The amazing thing is that even after Radiohead’s impossible-to-follow performance, the Bonnaroo party soldiered on. I found my way back to the hospitality tent and managed to scrounge up a couple of pork chops and a piece of carrot cake for dinner and sat down with my new friend Elizabeth, who’d been taking pictures all weekend on behalf of the festival. She was heading back to work, photographing the SuperJam, which started at midnight in one of the far-flung tents. SuperJam sounded ominously like the seventh level of jam-band hell, something that might go on forever once the cosmic forces that contained it were unleashed, so in the spirit of my journalistic enterprise I promised to stop by later, and she trudged off like she’d been sentenced to a slow death being stung by wasps.

Back in the press area I hitched a ride on a golf cart headed over to see Dr. John. After years of rehabilitating his image into a sophisticated jazz pianist who wears expensive suits and purple fedoras, he was apparently going to perform in his old psychedelic voodoo persona, replete with feathered headdress and snake charmer regalia with a bone through his nose and who knows what else. We pulled into the back of the venue and there he was, standing outside his trailer wearing a coat made of nutria pelts and raccoon tails, with so many feathers and bones and tree branches on his head he was seven feet tall. One of my fellow golf cart companions appeared to be a high-powered writer from The New York Times, because he was ushered over to meet Dr. John with a respect not many writers are afforded. I just sort of slunk in behind him until I was standing in the little semi-circle of conversation, but he and Dr. John were speaking in such low tones I couldn’t catch any of their incantations. Dr. John’s face was painted with stripes of ash, and his unfocused eyes indicated that he was either deep into a high-voodoo trance or had been drinking Muscat wine all day. His band came out of the trailer all dressed in tunics like Sun Rah’s Arkestra, and there were a couple of young Cajun girls in some kind of loose-fitting costumes, one of whom was smoking a cheroot.
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I sleep in vans a lot. On tour you can’t help it, but sleeping fitfully in a rental mini-van for three hours is no way for a journalist to live, and I vowed that next time I’d make sure to get a hotel. The premise of this festival is that the whole 90,000-odd attendees come for the entire weekend to the remote backwaters of Manchester, Tennessee and camp, Burning Man style, making puppet art, fire-dancing, and waiting for 20 minutes in line for the Porta Potty. It was suggested to me that I might enjoy the bonhomie of camping myself, as it would give me a window into the heart of the festival, but in retrospect I’d much rather be wearing a three-piece, white linen suit and sitting in a hotel bar somewhere. As it is, the Kentucky sunshine heated my van to a turkey roasting 400 degrees by nine o’clock in the morning. I downed a cup of water, washed the sleep from my eyes and headed off to the first press conference of the day, where the singer of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Alec Ounsworth, was giving a private, acoustic performance just for the press.

This is the kind of press pandering that publicists always tell you is a good idea, and maybe it is. Since I’m only masquerading as a member of the press I can’t really attest to the way they think. Still, as a fake member of the press, I thought his voice sounded like someone skinning cats. His songs were decently folky and he honked along on the harmonica, which was passable. Maybe it sounds like Neutral Milk Hotel or Talking Heads on the records, as I’ve heard reported, but it didn’t pass my dorm room test, which is: If you were stuck in a dorm room at SUNY Purchase and the same person was singing these songs, would you be thinking, “Holy shit, this guy is great!� or would you be trying to figure out how many songs was the polite number to endure before you could reasonably claim you had a ton of homework? Frankly, though, I didn’t understand Neutral Milk Hotel when I first heard it either and now I think it’s great, so maybe Pitchfork is right and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are brilliant. But I think there should henceforth be at least a short moratorium on Brooklyn songwriters, (and Ontario songwriters, for that matter) who yodel like West Virginia raccoon hunters.

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A Blog By John Roderick

I’ve never actually been to one of these big festivals except as a performer, so I was excited to act as a correspondent for CMJ and to finally get out and mingle with my fellow Americans. Bonnaroo has a reputation as a “hippie� festival, probably because in the first couple of years Widespread Panic played four times, but this year the acts are more varied and it’s starting to feel like the South’s own Reading Festival. I had some press/photo credentials and decided to charge around like a sober Hunter Thompson, pressing my luck where appropriate to get the real story.

I set out onto the festival grounds with confidence and authority, trying to blend in with the locals by “following my bliss.� I quickly realized that Bonnaroo, no matter what bands are booked to play, is still a hippie festival in every way. It’s built into the very concept of camping out for four days watching bands, but I was surprised that so much of the hemp necklace/Guatamalan skirt thing had survived the irony wars of the late ’90s. Normally I would approach huge crowds of sunburned, naked, 20-something, doo-ragged and Rhiannoned Southern college students with a tremendous Seattle disdain, but the “It’s all good� vibe washed over me and absolutely destroyed my capacity for sarcasm in the first 30 seconds after I walked out into the dirt.

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