Guest Post: Adam Gold On Bonnaroo Heartbreak For Second Straight Year

Douglas Mason/Getty Images – What Could Have Been:
Moon Taxi performs at Bonnarooon June 10, 2018 in Manchester, Tenn. The 2021 festival was canceled thanks to Hurricane Ida.

Adam Gold is a writer, music fanatic and vinyl archivist, and has been to Bonnaroo 12 times over 14 years. He has attended as a general admission camper, performer and journalist, having covered the festival for Rolling Stone, Pollstar, the Nashville Scene and others. He is currently writing the first authorized biography of Roy Orbison.

Is it me or is 2021 starting to feel like a Friday the 13th-style sequel to 2020? Chain Jason Voorhees to the bottom of Crystal Lake and somehow he still reawakens for another reign of horror. It’s often some kind of weather event that reanimates the monster. Lightning strikes the pole through his heart and voila, it’s hockey season once again!

For the annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival — which was set to celebrate its 19th installment in Manchester, Tennessee this weekend, after the live-music-quashing COVID-19-mandated gap year that was 2020 — fate struck in the form of Hurricane Ida. While making its way from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, the tropical storm set its eye on the Middle Tennessee town, nestled 60 miles southeast of Nashville, and dumped a biblical amount of rain on Great Stage Park, flooding the festival’s farm-turned-venue just as vendors were setting up and production crews and volunteers (many working for free passes) were in the final stages of the build, turning the site’s dirt access roads and grassy campgrounds into an impassable muddy moat. So, with just one day left before gates would open (and two days before the music would start), festival organizers made the wrenching decision to pull the plug.

There will be no 60,000-strong sing-along to Foo Fighters rocking “Everlong” as fireworks burst and bloom overhead. There will be no faces melting to what would’ve been Tame Impala’s first post-pandemic performance in the United States. There will be no fans busting moves with hearts enlarging while watching Lizzo triumph as the festival’s first-ever female headliner. Instead, the Bonnaroo 2021 bill is topped by disappointment, sadness, frustration and a 700-acre puddle of mud. 

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The sight of tractors pulling entrenched vehicles out of the mud is a sight familiar to any Bonnaroo veterans who’ve attended in a year with only light thunder showers. The resulting congestion (not to mention the added time of checking attendees required COVID-19 proof-of-vaccination or negative-test cards) and other insurmountable logistical issues, like lost access for emergency vehicles, would’ve made staging the festival this weekend impossible. However, widespread disappointment still beats the likely alternative had the festival pushed forward: Hundreds of cars, campers and buses stuck sunken in the mud, and headlines about tired, unwashed masses stranded on an infrastructure-compromised farm in Tennessee. That doesn’t sound like a good time. And, in the wake of laughingstock failures like Fyre Festival and sensationalized documentaries re-litigating Woodstock ’99, it wouldn’t have been a good look either. 

For the festival itself, the thousands of boots-on-ground, rank-and-file staff, the businesses in Tennessee’s Coffee county, which supply many of the event’s vendors and the many artists and crews getting back on the road after more than a year of economic uncertainty — all of whom were past the point of return on their time and money investments — Bonnaroo’s 11th-hour cancellation is knock-down sucker punch that stings. Even worse, for the Bonnaroo faithful, who travel from around the world to revel in the festival’s four-day carefree bacchanal of music and uninhibited hippie bohemia, the loss is a total soul-crusher. They’re getting refunds on their tickets, but can expect to eat the costs of flights, supplies, hotels, et al. But the cost in terms of intrinsic value is immeasurable. 

For Bonnaroovians with 18 months of pent up COVID-frayed nerves, the letdown comes at a time when they need Bonnaroo’s unmatched moments of catharsis and radiant positivity the most. In the hours following the festival’s cancelation notice, comments on threads across Bonnaroo’s many social media fan communities — left by the likes of people in mourning, people who lost jobs and frontline medical workers — echoed a persisting sentiment: “I needed this.”

READ MORE:
Bonnaroo Canceled As Ida Swamps The Farm

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