Bonnaroo 2011 Recap: Day One

It starts off innocently enough; you make a 12 hour drive in just ten hours, meet up with one of your favorite people, get yelled at by a Tennessee State Trooper to get off the Interstate!, have dinner at a Waffle House with the natives, sleep in a seedy hotel in Belle Meade, and finally make it to the farm after being routed all over Manchester. And then you find out that you’re exactly as far away from Centeroo (where all the action happens in Bonnaroo) as humanly possible. Total bummer.

So fellow Ruckuser Kenzie and I ended up in Camp Stewie Griffin, which was pretty awesome – our neighbors were cool and everything – but we were approximately an hour’s walk to Centeroo (or ‘the center,’ where everything goes down at Bonnaroo). It was about as hot as you’d expect and it took us awhile to set up camp.

By the time we made it to Centeroo, we’d missed my coveted Freelance Whales set, but I figured that we’d be able to catch them on Friday. We joined the massive queue headed through the arch (the queue is massive almost every hour of the day, which is no surprise considering that 80k+ people are coming and going all the time) and made our way into the center, where we could hear Freelance Whales taunting our lateness.

We got acquainted with the press tent and hung out with some of our fellow music bloggers, then headed over to the Comedy Tent for Henry Rollins’ set, something that I’d been looking forward to intensely (he is a Ruckus hero, after all).

Ably supported by comics Nate Bargatze and Tig Notaro (who gave the sign language interpreter the most hilariously hard time ever), Rollins touched on subjects both serious and silly, and approached both with grace and aplomb, including an edict against the standard American diet, and an anecdote about reading GWB’s biography out loud to a boiling mad Republican in the book section of Costco – in a perfect imitation of Dubya’s voice, no less.

We bounced over to This Tent for Donald Glover’s single Childish Gambino set of the weekend, taking a wide berth around the sizeable crowd that had already gathered. Glover was working with a full band, and this is the part where I admit that I was stupid excited to see his set. Say what you will about his lyrics (which I feel are meant to provoke – it’s clear that he’s not really a dick), he is a fucking amazing performer. His set was massively fun and super high energy; it was clear that he was having a great time, and he was blown away by the size of the very excited crowd (the largest he’d ever performed to in his Gambino guise).

Instead of staying for one of the late sets, we made our way back to Camp Ruckus, using one of the handy golf cart taxis which can be found tooling around the grounds (for $5 a pop, they’ll take you back to camp – totally worth it when you’re as far away as we were) day and night. Pro tip: even if a taxi already has someone on it, flag them down – they might be headed toward your pod. Tip #2, drivers can be bribed – wouldn’t you rather be taken as close to your camp as possible? For a couple of extra bucks, you can.

The camping experience itself is as good as you make it. We had a decent-sized tent and a quick shade canopy, places to sit, tent fans, and plenty of food and water. Also, air mattresses cannot be recommended enough. It all seems like common sense, and might seem like overkill to make a fancy camp when you won’t be spending that much time there, but it’s worth it. Day one down, we slept.