.

Anyway, here is a fact.  The people at Bonnaroo were nothing but friendly.  The vendors weren't pushy (like in Rome-- oh yeah I need to talk about Rome sometime); our neighbors were friendly and generous as we were to them; the guys who offered drugs were totally cool with us turning them down; a lot of people picked up their trash; the volunteers and safety people were completely easy going; even the artists were cool with the audience (except for some of the hard rockers-- Danzig and Bad Brains were not completely sociable).  We also felt some home love when we went to support Bloomington funk/rock/soul/jam group The Main Squeeze and found some friends and several fellow Hoosiers.  We also figured out the kids next to us at our campsite were from Depaw University in Greenecastle, IN, and a dude we stood in line with was in high school band with my sis-in-law.  By the way if you want to get recognized by people from your state just wear team gear from that state.  Don't worry it's totally cool.

What was the strangest thing about Bonnaroo?  Something you weren't expecting.


It's a four-way tie:

1.  People outside of Indiana LOVE the NBA right now.  It's amazing (joke intended).  NBA throwback jerseys and hats were everywhere (the Bryant "Big Country" Reeves Vancouver Grizzlies jersey was a highlight).  Bonnaroo showed both Game 6 and Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals somewhere on the grounds.  Sometimes I forget that the NBA totally matters right now because my proud home state still seems to think that our team is no good.  Yeah we sold out the playoffs, but we need more support than that.  All of the players from that Malice team are gone Pacer fans.  Come on back to the Fieldhouse.

On a related note, we met one guy who claimed to know LeBron's mom and said she is kind of a nut job.  Yet another layer ripped away from the onion that is LeBron James.

2.  You never know how wonderful a good hair washing can be until you have to wait three days and seven hours to get one.  There was a Garnier Fructis building that offered air conditioning and a free hair washing and that was pretty much awesome.  The only drawback was missing Santigold's set to wait in line, but I think it was well worth the wait.  That's how crazy Bonnaroo was.  A hair wash was easily worth more than seeing Santigold rock one of my favorite songs ever, "Creator", live.

3.  How easy it was to spot people I knew or fellow Hoosiers.  Not much to say other than it's nice to know that other Hoosiers enjoy sacrificing good hygiene for great music.

4.  I think almost every band except Radiohead introduced all the members.  I tried to immerse myself in the Bloomington indie scene for the past four or five years where it was massively uncool to do that. But every single band whether indie or jam, hip-hop or pop, was introducing their bandmates.  Did you hear that B-town?  Get on it.

What were some of the lowlights of the Fest?


You mean other than getting food poisoning the morning of the last day????  Three things:

1.  The Other Tent (Bonnaroo has some cute little names for their main venues including What Stage, Which Stage, This Tent, That Tent, and The Other Tent along with some more sponsored/normalish names for the small stages) was host to some "world music" acts on Saturday night.  By the way there is an interesting argument for the term "world music" being completely racist if not also nationalist or at least Western Culture-elitist.  But we can get into that another time.  The reason that I put Saturday at The Other Tent as a lowlight is not because the acts weren't any good.  On the contrary, Khaira Arby and Her Band as well as Red Baraat were absolutely fantastic, but hardly anybody was there to see them.  Earlier in the week I mentioned to Dr. Burkhart that no matter who you were, you were gonna get a solid audience.  But that just didn't seem to be the case by the end of the week.  I'm not saying the tent was empty.  There were probably between 100-250 people watching at each.  But these two bands deserved more, and they didn't get it because their fan base was across the ocean and they played during a big main stage act respectively.

2.  My back.  It turns out that walking multiple hours a day and standing during all the other hours can be bad on your back, especially if you trained for a marathon and ran 1,000 miles the previous year and don't have access to normal chairs and sleep in the back of a car for three days and don't have access to a good shower and are in the hot sun all afternoon.  We got smarter as the weekend rolled on and made sure to lie down periodically in the grass, but it was always an issue to fight.  I will get my weight back down for next year and make sure I don't have an injury from my running-- only great fitness.

3.  Dr. Burkhart and I are not campers.  I like air-conditioning and beds and warm breakfast and computers and buildings.  Don't get my wrong.  The camping is half the point of Bonnaroo and is totally worth it, but all the dirt that gets kicked up over the course of four days is enough to sometimes make you wish Bonnaroo was held on a college campus with dorms.

What were the highlights?


There were many.  Let's start with Non-musical:

1.  Hangin' out with the lady on a turf that I think we both equally liked for the same reasons.  Maybe I had the more nerdy knowledge of what we were saying, but we both dug it the same.

2.  The ferris wheel.  The last time I rode one I was 8 years old and scared s***less.  Well this time I mastered it at Bonnaroo and felt like a king.  It didn't hurt that I got a Psycho T shoutout from the ferris wheel guy cause of my Pacers shirt.

3.  The aforementioned Garnier Fructis shindig.

4.  The food.  Some classic southern food.  I ate alligator (a definite nominee for the food poisoning and something that is making me queasy right now).  Wait a minute.  The food might not have been a highlight.  Scratch that.  I've gotta go to the bathroom-- the one with the flushing toilet.

5.  The mushrooms.  No note those mushrooms.  The wonderful people at Bonnaroo created a super-meta-situation where what you needed to stay alive was contained within a group of giant blue mushrooms.  The water was fresh and good always.  It was one sanitary thing you could always count on.

And the musical:

1.  None of the bands were bad.  None Of Them.  Ok maybe the Dirty Guv'nahs.  And maybe Luda's set was a little weird with the interlude of pop hits that aren't his songs.  But that's it.  But some particular bands get a special shout out for just being ridiculous when we saw them.  This list of bands are ones we could catch only a portion of:

--Hey Rosetta! (great depressed white boy rock with a little bit of anger to them)
--Danny Brown (he is dirty and foul and is missing teeth and Dr. Burkhart would never listen to him except for this performance, but his rhymes are crazy creative, and his flow great.  He may never have
--The Soul Rebels (brass bands always do covers, but they always sound like brass bands--not these guys)
-- St. Vincent and Sara Watkins (put here together because they both were hauntingly beautiful in completely different ways)
--Battles (totally noisy, totally entrancing)
--Khaira Arby and Her Band (these guys wailed, seriously, look them up)
--Punch Brothers (Nickelcreek was in full attendance at Bonnaroo which made me hope for a reunion, but it didn't happen.  However Chris Thile has a knack for picking cool covers, The Punch Brothers cover of "Kid A" was gorgeous)
--Superjam (I have been drinking the Kool-Aid of D'Angelo over the past year.  I loved his stuff along with Lauryn Hill and Maxwell in the '90s.  Well guess who showed up at Bonnaroo with an All-Star cast of funk musicians.  That's right.  Friggin' D'Angelo!  They just did covers, but they were cool outside-the-box covers and he killed it.  When ?uestlove announced "I've been waiting 12 years to say this..."I grabbed the doc and screamed "Oh my God it's D'Angelo and that is exactly who it was.  He sounded great, but the bigger part to me was that I witnessed a musically significant moment.  I can say I was there when D'Angelo returned.  Awesome.)
--Alice Cooper (We only saw a couple tunes cause of D'Angelo, but how many of you can say you have seen Alice Cooper play "School's Out" live with monsters and whips?  Also, he staged a fake fight between Barack Obama and random Republican white guy Mitt Romney during "Election" and danced with a giant Lady Gaga doll in an awesome hard rock cover of "Born This Way."
-- Skrillex (I have not taken the dive into the dance music thing but I now totally understand why Skrillex is hot.  His show was crazy high-energy and the beats he put together are absolutely intoxicating.  And he definitely is the master of the dub-step thing.  Did I mention that he did his show inside a spaceship with moving tentacles?)

These cats were on a whole other level and we caught their full shows:

-- Rubblebucket (Very few bands can get these words in the same review: Blondie-like vocals, funky horn section that could kill any genre, giant robots)
-- The Main Squeeze (Probably most of the enjoyment came from having all the fellow Hoosiers there, but these guys really went nuts.  The keytar needs to exist more often.  How is it possible that I have seen these guys only once before and barely remember that even though I am from the same town as them?  Plus I got a shout out in the IU student newspaper article that covered the band.)
-- Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings (Everything you would think it is and more.  High-powered soul and Sharon Jones is a great showman[wo].  They stayed completely within their '60s time bubble and yet felt completely fresh and new the whole time)
-- Radiohead (Gorgeous with hypnotic beats.  No other band or act can pull that off right now and that's saying something.  They played some great tunes from Kid A, which is one of my top five favorite albums, and they never disappointed even on new stuff.  Each member of the band brings something to the table.  They were the band I was listening to most when I came back.  They are my stand-out band of the festival even though some other Bonnaroovians wished they played more hits.)

It looks like you basically tried to catch as much as humanly possible.  Would you suggest that mode of experiencing Bonnaroo, or do you wish you just focused more on a smaller set of acts?


Dr. Burkhart and I talked about this.  Didn't we do both?  We saw full sets from Rubblebucket, Sharon Jones, Main Squeeze, The Roots, Radiohead, and RHCP.  And had I not been doing Our Fathers in the Porta-John for a half-hour straight we would have certainly seen the Beach Boys and Ben Folds Five full sets (maybe I should have done more Our Fathers).

Look if you love music as much as I do, there is no way you will leave Bonnaroo without wishing you had seen more.  I saw 38 bands out of what I think was 150 and we were really booking it at times.  Somehow we got to see multiple bands cover sweet dreams but missed three tributes to MCA of The Beastie Boys.  We obviously missed all the Sunday stuff, but even if we stayed we would still probably have missed The Civil Wars, fun., and Kenny Rogers jam with Lionel Richie.  We missed what was supposedly a great set from 2011's Band Killed By The Radio that included horns from favorite little band Rubblebucket.  But those are the choices you make, and I am completely happy with how we handled it.  I don't feel like we made a bad choice or that we didn't get enough out of it by doing too much.  We did good.

So all and all it worked out.  Would you do it again?


You're damn right I would.  And I have learned from this one.  Next year I will be more prepared; though, I already forgot what I needed to learn for next time.  Don't eat alligator nuggets?  Yeah we'll start there.  Oh and bring an umbrella.  Take more naps.  Don't stress myself out too much and just enjoy what's in front of me.  There was some great music.  And it'll be great next year too.  Also bring a  generator and a fan.

How did you enjoy this question/answer style of writing?


I don't know.  It seemed like a good idea at the time but we'll see how it comes out tomorrow...

Kinda like the alligator nuggets.