Thank You Bonnaroovians!!!

Hey, for anyone who is so inclined, I have posted a blog about my Bonnaroo experiences and would like feedback. I just decided to post here....
Be warned, it doesn't contain many specifics about music, but really just my own personal sentiments...


Word,
Clay

Though it has nearly been two weeks since I journeyed back to the farm, I still can’t help but wax philosophical about the Bonnaroo experience. Those who’ve never been there, have really “never been there;” though, I am sure that numerous other festivals, concerts and musical and art experience offer unique takes on the vibe, Bonnaroo, in its purest sense, offers something that is ethereal and sublime.
In first few months of 2002 I can remember hearing about this festival that was supposed to happen in the middle-of-nowhere Tennessee, and that one of my favorite bands at the time, Widespread Panic, was going to have a headlining spot. Considering the fact that the news of this festival was accompanied by some more somber news that Mikey Houser was diagnosed with a terminal form of pancreatic cancer, the festival’s announcement was bittersweet, at best. Either way, I was in.
Sometime that spring, I went on a mission trip to Mexico and had a spiritual awakening. Sure, I grew up in a Southern Baptist household, but I was no longer a practicing Christian, not by a long shot. After the trip, I found myself trying to renegotiate a number of things in my life, mainly with abstaining from abusing substances of all kinds. It is not because I felt personally called to do so, it was just me trying to figure out “how I was supposed to act,” one of the greater ironies of this rebirth, and so here I was trying to change completely behaviors that I had exhibited for the majority of my short adult life. That April, I saw Panic for the first time sober out of the eighteen or so shows I’d been to. It was still every bit as much filled with joy as it had been before, except this time I could remember the setlist almost in its entirety. Near the end of May, my sobriety came to an end at midnight on eve of my twenty-first birthday. Needless to say, I got pretty “fired up” about it, and was in bed at 1:30 AM. I vowed to abstain from everything until Bonnaroo, which was something like three weeks away at that point, and I made good on that promise.
Late, or early in the morning, depends on what kind of person you are, my friends and I loaded up a Suburban full of supplies: a case of water, a tent (which we left at our house) some clothes, some food but not much (what we thought we needed was drastically off from what we actually needed). We were on the road from Tuscaloosa to Decatur to meet up with some other Bonnaroo festival attendees. Taking the back roads through Huntsville (my hometown), we made it somewhere near Manchester, we think, because that is when the longest row of taillights I had ever seen was in plain view up ahead. For the next fourteen hours, I took part in the biggest party that the streets of Manchester had ever seen at that point. Jumping from one truck bed to another, in between cars that were parked on the side of the road, listening to music blaring from vehicles, or from someone walking with a guitar, there was an excitement in the air that what we were about to experience was going to be something different. I once again indulged in the party that was going on around me, but despite the time, I was alert and my heart was racing with anticipation and excitement. Fourteen hours later, we were setting up camp, discovering that we’d left the tent in Tuscaloosa, and getting ready for I hike from a campsite near the Silo in this giant field, and following the sound of music blaring from cars, and stages, and tents. “BONNNNNNNAAAAAAAROOOOOOO!” was upon us.
I won’t bore you with the lesson that I learned in pacing and over-indulgence on the first day of Bonnaroo; however, I will say that I am very thankful to the kind people who took care of a wandering stranger who was talking out of his gourd, dehydrated, and sick at his stomach. The main effect that this lesson had on me was learning my limitations, and that indulging in certain substances will never result in a positive outcome for me, and although it has taken me a number of years for this conclusion to set in, it’s truth for me is readily verifiable: First, some people can handle things and do things that I, myself, will never be able to handle or do (probably never could have anyway, but not for a lack of trying); and secondly, that for my own pure enjoyment of music, a beer or two, and a few cigarettes is far better for my sanity in the long run that indulging in anything else. But I digress…
Regardless of my “learning experience,” there was something else in the air, a vibration, a tone, an attitude, like this works, whatever it is, this works. Though, I didn’t make it back for the second year of Bonnaroo, in 2004, I made my second trip to the farm.
This time I went with my older brother. I cannot explain because there are no words to really express with exactness, how great my second trip to Bonnaroo was. My brother, not really of the jamband ilk, but a music lover nonetheless, came with me on a whim, and I got to show him what it was like on the other side of the musical spectrum. He came from the school of thought that studio perfection exhibited by the Beatles was the pinnacle of musical accomplishment. I can’t argue with the music that the Beatles made because I, too, love it, but I got my foot in the door in explaining to him that what the Beatles didn’t do, from every account that I have heard, is exactly what the Grateful Dead did well, and that is put on a live show. Though The Dead of Bonnaroo 2004 was obviously missing the gaping hole of Jerry Garcia, the experience of standing in the rain for hours, listening to Jimmy Herring, Warren Haynes, Phil Lesh, and Bobby Weir march their way through some familiar and unfamiliar Dead territory opened my brother’s eyes to the grace and beauty of what live music, a bunch of connected souls, and ultimately Bonnaroo could do for music that no one in a studio could capture with enough accuracy to really catch it. It is in the live moment, the present that we truly learn and experience ourselves and each other in the purest sense. Needless to say, my brother was now in tune, though we would miss Bonnaroo 2005.
In 2006, much to my surprise, my wife, she was my fiancé at the time, decided that she wanted to journey to the farm with my brother, one of his friends, and myself, so here we were making yet another trip to the farm. This time, with a woman’s touch, we came over-prepared: cases of water, lots of food, an Aerobed for sleeping in the back of my SUV, a tent for my brother and his friend, fans, a power inverter. Again, this experience was much like the 2004 experience, in that I got to open the eyes of my wife to a world that she had never seen before. This new world, far from her rural Georgia upbringing, involved people with dreaded hair who didn’t share the same ethnicity as Bob Marley, overweight people who were obviously not too insecure with their bodies because of their free-flowing nudity. This lack of governance by the rules of what a television, or a magazine on how people “are supposed to look and act and feel,” had a striking effect on my wife, despite my fears that it would have the exact opposite effect. She said it best when she said, “I’ve never been around so many people who just don’t care what other people think, and I really wish that I could be more like them.” Wow, coming from someone who had said some fairly judgmental things over the time that I had known her, and who comes from an area renowned for its prejudice (as do I), I was shocked that she had come to much of the same conclusion that I had some four years before, and though, we do not share tastes in much of anything, we now had something completely new to discuss and think about. Needless to say, that my wife was definitely in for Bonnaroo 2007, in which she fell in love with the glowstick wars at String Cheese, albeit, she absolutely did not enjoy Tool in the least, but politely asked if I was serious.
Which finally brings us back full circle to this year: 2008. Although our camping arrangements may have been very different from the first year of five people having forgotten their tent sleeping sitting up in a Suburban to the pull-behind camper with air-conditioning, a stocked refrigerator, multiple working stoves, etc., there were still some of the same things, that ultimately, I had from the very beginning: A tight-knit group of friends all interested in attaining to the musical acme, by any means necessary (acts to be decided on an individual basis); excellent neighbors (a special thanks to Joe, Greg, and Jason from Baton Rouge, LA; you guys were awesome, and I hope that you’ve made it back home safely), and the sense of a community much larger than oneself of group of peers. There is a sense for me that somewhere lurking beneath all of the emotion that I feel each time I listen to music, whether by myself, in my car, or with 65,000 of my best friends, that I am always seeking community. To me, this is where Bonnaroo is really at its finest. Though, we all have our differences in musical taste, whether we like to sit, stand, dance, shake, or watch with mouth agape, whether we like to rest during the day so that we can make it up all night, or whether we like to get up with the sun, do some yoga, walk around the streets of the Sixth largest city in Tennessee, even if it’s only temporary, and we like to find people like ourselves, different from ourselves, and in these encounters, we have genuine community. Whether or not you thought an artist was good or bad, if you were trying to catch as many full sets as possible, or if you were just trying to sample as much music as possible, the one thing that Bonnaroo offers for me every year that I have been, and it’s the reason that I will continue to go is community. For lack of a better term and for lack of being able to accurately review the music that really cracked my head open like Miller Lite straight from my “Big Cube” cooler, this is the conclusion that I have come to. I guess, in all my ramblings, I could’ve talked more about a specific show, or one significant experience, but to me, they’re all significant, and non of them will fit on any amount of paper. I really just wanted to try and figure out why, every year when I come home from this festival, I feel a void, and in writing my thoughts out, I’ve discovered it. It’s you…ALL OF YOU…even the assholes who stole stuff from people’s campsites (although I’d rather not have thieves in our midst, they sure do make for good stories later), I miss you, and this is my, albeit WAY TOO LONG, letter of gratitude to you guys for making my Bonnaroo experiences what they are.