Imagine being in a newish band from a sleepy town in Wales, and you’ve just released an album of 60’s-styled psychedelic rock. A promoter plays the record and calls you to offer up the biggest opportunity in your music career–opening Bonnaroo 2023.
CVC (Church Village Collective) took the stage under That Tent on Thursday afternoon at 2:30pm to plenty of fanfare. They kicked off a 45-minute set with a rousing edition of their new single, Good Morning Vietnam, setting the crowd of thousands into a frenzy. As much as I would have enjoyed partying with them, I was more thankful for a seat on the raised ADA deck.
Early into their second number, Woman of Mine, CVC was interrupted by a PA announcement: “All visitors are required to evacuate Centeroo at once due to a serious weather alert half-an-hour away.”
The band unplugged and left the stage. Everything seemed so uncertain.
Up until showtime, Leah and I had kept a close eye on the weather, and lamented about the possibility of this event turning into a giant mud bash.
Naturally, we packed all the appropriate raingear in the event of a storm, but now it seemed likely that our weather anxiety may have been justified by this recent threat of wind and lightening.
As we headed back to the Airstream under a gloomy sky, all we could do was speculate how this would screw up the scheduling and how the promoters would respond.
As I reported in Bonnaroo–the Logistics, over 100 acts across all genres were signed to perform at the 2023 festival.
With the exception of the evenings’ headliners: Kendrick Lamar, Odesza, and Foo Fighters, and a handful of notable acts scattered throughout the lineup, most of the performers were new to me. But that didn’t matter; I was at Bonnaroo for the experience and to discover talent new to me.
But that doesn’t mean I was evaluating all of the talent on my own. I got some much needed advice from my son, Noah–an aficionado of nearly every music festival under the sun (except Bonnaroo)–who was helpful in handicapping the lineup in order to maximize my listening pleasure.
Sure, there would be some missed opportunities given overlapping scheduling conflicts and 6 distant stages, but I was intent on attending as many bands as possible.
Centeroo re-opened at 4 pm without so much as one fallen raindrop. Gray skies had been chased by clear skies, and weather prospects were improving for the remainder of the weekend. By 4:30 pm, music had resumed at all the tents, and CVC was back on stage performing a compressed set.
The balance of my Thursday was spent hobbling between This Tent and That Tent, where the ADA attendants were some of the cheeriest people on the planet, as well as the best resource for canned ice water, courtesy of Liquid Death. “Happy Roo! Would you like some cold water?”
After CVC came transgender rager/rocker, Ezra Furman…
followed by bluegrass maestro, Molly Tuttle.
Celisse lit up This Tent with her powerhouse vocals…
and guitar shredding, the likes of Prince and Hendrix,
while Suki Waterhouse’s chic pop stylings…
brought back memories of her star-turn in Daisy Jones & the Six.
Leah and I called it a night after a non-stop, 1-hour power set of Latin funk from Cimafunk.
Stellar music performances continued unabated throughout the weekend with few production hiccups. We must have crisscrossed the Centeroo acreage dozens of times to find music we enjoyed. Leah’s Apple watch calculated 7 to 8 miles of daily trekking between shows and stages, turning large swatches of grass into a giant dust bowl when crowds would scatter at the conclusion of each concert.
Rather than critique every artist’s performance I attended, I offer a slideshow gallery of photo highlights from several notable performers: Danielle Ponder, Sheryl Crow, Leni Wolf, Three 6 Mafia, David Grohl (Foo Fighters), Hailey Williams (Paramore), Sammie Rae, Umphrey’s McGee, Franz Ferdinand, Hippocampus, Kip Moore, Paris Jackson, and Andrew McMahon
And when we weren’t watching the performers, we were watching people:
After Josh Freese’s last drumbeat (replacing Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins) on Sunday night, Bonnaroo 2023 was in the history books…
and then the rains came.
Streaming thru America 