Recap Bonnaroo, June 11

Our waitress was irritated.

“Millions of dollars,” she said. “Literally, millions of dollars is what this thing brings in. And no one in town knows where it goes.” "This thing" is the Bonnaroo, a four-day outdoor music festival in Manchester, Tenn., that's grown into one of the nation's largest draws, and where Decider will be camped out for the weekend.

A tray under her arm, the waitress stood in the middle of the mostly empty Hometown Diner, having just delivered two buck-and-a-half coffees to a table. The cops had closed down one of the entrances to town, so that the thousands of potential patrons had no access to the restaurant. “I mean, probably some of it goes to the fire department and the police station and stuff like that. But I tell you what, if I’m a business owner, I’m going to the next town meeting and raising hell.”

Ten minutes later, outside the Fantasy 101.5 radio station in downtown Manchester, a small red hatchback hit a curb and busted its fender. Soon, one ambulance, one fire truck, five police cars—three unmarked—and two motorcycle officers showed up on the scene. The driver and passenger drove away unharmed. Judging by their tie-dyed shirts and dreadlocked hair, it was safe to assume they were heading to the farm. Bonnaroo was about to begin. Decider finished its coffee and headed for the stage.

Murs
First stop: the hip-hop tent, which was particularly congenial. “I’m here just like you,” said L.A.'s Murs said to the crowd. “Backstage, I took a shit in a port-a-potty.” Onstage, he rocked through a set of his typically introspective (self-hating, female-loving) but upbeat songs. Being one of the first shows of the evening, it took Murs a while to get the audience loosened up, but by the time he played “Bad Man” toward the end of his set, all the heads in the crowd were synchronized, bobbing to whatever beat his DJ chose to spin.

The KnuxThe Knux
An informal survey before The Knux’s show revealed that many of the people inside Bonnaroo’s Other Tent had never heard the group’s songs before. “I’ve heard of them” was the most common response. Nevertheless, the fans jostled each other for better floor positions and friggin’ got down when the group played its single “Bang! Bang!” The crowd got down again when the beat from MGMT’s “Kids” ran for a couple minutes. And then again when they played Kris Kross’ “Jump.” Krispy Kream and Rah Almillio pulled (newly converted) fans up on to the stage for a dance-along to “F!RE (Put It In The Air).” Given its relative anonymity, The Knux’s ability to draw the crowd into the show—indeed, onto the stage—made it stand out as the best performance of the night.  

People Under The Stairs
Thanks to a thunderstorm, festival-goers took shelter where they could, creating a packed crowd at L.A. rappers People Under The Stairs' show. Despite the odd mix of audience members, everyone was ready to dance. Some declined to move to the hip-hop two-step, instead maintaining their more hippy-ish styles. One dancer’s moves were compared to a Jell-O mold. Still, like most, he jiggled happily through the entire set. PUTS added an improvisational element to their show, starting off with a freestyle, and mixing impromptu verses in throughout the night. Not quite as high-energy as The Knux or Murs, but certainly a nice comedown from the night’s hip-hop highs.  

Passion Pit
It’s no real feat to get a gaggle of drugged-up hippies to dance. So the audience at Passion Pit’s late-night show was no real indicator of how they performed. There weren’t any overt problems with the Massachusetts band’s set. “Sleepyhead” and “The Reeling” were played both energetically and proficiently, but there wasn’t anything special about it either. It was as if there was a wall between the music onstage and the fans in the crowd. Maybe it was a scheduling thing—Passion Pit played at the end of a day when thousands of people drove hundreds of miles without sleep—but the show resembled a junior-high dance when compared with the orgiastic fervor kick-started by so many other Bonnaroo performers.