Bonnaroo 2004

Since I was thinking about that 3am Dead show at the first Bonnaroo I went to, here's a little festival tale, about the farm in Tennessee.

I spent all of Thursday (the day before the festival started) wandering around the huge site  with a handle of Jack Daniel's, welcoming everyone to my high school graduation party. I must have gotten pretty drunk, cause I passed out in a camping chair and pissed my pants.

My good friends thought it would be a great idea to stick lsd gel tabs to my face during my bourbon slumber. I woke up with little purple gelatin squares all over my face, feeling strange. 

Bonnaroo is a no holds barred drug circus, and I was using MDMA as a dietary supplement. I would be on 4 or 5 substances at once, tripping around in love with love.  I met the southern kid with pints of raw ether.

" the ether is in its own tent in case it explodes, bro"

It made perfect sense. I soaked bounty paper towels in raw ether and hunter thompsoned around the festival huffing  like a young child who had gotten into a serious medicine cabinet.

I saw praxis, in one of the side stage tents! You never see praxis! They never play...

Bernie Worrell, buckethead, Bill laswell and brain, weirdo super group from some psychotic circus dream/nightmare. They released the show as an album (Tennessee 2004) if you want to get weirded out it's on Spotify. At one point they were covering "shake it like a salt shaker" by little John or yin yang twins ( one of those Crunkers, I forget which).as the shaker was shaking I turned around to see William hung of American Idol fame on a Mardi Gras float, doing his Ricky Martin song. I'm not sure if that was an incredibly vivid hallucination, or real. It cannot be factually verified.

I saw so much music it's hard to keep track... my first David Byrne show (while playing frisbee) , an energetic cover filled trey Anastasiao band show (not as good as the 2002 barn burners I had seen, but a fun show), and the core four members of the Grateful Dead with Warren Haynes controlling the meteorological activity in the vicinity. I even enjoyed watching Dave Matthews and friends cover Peter Gabriel's "solsbury hill", with its odd time signature.

I remember being really into Steve Winwood's set, and some kid went "Jesus it's just Winwood" to which I replied:

"Jesus, man, it's just life"

I had more fun at my first Bonnaroo than I thought  was possible, well worth the 22 hour drive from MA. This was before Bonnaroo went all Kanye coachella. I went with about 10 friends in a van and a Kia, and we are bonded by the experience permanently