Features

Aside from the numerous collaborations, marathon late night sets, and the extremely muddy fountain, the two things most heavily discussed amongst the tents at this years Bonnaroo Festival were the astonishingly little amount of rain that dropped on the ground, and the massive amount of diversity that dropped on stage. As the weekend wore on, and the sun continued to break through, so did the eclectic mix of artists. Certainly there were many well expected jam treats with The Dead, Widespread Panic and Neil Young as the headliners, but many in the crowd discovered new sounds and saw the light in the strangest of places. As the stream of late night arrivals crawled bumper to bumper into the land of tents, tarps and tiki lamps, Antibalas hit the stage at the stroke of midnight Thursday night to get things started a little early. Then, for the next 72 hours, Bonnaroo was an 82,000 person bustling city that rarely saw an idle moment.

Dispersed throughout the sets of the weekend, many artists attended intimate press conferences in order to answer media questions, express their various thoughts on the event, and offer general comments about the industry and specifically the ever-changing improvisational scene. There were many poignant moments, and equally as many humorous ones. Here is a collection of some of our favorites.

"I think [events like Bonnaroo], at least speaking for myself, turn me on to new things. ‘Cause a lot of the times, at a festival like this, I may choose to hear people that I don’t know more than the people that I’m already familiar with. And a lot of the times I don’t get opportunities, or I don’t take the opportunities to do that. Where at a festival it’s all out there, it’s like a buffet. You know, ‘man, I’ve never had this food before, let me try that.’ At a place like this, I’ll go hear these guys and I’ll say ‘ok, I like these guys, I’ll go try out their record’."

"Anytime you consolidate something that much it’s going to be a bad thing. Owning four newspapers, and a bunch of radio stations in one city, it’s going to narrow the view more than it already is, so the gut reaction is, that’s not the way to do it. The music that we all play is under the radar anyway, at least at the beginning, so it’s usually unaffected. But as far as the mainstream, and the young minds that can be turned on to things, it’s pretty devastating."

"It’s a weekend situation, ‘cause Halloween isn’t falling right on the weekend, and we still want to do the traditional New Orleans thing. And we wanted to get JoJo [Hermann] back home."

"It is amazing. It’s a great feeling to actually feel like you’re accomplishing something. At a festival like this, it’s really great for that. One of the things that’s so amazing about getting to play for this many people…if in fact people’s asses were rocked, it’s a collective thing. If someone else’s ass is rocked, our collective ass is rocked as well. And to experience that, we don’t feel like we’re performing, but just kind of participating in an experience that hopefully everybody gets to have. And the goal is to not be up there like an exhibit, but more that you’re just a contributor to the overall experience of everyone there."

"We’ve been encouraging taping since day one. We used to tape our own shows and force the tapes on people (laughs). And that’s how we built our fan base. We don’t force the tapes anymore, but the taping community has played a large role in the growth of our fan base, so we’re all for that free exchange of the music."

"Well, I don’t know if I’d want to be cooped up on a bus with him for a month"

"I’m learning to ease up on it, and just let it happen. My management and myself, we just decided, you know, ‘if you guys are gonna Phish it,’ that’s our code word, start going Phishin. ‘If you guys are gonna start Phishin, you gotta let the fans do this.’"

"I don’t feel like we have to do anything. This has come up earlier today too, and really the only prime directive in moe. is that every guy in the band really enjoy what we’re doing. And if there’s one member not having a good time with some particular kind of music or song or whatever, we usually end up dropping that. And it’s not so much a written thing that’s enforced, but just the way we all sort of feel. We’re doing this ‘cause we love it, and we all need to be having a good time, and that’s what really drives what we do. So playing for thirty minutes is really just self-indulgence. It’s not so much for you as it is for us (laughs). But you know what, it’s a little bit of both. Clearly the fans have to be enjoying it. There’s nothing worse than being up there and giving it your all and having people sort of, like moderately bored, because…we’re the entertainment. We’re just the music at the party. That’s the best thing about our job…every time we do a show, it’s a celebration. It’s this huge occasion where everybody’s coming out to have a great time and we’re the music, but we’re no more responsible for that great time as the audience is. It’s like an equal contribution on all of our parts to make it a glorious occasion. So the thirty minute jams often were egged on by the fans to do that, but we love it so we keep doing it. And it’s reciprocal, and it can turn into a forty-five minute jam sometimes, so…"

"We don’t do the sort of thing that (moe. does), where we’ll just stretch out and not know, are we gonna play for thirty minutes, or six hours or whatever it’s gonna be. But I don’t think people really care. I think it’s all just music, and the audience, I don’t think they really discern whether a guy’s a DJ or a jamband, or I don’t even know what The Flaming Lips are at this point, but we’re all just doing music. And I don’t think anybody really has a certain line that they think, ‘oh, these guys do this thing, and these guys do that thing.’ And I don’t know, I mean, I must admit I‘m here in a way, because of Al (Schnier). I met him earlier in the year and he just seemed like a cool guy (laughs) and we just thought we’d do some of these things and it seemed like a lot of fun. To me it’s just music. It’s all rock and roll to me, you know. And I suspect people would like there to be a variety. I would think it would get sort of boring if every band just came up and did the exact same thing, and looked the same, had the same philosophies or whatever, and I think the audience wants there to be different bands saying different things, just like they want different foods at the concession."

"As far as I’m concerned, I think that the Internet is the wave of the future, and we’re doing everything we can to get our music to be available on the Internet. As far as should it be free, we’ve been giving away our music for a long time, and people have been trading it for a long time, and that’s ok with us."

"I don’t know yet, I haven’t got there"

"We just finished a new album, it’s actually a triple album, it’s going to be coming out in August, and there are a lot of collaborations on that. Some whole band collaborations, all the Flecktones with all the guys from Nickel Creek, and there’s a band collaboration with all the Flecktones and The Chieftains. And then Bobby McFerrin is on some stuff, and Branford Marsalis…a lot of our friends, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas. So it started out being a record that was just going to be the four of us, but as we went along it just sort of happened, steamrolled, and before we knew it, it was a very collaborative record."

"I don’t feel like I have the right to say what I think should happen for any other band, but for our stuff, as long as people hear our music, I get excited. People are coming out to our shows, and we’re able to sell records, so it’s a good thing…so I don’t know if I have a right to judge it one way or another."

"I wanna re-title it, ‘cause jamming….lets call it soulternative. You know what I mean…soulternative. Let’s swap it right now, let’s flip the script. ‘Cause "jambands" is just so…I mean it’s cool, I’m down with the moniker, like if it sticks and it’s not going away, well you might as well sort of wear it, but…soulternative, let’s call it soulternative everybody."

"I’m aghast that all this is still going on. First of all, I’m just mesmerized that we’re making enough to pay rent, ‘cause I never thought we would. I started playing music, and we started getting serious about it right about the time that The Beatles came out."

"Eat A Peach"

"I was thinking about this last night. It has a lot to do with accepting. I have these catch words, phrases, that come into my head when I’m trying to think about what makes it all work, and accepting. And sometimes I even go through these cycles where for ten seconds I’m thinking ‘the bass sound is horrible’ and the next ten seconds I’m thinking ‘oh, well, it’s just boomy, and boomy is cool,’ so I accept that. And the next ten seconds I think ‘shit, I have to go to the bathroom, I don’t want to be on stage.’ And I think, ‘well, that’s sort of a good feeling too…in some kind of a way.’ And last night, I actually ended up walking around yesterday for like twelve straight hours till 6 in the morning. I had a good time, I had my mud boots and everything. I started out at midnight with the [Funky] Meters, and Warren [Haynes] was sitting in with them and all, and then we wandered over to Sector 9, and I’d never seen Sector 9 before, but I was really into it, I really liked it a lot. And I just sat there for a while, and it’s the kind of improvising that, it’s that sort of house music flavor, but maybe some other jamband influenced stuff going on, but I was really getting into it and I started to walk away before the encore…and I just thought ‘shit, I’ll just walk back and maybe I could play.’ So I ran all the way back up stage and pretty much back onto the stage, and never met them or heard them before till just then. And I was thinking ‘well this is a whole different mode of improvising than I’m used to.’ In this case the bass lines are supposed to be more repetitive than ever maybe, or just going on and on and on, which I like, but it’s a whole new mode and I have to just tweak my brain to think ‘I’m not supposed to do this, and I’m not supposed to…’ you know, and there’s all this self-consciousness thinking ‘I’m supposed to do that, I’m not supposed to do this.’ That’s what has to go away, and all that thinking until you’re just standing there and letting it happen. And as I was saying in the beginning, accepting, and that’s what I was noticing, this constant learning about how to accept what already is."

"A little punk rock band called The Smiling Assassins"

"I’m not a hip-hop kind of a trick DJ or anything when I [perform] so I’m a little bit, I don’t want to say concerned (laughs), but I just went and saw Z-Trip and he’s all rockin’, like 40,000, or 50,000 people and he’s doing tricks and pulling records out of his hair (laughs). So it’s very exciting for me, and it’s cool this community has kind of opened up it’s eyes to my community and taken it in a new embrace."

"Have you heard about this thing called furries, or plushies, have you heard about them? People talk about this kind of, I think it’s kind of a weird sexual obsession, where people get into these sort of furry costumes, and this kind of gets them off or something right? You heard of that right? And so we thought when we first started taking these suits out that we would get all these sort of perverts up there every night, but it hasn’t really turned out like that at all."

"Giving [music] away and having it taken from you are two different things. There’s a difference, and we chose to give it away. But when people take it and sell it, and don’t pay the artist, that’s thievery, that’s no good. It’s a moral question here. It can’t be legislated, no way, but it has to be in your own hearts. When you take music…that’s how we send the kids to school, put food on the table, gas in the car, just like doctors and lawyers and what have you. So there is intellectual property and there [are] copyrights that you have to observe, but we just have always trusted our loyal fan base to do the right thing and trade freely, but not in commerce."

"I know a lot of independent record stores that are about to go under that have been alive and well for probably thirty years, and that’s how they support their kids. And now they’re like ‘I can’t do that, I can’t make it…I have three people in line, and they’ve got whatever, and they’re talking about how they’re not gonna buy the other ten ‘cause between the three of them and their other friends, they can just not buy ‘em.’ So it gets so deep, because…great sounding records aren’t made for free. Sometimes they can be, but most often they’re not. But they can be, that’s true…so see, it’s all debatable. I mean, if you want to talk about Nevermind or you want to talk about The Beatles’ records from the Apple days all cost bread. And maybe that’ll just get watered down and make less expensive records which would probably be a great thing too."

"We had two girls get up on the stage in Madison [WI], and I don’t know how a bluegrass show suddenly became a Vegas revue, but literally we were two tank tops away from something I’m not sure ever happened to Bill Monroe."

"Let me tell you…it’s put another bullet in the gun. It’s added a lot of great newness to the band, as well as this guy here, Derek [Trucks]. He gave us all the "want to" again. I’m not gonna sit here and say anything bad about anybody, but Warren Haynes is a hell of a player, and a hell of an addition to a hell of a band."

"You have to think about, ‘where is the music gonna go?’ Sure, we’ve made a good living, and we’ve done well, but if you’re a guy who’s in his late teens, early twenties and you want to make a career in music, you have the heart and soul for it, and the ability to do it, but you can’t make a living, what’s that gonna do to music over the long run? [If in order for him] to spend eighteen hours a day making music, [he] has to have worked bagging groceries to keep a roof over his head, that’s not gonna serve the music. So the answer to the whole question, or the whole issue is, honor what you love. If you love the music, honor it."

"I’m pretty lucky I got a song played on the radio, but I think it’s just a lot of luck really, I mean, it’s like you were saying, there are a lot of bands here that may never get played on the radio, but all of them have enough talent too. So you don’t really get to pick what happens, I never really thought about how to balance it really. I just feel really, really lucky to be involved in quality events like [Bonnaroo]. ‘Cause it’s easy to get written off once you get played on the radio. So it’s not really a balance thing, it’s just you get invited to something like this…that [is] all about really good music, and you’re honored to be on the same stage as the people that are playing it."

"Dissent is patriotic. Not using your vote and not speaking out when there are things that are wrong, that’s unpatriotic. Booing Eddie Vedder off the stage and burning CDs of the Dixie Chicks, that’s unpatriotic. So yeah, you have to stand up, wave the flag."

"Well I’d say it’s a straight draw. Not to be politically correct or anything, but you picked two of my favorite spots."

"I’m glad to see it though, I’m glad to see it’s happening cause these musicians are all gonna have a whole lot more fun and longer careers, and more fulfillment in life. You know if you go out and play a note for note set every night, I know if I went out and played a note for note set, I’d be ready for a bell tower."

"Well, I think Woodstock we had the biggest one we ever had, maybe you didn’t hear about that."

"I try to at least play some of the signature things that identify the song, and I try to play within the kingdom of what the band’s about without trying to copy anyone verbatim. It’s a little tightrope you walk, and it’s very challenging, and very much fun. I just try to do my best, and you know, depending on who you play with, different parts of your arsenals are brought out to the forefront. There’s a different side of me definitely playing with these folks, and I’m loving it, I’m really enjoying it"

"We’ll answer that, but it’ll cost ya"

"Music itself, not so much radio…whether radio plays us or not, or embraces us or not, it’s really the song, and that’s what this whole scene, and this situation is all about. For me straddling both sides, it is a challenge ‘cause I can meet the fans, I can shake hands, and listen to them, and they listen to me, but there is like that fact that it’s mainstream, and some people love the fact that their group is both, so there is a balance. I don’t focus on it or anything, ‘cause basically where the music goes is up to the world at large. I’m just glad anybody has heard it. That’s where I’m coming from. Humble beginnings, coffeehouses, where the espresso machine is twice as loud as anything I can play or sing. But when you step beyond that and acknowledge the position [Jack Johnson and I] are in, being on the radio, it’s kind of a weird situation, ‘cause Bob Marley is on the radio, The Grateful Dead is on the radio, so it’s all about the person and the band’s perspective. As long as you keep your mindset, and know where your song is, I think that’s most important."

"I’d just like to say that if every Deadhead in the state of Florida had voted in the last presidential election, it would be a very different world today."