fantastic bonnaroo review...must read

[dimafleck: the living legend.]

http://www.cokemachineglow.com/feature/article/bonnaroo2006.html

[Booche]

some sort of hex seemed like a very real possibility

[Freeker]

"blasting nitrous oxide for woozy wobbling sensations"

He left out the part about seeing God.

[timouse]

It struck me that most festivals must suck for artists — paltry set lengths to largely unfeeling crowds in sweltering heat, most of the multitude fuming over $10 brats and the $35 it cost to get drunk on flat Bud Light. The artists came to Bonnaroo expecting all that and worse — and by worse, I mean hippies — but all (except Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who just came off as dicks, and Dungen, who sucked) ended up expressing some earnest change of heart. What could account for this? What was Bonnaroo doing differently? It came down to two words: good vibes.

Believe me when I say that a little piece of me died in typing those two words, the most nebulous, heinous and overused in the hippie lexicon. Generally, hippies bemoan a lack of these vibes, calling in times of turmoil for more good ones and offering as the utmost insult that a person radiates bad ones. This always seemed, to me, the absurd height of the hippie’s pseudo-belief structure — not even as solidified in concept as karma (another abused notion, though), good vibes were like those “neutralizer†sprays that you buy and then spray in a room that smells bad, and what the spray does is not smell like anything, so then, in theory, your room smells like nothing, but actually it just smells like nothing and cat food. Vibes aren’t real, but my wallet is, and stealing it does not make those nonexistent vibes wiggle positively or negatively, because they can’t wiggle. Because they don’t exist.

But at Bonnaroo, backed by the force of 80,000 unwashed believers, good vibes were real, if only because the hippies willed it to be so. The dude with the clipboard (if you were there, you know the one) always asked everyone to pick up trash and help keep the good vibes.