I’m thinking about the craziest things I’ve learned about Bonnaroo over the past few days. The rules of time only seem to apply as a guide for artists to encourage everyone here to get their share of time on stage. I’m getting a steady 3.5 hours of sleep per day since arrival, and I’m hardly the last one to bed or first one to rise. Maybe energy drinks gets more powerful after they’ve been slow-cooking in your trunk.
The festival doesn’t end when the day’s headliners finish their set. Hardly. I don’t think I’ve seen a single encore. And it’s not like every last concert-goer is trying to milk the band for a few more minutes before driving home to bed – hell, people leave early in droves from The Flaming Lips’ and Jay-Z’s shows in order to get a good spot on the dance floor for LCD Soundsystem and Deadmau5, respectively.
Glowsticks – which you probably haven’t played with since the last time you went to Laser Tag in elementary school – are suddenly the quintessential cool. He with the most glowsticks is the tribe leader of the entire dance floor, until he throws his stash high in the air and the crowd scurries around to collect the sticks where they’ve fallen. Like the Homo Sapien discovering fire, girls zealously crack the sticks open to use as paintbrushes for their arms and legs (one requests to draw the Mona Lisa on my hand).
Everyone on the floor is impossibly energetic. I befriend a group of Wesleyan graduates in the heart of the LCD Soundsystem set, and together we start chants, stomps, mosh pits, and take turns crowdsurfing. By four in the morning I’m covered in more people’s sweat than Debbie after doing Dallas. A few of us go down to our skinnies and run through the center fountain to cool down, and then into the air-conditioned cinema to dry off and catch the tail end of a 3:30 showing of Inglourious Basterds.
The walk back to camp is not without its own charms. There’s still – still – people moving in the other direction towards festival grounds. As the sky gets lighter, many strangers are giddy to share tales of their night. The ad-hoc DJ set to my left is proof positive that even at 5:30 am, somebody is still in the mood to dance to thumping techno music. I check in at a light/sound experience called the Brainquility tent, and amid trepidation of the coming onslaught of sun and heat, I can recall only thinking “This seems like an entirely reasonable purchase for 5:45 in the morning.”
Tonight will be a short night of sleep – only maybe two hours until the heat is again unbearable – before it’s time to get up and do it all over. I can’t wait.
