Bonnaroo Rumination 2 Or Bruncheroo

Instead of talking about specific days I'm going to loosely follow the chronology and stop whenever I feel like it. The reason behind this is that with bands going off so late in the night, days turn into nights turn into the next day and sleep is forgotten and so forth. So this rumination begins with waking up friday morning and the topic of sleep. You do not sleep at Bonnaroo. This festival is like hippie endurance boot camp. Now, none of the bands begin playing until 12:30 the earliest each day so you would think you can just sleep til 11 or even 12 since you aren't gonna shower anyway. You would be wrong though. Being in a tent, the sun blares down on you and scolds you for partying so late in the night. By 8:30-9am every tent becomes a sweltering hippie toaster oven and it becomes impossible to sleep. You are forced to wake up by 9am. So what the hell do you do until noon or later? You sit there and try to move as little as possible, drink plenty of water, and eat whatever scraps you have lying around. Since there are no refrigerators and ice is a pain to get (and needed for beer) we brought in non-perishable foods and cooled beer as we needed it instead of buying it cold. This leads to a 9am breakfast of sweltering hell heat, beef jerky, tortilla chips, bananas and power bars with water or breakfast beer to drink (the beer is if you're feeling pretty zesty). That's what I like to call nutrition folks.


I have an endorsement deal with Jack Link's

In addition to bruncharoo, this gap before bands is also high time for all the illegal t-shirt salesmen and drug dealers to walk from camp to camp and sell their goods. Now I don't consume any drugs other than alcohol, but it's still impossible not to have a drug related story at Bonnaroo and tons of hilarious encounters. I'm going to save my thoughts and experiences with the dealers and other people looking for drugs to consume for later ruminations.



On to bands for friday, I had no real agenda until 4:30pm and the insanity that followed for the rest of the night, so having an open day to explore was fun. First band we saw was a band called Steel Train. They were in the vein of traditional American Rock and put on an energy packed show. A good way to start off the day without expending too much energy. But guys, lay off the cheery sounding songs that end up being about watching the twin towers fall on 9/11. This is like having a pinata filled with razor blades. It's real fun till you actually see what's inside and you want to cry. On the other hand maybe everyone at the birthday is a cocaine user so they are excited about the razors. My analogy is lost. Please provide a better analogy in the comments.


9/11! WOOO!

Next up we saw one song by Jose Gonzalez. We were following Jackie around because she had plenty of bands she wanted to see so we let her lead the way. She tackled Bonnaroo the way I tackle amusement parks and european vacations: see and do as much as possible and make the most out of your day. This was perfect for the gaps of time where I didn't know what to go see, it was like having a bonnaroo pu pu platter. A pupuroo, if you will. Then again I have terrible memory, hence why I blog things and take pictures so I can't really remember too much of Jose Gonzalez, just that he was by himself with an acoustic guitar and is SWEDISH making his name kind of stupid (yeah he's probably an immigrant or his parents were, blah blah whatever, just assimilate already).


Not Swedish

We also stopped by a small tent to see a few songs by State Radio where it was mostly short people asking me to take pictures. More on them later.

We then took a break before the friday evening madness to walk around and check things out. We said hello to some campsites, stopped by the incredible yarn artwork, and went to the food stations outside of centeroo (there's food stations inside, as well as in selected areas in the campgrounds). Fooderoo: festivals never seem to get the food thing right. Bonnaroo had a couple good options, the $1 grilled cheeses were a thing of beauty and the NY style pizza was legit and delicious (if not that filling) but holy nikki sixx people I WOULD LIKE SOMETHING OTHER THAN JUNK FOOD AT LEAST ONCE in 4 days. The closest I got to realizing that desire was the last day when I had a fish platter with crab and shrimp and fish and rice and some cooked veggies although it ran me $12 which sucks when you've already paid so much. Some grilled chicken with corn on the cob is easy to do. There are plenty of options, just so much junk food at such a high price starts to wear you down.


Do these people honestly look like they want nothing but french fries for 4 straight days?

OK that's it for now, more on the Friday night madness next rumination.