Bonnaroo: You Ain't No Woodstock

In June of 2008, hidden on farmland in a small town in Tennessee, a village of nearly 100,000 people was constructed for four brief days, just at it has been every year since 2002. Since its inception, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has grown in both size and scope into the summer music festival. I made the voyage to what’s been called this generation’s Woodstock, harboring an empty hope that the experience would be an appropriate comparison to that summer of ’69. I would like to believe that I am not naïve enough to be disappointed by an event that chose Metallica and Pearl Jam as headliners, that it’s no surprise that the words “sellout” entered my mind on numerous occasions. Still, I can’t help but feel the dull pain of disappointment, as if catching the show this year, its sixth, was too late and the festival is now past its prime.

I first heard of Bonnaroo in high school when one of my friends attended. He returned wearing tie-dye, telling tales of old hippies and jam bands, masses of acid-trippers and topless peace lovers. I waited patiently until I too had the opportunity to make the pilgrimage to what I had hoped might be one of the few true lovefests still in existence. The chance presented itself this summer.

My boyfriend and I packed into the only vehicle available: a white Chevy Suburban, hulking and armed with enough gasoline to cause the next tragic oil spill. Okay, we thought, we would be the most eco-unfriendly people there and would probably make very little friends with our huge SUV, but we would rest well on the air mattress that fit in the back.

We were traversing the great forests and farms of the American Heartland! We were wild! We were free!

Sure we had our flaws. Perhaps we should have been reading “On the Road” along the way rather than David Sedaris. But certainly the free-lovers would still allow us to partake of their Kool-Aid, right?

But instead of delicious red fruit-punch nectar, I found five-dollar-a-cup, more-ice-than-liquid lemonade sold from one of hundreds of stands waiting to take all your money as you stood dehydrated in the Southern sun. There were tents sponsored by television stations, software corporations, and Major League Baseball. I was a girl conflicted. At one show, I stood behind a man in a Yankees hat. I thought this was supposed to be a weekend of all things pleasurable, so how was it that someone who so obviously worshiped pure evil could exist here too?

“What are you doing here?” I thought at this giant spectacle in the middle of nowhere. “Where my hippies at?”

Among the fields of camped out college students, there were also fathers toting strings of children from the pay-per-use showers and white-haired friends perched in camp chairs. The diversity of the audience was obviously attributable to this year’s line-up, which included such varied bands as Vampire Weekend, Sigur Ros, Talib Kweli, the Disco Biscuits, and comedian Chris Rock. There was something for everyone. I knew that there would be this musical diversity when I began my trip, but it still did not help me come to terms with the fact that a burnt-out heavy metal band now occupied the spotlight that only a few years earlier had shown on Trey Anastasio of Phish.

I spent a portion of one day following around the most eccentric characters. A large man in heavy geisha-style make-up, a dress, and an inexplicable shiny circular target on his back forced me to unmask the falsity of this entire spectacle. I don’t care how weird you are, no one walks around wearing an outfit like that in 100-degree weather. I followed him to the restricted, Bonnaroo-backstage area. I now knew—for certain—that he had been a hired participant for the music festival’s charade, but even in this bitter victory I felt no real satisfaction.

Had I left for Bonnaroo expecting nothing more than music and a crowd and a psychedelics sunrise delivery man, I would not have been disappointed. As it was, I went expecting the world’s greatest music festival and, in the face of these expectations, the festival could only come up short. Even my relatively low expectations—for simple things, like relatively accurate show times—were frustrated when Kanye went onstage over an hour late, due to an unnecessary collection of lights and glamour.

Perhaps someday I will be able to attend this generation’s Woodstock. Existing in the space along the fringe of the crowd, the people whose culture we were trying to co-opt served as a reminder of my romanticized view of music festivals, of the way things could have been. It is there that the Grateful Dead hippies, with their white bushy beards and carefree steps, have been dancing since the first synthesis of LSD. Perhaps I would have been less disillusioned had I taken a few papers out of their book.