***The following is the first part (of many!) of my master's thesis-turned-memoir/lifestyle manifesto.  Over the next few weeks I will be posting snippets of my many experiences at and insights into the phenomenon of modern music festivals.  Much of the content is anecdotal, all of it is true.  Keep in mind that if experiences seem exaggerated, or warped, it was the intention of the author (me) to remain loyal to the characters' states of mind... which often were "exaggerated."  All the names in the stories, except my own, have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.  The contextual, more academic stuff will be faithfully cited and notated.  All photographs and artwork -- unless otherwise noted -- are my own, as is the story I tell.

I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I did, and continue to enjoy it every day as I do.

Cheers,

--ST

“Now is the time, a new day is just beginning...” --Edgar Winter

I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I thought to myself, as I peeled a page of newsprint off the backside of my already soaked beige cargo shorts, leaving behind a diagonal fingerprint of smudged black ink that stretched almost all the way across my left ass cheek. Apparently whoever had left their paper lying on one of the few folding chairs strewn haphazardly across the muddy path couldn’t take the time to throw it away in one of the bazillion trash cans within a ten-yard radius.

Nah, it looks better here, they must’ve thought as they walked away, leaving it to sponge up as much moisture as its wispy pages could handle. Everything was wet. The ground resembled an endless shag carpet fallen victim to a waterbed explosion, if said waterbed was filled with refried beans and Yoo-hoo. The air tasted like cold sweat, and every now and then, a new burst of droplets would be tossed down from the sky, or would fall from the loose grip of lazy oak leaves that were continuously tickled by the breeze. I walked over to the trashcan to my right and flung the paper into its gaping maw, which was already foaming at the lip with plastic cups. Another burst of drops sailed down from above, as a man previously unbeknownst to me fumbled with his own inebriated figure as he scaled the tree closest to me, all the while screaming “APPLES APPLES APPLES!” at the top of his lungs. This startled people bustling around me, and evidently also himself, making him lose his grip briefly, causing him to fall. I rolled my eyes and looked down at the muck that was seeping into the holes in my Crocs, whichwould have caked onto my feet like a pair of terra cotta slippers if there was any break in the constant moisture  being thrown in my direction. I tipped the chair up to allow the remaining fluid to drain from the seat, and sat.

I hadn’t packed for weather like this, but I couldn’t see it getting much worse. The fringed edge of the Grateful Dead blanket I had bought for my sister (and then decided to keep for myself) daintily spilled into the brown soupy mess below my seat, as if its yarns were the toes of a bridal party testing their mud bath at the spa, staining the lighter colored fringe a deep hue of cocoa. As I hastily pulled it out, I saw that most of the blanket looked fine, except the corner that was draped down my back as I held it tight around my body, dripping like a tea bag freshly removed from its cup.

I just want to go home, I thought again, starting to feel like coming here was the stupidest thing I had ever done. I sniffled and a few leftover drug particles still latching to the inside of my nostrils set themselves free, nestling in the back of my pharynx before either being absorbed by hungry capillaries or dripping down the back of my throat. It had been hours since I had seen Ben last, my phone was dead, and I was alone in the middle of a field with 60,000 fucked-up strangers. I was in Hell, and I wanted to get out.

*                     *                     *                    *                    *

I think, in the beginning, I just wanted to be cool.

When I was first invited to a music festival back in 2005, I almost declined. The only music festivals I was familiar with were those of years gone by, like Woodstock, burning like familiar flames through history, mimicking a joint in the night, painting muddy portraits in the stories of my parents’ hippie pasts and the choices they wish they had made. By the time my willful teenage years came about, only a handful of festivals existed (in America), most of them scattered around the country in hard-to-reach places. At the time of my invitation, my only knowledge of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival—the setting for much of this collection, the backbone of my festival experiences, then celebrating its fourth year—was that it was hot as balls, it was in Tennessee, and that it lasted for days.

My friend Ben was the one who had brought it to my attention. There was a group of my classmates who had gone the previous year, and about half of them were planning on returning again over the weekend following our impending graduation. This would be Ben’s first time as well, and wanted to include me too...mostly because we had shared a love of music, but also because he perhaps didn’t want to the be the only “virgin” in the bunch.

Some friends and I, in our Bonnaroo finest, ca. 2005.

I met Ben when he joined our class in the ninth grade. My high school also included grades seven and eight—and I had been there since the beginning—and so it was common for students to start matriculating in the ninth grade. Since my sister played sports and both of my parents worked—and since the school was a good twenty minutes from my hometown by car—I often stayed at the school until about five o’clock in the evening in the library, doing homework and socializing with the other stranded kids. Ben, like me, was one of the handful of marooned students. We started hanging out, talking and laughing about whatever fourteen-year old boys talked and laughed about back then. Ben was—and still is—extremely easy to get along with; he’s one of those people who is friends with everybody, one of the more popular kids in our class.

The private school I went to in Connecticut was small—really small. Though it included both middle and high school (grades 7-12), the total student population remained constant at about 350 students. My graduating class was only 56 students, but the small hallways and intimate after school sports teams, clubs, and arts activities allowed students to mingle with kids of different ages and classes. Our school was almost too small for any real cliques to pop up—the kind you might see at larger public schools (á la Janis’ cafeteria seating map in the classic high school comedy Mean Girls)—but there was definitely a hierarchy that separated the so-called cool kids from the rest of the pack. I fell somewhere in the middle: not quite the bookish, more isolated teens that would hide out in the library or computer lab, but not really part of the central group of students that dominated the two long tables our grade would take over during lunch. I was dependable enough to be elected class treasurer every year, and I got along with mostly everybody the rest of the time, but I never really felt like I belonged to the core popular group.

My time at elementary school was different for many reasons, the main one being that I had known all of my classmates since preschool and spent every waking hour with them, whether it was at school, playing little league sports, even during the summer at nature camp or the day camp organized by the local Parks & Rec. I had to watch most of the kids I had known practically the whole time I had been able to retain memories go off to the local tri-town public middle school, while I was sent away to Williams, a private school twenty miles away from my home in Essex. Thankfully, a few of them also made their way to Williams, and while we saw each other every day, they mostly were absorbed into the popular group and our hometown connection faded away. I was left to fend for myself.

For much of my career at Williams, I found solace in a small key group of friends. These five or six people became my family throughout my years there, and we spent basically all of our free time together. As the classes above me graduated and some of my friends went off to college, a few of us grew restless in our placation, wanting to be invited to keggers and other gatherings that the more popular kids would throw during school vacations or on weekends when parents were out of town. Ben was a bridge between the two, and as I grew more comfortable being around him, I started to make my way onto the party scene, showing up to parties with a big bottle of Jägermeister under one arm and a four pack of Red Bull in the other. The two beverages became my chosen party accessories, weapons of inebriation I wielded with pride whenever a drunken classmate approached me for a shot. Outside of the party scene, however, I didn’t see much of a change. I was still seen as that same, semi-nerdy theatre kid. I say ‘semi- nerdy’ because the theatre in our school was actually well appreciated by the student body, for the most part, which is part of the reason I decided to become involved in it in the first place. I wanted to get on their radar. I wanted to be noticed. But I still felt like an outsider.

Ben and I didn’t hang out much outside of school for the first couple of years that we knew each other, but as time passed and we got older, we found that we had a lot more in common than we realized. Over the course of our junior and senior years we started hanging out all the time, chatting mostly about music and film, which were two passions we shared and could inexhaustibly converse about. When the end of senior year rolled around, we were both planning on attending college in New York City—him for film at the School of Visual Arts and me for acting at Fordham University—and so his suggestion of Bonnaroo was also form of inviting me to take part in a rite of passage with him: a journey to take together before the pressures of the real world set in.

One of Bonnaroo's signature sunsets.

For some reason it just didn’t sound all that appealing to me, despite the appeal of such a grand “American adventure” that a lot of road trips carry with them. I didn’t really know much about the musicians playing (except for some of the headliners), the cost was fairly high, and ever since I had seen Deliverance in middle school, the idea of going to the South—especially while sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere—was far from the top of my list of “must-have” experiences.

“Come on, man! It’ll be great!” Ben’s long, messy brown hair bounced around his pale freckled face enthusiastically, his clear eyes twinkling with purpose and excitement. He had been trying to convince me to go for at least two days already, and I still wasn’t convinced. But he persisted: “Daniel’s got the whole thing figured out, all we need to do is buy the tickets!”

Daniel was also a friend from before high school, as we had met at camp during the summer before my transition to middle school. When he came to Williams in eighth grade, we also started to drift apart, but had started hanging out again in recent years. He had a penchant for partying too, so he was another bridge to this notion of “cool” that I was so desperately trying to latch onto. It became clear to me that going to Bonnaroo might be the best thing to score some points in the cool column, and while this would be taking place after graduation—so I wouldn’t need to impress my classmates anymore—it was an experience I was hoping to whip out in New York City, hopefully easing the transition into college life.

This is it, I told myself. This is your chance. Take it.

So I Did.

To Be Continued....

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ... Stay Tuned