Word: bonnaroo
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...love you too!" Radiohead's Thom Yorke confided to the audience at the fifth annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night. Such effusiveness from the English art-rock band's notoriously introspective lead singer was unusual, but then so was the setting: a 700-acre farm outside of Manchester, Tennessee, where 80,000 people had convened for four days of non-stop music, mingling and merriment. Radiohead's appearance was the centerpiece and high point of a wide-ranging festival that included satisfying sets from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah...
...Radiohead's appearance at Bonnaroo, known as a mecca for roots rockers, tested the range of Radiohead's appeal. Could a politically charged European band get a groove going with Southern fried hippies who worship Phish and the Grateful Dead? The answer came early in the set, as the crowd cheered and danced to "There, There," from the group's last album, Hail to the Thief, and later too, as the sea of listeners lustily sang along to Radiohead classics like "Karma Police" and "Fake Plastic Trees...
...that staunching the flow is hopeless. If anything, the quality of the new material has stoked anticipation for the band's next disc. The sprouting grassroots black market for bootleg Radiohead clips, ironically, also connects them- spiritually if not technologically - to The Grateful Dead, whose aura still wafts through Bonnaroo like patchouli incense...
...with a larger slice of tickets going to New Yorkers than previous years, the Web was burning with a heated debate on the pros and cons of expanding the event's core mission. On the North Mississippi All Stars Message Board, "wdsmith" fumed: "The lineup for this year's Bonnaroo is a joke." Countered "Hipman": "Radiohead is amazing live, I think they fit in pretty good at Bannaroo really...
...really more of a detante - the band's two musical tendencies rallying around a not-so-cryptic political stance. But in the new songs, perhaps because Yorke now has a separate outlet for his more personal yearnings, the fusion of urgency and detachment feels organic, unforced and fertile. Like Bonnaroo, Radiohead is bigger than ever and poised to reach audiences far beyond its core constituency. The band sounds reorganized and reenergized, ready to plant the seeds of what will come next...