Bon Iver Gives Life to Bonnaroo 2009

June 22nd, 2009    Posted in Bonnaroo 2009

 When 3:20 pm rolled around on Saturday, June 13, I wasn’t exactly ready to leave the show I was watching on the Which Stage – the legendary Booker T. Jones (as in Booker T. & the M.G.’s) was playing with the Drive-By Truckers. Take the raw and dirty, Southern rock of the Truckers, add Booker’s signature sound on the Hammond B3, and you’ll get quite a pairing. Playing mostly instrumental jams from their latest collaboration together, Potato Hole, I wound up leaving the show right before they went into the song that made Booker T. famous forty-seven years ago at the age of seventeen, “Green Onions.” You may not recognize the song title, but trust me…you know this song.

In about ten minutes, the indie-folk band known as Bon Iver (pronounced “bone evare”) would be taking the stage, and I would’ve never forgiven myself had I missed this show. I was lucky enough to land a spot right up front against the guard rail just before the show kicked off.

Led by Justin Vernon, the term “bon iver” comes from the French “bon hiver” meaning “good winter.” And it was during winter when Justin, who was bedridden from mononucleosis in his father’s remote Wisconsin cabin, wrote a bunch of songs unintentionally, while recuperating. These songs would come to make up his debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, which was almost not released, but rather would be used as a demo sent out to record companies. His friends encouraged him to release the album as it was, which was released on the independent label, Jagjaguwar, on February 19, 2008. Garnering massive critical acclaim, the buzz of the album spread mostly by word of mouth, landing spots atop charts like Rolling Stone (#29 on Top 50 of 2008), #31 on Spin, #8 on Last.fm and #4 on Paste’s Best Albums of 2008.

Bon Iver took the stage to a very lively crowd, who were giving some of the best cheering and clapping I had seen yet at Bonnaroo 2009. They started things off right with “Creature Fear”, a tune that starts out rather quiet and somber, but immediately becomes loud and energetic during the chorus in the matter of a second. While it constantly goes back and forth from quiet during the verses to loud during the chorus, the song ends with an experimental jam session of noise and beauty, in which everyone just seems to go off in their own little rants, most notably the drummer who eventually brings the direction of the song back closer to the end, followed by ecstatic cheers and Vernon saying, “thank you guys so much.”

Vernon quickly introduces the band before going into their hit “Skinny Love”, which sees amazing crowd participation very early on with clapping and singing of the lines, “my, my, my…my, my, my, my, my” and ”I told you to be patient and I told you to be fine and I told you to be balanced and I told you to be kind…” and so on and so forth.

Things slow down and become somber-like once again, with “Lump Sum”, which you’ll come to find as a continuous mood on his album. The next few song selections are newer, all of which are new to my ears. “Blood Bank” starts out with an instrumental jam, feeling much harder and heavier, driven by pounding drums and various feedback and echoes from the guitars. This mood continues on throughout most of the song, even with Vernon’s high-pitched vocals wailing away, as the enthused crowd becomes part of the show almost, with their never-tiring energy. “Beach Baby” is a short and quiet song about,  in Justin’s words, “a dream that you have…you’re on the beach with someone making out…” while “Brackett, WI”, from the Dark Was the Night compilation, was dedicated to those from Wisconsin.

Before going into the next song, a member of the Bon Iver entourage asked the crowd who had seen Grizzly Bear and Phoenix, noting that “there’s a few good acts on the premises.” My question to those who attended Bonnaroo 2009 would be, “who saw Bon Iver!?” The next song was “Flume“, which starts out with only Vernon on guitar and is perhaps the one song where you’ll find the most soul captured in his voice, singing lines like “only love is all maroon…gluey feathers on a flume…sky is womb and she’s the moon…” The song soon after adds some rim shots from the drummer, a nice little electric riff as well as plenty of reverb and feedback from the electric guitars. You would think that the song would be over when you first hear the roars of the crowd, but not before they take their little experimental jam session back into the chorus of the song.

I hate to say it, but when Vernon announced they’d be doing a Yo La Tengo cover next, I was pretty much left feeling clueless. Now, I know of Yo La Tengo, but I’m really not all that familiar with this band. So while I don’t know how the original sounds, I have to say that I enjoyed and connected very well with Bon Iver’s version, especially since the horn players from Elvis Perkins’ band had joined them onstage. This song, “I Feel Like Going Home” was probably a little too melancholy, maybe more than I needed to feel at the moment, seeing that I had traveled to Bonnaroo alone, and often felt alone though I was among 75,000 strangers. But the song was honest, it spoke loudly and just hit me, and I could relate. For a moment, I had wished I was home. That’s a huge part of what music is about for me. Bonnaroo’s great and all, but it’s much better when you have people their to share it with.

It may have brought me down a little bit, but the next three songs would bring me back up high again, which was probably the climax of the entire Bon Iver show.

“For Emma” may also be a downer, but I have to tell you that I didn’t even feel that way with the bright sounding horns from the Elvis Perkins in Dearland boys and the crowd singing along. While the story seems to actually be about a girl Justin may have lost, the lyrics don’t reflect the upbeat and happy vibe the song gives off. This song was definitely the second greatest part of this Bon Iver show.

Justin asked the crowd if he could do another quiet one, which they seemed not to be against at all. He did “Re: Stacks” alone, a song he said was kind of about “the devil’s hand” in the game of cards. After reading through the lyrics online several times, I couldn’t exactly put together what he meant, nor do I really understand card games or what the devil’s hand may be. But I love the song, it’s one of my favorites from the album.

The full band joined him back up onstage for the last song on the set, a song that only seemed right to end with. After hearing various downloaded shows of Bon Iver, I knew what better way to end their Bonnaroo performance than with a song which pretty much relies on crowd participation. For “The Wolves (Act I & II)”, Justin asks the crowd to join in by singing the line “what might’ve been lost” towards the end. When Bon Iver began playing out live, Justin realized that this was a song that needed the crowd to participate because the band simply cannot recreate what thousands of people are able to do. As the song goes on, the crowd continues to build up that lyrical line, buidling it up so much, that it gets to the point where the entire audience ends up screaming and making as much noise as possible, as the members of Bon Iver go off into a very loud and noisy experimental rant, which I realized was one of the great, most energetic moments of Bonnaroo 2009, or any concert I’ve ever been a part of for that matter.

Although they only played eleven songs during their set and ended earlier than scheduled, Bon Iver managed to draw nearly ten-thousand people to This Tent, including celeb couple Drew Barrymore and Justin Long. From the get-go, I immediately noticed a certain energy in this crowd that I hadn’t seen at any other tent show yet, actually any show for that matter. After Bonnaroo was over, this energetic crowd participation/reaction seemed to match that of both Phish’s and Bruce Springsteen’s shows.