2009-06-13 Great Stage Park, Manchester, TN

Scheduled: ??:?? Local Start Time ??:?? / End Time ??:??

Info & Setlist | Venue

Max Weinberg returns, but only through "Kingdom Of Days". Jay Weinberg plays the second half of the show at the Bonnaroo Festival. Evan Springsteen plays acoustic guitar on "American Land", which includes a snippet of "Theme From Shaft" in the band introductions. "Glory Days" includes an instrumental "Louie Louie" coda. "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town", "Growin' Up", and "Thunder Road" are played by sign request. After Bruce's own performance, he and Evan attend MGMT's late-night set.

Bonnaroo Festival

Evan Springsteen (Guest)
Jay Weinberg (Guest)

Intro to “Badlands”
“Hello, Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “Working on a Dream”
“Good evening, everybody (crowd cheers) we’re so glad to be here tonight at the beautiful Bonnaroo (crowd cheers) that’s right…that’s right…we’ve come all the way from the great state of New Jersey (crowd cheers) to fulfil our solemn vow to rock the house! (crowd cheers) but we didn’t come all the way down to the beautiful Tennessee hills just to rock the house…we came down here tonight because we wanna build a house (crowd cheers) that’s right, right here in this field tonight we wanna build a house tonight…we wanna take the fear that’s outside there and we wanna build us a house of love (crowd cheers) we wanna take doubt and we wanna build us a house of faith (crowd cheers) we wanna take despair that’s out there and we wanna build us a house of hope (crowd cheers) and we wanna take the sadness and build us a house of joy and happiness (crowd cheers) and then we wanna take the cooling off and we wanna build us a house of sexual healing! (crowd cheers) that’s right, are we ready for the sexual healing to begin? (crowd cheers) that’s good…because we’re gonna use the bad wood and we use the good wood…we use the bad news that’s out there and we use the good news that’s here with us tonight…and we got all the tools we need right here on this stage and in this field tonight…and we wanna build us a house out of music and spirit and noise…now, listen to me, listen to me…because the mighty E Street Band is here tonight and we’re gonna do all our best to bring down the power of the music on you (crowd cheers) but, Bonnaroo, we need you to bring the noise! (crowd cheers) let me hear it (crowd cheers)(?) now sing like you mean it…”

Intro to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”
“It’s request time…it’s too fucking hot for Santa…it’s too fucking hot for Santa…it’s too hot for Santa…(intro music starts)…if I’m gonna sing this song in this fucking hot, I better hear some voices out there (crowd cheers)…
(…) It’s 259 days till Christmas!…has everybody been good out there? (crowd cheers) you’re not taking none of the brown acid? (laughs from the crowd) then sing it with us…”

Intro to “Growin’ Up”
“(Piano intro starts)…Oh, I saw it in there somewhere…let’s go…”

Intro to “Kingdom of Days”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you…come on, baby…alright…I’m gonna dedicate this to Pats tonight, we got Patti with us (?)(crowd cheers)(?)…it’s nicer over here, you can read my words, I got a cheat sheet…(?)(chuckles)…”

Intro to “Hard Times”
“We just came from Norway where it was 48 degrees (chuckles) damn! alright…it’s good training, good training down there (chuckles) oh…woh…this is only, I think, the second festival we’ve ever played, we played one in Holland a few weeks ago and this is really…it’s the second one we’ve done and we’ve had a great, great time tonight, I wanna thank all the folks at Bonnaroo for inviting us (crowd cheers) it’s fun seeing all you young faces out there…here’s a song, uh…I have a friend, Jackson Browne, and every time we go out on tour, you know, and he comes to the show and he’ll say “You know, it’s a, it’s a good thing about those good songs, those good songs stay written” – in other words, if you wrote one thirty years ago and it was good, thirty years later it still sounds pretty good…but, uh, this one was written in 1855 (chuckles) so this one stayed written and uh…the reason it stayed written and sung so long is because it addresses times like we’re having right now, you can pick up a newspaper and you look and you see millions of jobs here in the country lost, hundreds of thousands of jobs every month, we see things that, uh, if anybody ever told me I, I’d be a part-owner of General Motors, I wouldn’t believe it (chuckles) but, uh, you see things that I never thought I’d see, with many, many folks struggling out there and uh…this is a song written in 1855 by Stephen Foster, it’s called “Hard times come again no more”…”

Intro to “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”
“Is there anybody alive out there? (crowd cheers)…is there anybody alive out there? (crowd cheers)…is there anybody alive out there? (crowd cheers) then come on, I wanna hear you…”

Intro to “American Land”
“We wanna thank everybody at Bonnaroo for inviting us tonight, we wanna thank you for coming out and seeing us…
(…) Little Steven on the guitar (crowd cheers) Miss Patti Scialfa (crowd cheers) my boy, Evan James Springsteen (crowd cheers) Curtis King (crowd cheers) Sister Soozie Tyrell (crowd cheers) the prodigy, Jay Weinberg on the drums (crowd cheers) Garry W. Tallent (crowd cheers) Roy Bittan (crowd cheers) Charlie Giordano (crowd cheers) Nils Lofgren (crowd cheers) Cindy Mizelle (crowd cheers) and the biggest man you’ve ever seen: Clarence “Big Man” Clemons (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) Bonnaroo! (crowd cheers) you’ve just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, earth-shocking, booty-shaking, love-making, Viagra-taking, history-making, legendary (crowd: “E Street Band”)(crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “Rosalita”
“You can’t take no more (crowd cheers) you’re gonna pass out from heat prostration (crowd cheers) I don’t wanna be responsible to your mommy and your daddy (crowd cheers) you can’t take no more (crowd cheers) you can’t take no more (crowd cheers)…did anybody say they were from New Jersey tonight? (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “Glory Days”
“You can’t take no more (crowd cheers) you’re all Bonnarooed out (crowd cheers) you’re all Bonnarooed out, you can’t take no more (crowd cheers)…
(…) Come on, Steve…it’s quitting time, baby (Steve: “No way, baby”)…I’m tired (Steve: “Bonnaroo don’t close”) I wanna go back to (?) and put on my pyjamas (Steve: “Bonnaroo never really closes”)…well, Steve, if it ain’t quitting time…what I wanna know is what time is it?…(Steve: “It’s Boss-time!”)…”

^{Compiled by : Johanna Pirttijärvi.}

^{© All credits to the original photographer. We do not monetize a photo in any way, but if you want your photo to be removed, let us know, and we will remove it.}

Generations Mingle at This Year’s Bonnaroo

MANCHESTER, Tenn — There’s nothing hip about the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, where tie-dye is still in fashion and white hair doesn’t disqualify a headliner.

The eighth annual Bonnaroo drew about 75,000 people to 700 acres of farmland here in Manchester, 60 miles from Nashville, for a lineup headlined by a jam band (the reunited Phish, playing three-hour shows on Friday and Sunday), rockers whose careers are measured in decades (Bruce Springsteen, Nine Inch Nails and David Byrne) and rappers who now qualify as old school (the Beastie Boys).

Next Saturday the cable channel Fuse will broadcast excerpts from the festival, which ended Sunday.

At Bonnaroo, sweaty temperatures and muddy ground work against any preening, and while the more than 100 acts this year included their share of first-rate indie bands beloved by bloggers — St. Vincent, Yeasayer, Bon Iver, Of Montreal — they also featured bluegrass, soul, African rock and comedy (including Jimmy Fallon of “Late Night”). The festival depends on the entire mix; it may be the only gathering to include Public Enemy, Merle Haggard, Wilco, Girl Talk and King Sunny Adé in the same weekend.

Bonnaroo also relies on an audience, mostly camping on the grounds for the weekend, that has envisioned a smiley, benevolent version of hippie hedonism four decades after the fact.

Instead of the civil-rights and antiwar furor of the 1960s, Bonnaroo features environmentalism; at the center of the festival, on the way between stages, is a cluster of booths, exhibits and a small solar-powered stage dedicated to ecological activism. (How that squares with the Art of Such n Such, a nightly show of huge, choreographed flames, is unclear.) Among the speakers this year was Robert Kennedy Jr.

Phish, which changed its mind after playing what it said were its final concerts in 2004, had never performed at Bonnaroo as a group, though all its members have appeared in various jam configurations.

Trey Anastasio, the band’s guitarist and main singer and songwriter, announced on Friday night that he was “incredibly happy,” and so was the set: three hours of Phish at its most euphoric and airborne, zooming through elaborately composed songs like “Stash” and “Free” and jamming through roots-rock-flavored older songs, like “Wolfman’s Brother,” and a new one, “Kill Devil Falls.” Riffling through idioms like funk, salsa, country-rock and quasi-classical counterpoint — as well as a jovial version of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” — Phish demonstrated the jam-band eclecticism that Bonnaroo has turned into a booking policy.

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” Mr. Springsteen hollered on Saturday night in “Badlands,” the foundational text for his current tour, which calls for love, faith and hope in hard times. (For an encore, his band harmonized fervently on Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times.”)

Playing Bonnaroo, Mr. Springsteen wasn’t facing an arena full of longtime fans singing along on every word, but a younger crowd eager to clap and shout la-la’s, and as usual, he was far more showman than politician. Mr. Springsteen’s three-hour set was sprinkled with tales of economic woe, like the bitter “Youngstown” and a version of “Johnny 99” turned into a full-tilt Chuck Berry-style romp.

But he also took requests, including the out-of-season “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” from a whimsical audience member who had brought a man-size Santa Claus poster. Bonnaroo’s magnificent main-stage sound system revealed details in the E Street Band’s chiming-steamroller arrangements that are lost in arenas, and Mr. Springsteen’s set barreled through nearly an hour of encores that were purposeful and jubilant.

Less than 40 minutes later, Mr. Springsteen’s affirmation gave way to Nine Inch Nails’ animosity and self-laceration. Trent Reznor’s songs place fury, angst and just enough melody at the convergence of disparate kinds of impact: dance beats, electronic jolts, hard-rock guitar and every shade of distortion. The band’s live versions of the songs were stark and strategic, ricocheting among genres from verse to verse; at Bonnaroo, they had people dancing. Desolate, minimal meditations gave way to some final blasts, including one of the unexpected collaborations that are part of Bonnaroo: a hard-rock band, the Dillinger Escape Plan, came onstage to add even more crunch. Partway through the set, Mr. Reznor announced that Bonnaroo would be “our last show ever in the United States,” suggesting that he intended to retire from touring, though not from making music. “I’ll keep going,” he said.

Friday’s lineup was dominated by music from, of all places, New York. It harked back to the 1970s and ’80s with overlapping sets by the Beastie Boys — equally hearty in their early, insolent raps and their more responsible later ones — and by Mr. Byrne, performing songs he wrote with Brian Eno, last year and decades ago, in musically emaciated new arrangements and surrounded by Broadwayish dancers.

The afternoon lineup preceding them was stronger. TV on the Radio leaned on the funk, gospel and hard-rock underpinnings of its art-rock; Dirty Projectors (joined for one song by Mr. Byrne) turned African guitar filigrees, zigzag melodies and pinpoint staccato vocals into cerebral but effervescent songs.

Animal Collective’s songs bubbled up out of primordial electronic noise, creating dizzying layers of samples and voices. Grizzly Bear’s songs were gorgeous, hovering apparitions, with ethereal vocal harmonies facing upheavals of guitar noise. Meanwhile, Al Green was unleashing his falsetto on his 1970s Memphis soul hits; Lucinda Williams was exulting in some of her newer, happier songs; and an entire stage was devoted to African bands — Mr. Adé from Nigeria, Amadou & Mariam and Vieux Farka Touré from Mali — kicking up electrified traditional grooves.

Tradition matters at Bonnaroo: not as something to be kept pure by simple preservation but as an ingredient worth drawing on. On Saturday afternoon the Africans were replaced in the Other Tent — Bonnaroo’s big stages are What, Which, This, That and the Other — by Tennessee pickers with bluegrass roots like the Tony Rice Unit (led by Mr. Rice on guitar), who can play in deeply traditional style or fuse it with jazz and other possibilities.

Allen Toussaint, the New Orleans pianist and songwriter, paid partial tribute to Tennessee — with a boogie-woogie “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” recorded in Memphis by the Louisiana pianist Jerry Lee Lewis — before heading back to New Orleans for a Professor Longhair medley. Raphael Saadiq led a band reminiscent of Motown soul — and for an unexpected bit of Detroit, also belted a protopunk song from Iggy Pop and the Stooges, “Search and Destroy.”

In the jam-band spirit, Bonnaroo spurs collaborations. Mr. Toussaint joined Elvis Costello during what had been billed as a solo set, but ended with Mr. Costello leading a full band and singing with the folk-rock songwriter Jenny Lewis. (He appeared during her set, too.) Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the MG’s, the Memphis soul studio band, collaborated at Bonnaroo (and on a recent album) with the Drive-By Truckers, fusing soul organ and Southern rock.

Wilco, from Chicago, played one of Bonnaroo’s most extraordinary sets. Many of Jeff Tweedy’s songs, suffused with depression and estrangement, could have been straightforward 1960s and ’70s rock, glancing back at the Beatles and Neil Young. But Wilco doesn’t play them that way. Strange tangents arise midsong — faraway keyboard dissonances, streaking and scrabbling guitar crescendos — and envelop the whole band, only to disappear moments later as if nothing had happened.

Bonnaroo itself is something like that in the context of the music business, where youthful glamour, hip novelty and studio-perfect disposable hits are still the priorities. For four days, Bonnaroo looms out of the Tennessee mud, jamming gleefully, then it vanishes until next year.

^{By Jon Pareles via The New York Times.}

Springsteen Plays “Santa,” NIN’s Reznor Says Farewell at Bonnaroo

At last year’s Bonnaroo, rapper M.I.A. made headlines when she claimed that she was performing her last show ever.

Here we go again: during his late-night set on Which Stage for Bonnaroo Day Three, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor announced that he was performing his last show ever in the United States. (Reznor and his band are headed to Europe and Asia for a 33-date tour that wraps on August 12th.) Reznor suggested that his decision was from too much touring, but he did allude that he would continue to record and release new music. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “I’ll keep going.” If Reznor was growing weary from the road, you would’ve never known it from NIN’s blistering set of raging, anthemic industrial rock, which featured highlights like the propulsive new track “Discipline” as well as an onstage collaboration with the Dillinger Escape Plan for “Wish.”

Just before Nine Inch Nails, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band stormed Bonnaroo with a monster three-hour set that was heavy on hits (“Born to Run,” “Thunder Road”) along with a few rarities. Springsteen also seemed to be having a total blast during his set, frequently sprinting down a catwalk to get closer to the packed crowd. During the portion where he grabs placards from fans emblazoned with song requests, Springsteen managed to snag a giant Santa Claus poster with the words “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” You’d never think Springsteen and his E Street Band would’ve launched into the holiday classic: it was the middle of summer, after all, and the weather was hovering around 80 degrees. But Springsteen was game and he signaled his band to kick off the song with percussive sleigh bells. Mid-way through, Springsteen shouted, “It’s 259 days to Christmas. Have you all been good? You haven’t been taking any brown acid?” It was a strange and hilarious moment, and one that will go down one of Bonnaroo’s most memorable. (Watch what happened when the hilarious Aziz Ansari — posing as Bruce’s road manager — hit up some Bonnaroo vendors for freebies.)

The collapse of the auto-industry and its effect on blue-collar American workers weighed heavily on Springsteen’s mind and his set was filled with working-class anthems like “Johnny 99” and “The River.” Springsteen also took a moment to deliver something of a sermon about the transformative power of his music in hard times. “We want to take despair and we want to build us a house of joy,” he said. “And we’re gonna take the sadness and build a house of joy!”

Mid-afternoon highlights included Wilco, whose set focused on songs from their upcoming Wilco (The Album). (Click above to watch footage from Jeff Tweedy and Co.’s set.) When the band took the What Stage they launched into fan tribute “Wilco (The Song),” and later stretched out with the new album’s centerpiece “Bull Black Nova,” which hit a soaring height thanks to secret weapon Nels Cline’s avant garde noisy guitar solo. Just before, over on the Which Stage, Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule played a covers-heavy set, featuring predicable ones like the Grateful Dead’s “St. Stephen,” along with more surprising choices like Radiohead’s “Creep.” Haynes gave the latter a cool new vibe by trading in Thom Yorke’s high-pitched falsetto for his own bluesy growl.

Expectations were high for the early morning set from neo-psychedelic warriors MGMT, who wrapped up day three with an hour-and-a-half performance at That Tent. MGMT have been slowly building a huge fanbase, thanks to their singles “Time to Pretend” and trippy videos like “Kids.” And judging by the crowd — which stretched for at least 50 yards outside of the tented area — these guys should have been playing larger areas like the Which Stage. As singer Andrew VanWyngarden said, “Thanks to Bruce Springsteen for opening up. We wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.” Overall, MGMT’s performance was spectacular and it is sure to go down as a career-defining breakthrough. Frontmen Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, along with their crack band, turned out woozy, surreal psychedelic rock that sounded equally tight and, at times, improvised. (What can it mean when Phish fans come to your show and start tossing around hundreds of glowsticks?) After dipping into covers like an awesome version of Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” (featuring Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek singing lead), the boys wrapped up their set with a new song “Congratulations,” a laid-back electro ballad with a chord progression that borrowed from the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil.” “All I need is a great big congratulations,” VanWyngarden crooned. MGMT earned one for sure.

^{By Rolling Stone.}

Links: