June 14, 2004

A Family Feeling as the Bands Played On

ANCHESTER, Tenn., June 13 — Music fans danced in the sun and danced through a Saturday-night deluge here at the three-day Bonnaroo 2004 festival. What they danced to was virtually anything with — and sometimes without — a beat: bluegrass, heavy metal, funk, jazz, folk-rock, reggae, hip-hop, Indian tabla drumming, a New Orleans brass band, electronic noise and, for three hours on Saturday night, the music of the festival's inspiration, the Dead. The third annual Bonnaroo drew 90,000 people to a 7,000-acre cow pasture here, 60 miles from Nashville.

Bonnaroo is a music marathon, with overlapping performances on six stages for 15 hours each day. Its foundation is the jam-band circuit inaugurated by the Grateful Dead and extended by groups like the Dave Matthews Band and Phish; Friday's headliner was Dave Matthews and Friends, featuring Trey Anastasio of Phish on guitar. The festival sold out in advance with no paid advertising, thanks to the Internet-assisted word of mouth that jam bands and their fans have cultivated.

The music revolves around a benevolent sense of family that excludes no one. What matters is the feeling of connection: from past to present, from musician to musician, from style to style, from bands to fans. The North Mississippi All-Stars, led by Luther and Cody Dickinson, brought friends and neighbors (the bluesman R. L. Burnside, the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band) as well as their father, Jim Dickinson. Bands also claimed ancestors by performing their songs: Gov't Mule singing Ray Charles, multiple bands performing songs from Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley.

But Bonnaroo was never purely a collection of jam bands, although this festival include many circuit regulars. It favors bands that earn their living on the road, but nowadays those also include indie-rock bands, folk-rooted performers and disc jockeys. Bonnaroo leans toward bands that savor the here-and-now of performing, with the volatile dynamics and improvisational serendipity that commercial recordings rarely capture.

Bonnaroo was the right place for the huge, pealing three-guitar textures of My Morning Jacket, for the detours into introspection and noise in the latest songs by Wilco, and for the meditative, startling, distorted crescendos that Damien Rice brought to the moony love songs from his album, "O."

Perhaps to compensate for the overwhelmingly male personnel of jam bands, there was a contingent of female songwriters who delved into volatile rock (Rachael Yamagata, Erin McKeown and a triumphantly utopian Patti Smith), jazz and funk (Ani DiFranco), echoes of Tin Pan Alley and hip-hop (Nellie McKay), old-fashioned country (Gillian Welch, Mindy Smith) and folk-soul meditations (Beth Orton).

Of course there were bands led by male songwriters too: Simple Kid mixing banjo and slide guitar; Grandaddy singing majestically surreal pop; Calexico playing twangy, haunted story-songs with mariachi trumpets; and Blue Merle. Bob Dylan was on hand for a reserved, semi-scrutable set of breakup songs and, perhaps because he was in Tennessee, country ballads from Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, along with "Highway 61 Revisited," which heads south from Memphis.

Tucked into the festival was a bluegrass minifestival including Doc Watson and Del McCoury.

Dave Matthews and Friends mostly performed Mr. Matthews's songs, although the band had the crowd singing along on a Phish song, "Bathtub Gin." With jam-band flexibility, Mr. Matthews and Mr. Anastasio used their collaboration to sound completely unlike their regular bands. Instead of the pointillistic counterpoint of the Dave Matthews Band or the light-fingered lilt of Phish, the Friends had a brawny, earthy rhythm section that left plenty of airspace for Mr. Anastasio's keening solos. At the end of the set, they started romping through Hendrix's "Fire" and Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You," with Mr. Matthews bursting into a dance that was somewhere between an air-guitar session and the Funky Chicken.

The Dead are a changed band, but invigorated. On guitar Warren Haynes brings Southern-rock riffing; Jimmy Herring recaptures Jerry Garcia's quicksilver legato runs. In an incandescent second set, with a jam that incorporated "St. Stephen," "The Eleven" and "Dark Star," the Dead traded its old feeling of drifting exploration for robust, hyperactive interchanges. "This is the season of what now," they sang, and the improvisation took that as a credo.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the jam band Umphrey's McGee took a break in midset by handing over its instruments, one by one, to the members of Moe, until the entire band was replaced without interrupting the song. Then Moe latched onto one chord and stayed with it for nearly a half-hour, spinning vamp after vamp, crescendo after crescendo, driving the dancing crowd to shouts of approval. It was all in the family and all in the moment, true to Bonnaroo.