Bonnaroo Begins: a Charged-Up Crowd

Original Source: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
Author: Jon Pareles
Original Publication Date: 12 June 2009

MANCHESTER, Tenn. — Like a long jam-band set, Bonnaroo eases into gear with its Thursday opening, keeping its biggest stages dark and putting on what amounts to a night of warm-up acts. The early arrivals are already primed, though. I’m used to New York audiences, who only respond after carefully gauging peer response and music quality; Bonnaroo crowds are more instinctual; if the music grooves, they join in.

When the rapper Murs, whose rat-a-tat rhymes are full contradictory feelings about sex and love, asked the single ladies to shout, they did — while everyone joined in on the songs’ more hostile moments. (Murs disavowed them.) When White Rabbits, a moody but percussion-heavy Brooklyn band, socked out its swinging drumbeats behind songs about, for instance, feeling like the fox in a fox hunt, the Bonnaroovians threw their hands in the air and clapped along — tilting the songs from art-rock toward something like cabaret. By the time Passion Pit played its set of shimmering but monochromatic synth-pop with falsetto — far more beloved by the audience than by me — people were splash-dancing in ankle-deep puddles.

Fashion note: Tie-dye was on the wane, though never entirely absent, at the last few Bonnaroos. This year, it’s back in force. Must be the Phish fans.

Meanwhile, the boots were a good idea. When I reached the site Thursday afternoon, there were already mud pits, and intermittent rain is only expanding them. Wait — yes — those were thunderclaps. And there’s lightning behind the Ferris wheel. Things are going to get slippery — and half the crowd isn’t even here yet.

 Retweet This Post