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Dateline Manchester, TN

(This entry was written in a notebook on Friday night and posted on the following Tuesday, after much R&R)

Day two started early for our camp, with the temperature well into the eighties by 7:30 am. Needless to say, we got up and out of the camp quickly, as we had neglected to bring any kind of shelter other than the tent, and were beginning to resemble lobsters even before 9:00 am.

We found some shady trees and spent the rest of the morning playing Spades and watching the craziness happening all around us. Everyone was in high spirits, and people were still arriving, eventually crowding 80,000 deep into slightly less than a square mile.

Around 1:30 pm, we begin to make our way to “Which Stage” to get settled in for the Ben Folds show at 2:00 pm. Drawing the first really large crowd of the weekend, Folds played for a little over an hour, interspersing the music with some stage antics, including photographing everyone who was photographing him.

The throng of bikini wearing, sunscreen slathered fans were not as responsive as they could have been to Ben’s exhortations to sing with him - the Tennessee sun having reached well into the nineties by mid-afternoon - but all-in-all it was a fantastic show, and a perfect start to the first full day of music at Bonnaroo.

After the Ben Folds show, I split off from the rest of our group and went to see Mike Gordon & Ramble Dove while they headed to see G. Love & Special Sauce. That was a hard choice for me, but fortunately, I had seen G. Love before, which made it a little bit easier. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t seen either of them before…

The Ramble Dove show was everything I had hoped it would be, and in the hour and a half they were allotted, they tore through an impressive array of honky-tonk favorites from Hank Williams, Lefty Frizell, George Jones, Jim Lauderdale and Gram Parsons.

I couldn’t manage to get inside the tent where they were playing, but I did find a nice shady tree just to the left of the stage, and laid under it for the entirety of the show. From this point on my Bonnaroo experience was pretty much defined by sprints from shade to shade in a futile attempt to avoid sunburn.

At 5:30pm we all met back up for the show that I was most excited about - Oysterhead. The supergroup side project featuring former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, ex-Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and Primus bassist Les Claypool, reformed for the first time since 2001 and offered a mighty performance on the mainstage.

For two hours the three amigos threw down hard thick funk that had a huge crowd (the largest daytime crowd of the festival) bouncing and screaming. Costume changes, dueling solos, and an impassioned speech from Stewart Copeland that ended with

…you make me want to take off all my clothes and dance among you!

turned the show into a musical spectacle. If I had any compliant at all about the show, it was that they didn’t play the Pseudo Suicide / Jerry Was A Racecar Driver / Reba jam that blew everyone away at the 2000 New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival.

I’m not complaining however. Their set was tight and energetic, with plenty of intricate teases and riffs as you would expect from three musicians of that caliber. honestly, I could have gone home after that show and been perfectly happy with my Bonnaroo experience, but fortunately, I didn’t have to.

Leaving the Oysterhead show was something of a surreal experience (one that would be repeated several times during the weekend). I don’t know what it is about 50-60,000 people all shuffling slowly in the same direction, inches from each other, but the potential for mayhem was palpable in the air. you could see the anxiety on the faces of the mounted “safety officers”, and ripples of what can only be described as fear of being trampled echoed through the crowd until we were clear of the gates and back amongst the camps.

We all took a much needed break from the festivities and repaired to our camp for food and drink. Our dinner break turned into nap time, and before you know it, it was dark, and we were awoken by the thunderous applause coming from the Tom Petty show on the main stage.

Blake, Sam and I headed down to the show, and arrived just in time to see Stevie Nicks arrive on stage, which sent the enormous crowd into convulsions of glee. Nicks and Petty played their hit ’80s duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” and for several more songs, including the Petty staple “I Need to Know,” sung by Nicks, who is performing this mini-set with Petty at each stop on his current U.S. tour. Ironically, during their two-hour-plus set, Petty and his Heartbreakers covered the pre-Nicks Fleetwood Mac rocker “Oh Well.”

The show went long, and it was almost 1:00 am before we managed to drag ourselves back to camp. We were exhausted, and unable to muster the energy to get to the Lyrics Born / Common / Blackalicious show. We had to console ourselves instead by listening to the roaring crowd as My Morning Jacket brought the house down and the second day of Bonnaroo came to a close.