• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Festivalia 2006-2007 (Part One of Two)
• Our Shining Futures
• A Descent into Madness and Confusion
• Outed Characters in Literature Humanities
• Iraq Exit Strategy: The Boardgame!
• Campus Characters
• Ugg Season Descends on Barnard (or: DAS BOOT)
• Drunker Strike
• Scenes from South Lawn
• The Art of Ray Johnson
• ABC: Your Money Is Now Our Money (or the V-Show's)
• A Message From Public Safety
• The Great Scientific Experiment
• Brown Bagging
• THEY Watch
• The Staff
• The Fed Presents: The Spirit Of Giving

Rachel Katz

Bonnaroo '07

Rachel Katz

Regina Spektor, VirginFest 2007

Rachel Katz

Mind-altering substances, Bannaroo 2007

When I began to work for The Fed, I blatantly told Kareem (Feditor-in-Chief emeritus) that I was joining the staff to abuse my privileges: to get backstage passes. He told me that was fine, as long as I made something of it. So this is my something.

It is a yearlong analysis of three different music festivals that I attended, for two of which I scored a press pass; I have come to conclusions of two categories, which became two separate articles. The first, this article, delves into the concerts themselves, and the scene and concertgoers. The second article (tune in next issue) discusses ideas of Celebrity, from a personal perspective of the people I’ve met. I took my ever-growing interest in the scene and the people involved and I decided to actually examine it in a professional lens rather than mere speculation.

PART 1: CMJ ’06, Bonnaroo ’07, and Virgin Festival ’07

Upon beginning my analysis, I spent a great deal of time trying to fit each concert into a category of vices. Sex, drugs, rock & roll, etc. To merely sit back and take in the people in attendance requires a pen and paper, and I soon found that I looked rather creepy sitting in a corner (if there was a corner to be had) with a pen and my leather journal. Yet for the sake of journalism, it had to be done! I endured the odd looks in my direction for these speculations.

I also began to categorize concerts by the characters I thought that I would meet there and overall the general taste of the concert. Festivals intrigued me more than solo concerts, due to the vastness of the types of people who attend (both performers and revelers). In the fan category, you have your Rabid-Foaming-At-The- Mouth-Fanboy/girl, your chilled out hippie, your drunken preppy kid (who might not even like the music, in all honesty), your indie kid, your emo kid, your goth kid, your obese middle ager who is as drunk as the preppy kids but wearing much more unflattering clothing, your average guy who frustrates you because you can’t categorize him—and to think, all of these different types of people all enjoying the same music. Or at least the same atmosphere.

Starting from the beginning of my adventures, to CMJ I present The Most Sober Award. I did not want to get raped or mugged in the City, therefore I was completely sober for the entirety of the festival. Because I was, as my mother put it, “traipsing” all over the city by my lonesome at “GOD KNOWS WHAT HOUR—YOU COULD BE KILLED FOR HEAVENSAKE! OR WORSE: RAPED!” I needed to be able to spot danger at ten paces and whip out my mace in time. Also, I wanted to be able to find my way home after the shows. Besides the safety factor, it is also much more difficult to sneak liquor into venues in New York City, use a fake ID, or get some older guy to buy you alcohol, as venues in NYC are still the real world; at Irving Plaza or the Knitting Factory, you aren’t likely to hear some dude walk beside you and whisper “doses...molly”* in your ear, like you hear every five seconds at Bonnaroo. You are much more likely, however, to be arrested for underage drinking or belligerent behavior due to alcohol than you would in a random field in the middle of nowhere in some vague region of the south where a festival is consequentially being hosted.

I believe that huge festivals, like Bonnaroo and Burning Man, are intentionally hosted away from civilization so people can go bat-shit crazy without injuring or disturbing innocent bystanders. Concertgoers know what they are getting themselves into, so they aren’t completely fazed when a crowd surfer comes down on their heads, or when a bunch of people dressed entirely in green begin frolicking around them. They are free to experiment as much as they want, because, hey, they are in a field in the middle of nowhere with no cars to hit them and no sober people to bring them down. Even sober people are intoxicated by proximity.

CMJ is atypical in a festival sense that I saw no one dropping acid or running around naked. Rather than a festival where you walk from stage to stage, it is an ongoing series of concerts that all happen to be on the same five nights. I, myself, prefer a nice summer festival like VFest or Bonnaroo because it’s much easier to sample each band rather than dedicating yourself to one venue for the whole night. Also, admission to a typical festival guarantees that you will be able to see every band in the lineup if you so please. At CMJ, I was turned away from a show because I was only 18 at the time. A band called Cloud Cult, an experimental indie rock group from Minneapolis, was playing at the Mercury Lounge down in the village, and because the Lounge is a bar, I was not allowed to go and see the band. I had waited in line for about an hour in 30 degree weather because I was such a huge fan of this group and then they wouldn’t even let me in after I offered to have both of my hands x-ed with permanent marker (like most alcohol licensed venues tend to for those of us not yet of drinking age).

Needless to say, I was quite upset. The fact that I was turned away from certain parts of the festival sets it aside from the others, because everyone is allowed to see every band in the lineup at an outdoor festival, yet at CMJ, blocks out of the lineup are completely off limits. In my opinion, CMJ should make sure they host events at venues that allow all ages to enter, whether or not there is alcohol. Or they could hold it in Central Park, like how Lollapalooza is held in Grant Park in Chicago.

But nonetheless, boo, Mercury Lounge.

On the COMPLETE other end of the spectrum, Bonnaroo was just about as different as an experience one could get from a Very Sober Concert series in the city. Myself, along with 80,000 other Bonnaroosians were in an utter haze for the four or five days spent in Tennessee. Whether it was from the dusty dirt roads that got in your every orifice making life seem blurry or if it was from the multiple brain-altering substances you had taken at 9 am that morning, it did not matter. Everyone was together in some sort of kumbaya-harmony that made real life seem to pause while you enjoyed the music and psychedelic atmosphere. Everyone was drinking because, hey, you brought your own beer, and if you didn’t have your own, your neighbors at the campsite were always more than accommodating. I learned more about drugs during this concert than in my neuro-psych class, mainly because you couldn’t walk down the street (Shakedown Street, typically) without hearing someone pushing seven different kinds of ecstasy, cocaine, acid, or marijuana, or some lethal mix of a few. That isn’t to say that it was a giant free for all, though. There were Mounties who were confiscating what they found, but in all honesty, how are you going to police 80,000 when 99 out of every 100 has an illegal substance on their person? Even Coyne of the Flaming Lips said, “Bonnaroo’s about ‘fuck it, let’s take some acid.’” So simply, because Bonnaroo is a different world (or rather society) than the normal one, you could be on an acid trip for the majority of your time spent there and merely be able to communicate better to the other 80,000 people who just…got you, man.

One of my friends who I attended Bonnaroo with this year confided in me, “R, I’m not actually here because of the music,” he said. I gasped and gave him a scandalized look.

“Then why on earth would you spend $200 on a ticket, not to mention taking a week off work, gas money, food money, and alcohol money?”

“Rach,” he laughed, “I’m here for the people. The people and the drugs.”

Just being at the concert was good enough for him, and whether he had a good experience truly depended on whom he met and interacted with. And also what terribly mind altering substances he imbibed over our fiveday adventure into the heart of the wild. Just as many people paid the $200 for the music as there were that paid the $200 only to spend another $100-$300 on yeo and make new friends.

Virgin Fest, though, is in the middle of the concert spectrum, as neither Here nor There. It is a mix between Bonnaroo and CMJ, and is hard to place it exactly on an intoxication scale. The preferred substances were most definitely beer and pot, but not even so much of the latter. I was surprised at how few people I saw blazing through the duration of the two days, and not surprised at all by the half hour long beer lines at every single beer station. The policing was more lax than New York, but way more tight than that random field in Manchester, Tennessee. Certain stations had an ID book that they were using to scrutinize out of state IDs. I heard quite a few choruses of “nice try, sweetheart,” from multiple bartenders around the venue. They really weren’t playing around. On the flip side though, their bag searches were a bit less than thorough.

I appreciated both CMJ and VFest for what they were: concerts close to my home(s) where I was another anonymous fan. I’m fine with that. But overall, my most memorable experiences came from Bonnaroo, mainly because it was just a completely different world, where the only thing that was on your mind was listening to music and making friends. I didn’t think about school or responsibilities at home or getting a job or my future. It was a reprieve from real life to live a derivative of Kerouac’s “American Dream.” That I could find it once really was an amazing experience. That I can find it again every year is just inconceivably magical.

*Doses means acid (LSD) and molly is pure MDMA in street-drug-lingo that I learned by attending Bonnaroo and asking anyone around me if they knew what words meant. For example, a man asking if I knew Tony, to which I replied, “Frankly, I have no fucking clue what you are talking about,” explained that tony is another name for cocaine, not just some guy named Tony.