In the Corner Element, driving back to VA, Monday morning, going back through the memory banks for Friday wanderings/ramblings...(see my Bonnaroo videos here, by the way)
Tift Merritt started off the day in the lightly attended and very muddy This Tent. Nice to hear her rocking out a bit with the full band after her recent solo acoustic show at Music Resource Center in Charlottesville.
saw a few Gomez songs from the bleachers at the Which Stage. cool cover of Zeppelin's "Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp"...they seemed to gear their setlist to their early set time, which meant slower, more meandering jammy stuff...maybe that was just the part of the show we saw.
wandered up to the "Africa Calling"-themed The Other Tent for Toubab Krewe, who added a touch of surf guitar to their eclectic, West African instrumental mix.
caught a little of Kaki King's set at This Tent. Quite a few more folks had gathered over there by this time, which was good to see for one of the best, most unique guitar players around today. And Bonnaroo is certainly a case in point - there are plenty of noodley guitar dudes; the world can certainly use more women who can absolutey shred too, right?
Over to the first-ever artist curated stage with Dirty Projectors playing to a very large crowd at That Tent. You can see why David Byrne loves them so much, and apparently he made a guest appearance later in their set, which we missed after tiring of too much of the lead singer's voice and not enough of his excellent female vocalist bandmates. Definitely a promising band, though, as heard on Brighten The Corners...still waiting to hear the full length release.
back over to The Other Tent for Vieux Farka Toure, who was excellent. When the term Afropop is used, it usually means lilting, light guitar lines, but Vieux definitely upped the rock/funk quotient for sure, as an appreciative crowd danced the afternoon away.
Walking back over to That Tent for St. Vincent, the Silent Disco was jumping with chants of "celebrate good times, come on!" It's always one of the most popular tents at Bonnaroo - the DJ plays a mix that only the folks in the tent with headphones on can hear (there's no outside speaker system), while passersby look on in puzzled amusement...probably should've given this a try this year, and also never got around to taking swings in the backstage batting cage, dang. St. Vincent was good though, proving that even with such a beautiful, pure voice, she can also rock when she wants to.
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals tied the previous day's rainstorm into larger biblical themes by encouraging her crowd to "let it rain" on an epic closing number at This Tent. Grace's new bandmates (she's added a new bass player and 2 guitarists since the UVA Springfest show where she opened for Sara Bareilles earlier this year) sounded great.
It was unfortunately hard to avoid Animal Collective's Which Stage set on the way to our first visit to the largest What Stage for Galactic. I swear we heard NO applause after one of Animal Collective's songs. And believe me, it was a HUGE crowd watching them. And then I thought about how this kind of response is so rare from a usually very appreciative Bonnaroo audience. I felt kind of bad for them because, like the All Points West festival last year in NJ, they were stuck in the hot mid-afternoon sun. Maybe it was just too hot for people to clap (overall, the crowds did seem slightly more subdued this year). Seemed like their style of music and light show would've been better served during a late night spot. But then I remembered their drummer's name is Panda Bear, so I no longer felt so bad for them. Oof. And what's up with (what's the French word for hot?) Phoenix only getting 45 minutes at 1130pm? I'm just noticing that in the schedule here on the drive back home...No wonder we missed them. That's one of my favorite things about Bonnaroo - the set times are usually long enough that you have time to get to a variety of things, and if you want to stay and enjoy one artist, you feel like you've gotten their typical full show, and maybe even their best show, thanks to the surroundings, and not a shortened, "festival set." Heard from a couple folks that Phoenix was good, although I wasn't very impressed by the 3 songs they did on SNL a while back. Let's see next year at this time between Phoenix and Animal Collective who turns into Arcade Fire and who turns into Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
ok, gotta get some sleep on the ride home...will write more later, promise!
oh, and i'm including the following notes for myself in case I forget to mention in future posts...
Brett Dennen was good Sunday afternoon
My theory of "camping breeds hardy festival goers," which makes Bonnaroo better than the rest
would've liked to have seen some of the Comedy Tent stuff, but tickets were required and you had to be in line 20 minutes before the performance, so it seemed like too many hoops to go though with so much great music going on.
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