How long has it been since the Beach Boys played to an arena-sized audience full of young, squealing girls eager to dance and sing along? Decades? Whatever the answer, the band that summed up the myth of the California summer had something going for it on Sunday; as it played “Barbara Ann,” the sun moved out from behind the clouds for the first time all day.
Posts tagged with BONNAROO
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Bonnaroo: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Get Funky
By Jon Pareles
Chad Batka for The New York Times
The Red Hot Chili Peppers at Bonnaroo.
With the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing the headlining set, one through-line for Bonnaroo on Saturday was funk. The festival offered up funk as motion, as repetition, as a mathematical pattern, as a process, as a communal project, as a yardstick of history and a reason to just dance.
In their two-hour set, the Chili Peppers repeatedly knocked their music apart and slammed it back together. Nearly every song is built on Flea’s bass lines–robust, precise and adamant–in
lockstep with Chad Smith’s splashy yet absolutely supportive drumming; Mauro Refosco, the Brazilian percussionist now touring with the band, adds even more syncopation. Josh Klinghoffer’s guitar
meshes with the beat, scrubbing and ratcheting or reaching back to laconic 1960’s soul, then uses solos to go haywire with wailing, string-bending blues lines and psychedelic tempests. The songs are
starkly uncushioned; Anthony Kiedis’s vocals, sung or chanted, are dry and functional. But every so often, in intros and interludes, the Chili Peppers opened up the machine; Flea set aside his riffs
to face off with Mr. Klinghoffer or Mr. Refosco for skittering, improvisational jams before switching back to the funk.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
The lyrics take on big themes–mortality, desire, solitude, the paradoxes of California culture, instinct as spirituality. But the Chili Peppers performed like kids at recess, running and jumping around. At one point, Mr. Kiedis pulled off a leaping twirl that looked like a skateboard trick without the skateboard, while Flea made his entrance for the encores walking across Bonnaroo’s wide stage on his hands. It was, like the music, sheer muscle power. Read more…
Bonnaroo: D’Angelo, Back in the U.S.A.
By Jon Pareles
Chad Batka for The New York Times
D’Angelo at the Bonnaroo music festival on Saturday.
Bonnaroo’s late-night surprise was a doozy: the return of D’Angelo, the all-around soul man who has not played a concert in the United States since the end of his 2001 tour for his album “Voodoo,” a masterpiece released the year before.
R&B fans have been waiting for its successor ever since. On Saturday night, D’Angelo was in full voice, or, to be more precise, voices: the silken falsetto, the funk yowl, the love-man tenor, the full-throated shout. Playing keyboards and guitar, flaunting muscles and charisma, D’Angelo was intact.
After shows earlier this year in Stockholm and London, D’Angelo had been scheduled to make his American return on July 6 at the Essence Festival in New Orleans — where, presumably, he will be performing his own material with his own band.
But for Bonnaroo’s annual Superjam, which promises mystery guests, Questlove of the Roots booked D’Angelo along with a band of studio all-stars. Earlier Saturday, before the Roots played their own Bonnaroo set on the main stage, the Superjam band worked up half a dozen songs and funk-jam medleys. The songs were not by D’Angelo; they drew from Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, the Beatles, the Ohio Players, Curtis Mayfield and the Time. (The band included Jesse Johnson from the Time on guitar.)
There was nothing tentative about D’Angelo’s performance. He took his place at keyboards and floated his voice into the opening of Hendrix’s “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland),” pitched right where his tenor glides into falsetto. He had the yowl for Sly and the Family Stone’s “Babies Makin’ Babies,” the shout for the Beatles’ “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and a blues-rock wail for Led Zeppelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be”; his phrasing was spontaneous and sure. And when he was not singing, he was fully engaged in the instrumental jams.
By the end of the set, with the funk of the Time’s “My Summertime Thang,” he was back at the keyboard, jabbing at an organ riff and raising his hand with a certain number of fingers up to cue band hits and false endings, working up both the band and crowd. By then, he had sung and lived up to Hendrix’s lyrics: “With the power of soul, anything is possible.”
Bonnaroo: Radiohead’s Festival Evolution
By Jon Pareles
Chad Batka for The New York TimesThom Yorke and Radiohead performed at Bonnaroo for the first time since 2006. 
More Photos From Day 2The last time Radiohead played at Bonnaroo, in 2006, it seemed to metamorphose on the spot: from a cerebral, futuristic, anxiety-driven band playing its arcane songs to earnest theater audiences to a cerebral, futuristic band that could make tens of thousands of people dance like crazy. Friday night at Bonnaroo was the follow-through: Radiohead the rhythm band, hitting groove after groove and riding them to darkly kinetic places.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Read more…
Bonnaroo: An Afternoon of Smart Female Singers and Songwriters
By Jon Pareles
This one’s for the ladies. Actually that was Ludacris’s line as he introduced one of his many celebrations of lust and intoxication, setting off squeals, fist pumps and shout-alongs in a wildly appreciative arena-size crowd that swarmed well beyond This Tent. He had a backup band with him, not that I could get close enough to see it onstage.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Read more…
Scenes from Bonnaroo
By The New York Times
Chad Batka for The New York TimesBrittany Howard of Alabama Shakes performs at Bonnaroo on Thursday.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
More Photographs
The 2012 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival got underway in Manchester, Tenn., on Thursday.
Bonnaroo: Kendrick Lamar and Rappers With Vocal Bite
By Jon Pareles
Chad Batka for The New York Times
Kendrick Lamar at This Tent.
Qualifications for rappers at Bonnaroo 2012: technique, inclusiveness, vocal bite, stage presence. Thursday night brought three in a row to the This Tent for a deluge of multiply rhymed lines and polysyllabic
precision: Danny Brown, Yelawolf and Kendrick Lamar. (More are due in the next days, both well-qualified on those fronts: GZA and Ludacris.) But
their shticks were different, and in my earnest way I prefer Kendrick Lamar, who equally earnestly presents pleasures–booze and sex–as ways to “ease the pain” of a deprived upbringing
and a competitive adult life.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Mr. Lamar hails from gangsta rap central: Compton, Calif. But instead of directing his anger at the police, women or outsiders, he criticizes himself and his environment, and he projects far more ambition than victimization. One song, “She Needs Me,” praised a career woman–a rare creature in hip-hop. Mr. Lamar uses hip-hop’s love of raunch and brand names (especially fashion labels and upscale alcohol) as teaching tools. Both, for him, are incidental to tales of striving, self-improvement and overcoming a rough past, delivered with a cutting rasp and fast, complicated meter shifts. Read more…
Bonnaroo: Getting in on the Act
By Jon Pareles
Chad Batka for The New York TimesThe crowds at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn.Bonnaroo’s participatory spirit runneth over. During the brief and efficient equipment changes between acts, on stages without curtains, band members often arrive to plug in, play and tweak their instruments,
greeted, often, by roars of applause. And as the Cave Singers discovered before their set of bluesy, growly roots-rock, when a drummer
starts steadily tapping his kit to make sure it’s coming through, a good part of the audience might start clapping along.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Fashion note: The majority of Bonnaroo’s bookings no longer have much connection to the hippie era in age or sound. Foster the People? Red Hot Chili Peppers? And from their singalongs — another participatory ritual — the people who go to Bonnaroo are perfectly happy with un-hippie styles like hip-hop and electropop. But that doesn’t hinder Bonnaroo’s annual outbreak of tie-dye, face paint, body paint, feathers and headbands (and feathered headbands). Are these, like New Orleans carnival costumes, kept in a closet for the annual gathering? Or are they broken out on other occasions?
Bonnaroo: Wild Girls in Control
By Jon ParelesBonnaroo got under way on Thursday with wild girls working two varieties of smoldering and letting loose on two tent stages: one with the staccato digital attack of hip-hop; the other with the drones and smears of primitivist rock.
That Tent held K-Flay, a rapper, singer and DJ backed by a drummer and samples she controlled — including one song with a rhythm track of “blah blah” hopping around various pitches. She
was rapping about frustrations and pushing back, in an articulate rush of syllables that sometimes switched to peppy sung choruses. She let the beat send her jittering across the stage, or added to it with
her own percussion kit, facing all annoyances with brittle energy. “Doesn’t matter what the prison/Rest assured I will escape, ” she vowed.
Bonnaroo
Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Over at the Other Tent was EMA, doing a set of goth breakouts orchestrated with Velvet Underground drones and feedback and stark stomps via Nine Inch Nails. They were the backdrop to her mutable voice, changing from dreamlike musings to moans and shrieks as she plunged into memories and sensations: “I wish that every time you touched me left a mark.” But she was decidedly in control; in one song, a jerk of her elbow cued a tom-tom accent, and spreading her fingers brought a cymbal swish. Undercutting the spookiness was her wardrobe choice: a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
A New Pop Music Festival in Delaware
By James C. McKinley Jr.The Killers, the Black Keys and Jack White will headline a new music festival in Dover, Del., this summer. The three-day event, the Firefly Music Festival, is scheduled for July 20 to 22 at the Woodlands of Dover International Speedway. Organizers say more than 40 bands and solo artists will play, ranging from the R&B singer John Legend to the indie band Death Cab for Cutie. The rappers Tinie Tempah and Lupe Fiasco are also expected to perform.
The festival is being produced by Red Frog Events, a five-year-old Chicago company that has had success promoting extreme foot races under the name Warrior Dash, as well as pub crawls, but has never put together a large music event. Meghan Roman, a spokeswoman for the company, said the vision of the owners — Joe Reynolds and Ryan Kunkel — was an open-air festival on the East Coast with plenty of outdoor camping, much like the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. A three-day pass costs $178. Attractions will include an air-conditioned brewery, a wine garden and hot-air balloon rides above the speedway, she said.