Bonnaroo

I’m fried. That’s what Bonnaroo does to you. It’s like a huge Tennessee deep fryer. It immerses you in a massive vat of sizzling hot music for three days and you come out the other side extra crispy. How else do you explain the madness? You could try to extract some sense of logic from the numbers (3 days, 80 bands, 90,000 people, 700 acres, 7 stages, 1 million pounds of ice, over 6,500,000 watts of electrical power, three scattered hours of torrential thunder and lightning sprinkled with a couple of hail and tornado warnings), but like any good mind blowing, logic is useless. However, here are the tender deep-fried, greasy, morsels that encapsulate the spirit of such a blessed event as ingested by one overfed attendant.

• Randomly finding an old college buddy’s drivers license on a hotel lobby floor and then running into him 10 minutes later amidst 90k people after not having seen him in eons.

• A twisted Abbott and Costello routine being played out in a Lewis Carrol-designed theme park, as we navigate around the What Stage, the Which Stage, past This Tent and That Tent and the Other tent to see Papa Mail at Another tent.

• Watching Black Keys drummer (and Hanson Brothers doppelganger) Patrick Carney beat and whip his snare with the wingspan of a turkey buzzard while wearing a shirt that reads “Keep Your Emotions in Motion.”

• Seeing Wilco—in all their jean-jacket coolness—crank, twist, jolt and spank out a “War on War” that has a sober Tweedy playing over his head, literally. Jaws clank off the aluminum bleachers with a resounding din.

• Chris Robinson serenading the merciful sunset with a gut-ripping and salacious send up of “Ride,” while the audience convulses and contorts like a bunch of boneless chickens in a swirling sauna of backstage “dry-ice” smoke.

• Dylan challenging Madonna as the champ of revamp. Ditching the pencil-thin mustache, swingin’cowboy, bow-legged crooner from the carnival circuit for Mr. Piano Man on cough syrup, which of course bows to his enigmatic, contemptuous, impervious, poetic, sardonic and (at times) insufferable mystique. I miss the troubadour in the neo-Nudie suits already.

• Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pining for beautifully poor souls, like a lost Steinbeck book on tape.

• Watching a new friend weep openly at the poignancy and validity of Dave Matthews’ and Trey’s Anastasio’s acoustic version of “Waste,” just before most of the 90,000 people start softly clapping and humming to “Bathtub Gin” with intimate fervor, Trey gently rapping his guitar with a single knuckle, like a massive sing-along where no one wants to wake the baby.

(Photo at top right: Phish frontman Trey Anastasio condcuts a 40-piece orchestra through one of his self-composed fugues at Bonnaroo)