First things first: yes, I have written about Bonnaroo before, and no, the following is not a simple repetition of the previous 17,000 pieces about the festival that have run in this column. Furthermore, I assure you that the frequency with which I have covered Bonnaroo for The Daily reflects neither a dearth in local live music nor any kind of corporate relationship I may or may not have with the festival's promoters, but rather my own personal interest in the event, which I consider the greatest thing on the face of the Earth.
Having said that, I'd also like to declare that the lineup for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival mercilessly trumps the offering for the sixth installment of Bonnaroo on paper.From the triumphant returns out of hiatus of ultra-??ber-mega-stars Bj?¶rk and Rage Against the Machine to the debuts of less heralded but comparably awesome artists like Sparklehorse, Grizzly Bear and Jose Gonzalez, the Coachella bill reads like a who's who for creative musicians that I like and that sound really good on record.
Conversely, the first- and third-billed bands at Bonnaroo this year are The Police and Widespread Panic. The String Cheese Incident will be there, as will Damien Rice, Wolfmother, and the unfortunately named Hot Tuna, who somehow manages to sound worse than their name would suggest. Regina Spektor, Galactic, The Slip ... in general, while I count myself as a fan of probably 85 percent of the Coachella artists, I genuinely hate a pretty sizable portion of the musicians who will be at Bonnaroo.
So why am I so obsessed with Bonnaroo? Why, for example, have I made a mental list of the things I am going to pack for an event that is more than five weeks away? Why can I recite from memory almost all of the performers and the order that they appear on the festival's promotional flier, which I have looked at multiple times per day, every day since the lineup was first announced? (The answer is not because I am a gigantic toolbag fanboy.)
I am excited for Bonnaroo because while the promoters might not have the same record collection as me, Superfly Productions and I can agree on what makes a good music festival: bands that kick ass live. I don't like a good deal of the bands that will be at Bonnaroo, but the ones that I do like - and even ones that I don't - are fantastic performers that will truly shine at an outdoor music festival.
This did not appear to be, and in hindsight, wasn't at all the case for Coachella's lineup. I love Junior Boys; Peter, Bjorn and John; Andrew Bird; Nickel Creek; Cornelius and others, and Bj?¶rk and Grizzly Bear are responsible for some of my favorite records, but I can't think of an atmosphere in which I would want to see them less than at the overcrowded, impersonal, skin-charring oven that is the Coachella festival grounds. While the desert is a great place to hide from the government, find peyote or die, there is just no way that the intricacies and mood so important to the music of Bj?¶rk, Grizzly Bear and other cerebral artists can come to life when you're standing in a boundless crowd of 50,000 people.
Reports from friends and bloggers who went this year confirmed this notion. The few artists whose music translates to faceless outdoor mayhem - Rage, LCD Soundsystem, Manu Chao, CSS, a few others - have received high marks, but pretty much everyone else was either ho-hum, boring or unlistenable.
The (good) bands at Bonnaroo may not be as subtle as those who were at Coachella, and they may not sound as good on record, but their music positively slays live and outside. With enormous guitar hooks and danceable tempos, bands like Franz Ferdinand, Spoon and The White Stripes rock so plainly and so hard that their music is not vulnerable to the evil acoustics of nature. It doesn't matter how crowded or hot it is when you're double-fisting cold beer and Wilco is blasting crunchy guitar melodies and power chords. The Hold Steady and The Black Angels aren't Bj?¶rk or Grizzly Bear, but given how rousing the former's ballsy rawk feels live, that's a great thing in this context.
While the music of these bands' translates well outdoors, the artists I am most excited to see are so phenomenal live that their music transcends the whole hot-crowded-outdoor-festival issue. Ween is so funny, so deceptively virtuosic, and so excited to play that no matter where you stand for the show, you're going to end up goofily pounding your fist in the air and dancing to polka songs.
STS9's cohesion and rhythmic fury is so pathologically sublime that you could be seeing them in the tiniest, dingiest dive in some two-bit metropolis and still feel like you're peering through the pearly gates watching Jesus, Albert Einstein and Keith Moon jam. And say what you will about Tool's music - it is rooted in such technical mastery and feels so unbelievably terrifying in person that seeing the band, who is billed second, is something every music fan should do before they die.
I think that most people's lives would be better if they owned "Yellow House" by Grizzly Bear, but it just isn't that necessary to see them play it live, especially while sweating out valuable nutrients by the gallon in a vast desert full of people. Good music and good live music aren't always the same thing, and while the organizers of Coachella may not fully understand this, the organizers of Bonnaroo definitely do. In a press conference that I attended, Ben Harper said, "Every show I'm hoping is the best show ever to play because that's how I approach the stage with that level of expectation in myself." Maybe the reason all but a handful of the shows I've seen at Bonnaroo in the last four years have been tremendous is because the artists that appear share Harper's noble mentality, or maybe not. I don't know the answer; all I know is that as I'm writing this the festival starts in 38 days, 14 hours, 45 minutes and 22 seconds...21...20...
Mikey Goralink is a sophomore majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
