Bonnaroo 2010: Hot Times on Stage and Off

John Fogarty performs at the 2010 Bonnaroo Music &Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn. (AP Photo)

MANCHESTER, Tenn. (CBS/AP) Rock performers broke a sweat in Tennessee this weekend as musicians and fans alike sweltered in the heat and humidity during the four-day Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival .

The ninth edition of the festival wrapped up Sunday night with headliner Dave Matthews Band. Jay-Z and Stevie Wonder headlined the main stage on Saturday; Kings of Leon had the honor on Friday.

PICTURES: Bonnaroo 2010

Ashley Capps, co-founder of Bonnaroo and president of festival co-producer AC Entertainment, said attendance was more than 75,000, but slightly less than sold-out.

Temperatures were in the mid-90s most of the weekend, with the heat index at more than 100. Capps said that for the most part, festival attendees stayed healthy. Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves said arrests were “about normal.” More than 50 had been arrested as of Sunday afternoon.

More than 100 other acts performed on five main stages and assorted smaller ones, scattered throughout the 650-acre site.

The Saturday evening double bill of headliner Jay-Z and Stevie Wonder was the apex. Introducing Wonder, Conan O’Brien shouted to the crowd: “All the mud, all the rain, all the heat it’s all worth it.”

O’Brien was the most omnipresent figure at this year’s Bonnaroo. The comedian twice performed his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” show, and he played master of ceremonies on the main stage Friday and Saturday.

“In six months, I’ve gone from hosting ‘The Tonight Show’ to performing at a refugee camp,” O’Brien, who begins a new show for TBS in November, said Friday.

Bonnaroo: The Dave Matthews Band and Some Final Thoughts

The Dave Matthews Band wound up Bonnaroo for the jam-band faithful, still head-bobbing and flinging glowsticks after four days.

I miss the old Dave Matthews Band. That was the eccentric five-piece lineup of acoustic guitar (Mr. Matthews), violin (Boyd Tinsley), electric bass (Stefan Lessard), drums (Carter Beauford) and saxophone (LeRoi Moore, who died in 2008). With only one chordal instrument, the guitar, that lineup forced itself to come up with inventive ways to do what most rock bands take for granted. And it did, devising nimble, pointillistic arrangements that could lean toward country or acoustic funk, Celtic music or jazz. Mr. Matthews’ songwriting — visions of trouble, battles with inner demons and openly amorous vows of love, full of zigzagging tunes and meter shifts — was inseparable from the sound of the band.

Even before Mr. Moore’s death, the band was adding keyboards and backup singers to its onstage lineup. Now, the touring group includes a saxophone (Jeff Coffin), trumpet (Rashawn Ross) and electric guitar (Tim Reynolds, who also has a long-running duo with Mr. Matthews). Two more horn players joined them for some songs at Bonnaroo, to make the sound “a little bit fatter,” Mr. Matthews said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Actually, I do mind — not the horn players, who did their jobs pretty well, but the fattening. With this lineup, there are standard ways to arrange songs: using lead and rhythm guitar, bass and drums, with a horn section or violin for soul or country flavor. And with those possibilities, clichés arrive: the bass vamp under the wailing lead guitar, the boom-chunk beat with the power chord. The band doesn’t always evade them.

Mr. Reynolds often dominates the music, taking solo spots that might have gone to violin or saxophone and filling them with blues-rock clichés, bending or trilling every note. After hearing other guitarists at Bonnaroo, like Jeff Beck, or Dean Fertita of the Dead Weather (he’s also in Queens of the Stone Age), or the sidemen in various country bands, Mr. Reynolds sounded like a student player, fast but still learning the finesse of phrasing.

More instruments mean more possibilities, a springboard for Mr. Matthews’s extraordinary voice. Sometimes the fatter band did mesh. The funk of “Shake Me Like a Monkey” was angular and aggressive, and the prog-rock-hoedown-whatever of “Tripping Billies” let Mr. Matthews moan and howl. And it wasn’t a matter of how many instruments were being played; when Danny Barnes on banjo joined the band for three songs, somehow the arrangements made room to let his quicksilver picking gleam through the counterpoint. But to hear the brisk, transparent syncopation of an older song like “Two Step” give way to the wah-wah and whammy-bar abuse of an electric guitar solo was a letdown. One thing the Dave Matthews Band doesn’t need is the finger exercises known as shredding.

For the festival’s finale, the band played Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” with the horns quoting “Stairway to Heaven” and golden fireworks blooming overhead. It’s the three-chord apocalypse for all occasions, except perhaps this one: Pearl Jam used the same song for its last Bonnaroo encore in 2008.

Thank You, Bonnaroo

Last night, after the Dave Matthews Band closed the Bonnaroo Festival, and the crowd started to leave, I heard a young woman say in a quiet, earnest voice, almost a whisper, “Thank you, Bonnaroo!” Who was she addressing, exactly? The spirit of the music? Some pagan god? The brand?

Earlier in the day, I brought up this question—What exactly is Bonnaroo, and what can it be?—with the four partners in Superfly Productions, the co-founders of the festival. One of them, Jonathan Mayers, told me, “We see ourselves as curators, or tastemakers, if you will, programming a festival for the iPod generation—people who may have many different types of music on the same playlist, and don’t mind mixing genres.”

“But people still need filters,” Rick Farman, another partner, added, “and we are a big filter, and a trusted source of music for our fans.”

Mayers: “What we trying to do now is figure how to expand our influence to other platforms, without losing our authenticity.”

Here’s another slide show from Bonnaroo, with photos by Randy Harris. (See our first slide show.)

• This is an old bus on the way to the tent camping sites. It brought out Randy’s inner William Eggleston.
• You can see the tent city in the background. By 8 A.M., the tents were too hot to stay inside, so you either just lay down in the baking sun outside and tried without success to sleep, or you crowded into this little covered area and tried to regroup.
• The promoters put a lot of effort into greening the festival as much as they could. There were helpers next to the garbage cans to tell you what goes where, and trading posts around the grounds where you could cash in bags of scrounged recyclables for clothes and food. But all this is a mere toenail on the massive carbon footprint Bonnaroo leaves on the atmosphere. Virtually everyone drives, and a lot of the people in the RVs and trailers run generators day and night. Whenever the music stopped, you heard the sound of motors.
• The guy with the acoustic guitar is Harper Simon, Paul Simon’s son, a rockabilly singer-songwriter from Nashville who killed on one of the small stages. My favorite Bonnaroo experiences were in these small settings, discovering artists I’d never heard before.
• “Honey, if you’re going to sleep on the ground, promise me you’ll use a plate.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

• I don’t know that this guy was all that happy with the attention Randy was paying to his lady friend.
• Phoenix is a hot alternative-rock band from France, and a lot of people turned out to see their performance, Sunday evening on the Which stage. The lead singer, Thomas Mars, is Sofia Coppola’s partner and the father of her first child (they’re expecting a second one). I liked the songs, but they might have been better to listen to in your living room than on a big stage. However, of all the bands I heard, this is the one whose CD I’m most interested in buying.
• While Randy was taking pictures like these, he was ignoring my explicit instructions to photograph more of the acts I loved. So I’ll just take this opportunity to say that I thought Brandi Carlile, the country rocker from Seattle, was wonderful in her Saturday afternoon performance, and I don’t know why she isn’t a bigger star. I also thought the country artist Miranda Lambert sang her heart out, and her affectless enthusiasm charmed me. She could use some more distinctive songs, though. And I could use some pictures of her.
• I heart Regina Spektor! Her performance on Sunday afternoon was another one of my favorites. Such a pleasure to listen to her clever and witty but also moving lyrics (my eyes watered, but maybe it was the heat), and to watch the young women sing along with every single word. And, for the first time, I thought I heard the rocker inside Regina. Free her!
• It’s strange that while music played such an important role in the civil-rights movement during the sixties, you almost never see truly integrated popular-music shows. Bonnarro was better than most at getting different colors together. But we still need to overcome when it comes to Balkanized popular-music tastes.
• Among the many details that made a huge difference in the “user experience” at Bonnaroo was the security at the gates. As you can see from their shirts, they called themselves “Safety,” and instead of the vague air of menace you get at a lot of these types of events, these people seemed like they were one of us.
• One of the many food vendors along “Centeroo,” the main drag. The food was not outstandingly good, but it was too hot to eat anyway. Drinking was the main activity.
• No one invited me to perform this year—Thank you, Bonnaroo: Not!—so I was reduced to performing for Randy in the RV. He went nuts.

All photographs by Randy Harris.

A little rain wanted for Bonnaroo

MANCHESTER Overheated concert-goers might be wishing for rain just to cool things off as the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival ends today.

Air-conditioned medical tents were treating about 25 percent more people than in past years, estimated Carl Monzo, director for Bonnaroos Emergency Medical Services.

Its a luxury out here. Its a nice place to rest, get water and cool off, he said, noting that the average person stays only about 15 minutes. They want to get back out and see the bands on their agenda for the day. They have their days here all planned out.

As of noon Saturday, 26 people were transported to area hospitals for heat-related emergencies or for other injuries, such as sprained ankles, that could not be treated on site.

Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves, who has worked each of the previous eight festivals, said it more uncomfortable than past years.

All I really know is theyve had several incidents of people collapsing from the heat, he said. Weve had a heat index over 100 (degrees) two days in a row and not a lot of showers to cool things down.

There is a 30 percent chance of rain today in Manchester, and though no record highs are expected, the heat index is about 104 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

Aside from the weather, Graves said the number of arrests this year are pretty typical. More than 50 people had been arrested for disorderly and drug-related charges. Graves said Coffee County General Sessions court scheduled a day, Sept. 24, separate from the regular docket, just to deal with Bonnaroo arrests.

Its a nightmare, Graves said. Our court docket is probably gonna have more than 200 people on it.

Top talent, 80000 fans at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival

Hot humor: Fans began lining up around 5 a.m. Friday for Conan O’Brien’s afternoon show at the comedy tent. The 1,800 who made it in greeted O’Brien with a standing ovation. “I see, like, six guys wearing shirts — and that’s it,” he said. Even with air conditioning, the tent was sweltering: “I’ve gone from hosting The Tonight Show to performing in a refugee camp.” Since leaving NBC, O’Brien has grown a scruffy beard that he says makes him look “like Paul Bunyan with an eating disorder” or “the Brawny paper towel guy just before his bone-marrow transplant.”

Kings on fire: Playing in front a massive rack of glowing lights, dynamic Tennessee rockers Kings of Leon kept 60,000 or more people captivated for two hours, whether previewing material from their next album (“If y’all hear something you don’t know, you’re one of the first to ever hear it,” said frontman Caleb Followill) or ripping into hits like set opener Crawl and Sex on Fire. KOL is Bonnaroo’s first to play a smaller stage, then move up to headliner. The significance clearly moved Followill: “There are very, very few times when I’ve felt really proud of what we’ve accomplished. This is one of those times.”

Dead Weather brings the rain: The Dead Weather took the stage just as the actual weather decided to snap out of a cruel heat wave Saturday evening. A storm rolled in as the alt-rock supergroup took the stage clad in black, save for Alison Mosshart’s leopard-print jacket. Luckily, the music proved much more menacing than the clouds, and the band ripped into the opening number of its nightmarish neo-blues rock as rain drizzled. “I want you to remember which band brought the rain to you, all right?” Jack White told his audience, taking center stage to sing You Just Can’t Win.

Stevie’s surprise-filled set: Shortly before Stevie Wonder began, Bonnaroo cameras briefly focused on his set list. That shot gave the 60,000 gathered a preview of what was to come — but anybody who got a good look soon found themselves surprised. The R&B legend started calling audibles just a few songs into his hour-and-a-half set, leaving his band members exchanging perplexed glances. Wonder broke out his harmonica during the unscheduled For Once in My Life and morphed Parliament’s Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker) into I Heard It Through the Grapevine and a slowed-down Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours). After getting the crowd to sing a couple of choruses of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance, Wonder brought out a gospel choir to help him perform A Time to Love.

Bonnaroo’s blueprint for hip-hop: ”Wait till I tell my mom Stevie Wonder stayed for my set!” Jay-Z announced. Wonder — and the 70,000 or so other people who watched the rapper’s hit-filled set — got an earful as Jay-Z tore through Big Pimpin’, 99 Problems and Hard Knock Life. Throughout, he tempered a well-deserved swagger with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm to be performing in front of tens of thousands who likely had never seen him. “I wanna make Bonnaroo my second home, if that’s OK with y’all,” he said as he introduced his first home by way of Empire State of Mind, with Bridget Kelly on vocals.

Get a whiff of that: Indie popster Ingrid Michaelson got big cheers Sunday afternoon when she worked a few bars of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face into her opening number, Soldier. “We smell like a bunch of slightly dirty music lovers,” Michaelson told the crowd. “And what is better than that?” Regina Spektor came dressed for the occasion, wearing a summer frock and red high heels as she sat down to her grand piano for The Calculation. “I’ve been here for just a few hours,” she said after a false start on Folding Chair. “How do you guys do it?” She brought along a cellist, a violinist and a drummer to accompany her on a chamber pop set that included Eet, Samson and Better.

Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, Weezer and more play Saturday shows at Bonnaroo
Published: Sunday, June 13, 2010, 9:03 AM     Updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010, 9:47 AM

MANCHESTER, TN — On Saturday, Bonnaroo saw Jay-Z blaze through a 90-minute set of No.1 songs, Stevie Wonder play “Superstition” and Weezer cover Lady Gaga and MGMT.

For most of the day Saturday, an unrelenting heat  bore down on the 75,000 fans at this massive festival in Manchester, Tenn. But by the earlier evening, a light rain had cooled off the festival.

Bonnaroo concludes today with performances by Phoenix, Ween, Dropkick Murphys, Against Me! and Dave Matthews Band.

Read Jon Busdeker’s blog updates from the festival:

Bonnaroo first-timers see what it’s like at four-day festival

Bonnaroo: What’s so great about it?

Didn’t make it to Bonnaroo? Here’s what you’re missing

Bonnaroo isn’t only for the young: 53-year-old hasn’t missed festival since 2003

Here’s some pictures from Saturday at Bonnaroo:

Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder lead Bonnaroo on day 2, as Tenn. music festival endures …

Both were to take Bonnaroo’s main stage Saturday evening in succession, with headliner Jay-Z following Wonder. The day’s acts also included Weezer, Jack White’s the Dead Weather, Norah Jones and a middle-of-the-night set by the jam band Disco Biscuits.

Excessive heat in the high 90s has thus far been a constant at this year’s Bonnaroo, the ninth annual. Thunder clouds loomed late Saturday afternoon, threatening to further muddy the grounds, which took heavy rain on Wednesday.

Conan O’Brien performed his “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” comedy show for a second time on Saturday. And many fans took a break to watch the U.S.-England World Cup match, which was broadcast at Bonnaroo’s Lunar stage.

Live From Bonnaroo 2010

Fuse, Madison Square Garden’s national music television network, returns to the fields of Manchester, TN to cover the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival as the exclusive television partner.  The ninth annual festival will be held June 10-13. Fuse will bring viewers live hits and backstage interviews leading up to the June 17^th premiere of “Live From Bonnaroo 2010,” a highlight show featuring this year’s greatest performances from Dave Matthews Band, Rise Against, The Dead Weather, Damian Marley and NAS, Tenacious D and more.  Later this summer, Kings of Leon’s Bonnaroo performance will air on August 1^st at 9 pm ET in a one-hour program titled “Kings of Leon Live From Bonnaroo 2010.” A third show featuring more 2010 Bonnaroo performances will be announced later this summer.

Online at Fuse.tv, viewers can find Bonnaroo blogs, polls and photo galleries.  Fans can also view videos from the festival, featuring the latest Bonnaroo news, artist interviews, and festival goers talking about the Bonnaroo experience and more.

“LIVE FROM BONNAROO 2010”

Premieres Thursday, June 17^th at 7pm ET

Fuse is front and center at Bonnaroo 2010 with this year’s biggest artists in a Fuse exclusive concert special.  Don’t miss the greatest performances by Dave Matthews Band, Rise Against, The Dead Weather, Tenacious D, Damian Marley & NAS and more as well as the best moments from this year’s festival.

“KINGS OF LEON LIVE FROM BONNAROO 2010”

Premieres Sunday, August 1^st at 9pm ET

Tune-in to see Kings of Leon from the electric setting of Bonnaroo 2010 featuring their biggest hits and hottest songs in a one-hour concert special.

Leading up to the Festival, other Bonnaroo programming includes:

“LOADED: BONNAROO 2010”
Sunday, June 13^TH at 1pm ET

A half-hour jam packed with only videos from the best of Bonnaroo artists, including JAY-Z, Kanye West, Kings of Leon and more.

“NO. 1 COUNTDOWN: BONNAROO ALL-STARS”

Sunday, June 13^TH at 2pm ET

Tune-in to this special edition of “No. 1 Countdown” featuring past and present Bonnaroo artists including Bruce Springsteen, Kanye West, JAY-Z and many more.

CoCo Rocks! Former ‘Tonight Show’ host makes appearance at Bonnaroo Music Festival

BY Michael Wursthorn
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Saturday, June 12th 2010, 4:00 AM

Meet CoCo the rock star.

Ousted “Tonight Show” comedian Conan O’Brien stopped at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and brought his “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour to Tennessee on Friday.

Fans chanted, “CoCo,” – a nickname earned during his tenure as “Tonight Show” host – when O’Brien hit the stage, performing songs by Elvis, The Band and the White Stripes.

“In six months, I’ve gone from hosting the ‘Tonight Show,’ to performing at a refugee camp,” O’Brien joked at the start of the show.

Other funnymen lived out their rock star dreams as Jack Black’s Tenacious D took over Bonnaroo’s main stage with their over-the-top performance. And Steve Martin followed with his bluegrass band, the Steep Canyon Rangers.

Martin made the banjo a central part of his standup act decades ago, but bluegrass has in recent years become a more serious endeavor to him. Last year, he released “The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo,” which won a Grammy earlier this year for best bluegrass album.

“It’s been a longtime goal of mine to play bluegrass at Bonnaroo,” Martin deadpanned to the eager crowd. “Tonight, I feel like I am one step closer to that goal.”

Just the night before, O’Brien performed at Nashville’s Third Man Records, a label owned by the White Stripes’ Jack Whit

Since exiting NBC’s “Tonight Show” after a bitter feud, O’Brien has been promoting his music tour while gearing up for his new late-night talk show on cable network TBS. The show is slated to begin in November 2010.

With News Wire Services

Where Bands Jam, but Traffic Flows

Especially dear to his heart is an unused ticket to Woodstock in 1969. Mr. Pennington, 60, keeps it to commemorate the trip he canceled to take care of his young family. But it also represents Bonnaroo’s dual ambitions: to be a cultural touchstone known around the world, yet — unlike Woodstock — to be efficiently run, with smoothly flowing Interstate traffic. The festival found fame at the start, but after a traffic-clogged first couple of years, many people here say the goal of efficiency has largely been achieved.

“They’ve got it down to a science,” said Mr. Pennington, who also owns a restaurant offering a rather more congestive Bonnaroo Burger, topped with an egg and two slices of bacon. “They’ve got a traffic person that knows just what they’re doing. They get those people in, and everybody around here just operates as usual. You don’t even know they’re out there. You’ll see.”

This year Bonnaroo will feature more than 100 acts through Sunday, among them the Dave Matthews Band, Stevie Wonder, Jay-Z, Norah Jones and Kings of Leon. Past Bonnaroos have attracted up to 90,000 fans; although it has not yet sold out this year, more than 75,000 people are expected, according to Ashley Capps, one of the promoters. Tickets for the full weekend are $250. From Friday to Sunday both YouTube and the NPR Music Web site will be streaming performances.

Such big numbers usually lead to traffic nightmares, which is just what happened in Bonnaroo’s first year, 2002. Festival organizers warned officials about a tide of tens of thousands of cars. But since a previous festival, Itchycoo Park, had been a flop, and Bonnaroo’s marketing and ticket sales had all been online, with no traditional advertising, no one in town took its claims seriously. “Bonnaroo gave us fair warning, and we just laughed at them,” Mr. Pennington said.

Since then the festival has worked out an extensive traffic plan with the state and local police, involving a temporary exit and dedicated festival lanes on Interstate 24, as well as a helicopter to guide the parking staff on the ground. “We got it down,” said Steve Graves, the sheriff of Coffee County, which includes Manchester and has a population of about 52,000.

A 2005 study by two professors at the Middle Tennessee State University found that Bonnaroo contributed about $18 million to the local economy, and Mr. Pennington estimates that since then it has grown to more than $20 million. Signs welcoming Bonnaroo fans hang in stores throughout Manchester, and tie-dyed Bonnaroo T-shirts can be spotted underneath waitresses’ aprons and Wal-Mart clerks’ uniforms.

Three years ago Bonnaroo’s promoters bought most of the land on the site, a former farm, and they plan to stage more events there during the 361 non-Bonnaroo days of the year. Mr. Pennington said he hopes they will serve as an anchor to attract more music-related businesses to the area.

“I see the music industry as something we can tap into here in Manchester,” he said. “The recording artists, the recording studios, the songwriters. Not as big as Nashville, obviously, but that’s the new industry that we want here. And with Bonnaroo here, that makes a difference.”

Mr. Capps, the promoter, said that Bonnaroo’s biggest challenge is maintaining a strong identity in the face of competition from other festivals around the country, like Lollapalooza in Chicago and Coachella in Southern California. They, as well as many other smaller but still significant events, are all bidding for the same acts and trying to attract out-of-town fans.

“It’s something that we’re conscious of every year,” Mr. Capps said. “How do we maintain the thread and be true to the core of what the Bonnaroo experience is without repeating ourselves year after year after year?”

Bonnaroo’s core might have as much to do with its audience as the music. The festival grew out of the post-hippie jam-band scene, which has traditionally been an open-minded, loyal and not terribly fickle audience: an ideal constituency for an annual festival that relies on repeat customers. Over the years Bonnaroo has served as a kind of training ground for bands to return again and again, to ever bigger crowds. Kings of Leon, for example, has played there three times before.

By Tuesday evening the pilgrims had begun to arrive in Manchester, with drum circles forming in the Wal-Mart parking lot and teams of dreadlocked, flip-flop-wearing fans taking turns going in the store to stock up on beer, comfort food and rubber boots. (The weather forecast called for plenty of rain.)

Steve Willis, a 59-year-old mail carrier from Manchester, shopping at the Wal-Mart, praised the festival and local authorities for keeping the traffic flowing as well as can be done. The roads, although slow at the beginning and end of the festival, are navigable. “It’s kind of hard to get around some times,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a hindrance, but it’s not a big deal.”

His wife, Donna, 54, looked out over the Wal-Mart parking lot as the sun went down.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said.