“I knew I was coming!” eternally sunny singer Jimmy Buffett told us in yesterday afternoon’s press conference following his surprise set that kicked off Saturday’s Bonnaroo calendar.
While Buffett’s longtime backing band The Coral Reefers was already on the schedule, the confirmation that the “Margaritaville” man would be joining them didn’t come until Thursday night and quickly became the worst-kept secret of the week.
“At Bonnaroo, noon is like eight in the morning” Buffett said about his early afternoon slot and since Phish had jammed and Paul Oakenfold dropped beats until almost sunrise, he was right. It was an unusually subdued crowd—and undersized, compared to his stadium-packing standards—that turned out to watch him strum his way through “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and “Changes in Latitudes”.
I asked the guy beside me—a shirtless twentysomething wearing oversized Cat in the Hat-style headgear—what his favorite Buffett CD was. “Oh, his greatest hits,” he said earnestly, which is either the smartest or the dumbest answer ever.
“This is the first festival I’ve really been to since seeing Jimi Hendrix in the Isle of Wight in 1970”, surrealist English rocker Robyn Hitchcock said before his afternoon set with the Venus 3. “I’m gonna re-lose my festival virginity for the second time in 38 years.”
The crowd that came out for Hitchcock’s second first time increased as his show progressed, either because of his excellent performance, his fluoresecent pink shirt, or because word circulated that his guitarist was R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. Despite tearing through several songs from his recent Goodnight Oslo album and providing the best between-song banter of the festival, the loudest ovation came during Buck’s mid-show introduction. I highly recommend checking him out at the Glastonbury festival later this month and, no, the fact that I own approximately thirty of his albums doesn’t make me biased at all.
Jenny Lewis did a solo set in the ridiculously named That Tent, whipping her red hair and belting songs from her pair of solo albums with an intensity she pulled from the back pockets of her denim cutoffs. “Feel free to put your fists in the air for this one,” she said before the appropriately named “Rise Up With Fists!!” and the crowd obliged, swaying along for the duration of the song.
My other fave moments from her set were the rocking cover of the Traveling Wilburys “Handle With Care” that had Elvis Costello singing along backstage and when Costello and his furry purple hat joined her onstage to sing “Carpetbaggers”.
Whoever designed Saturday night’s schedule obviously hated me, since they stacked Mr. Costello’s show at the same time as Wilco and The Decemberists, three of the bands I’d wanted to see since I saw their names printed on the poster. The Wilco show was on the mainstage on the other side of the grounds and my flip-flopped feet were screaming at this point, so I hopped between Elvis and The Decemberists, since their stages were on the same portion of the site map.
At the beginning of Costello’s set, he didn’t share the stage with anything but his acoustic guitar and a cup of tea before opening with “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and “Watching the Detectives”. For his hour-plus show, he covered the Beatles (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”), the Velvet Underground (“Femme Fatale”) and snuck in a pair of songs from his newest release Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane.
He was joined onstage first by frequent collaborator Allen Toussaint and Jenny Lewis before much of Lewis’ band came out for the finale. “Who wants to hear some rock and roll music?” he asked before closing the show with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”.
Meanwhile, Colin Meloy and The Decemberists had the biggest crowd I’ve seen in the other tent (actually in the This Tent, not to be confused with real The Other Tent where David Grisman was plucking through bluegrass standards). The nattily dressed Portland natives weren’t bothered by the sauna-style heat of the packed tent as they made their way through new tracks from The Hazards of Love as well as old favorites like “July, July!” and “O Valencia!” and holy crap, do they like punctuation marks. The crowd never ceased to shout the lyrics, making for what may be the first singalong about infanticide ever (“The Rake’s Song” from Hazards).
The shows on the side stages had wrapped up by the time festival headliner Bruce Springsteen started his set shortly after nine. The almost-sixty year old Springsteen is only ten days younger than my mother and, while my mom is an energetic gardener, I’m not sure she can stalk a stage for three hours like the Boss. Earlier in the week, I talked to a photographer from Backstreets, the Bruce-themed publication, who said that this would be Springsteen’s best show since it wasn’t his typical crowd (because they were younger by, oh, half) and he felt like he had something to prove.
Whether it was a true story or not, Springsteen rocked his denim-clad ass off, ripping through everything from opening song “Badlands” to “Glory Days” to —no kidding—“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. “We came down here tonight because we want to build a house…a house of love. A house of hope," he told the massive crowd and during his hit-stacked set and never-ending encores, he built that house and tore it down more than once, walking off the stage to an ovation that probably registered on the Richter scale.
You can catch the Boss later this month at Glastonbury. My mother will be appearing in her front yard through the end of the summer.