Headlight On A Northbound Train: McCartney, AmericanaramA, Deadheads, and Me

My music fandom began sitting on the carpeted floor of a middle-class house in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. My parents owned a record player and a handful of albums, among them The Beatles’ Revolver and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Much like the scene in Almost Famous when the protagonist’s sister turned her younger brother onto her tunes, the needle touched vinyl, and pretty much everything changed. By junior high, the music of The Beatles and Dylan saturated my psyche and shaped my identity.

At the time, the likes of Simon & Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin also seared my ears and soothed my soul. Rock ‘n’ roll inspired all-night adolescent airband artistry and class presentations on the poetics of the Don McLean song “American Pie.” Tragedies like the respective deaths of John Bonham and John Lennon jolted our reality. We discovered that Bonham died when we went to school one day and had to ask, “Why are all the burnouts crying?” But of course when Lennon died, everybody cried. Like the McLean song prophesied, we had many, many days when the music died.

In my high school years, punk, new wave, and of course the jubilant jangles of REM and the angelic anthems of U2 put some distance between me and 60s-70s classic rock, but I grew up in close enough proximity to the actual hippies and stoners that I would always suffer an epic kinship to these transformative periods of American popular music that still impact us today.

With all the burning-out and fading-away and ultimate fatality, it’s no short miracle than any of the greats that all but danced down the apocalypse still survive this far into the 21^st century, to this post-2012 period of popular musical renaissance and revival. With all this in mind, I feel such gargantuan eardrum-obliterating gratitude in relishing the immediate memories of the fantastic fact that in June 2013, in a span that stretched 16 days between two amazing weekends in Tennessee, I would see Paul McCartney at Bonnaroo and Bob Dylan on the Nashville riverfront. I’m likewise blown-away by some of the other bands we’ve been able to hear, the peers for my ears, who along with the headliners create bookends of beauty and blessing, of soggy singalong eyes and goosebump-inducing bliss.

Frankly, I cannot hype enough hyperbole to express the hopeful holiness, mix enough metaphors to convey the meaning, or raise high too many mocktails to celebrate the recently passed occasions. Frankly, I would feel too selfish to savor this if I didn’t have the chance to suggest you catch Dylan or McCartney who are both still on tour, if the other peers-for-the-ears were not still hitting up festival-after-festival for the rest of the summer. As endless rains fall on my 4^th of July holiday weekend, I scribble this testimony in hopes that someone might get a nibble of the goodness I’ve already experienced and perhaps seek out some of these shows the rest of the summer. As I ponder some of the more painful and plainly ludicrous prices that others have paid for the privileges I enjoy, I admit that I am most patriotic when it comes to our popular common culture, from sport to movies, but I am a patriot when it comes to music most particularly.

Since The Beatles official touring ended in 1966 and since Lennon died in 1980, I don’t think I’ve ever really wrapped my mind around the sheer significance of a Paul McCartney tour. Sure, we hear snippets of his later work and lots from the Wings period, but at root, we’re not hearing McCartney cover The Beatles; McCartney is a Beatle. Here in my mid-40s, more than a decade into the new century, I am watching a man in his 70s, looking and sounding sharp and charismatic do nothing shy of reclaiming and reviving with sonic groove and grace the greatness of The Beatles.

We hear love songs that kindle every feeling of passion I have for my partner dancing beside me and our world living and dying around us. We hear a song of letting-go like “Let It Be,” and for those few minutes we actually obey and let go; we let, it, be! Psychedelic moments surge forth from the tunnel of memory into the sober mess of the present, and we get crazy happy hearing “Helter Skelter” or “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Throughout McCartney’s set at Bonnaroo, I had several delightful moments where disorientation met déjà vu, and I felt myself wonder, “Is this even happening?” Similar sensibilities of timely and timeless wonder would return in a little over two weeks at the Nashville riverfront.

Most people benefit from an extracurricular passion or hobby or two—or in my case several. As much as I have hoped to enhance and enjoy the avocation of music fandom, at times, I almost abandoned it or even worse sabotaged it. At one point, I almost lost track of the best tracks from sheer necessity and lack of time or lack of money. But then it gets worse, at the very time my fandom had rekindled with verve and passion. Like too many before me and too many after me, I tried to spice up the musical listening and dancing experience with drugs and alcohol. This resulted in bad trips, drunken mistakes, and general stupidity—all in pursuit of a quicker fix and higher high. The Americanarama festival that’s now on tour brings together artists for whom, all at different times, I have an acute recollection of almost wrecking the cosmic connection that their music brings for me.

Spanning the years from 1988 to 2008, from the days of youthful entheogenic  experimentation to the seemingly endless nights of excessive intoxication, I occasionally overestimated my abilities and my tolerance and seriously compromised my boundaries and my values. Let’s just say I’d undermined otherwise potentially perfect nights with The Grateful Dead, My Morning Jacket, and Bob Dylan, ruined not so much for anyone else, but trashed for myself. Yet on the last day of June, I had an opportunity for musical redemption, getting high on the songs and on life, on enjoying the modesty and the clarity of not being “that guy” at the show.

Former Dead and current Furthur guitarist Bob Weir performing solo begins the itinerary, and we got to the show early enough to catch his set. In fact, we could hear Weir’s soundcheck as we lined-up outside the venue and were satisfied to get a spot up-close by the stage—even if the ground, instead of a carpet of grass, was merely a fresh layer of mulch, the kind that smells just a little too fragrant, too much like, well, mulch. Other reports have it that the sound quality suffered towards the middle and back of the field, but we were glad to be so close and not need earplugs to enjoy the show.

After opening with a Ratdog track that I enjoyed but didn’t recognize on electric guitar, Weir followed on the acoustic with the Dead standards “Loose Lucy” and “Friend of the Devil.” The pearls of rock wisdom that lit up his lips and fell from Weir’s lyrics were simple yet prophetic and paradoxical in the opening song: “If we don’t believe together, we might just cease to be”; and the final refrain “Dreams are lies, it’s the dreaming that’s real.” Of course this rings authentic to me, for whom the drunken dream was a lie, but dreaming a sober psychedelic experience suddenly became real!

My rekindled Dead interest has increased over the last few years as I have rediscovered their music without the aid of any of my former chemical crutches. Music that I once presumed required a listener to be intoxicated has opened itself up to me in new and magical ways completely clean. Last summer, I missed a Furthur show that I’d planned for—in order to attend a funeral; I still have hopes to catch one before too long. I cannot help but admitting that learning Bob Weir would be part of this AmericanaramA event felt like some beatific cosmic payback for doing the right thing last year.

After covering the Bob Dylan track “Most of the Time,” mentioning that we wouldn’t hear it later, Weir closed his too short set with a track he co-wrote called “Cassidy.” The lines invoke endless youth: “Ah, child of countless trees. Ah, child of boundless seas.” The stories behind the song are both a charge of hope for a young child born to the Dead tribe back-in-the-day and a tribute to the late Neal Cassady, the reckless and impetuous idol of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the Beat Generation. The old me was like Neal Cassady, one who sought a false boundlessness of hedonistic debauchery, but the new me might be more like a reborn child who sees countless blessings in a sea of hopeful faith and fidelity, an inner freedom to which the many wildly-winding and rocky-rocking roads finally led me.

I must say that the time between sets at shows can grind down my serenity and patience. Whether out at the food lines and bathroom lines or standing or sitting simply waiting, the minutes that usually fly by just drag on. This time we brought a deck of cards to pass the time as we sat on our now mulch-soiled blanket. But we could barely finish one hand of rummy before My Morning Jacket stormed the stage to open with a campfire anthem that more often closes a show, “Wonderful (The Way I Feel).” The ensuing 75 minutes flew by, with many of our absolute favorite Jacket songs and some surprise back-catalog nuggets. The whole band was tight, animated, on. Something about seeing them in daylight from so close to the stage, especially before the people around us were totally trashed and pushing past us, made this a perfect set for me.

In the midst of all this gloriousness, Bob Weir joined the group on stage to perform two Dead numbers. The first song they chose was “Brown Eyed Women,” the lyrics for which I could not get out of my head for days following the show, and these filled me with wicked irony. Here I am cold sober singing in my head the sloppy refrain, “Brown eyed women and red grenadine/the bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.”

It’s a great comfort to me that another Dead song called “Wharf Rat” is about a down-and-out drunk and that this tag has become the moniker for the Wharf Rats, the seminal clean-and-sober fan community that’s created a far-flung fellowship and meeting support structure for Deadheads who voluntarily abstain from alcohol or drugs.

All this said, the Grateful Jacket ranks as one of my greatest concert experiences ever, just those two songs, almost like it was destined to happen since before our MMJ boys were even born. During some of the jammier moments, the way the rest of the Jacket members focused their attentions and intuitions on Weir was just mindblowing. The almost acapella harmonies at the end of “I Know You Rider” with Bob, Carl, and Jim singing to the center of my gut, that was so phenomenal that I just want to cry thinking I actually got to see it! Ever since I first heard it some 25 years ago, the line towards the end of the song—“I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train”—has conveyed such hope for me; others have been that light for me, and we can be that light for others.

At this point, AmericanaramA could be called AmericanaJamma if you ask me. Smiling, I went from “wow” to just more—wow wow wow! The collaborative synchronicity and spontaneity continued during the Wilco set when Weir returned for two more songs, first the Dead’s “Bird Song” followed by a face-melting and sheer shredding rendition of “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles. For all their musical and lyrical inspections, to all the setlist-shapeshifting with each night a different confection, My Morning Jacket and Wilco are wonderful heirs to what the likes of Dylan and the Dead have done for American music.

This life has been a journey between polarities, from the desperation found in “Friend of the Devil” to the grace of Jeff Tweedy opening with “Blood of the Lamb,” Woody Guthrie lyrics set to Wilco music. My past experiences of Wilco live had been daytime sets at Bonnaroo where they were a bit woozy for me, even sleepy, but not that night, that last Sunday in June.

Neither Wilco nor My Morning Jacket needs to take the opening spot on a tour, but AmericanaramA conceives itself more as a concept roadshow, of which Dylan has participated in many, like the fabled Rolling Thunder Revue. The crowd at Nashville spanned the generations. Rather than a crew dominated only by old Deadheads and Dylanologists, the field was filled with lots of younger folks, including those who seemed to know most every Wilco or Jacket song.

By the time Dylan took the stage, we were already full to overflowing from the first four hours of the night. To see Dylan in his proper context is to approach him as everything we’ve heard and read and nothing at the same time. Dylan destroyed expectations when he went electric, when he went for Jesus, when he refused to be a spokesman for whatever generation and instead let his song-poems speak for themselves.

Dressed in a big white hat and impressive white jacket, growling and spitting his verses, Dylan was just another white MC dressed-in white and laying his vision of the world down on the greasy backing track of the white man’s blues.

Newer tracks like “Early Roman Kings” could either invigorate or indict the image of power that Dylan undermines even as he takes advantage of it. Looking around the audience, we are all benefactors of that vision, where we’re both critic and cynic and innocent psalmist all at the same darn time. Seeing his swagger sinks deep, because by recalling the badass he once was he also reminds us that this elegant grizzly elder is more badass than many of his contemporaries could ever be.

The opening track of the main set is “Things Have Changed,” as if to rub-in and reiterate that this isn’t our freewheelin’ folk singer that I first discovered on vinyl. He closed that set with “All Along The Watchtower,” and we danced near the back of the field, having moved just two songs ago from our spot up close, savoring the view and lights. The lyrics of “Watchtower” walk to the center of me, for this speaks a story from which I am now at a fragile but triumphant distance. There was a time when I could “get no relief” not even from drinking wine, when everything seemed false, when I felt trapped by fate, when the hour most definitely was getting late!

Speaking of late hours, it was now just past 11, and we left before the encore, to follow our own headlights on an eastbound itinerary for a morning that would get here too soon. In the car, I played a version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” from the Rolling Thunder Revue, with Joan Baez joining Dylan on vocals. My sweet wife said, “I wish he had played this song,” suggesting the emotional power would have brought the whole place to tears. “He never plays this song live,” I retorted, with an explanation of his refusal to be “that Dylan” just for us fans. Little did I know then that his gospel friends from his born-again period, the McCrary Sisters, had just joined him onstage for the rare rendition of “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

I can’t undo leaving early or deny that Dylan will probably always remain just beyond our grasp of who we think Dylan is. Americanarama is still on tour as of this writing, and I imagine that something freewheeling and rolling and thunderous in the spirit of American music awaits every fan with tickets to catch this show, sober or not, with a surprise encore like Nashville or with the “Ballad of a Thin Man” that most crowds get.

Something is happening. And we don’t know what it is. But we’re going to check it out anyway. And keep checking it out as long as our ears and hearts cooperate. –Andrew William Smith, Editor

Pictures by Andrew William Smith

For AmericanaramA tour dates, go here: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/upcoming-dates

For Paul McCartney tour dates, go here: http://www.paulmccartney.com/live/27468-out-there

Listen to Bob Weir with My Morning Jacket from the Atlanta show: http://snack.to/ahp070es

Musical Messengers of Love Make Memphis Marvelous

Photos © by Bob Bayne/Memphis in May, taken from http://www.facebook.com/bealestreetmusicfestival

Beale Street Music Festival’s reputation preceded itself with the nickname “Memphis in Mud.” Given the rainy tradition, most fans embraced the sunny and unseasonably steamy weather of the 2012 installment. Given the utter marvelous ubiquity of music festivals these days, what makes Memphis special? The lovely lineup is what brought this Bonnaroo regular across the state for the weekend; and how this festival fulfills the Memphis musical legacy already inhabiting the banks of the Mississippi River kept us enchanted for three delightful days.

Needtobreathe followed by Florence and the Machine opened the weekend. The angelic soaring sonic blessing brought by Florence Welch took me towards that festival in the mind and heart. Full moon rising, mild Mississippi breezes caressing the dancers on the lawn—this is a perfect night, recovering from an unseemly hot day.

My Morning Jacket, though, are the band that motivate me more than most to take long rock n roll road trips. After opening with “Circuital,” the setlist dipped into B-sides and back catalog. Whatever the song choices, Yim Yames could sing to me on any Friday night. The soaring greatness of Carl’s guitar part and the sheer emotions of Yim’s vocals on “Gideon” never fail to destroy me.

The outta this world “Outta My System” is one of my clean & sober theme songs (just celebrated three years!), so it’s always great to hear that in a set. On “Wordless Chorus” and “Touch Me,” Yim’s freaky falsetto yummy yelps give me chills no matter how warm it is. An always brain-and-body-bending “Off the Record” riffs into our reggae-soaked “Phone Went West,” soulfully slinked to perfection. Quite simply, My Morning Jacket have become (or perhaps they always were) a quintessential classic rock band in the deeper sense that teenage boys dream about. Yim Yames is a warm-hearted light-worker, sending furry beams of fuzzy love across galaxies of realities in need of repair and revival. I am honored to have traveled to the sonic sanctuary that he and his mates have created on so many occasions.

As much as Friday fulfilled, Saturday sanctified, first with the rusty interstate rambles of Son Volt, with Jay Farrar fierce as poet-troubadour roots-rock frontman, a John Fogerty-meets-Jack Kerouac lyrics-and-guitar prophet. But it was later Saturday when we left the rock themes for a one-of-a-kind soul revival. The Reverend Green brought a band, his daughters as backup singers, dozens of roses to decorate the crowd with love. Green graced us with a medley of “Amazing Grace/Nearer My God” that slipped so perfectly into “Let’s Stay Together.” Late in the show, he became a human jukebox, power-packing snippets of several super-hits into just a few minutes. Broadcasting brightly on the frequency of love, Green’s soul sensuality and sanctified reality combine seamlessly and sacredly – as it should be. More than any festival I’ve been to since leaving downtown Detroit, the racial diversity in the crowd celebrated a sticker I saw on Beale Street: “Not Black, Not White, Just Blues.” The amazing Anthony Hamilton held the soul vibe high into the wee hours.

Sunday’s sets sealed the weekend in more sweat and sweetness. Under the blazing heat, Chris Robinson (of Black Crowes fame) kicked back for a hot and heavy hour of the hippie blues. Then there’s something that makes a festival a festival. Michael Franti and Spearhead wrapped all of Memphis in a mighty group hug of good vibes. Sticking more to recent tracks mostly from The Sound of Sunshine, Franti feels mellower with his message tilted from justice-movement politics towards straight shots of hope-and-unity. When you’re dancing at a festival, such genuine human warmth serves the politics of the good regardless. Some fans have bemoaned the softening of Franti’s sharper edges, but I welcome this latest evolution and look forward towards his next incarnation as well.

We wrapped up the musical quilt of our weekend with quieter duets of The Civil Wars. What Joy Williams and John Paul White have created evokes emotional reckonings and rustic moods, adding yet more to the alt-folk-roots revival that just keeps blossoming with new beauty. They serenaded our after dinner iced-tea hour and sent us walking towards the car with appropriate contentment to carry back to the middle of our fine musical state of Tennessee. —Andrew William Smith, Editor

Bonnaroo’s Decade of Dust & Dreams: Jacket’s Sonic Beauty, the Sightings of Ben Sollee, & So Much More

Trekking down to Manchester, Tennessee for another music festival touches the body and soul like embarking on a mission trip or a fishing trip or a combat mission – where music fandom stretches your physical limits to achieve a limitless emotional and spiritual experience.

The social barometer consulted by our neighbors in the mid-South sees us as suffering a mild form of insanity, but that doesn’t stop us from returning again and again – despite logic and basic boundaries as to what a human can endure. This year, in a late spring where the weather’s been remarkably wet and mild, our convergence weekend wore us out by being unusually hot and dry.

With an outer composure hiding an excitement that hasn’t subsided even in my sixth year attending and an inner howl of “Bonaroo-hoo” warming my blood,  I headed off with a crew of coworkers and best friends for the tenth anniversary of a world-renowned and somewhat risky weekend of concerts, community, and collaboration.

Doing three days instead of four this year, I knew that Friday alone would be worth the journey. Making my first stop at our “home base” inside the Academy tent in Planet Roo meant stumbling into a mesmerizing and mellow chanting workshop led by the Rahasya crew from Athens, Georgia. In general, Bonnaroo doesn’t need to sell counterculture stereotypes or cultivate its jam band reputation because these notions tagalong regardless of how close they resemble reality. But in the case of these folks bringing the day by humming “Hare Krishna,” this welcome flashback to the early 1970s calibrated our inner spaciousness in a way that we could spread across the weekend. (Besides all the overt instances of jam band and classic rock that populated the schedule, the indy-Americana of Low Anthem came sweating into Saturday afternoon so steeped in retrophilia that a song like “Hey, All You Hippies” functioned as a sort of audio time machine for those who hadn’t already left the temporal realm by other means.)

Seeking my first serious headliner on Friday took me to The Other Tent at the edge of Centeroo for a rousing afternoon revival with the incomparable rockabilly hipster Justin Townes Earle. Like his father did in this same tent a few years ago, JTE reminded us how crazy we were for spending the whole weekend roasting in the heat with our fellow fans. His sizzling set brought our first Ben Sollee sighting of the weekend, as the Kentucky singer-cellist-activist came onstage to add cello to “Mama’s Eyes” and background vocals to “Harlem River Blues.”

As afternoons at Roo this year meant grilling one’s flesh like a burger in a global solar barbecue, we decided to seek refuge in the fabled and air-conditioned Cinema Tent. After cooking some more in line, we were able to score seats for the screening of Louisiana Fairytale, Danny Clinch’s documentary about the collaboration between My Morning Jack and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Immersion in the cool dark room as deep journey into dynamic devotional: a musical and cultural cross-pollination placed me in a religious mood that would last into the night. My Morning Jacket pay homage to the past as it lives in the present, presenting themselves to us as a tribal tributary that links heart and sound, sharing a roots reverence and popular lineage that taps history without cheapening it. At the movie’s conclusion, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band kicked it out live, much to the delight of the packed house of patrons.

Even though we were able to catch some of Ray Lamontagne’s set on Which Stage that included many of my favorite tracks from last year’s excellent God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise, his lack of conversation between songs combined with the day’s lingering heat, gave the performance a detached mellow and lazy mood that has historically been a real detriment to artists who’ve performed on Which Stage during daylight hours. Such was the steamy curse that I recall from a particularly alienating Animal Collective show in 2009 and that this time around afflicted the wispy waiflike work of Lamontagne and Amos Lee later in the weekend. Luckily, we’d see some folks defy the dusty odds and do their best to play their best even in the daylight.

Field of Dreams: the Jacket’s Victory Dance

As dusk quickly approached, though, we found ourselves on the crowded walk towards What Stage to grab a spot for the Jacket’s 8pm slot, seeking a particular piece of lawn where we could spread out and dance. Leaving the pit and the several rows after it to the patient folks willing to press, we really got a sense of the vastness of the main Bonnaroo venue by laying our blanket halfway back, with the VIP section just behind us and the waxing moon above. Seeing this band for about the tenth time brought layers and levels of emotion based on how their music meets me on a spiritual plane and in sheer anticipation of how they’d weave in the new songs that I’d been listening to for about ten days since Circuital had been released.

The opening one-two of “Victory Dance” and “Circuital” perfectly tones the crowd to connect with the new tunes – from the spine-chilling trumpet solo that kicked off the set as though “Taps” were playing in the belly of our common memory to Jim’s otherworldly wail at the end of “Victory Dance” to the comforting way the new record’s title track tracks our cellular responsiveness to the Jacket’s versatile jangle and sparkle.

Immediately switching gears to three soaring hits from 2005’s Z, the setlist immediately attracted anyone who wasn’t already reeling towards bliss. “Off The Record” opens slowly before slinking into lyric and hook and a danceable refrain that had the mass of thousands grooving along joyfully; then, suddenly, at midsong we meet the kind of whacked and wicked jam that makes the Jacket the Jacket, that stretches every player in the band to follow its tangly riffs into the manna of meaning as Bo Koster’s keyboards carry us to the misty mountaintops of rock and roll bliss. Followed by the fierce glory of “Gideon” and the playful abandon of “Anytime,” the party was fully underway, with James then greeting the “ocean of humanity” by announcing the occasion as an entirely surreal, mind-blowing, and “magical honor.”

At Roo, the everyfan’s festival, many bands forget their roots as fans, arrive just in time to do their set, and leave with similar haste. That’s not the case with My Morning Jacket who have been like pillars of the whole Bonnaroo project since its earliest years, always hanging out to catch other artists and really taking things to the next level with late-night sets of legend in 2006 and 2008.  For two hours on Friday night, we got to give the Jacket their due by giving them such a premier place in the schedule, and the Jacket just poured the love back out on us.

Even though only a handful of tracks from 2008’s excellent but polarizing Evil Urges have remained in the set, the journey that injects “Smokin’ from Shootin’” into a snippet from “Run Thru” (a 2003 track) and then collapses into the arms of “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Part Two” undoubtedly torques listeners into a state of rotation and levitation that leaves little doubt that this band has no qualms about bending the tilt of the universe for the time that it’s onstage each night.

Intentionally or inadvertently, My Morning Jacket give a ton of credibility to the narrative that the moment of Circuital signals a retro movement all about returning to the band’s roots by playing more songs from the 2003 pre-breakout album It Still Moves than they do from either Z or Evil Urges. And even though I did miss hearing “It Beats for You,” “Wonderful,” Librarian,” “Dondante,” and “Evil Urges,” to name a few, neither the focus on the new album nor on the older, jammier jams from earlier in the century in any way diminished the devastating beauty of the entire evening for me.

From their funkiest and freakiest with newer tracks like “Highly Suspicious” or “Holdin’ On To Black Metal” to the culminating guitar-god pyrotechnics of “Dancefloors” diving into “One Big Holiday,” My Morning Jacket made my night and my weekend with what may have been one of their career’s most important sets to date. For me, it meant watching and dancing from a vaster vantage point, from a different distance and angle, from a more mature but no less appreciative perspective. As far as I can tell, the latest album embraces all these added textures in what is already a many layered rock and roll masterpiece of a musical vocation.

Festival Gospel and Living Greats

Nobody pretends that Bonnaroo is a gospel festival or that when most people use the term “religious” to define the weekend that they really mean it in any other than the figurative, symbolic, or mythopoetic sense. Nonetheless, in ways that might surprise people who have never caught one of these shows or are skeptical of such old-fashioned spirituality in general, Bonnaroo offers plenty of bonafide soul songs for people who want to get their Jesus on or feel the Holy Spirit moving in ways that don’t require chemically-induced imitations of infinity.

With Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens and then Mavis Staples, both Saturday and Sunday afternoons kicked off with healing services on main stages, giving us what Staples said would be the closest thing to church we’d find inside Bonnaroo. Complete with arm-waving ambiance and “Amen” shouts, the altitude and attitude of the sun-kissed masses shifted as we got a taste of the Son – whether that’s what we were looking for or not.

Later Saturday afternoon saw the sought after Mumford & Sons show overwhelm the capacity of the Which Stage field for a stunning 90-minute set that included several new songs and all-out closing jam of “Amazing Grace” with support from members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Apache Relay. As great of a show as the Mumfords was, we snuck away to catch some of a veritable legacy Loretta Lynn over at That Tent. In a similar fashion on Sunday, we decided to forgo Iron & Wine to watch Cold War Kids but then ditched CWK to hear a few tracks from living legend Gregg Allman.

Such is the reality of seeing shows at Bonnaroo: you don’t ever see all the shows you want, and you often stop short of seeing all of one show just to catch a moment of another one. Sometimes this decision making is based on which artists I have seen before and which artists I expect to have the chance to see again.

One set that stood out among the others as a “must see” and “might never see again” came Sunday afternoon with Daniel Lanois’s new project Black Dub, featuring Lanois on guitar, Trixie Whitley on vocals, Brian Blade on drums, and Daryl Johnson on bass. For years, I’ve followed Lanois as the legendary U2 co-producer, and this was my first opportunity to hear him with his own group. For some reason, This Tent wasn’t terribly packed for the set; we got a great spot in the center of it all, in front of the sound board, and just sank our toes into the sandy floor and soaked in the funky, jazzy, clubby, soulful, and pleasant assault on the senses.

Cheesy Does It & Our Late Night Danceathon

Sleep at Bonnaroo is both rare and precious, and the musical schedule both dares sleep-deprivation and defies what’s even possible. As I grow older into the festival, I’ve had to sacrifice some shows for others, and I’ve had to prioritize rest. Now, many people might think I was crazy to skip both Buffalo Springfield and Eminem (skipping Black Keys was no big deal, having seen them many times before, including a real disappointment at the Ryman last year). But as soon as the sun set Saturday, I took a nap in order to be able to enjoy one of the fabled Bonnaroo late nights (which are in fact very early mornings).

Rising from my rest around midnight meant enjoying shows under the cover of darkness, with thinner crowds and cooler temperatures. And we found it amazingly easy to make our way from tent to tent to stage, taking in bits of Scissor Sisters, Dr. John, String Cheese Incident, and STS9 – and still making it back to the tent long before dawn. I don’t what it is about slipping from the simply sleazy gay disco of the Sisters to the mojo-moving Louisiana hoodoo of Dr. John to the eclectic cheesy jammy-pleasing work of String Cheese or STS9, but I was able to get my dance on in every case and loved the last stroll home with Cheese ripping through their closer, an awesome cover of U2’s “Mysterious Ways.”

The Wild World of Ben Sollee

On Sunday morning, we were browsing some booths when we stumbled across Ben Sollee giving an impromptu unplugged concert outside the Oxfam American tent in Planet Roo. We heard his track “Electrified” and a cover of Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” Having arrived at ‘Roo in 2009 by bicycle, Sollee required many golf-cart shuttles this time around to show up at just about everything.

Even though we missed his actual headline set, we saw him jam with Justin Townes Earle, My Morning Jacket, and Low Anthem. We caught a bit of his set on the Sonic Stage and this spontaneous Planet Roo set. We also saw him marching in a protest parade around Centeroo with the folks from Mountain Justice Summer, advocating an end to mountaintop removal coal mining. And when we were deeply enjoying the Black Dub show, we looked behind us to see Ben Sollee just digging the set as a fan.

In a musical and cultural world where borrowing is both blessing and necessity, it’s hard to call very many artists original anymore, but Ben Sollee’s invigorating and innovative blend of cello, songwriting, and singing sure comes close. Add to that his warm activist spirit, and we have a real force for good in the world, embodying the best of what we’d like a festival of Bonnaroo’s magnitude to be.

With an anchor in the arts, music, theater, spoken word, gardening, drumming, and dancing classes we taught back at the Academy and with as many shows as I could manage when not working, eating, or sleeping, another Bonnaroo came and went quickly. With attendance such a miracle in logistics and a marathon in persistence, each year I tell myself that it could be my last. We’ll wait for the lineup to be announced in early 2012 and for our Academy plans to coalesce. We’ll wait and see and recover and rest. In the meantime, we have dusty memories (as well as pictures, videos, and downloads) documenting our dreams all over the web. –Andrew William Smith, Editor

My Morning Jacket pictures by Jeff Kravitz; Black Dub picture by Morgan Harris; courtesy of Bonnaroo.com; all other pictures by Andrew William Smith. For more information: Bonnaroo.com

Coming Full Circuital: Jacket Jams Monastic & Fantastic

The review-as-press-release-quipping-common-wisdom concerning the rock kings of the Kentucky hills on their sixth studio release implies that it’s the “return to their roots record” – that is, the return to hairy masculine pyrotechnic roots rock in reaction to the fairly fairy funky flourishes of Evil Urges. Perhaps it’s that – but it’s more than that.

With the many philosophical readings of the album’s title (and title track) Circuital shaking the trees of Appalachia, there’s no doubt that this record rides a wide river of meaning. Thus, the return to form returns to being born – not so much a return to their roots, but a return to our roots, to the roots of humanity, to the circuit of life where a tribe of earthlings does their “Victory Dance” of simply waking up to the “First Light” of a spiritual reality.

With his monkish humility, muppet mop, and wizard’s beard, Jim James has always rocked his frontman mystique like a renegade mystic, peddling rock n roll parables and koans of a Zen Jedi sensibility with sudden doses of Jesus and the devil thrown in to keep us guessing. Churning out albums and tours “on the circuit” like a fiery preacher or rodeo star matches work ethic with a wandering wisdom and yearning for greater truth, beauty, and freedom.

Culminating the band’s career to this point, Circuital could be listened to as a coherent religious statement, a new testament of a band’s enduring magic and magnificence on the edge of midlife maturity. In our world’s menu-driven kaleidoscope of easy downloads and fleeting fads, My Morning Jacket craft an old school and epic modernity, full-length albums worth dusting off the headphones and turning off the lights for, for focused and mellow front-to-back sonic contemplation.

My Morning Jacket are a band that give me hope that “The Day Is Coming” when all our splicing and dicing of contemporary music subgenres will collapse back into the more generous and inclusive categories of rock and pop, where music’s communal impulses will return us to our primary purposes of improving our world. Listening to “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” – a song that’s been in the Jacket & James’s live sets for some time now – I cannot help but want it to become the campfire classic of the 21^st century, a sort of New Age mantra-mashup where “Kumbaya” meets “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” It’s a glorious track of holy hummin’ and strummin’ that’s always existed in the heart and that I can’t imagine ever growing tired of.

I don’t know about you, but this Jacket fan had more than a few demons I had to get “Outta My System” over my years of indulging in the seedier sides of the music scene. Today, this charming track could be listened to with humility or nostalgia by some fans and as a warning to others, cautioning both against prodigal excess and excesses of piety. The sudden switch to the slick, sick, and slinky jam of “Holdin’ Onto Black Metal” keeps reminding us about the dark side even as it ages into a humorous and health distance from it. This record dances in the deeper grooves, all about a band growing up before our ears and eyes, gifting us with lessons about growing up.

With abiding respect for rock’s many rivers progressing toward an ocean of awesome, My Morning Jacket tap twinkly and tweaky sources of playful genius and balance these with reverence for songcraft, cultural evolution, and spiritual awakening. Their popular progress has been steady and slow and while not as gargantuan as peers like Fleet Foxes or Kings of Leon or any of the Jack White projects, they remain my favorite of the 21st century bands for their courageous sincerity and complex simplicity. This is a circuit I’ve been on since 2006, and one I’d like to stay on with the band for as long as they’re working it and bringing us back to the place where we all began and begin again.

–Andrew William Smith, Editor (Circuital was released on Tuesday, May 31. Visit mymorningjacket.com)

The Jacket Are Back At It

Having their Evil Urges tour cut short by Yim Yames’s injury (falling off the stage in Iowa), My Morning Jacket are back on the road for the first time since welcoming 2009 at Madison Square Garden. Always inspired and innovative about what makes a rock show special, the Jacket have brought the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on tour as support.

With a stop at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival behind them, the short spring caravan dances throughout the southeast. Later this summer, the Jacket will hit some festivals and do a few nights opening for Tom Petty. On the second night of this leg, the phenomenal five-piece brought its virtuosity and ferocity to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium.

For the small crowd in attendance for the opening set, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band created a timeless, romantic, and clubby vibe, complete with clarinet solos and a soaring sousaphone. For two tunes, Yim Yames took the stage and sang lead through a red cheerleader’s megaphone. The collaborative spirit and mutual respect seen then would return for the encore, where the Preservation party would join the Jacket for a full-on, throw-down, soul-town, funkytronic dance party.

Seeing the Jacket’s many gifts, the Nashville faithful bore witness to the sheer ingenuity of a band that can surf seemingly oppositional genres to create a seamlessly unified wave of wondrous get-down. With Yames’s pleasing pipes and gently charismatic muppet magic at the helm, the Jacket’s sizable mojo has always pointed towards a guided tour through the historic kaleidoscope of popular music.

This night hit all the high points of rock and roll diversity and kept getting higher. Now a staple in their always expansive sets, the Jacket jack the unifying rock anthem and execute it at an arena-fit altitude on tracks like “Gideon,” “I’m Amazed,” “Wordless Chorus,” and “Evil Urges.”

Showing Yames as a folk balladeer who could trade wisdom tales with the likes of  John Prine, the obscure “Wonderful (is the way I feel)” offered a quiet, reflective, mid-set moment of profound lyrical insight. Other soft spots like “The Way That He Sings,” “Golden,” and “Thank You Too!” tap a vein to the 1970s where light rock, soul, and alt-country (before it was called alt-country) converge in an exploding cassette deck of American mythology. A new track – called “Friends Again” on the setlist – also channels a lost Bic lighter raised to the spirit in the sky with direct telepathy to a bygone era.

Of the more passionate Jacket fans, many come for the deeper valleys of the show, the gorgeous dark spots on the sun that can be found in face-scarring psychedelic jams, last week seen in the trilogy of “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Pt. 2,” “Dondante,” and “Run Thru” that closed the main set. Wiggy epiphanies like this once gave the Jacket certain stoner credentials, a legend along the lines of “they’re hirsute cave dwellers who live like the-Bonnaroo-of-the-mind never ends.” What’s ultimately refreshing, then, about the encore, is that the Jacket didn’t stop with the revelation of that hard-jamming indy-psychedelic crown they wore after Okonokos.

Like any good musicologist, Yim Yames knows that all good American music has African roots, and his recent explorations of the jazz-soul-funk continuum prove that his spiritual inclination best meets a communal extrapolation without limits based on genre or cultural boundary. Now, some more academic folks have been “Highly Suspicious” of blues funky white boys from Clapton to Page or of afrobeat borrowers like Paul Simon, for their alleged stealing of the “black” sound. Not only does Yames seem beyond that debate and to be sincerely working in a spirit of musical and cultural solidarity, the dance party the Jacket threw for all of us with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band pumped pure bumps of joy into the Nashville skyline, superior sounds that will reverberate in our bones until the Jacket’s next visit.

–Andrew William Smith, Editor

Photos by Andrew William Smith

My Morning Jacket are currently on tour. Please visit www.mymorningjacket.com

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