Bonnaroo

To be served with tempeh

2007-06-19T23:43:00Z

Widespread Panic
If I owned a VW Bus, and my bus was having mechanical trouble, I would be so psyched to run into the guitarist of Widespread Panic out on the road. He looks like he must be the greatest VW mechanic in the known world. In fact, all the members of Widespread Panic could claim to be able to fix my bus and I would believe them, except maybe the guy who looks like a diamond merchant that plays the congas.

Just to establish my credentials here, let me state for the record that I saw the Dead twice, once at RFK with Edie Brickell and once at the Tacoma Dome with Santana. I’ve seen jam bands at their jammiest, and can attest that jamming is fun, both as a player and as an audience member, if you’ve been smoking pot all day and people will let you get away with it.

The Widespread Panic is a jam band of the highest order, except the guitar player, Jimmy Herring, does almost all the jamming. He is an AWESOME guitar player — apparently he’s the new guy — and the nature of the music allows him to literally solo for hours, a feat that would make even Clapton blush. Astonishingly, he keeps it interesting, lyrical and fluid. The rest of the guys hold it down, jam it out, take solos now and again, and sing lyrics over the music which the audience seemed to know and appreciate.

Unfortunately, it’s far too late, in my life and in this evening, for me to be able to get into the music of Widespread Panic. Perhaps it is that my heart does not have the spirit of love in it to connect with the music on a higher level. Perhaps it’s that I haven’t eaten enough tempeh, cumulatively. Perhaps it’s that they haven’t changed keys yet, and I’ve been watching them for a half an hour. Either way, I tried, I gave it a shot, but it was like listening to paint dry. But it’s not like I came up empty: I like the new guy.

Rock at its purest

2007-06-19T06:23:00Z

White Stripes
It was clear that the White Stripes should have played the mainstage. Whether or not they’ve sold enough records to be considered the big headliner is immaterial. For this kind of show they were unsurpassable and everyone knew it.

The field in front of the second stage was packed like a London Underground station during rush hour, and there was no earthly way I was going to get close enough to see the show without some major trickery. The vast majority of festival attendees were converging on the same spot at the same time. My all-access passes weren’t worth anything; every hotshot in Tennessee was trying to talk his or her way into the backstage, the side stage, the photo pit, wherever…

Somehow I fell in league with guy about my age with a similar “never say die” attitude (peace, man), and together we climbed up on a giant panel truck parked in the catering area just over the infield wall. It was the perfect vantage point, and we adopted the cavalier attitude that this was OUR truck and we were on the job. Until someone waved their keys at us and told us to get down we were sticking to our story.

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It was an incredible scene. The sun was setting on an ocean of people and we were in the crow’s nest. The White Stripes hit the stage already worked into a frenzy, and took it up from there. Jack White does the work of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and half of John Bonham, and somehow manages, at times, to surpass them all. He’s an American treasure and should be awarded a Congressional Medal of Freedom for the work he does on behalf of us huddled masses. Oh Lordy!

And although Meg White drums like she’s riding a pony, she’s the perfect compliment, the perfect foil for his raging tornado. It’s incredible, what they do. How in the heck are the electric blues so elastic, so supple, that for 50 years they’ve been the wellspring of every subsequent genre, yet the White Stripes can strip it back down to its most basic forms and still create something new? It’s unprecedented in any other art form, except maybe paintings of the Virgin Mary, which had a good run there for 1,600 years.

They saved their hit, "Seven Nation Army," for the end, and that was it. We were served.

Getting beyond the myth

2007-06-19T05:13:00Z

Wilco
I have no real problem with rock mythologizing. If Slash from Guns N' Roses wants to act like he’s too busy playing with his Burmese Python to have sex with the foxy model in his bed, OK. Likewise when Eddie Vedder traded his high-tops and Lakers jersey for combat boots, a flannel shirt and a drinking problem.

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There’s only one type of rock mythologizing I can’t abide, and that’s the “I’m so fragile, so sensitive, that I’ll just DIE if I have to do one more press conference” type. Jeff Tweedy made a feature-length film about how much he hated being on camera, (and so did Radiohead, come to think of it), and people lapped it up like clotted cream. Barf.

So I was pretty sure Wilco was baloney, and all the hero worship around them was just atheists looking for a saint. But their performance shut me up a little.

Jeff Tweedy made the Bonnaroo mainstage feel like somebody’s living room sofa, and that is an amazing feat. They played rock and they played country and they played folk and it all felt intimate and real, not at all contrived, which is hard to do even if you’re ON somebody’s sofa. I still think it’s pretty bunk to be a grown man who hides behind his hands like a five-year-old, but Jeff Tweedy was standing tall at Bonnaroo.

And the fans go wild

2007-06-19T05:11:00Z

Feist
I’ve also toured with Feist, but now that I’ve established my journalistic integrity we can dispense with formality. She’s a first-rate guitarist and musician who is inspiring some cult-like devotion from her fans.

I didn’t hear cheering anywhere else like the cheering for Leslie Feist — she’d arch her eyebrow and the place would blow up — which always makes me wonder what the heck is going on. Her songs are minimalist and inventive, and she has a good voice and a good ear, like a PJ Harvey who’s not so mad at boys, but the rabid fandom is usually about something else. She must be code for something that I haven’t figured out.

Let the feud begin now

2007-06-19T05:07:00Z

Decembrists
In all fairness, I should probably recuse myself from reviewing the Decembrists. They are a band I know, we’ve toured together and I’ve appeared in one of their music videos. Also, Decembrist Chris Funk guested on the Long Winters’ most recent album. I can’t possibly review their show impartially, because I like them too much.

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On the other hand, I’ve been in a “fake feud” with them for several years, involving some “smack talking” and pranking, which despite my best efforts has failed to catch fire mostly because they reciprocate too passively. (I think they’re holding out for a fake feud with Sufjan Stevens or something). So I can’t really be trusted not to call them a bunch of fruity, Vaudeville, pirate-song-singing sissies just to burn their britches a little.

But in this instance I’m acting as a professional journalist and I must honor my caste by reporting the news without adornment. They played their epic song, "The Tain," which was a bold choice, and their kitchy theatricality played exceptionally well with the big crowd.

At one point Colin led the audience in bidding the sun to set, and the effect was like a pagan ceremony — 15,000 people all motioning in unison toward the sun. In the end Mavis Staples joined them for a song, which was a little like... Like... Well, there is no better analogy for an unfathomable incongruity than: Like Mavis Staples jamming with the Decembrists.

More than his backstory

2007-06-18T21:26:00Z

Elvis Perkins
Here’s a guy that if I told you his backstory you’d hardly believe it. In fact, most writers want to talk about his story so badly, and how it influences his melancholy music, you can tell they aren’t really listening to his tunes. They figured out what the story is before they heard a note.

Elvis and his band played lyrical folk in a Newport in ‘65 kind of way, with acoustic and electric instruments in equal measure. The real highlights were the tunes he announced as coming out on their next release. These new songs sounded like early Animals or Troggs, and the extra energy was like a shot in the arm. The Bonnaroo audience got an early taste of the songs they’ll be singing along with next year. Hail, hail rock and roll!

Something for the round file

2007-06-18T20:52:00Z

The Bonnaroo Guide
Wow, why didn’t I look at this thing sooner? There’s a wealth of information in here that would have enabled me to represent like a real music journalist. For instance, many of you probably already know that Maynard Keenan from Tool is also in A Perfect Circle! Scintillating!

The fact is, and I speak from experience here, both as a musician and a reporter, that the fixation on trivia, arcana, timelines and pedigree, while making up the lion’s share of the conversation about music in the world, have nothing at all to do with music. It’s all glorified baseball-card collecting. I’m as guilty as the next guy, and will bore you to tears talking about George Harrison’s guitars, or which Judas Priest records are the good ones, but more often than not, too much information gets in the way.

Although music can be broken into pieces and categorized a million ways — think of all the old floppy discs, full of primitive spreadsheets cataloging collections of 45s, now lost to time — there is always someone, somewhere, listening to your favorite song for the first time.

So I’m glad I didn’t report from Bonnaroo with guidebook in hand. There were enough reporters there from other media outlets all copying their coverage from press releases, and all pretending to like bands they don’t.

Fast picking from a master

2007-06-18T20:23:00Z

David Bromberg
Testing my “Happy Birthday” theory was David Bromberg, another truly gifted player who appeared to have come directly from his day job as a watch repairman in Schenectady, NY. (Actually, he repairs violins in Wilmington, Del. I’m cheating now, consulting the festival guide, and it’s comforting how close I came.)

Mr. Bromberg played a nice mix of bluegrass and folk, with a lot of fast picking and fiddling, but he was taking the piss too, and hamming it up.

It’s easy to forget that some of the first people to discover and popularize jazz and blues were the east coast Jews, so that Catskills Bluegrass is probably as old as rock and roll. David Bromberg has played with Dylan, (again, the book) so it must all seem like a go

A professional at work

2007-06-18T20:00:00Z

T-Bone Burnett
T-Bone is a famous producer, a man with golden ears, and if memory serves he was also the bass player in David Letterman’s band and the "Saturday Night Live" band? I can’t really fact-check T-Bone’s resume because I’m typing on a BlackBerry phone in a dirty field with 60,000 hippies, but I’m sure some concerned citizen will castigate me for not knowing more.

T-Bone obviously plays for the love of it, and his band had the feel of a busman’s holiday. Just some great journeyman players running through some oldies rock numbers for the hell of it. The stage looked like a high-end vintage music store, and those old instruments really did make appreciably sweeter tones. I think players of this caliber could play anything, could play the Happy Birthday song for an hour, and I’d still enjoy the show.

Don't break out the doubleneck unless you're serious

2007-06-18T19:50:00Z

Wolfmother
When Wolfmother took the stage, I was jazzed. Right out of the gate their riffs and tones landed close to my heart, conjuring a young Black Sabbath with just a hint of pop. I love old Black Sabbath, so I settled in with the expectation that I’d be happily heavy metalled for an hour in the hot sun.

A few songs in, however, my enthusiasm morphed into incredulity. Were these guys serious? They sounded EXACTLY like a young Black Sabbath, same Ozzy vocals, same half-step modulations and even clunkier Toni Iommi solos. Was I missing something? Isn’t that illegal? Can you really DO that?

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I tried to check myself. Look, I said, you’re being a real grump about all these bands. Isn’t it OK for music to just be fun? Wolf Mother is a damn decent hard rock band, the crowd is loving them, and if you were super-stoned they would probably sound like the real deal. Lighten up. It’s no different than when the Stones copied Muddy Waters, or the Stray Cats copied Carl Perkins.

So I stood there in my new frame of mind, trying to get hep, when all of a sudden the guitar player busted out a white Jimmy Page doubleneck guitar. This is a serious statement, this is the "Stairway to Heaven" guitar, so I figured we were about to hear their epic number. Instead, the kid plays the whole song on one neck of the guitar and doesn’t even touch the 12-string. Sacrilege! Travesty! You can’t just bring a guitar like that out as a GAG! Boo!