Bonnaroo Day 4: Billy Joel, Robert Plant and Spoon Close Out Sweet, Sweaty Fest

From the conversations we overheard, it sounded like a lot of people were planning on leaving Manchester before Billy Joel’s headlining, festival-closing set at Bonnaroo Sunday night. The man's music has never been particularly cool, and coolness is the one thing a music festival attendee pretends to value most. (And yet the same people have no problem with Mumford & Sons. Go figure.) But from our vantage point (we lucked out and got to watch the show from on the side of the stage) it seemed like there were quite a few liars left on the farm, waving lit-up signs around, throwing glow sticks about and singing along in earnest to the piano man's classic Tin Pan Alley-style hits.

Dicking around with a flyswatter and cracking on the paper lanterns rising into the sky, Joel’s set was pretty much anything you’d ever want from the man. He opened with “My Life,” jumped into “Pressure” and closed out the main set with an arm-around-your-fellow-Bonnaroovian mass-pub “Piano Man" singalong. Our friend was excited for “Zanzibar,” we were happy as ever with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” and the crowd valiantly tried as well as anyone to sing along with “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Don’t worry, though, Joel had the lyrics scrolling along on multiple TelePrompTers across the front of the stage, strategically placed on either side of the singer's rotating piano riser. 

There were two pretty weird moments — a roadie identified only as "Chainsaw" front Joel and band through a faithful cover of AC/DC's very-un-Joel  “Highway to Hell” while simultaneously carrying on his roadie duties with a smoke machine, and there was a brief interlude of ZZ Top’s “Tush” in the middle of “River of Dreams.” It’s funny that Joel and his band’s interpretation of “rock” is still 105.9 style songs that are, at this point, 40 damn years old. It's also perhaps telling that, to our surprise, "Dreams," the youngest hit in the set (it came out in 1993), was the the most biggest crowd-pleaser of the bunch. 

But whatever! The five-song encore of “Uptown Girl,” “Still Rock and Roll to Me,” “Big Shot,” “You May Be Right” and “Only the Good Die Young” killed, even if they brought a little hint of Vegas to Great Stage Park. There’s basically no use for anyone to pretend they're too cool for Billy Joel, who totally did look like a fish out of water in the festival's music-loving freak scene. On the flip side, Bonnaroo is an ideal venue for boundlessly adventurously rock icon Robert Plant, who played Which Stage as the festival's penultimate headliner. 

"Louder!" and "Turn it up!" weren't cries you heard often at a Led Zeppelin concert (mostly because you couldn't hear). But this wasn't Led Zep: it was Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, a whole other beast — even if the bros around us shifted around impatiently until they recognized a familiar guitar lick. That happened admirably few times: Even when the 66-year-old Plant was revisiting rock-radio monoliths such as "Black Dog" and "Dazed and Confused," he tested them with different arrangements, instruments, and rhythms drawn from the pan-cultural adventures of his post-Zep career, punctuated with a slash of his mic stand. That fuck-nostalgia belligerence has made Plant among the most interesting of classic rock's elder statesmen, a term he did his damnedest to obliterate on a sizzling version of Bukka White's "Fixin' to Die" and a lesson in blues history anchored around the titanic riff of "Whole Lotta Love."

Eleven hours before the last notes of "Only the Good Die Young" closed out Bonnaroo 2015, The Spin's fourth and final full-chocked, sweltering day of genre-spanning music started off at That Tent with a set from Austin, Tex. Americana-star-on-the-rise Shakey Graves (nee singer-songwriter Alejandro Rose-Garcia). With temperatures high enough to kill the elderly, the singer and 'Roo veteran dedicated "Bullys Lament," a song thats chorus repeats the line "not like the others," to the hydration-conscious, no-man-left-behind spirit of the festival.

Keeping things on the Americana tip, next we caught one of the nebulous genre's most arresting acts, Hurray for the Riff Raff. Whether it's the way the group slides nimbly between folk, blues and R&B that gets you, or frontwoman Alynda Lee Segarra's rich alto voice, or the bountiful subtleties of her songs — something's going to captivate you, and they used all of their faculties in their set. The Riff Raff wrapped with an as-yet-unrecorded song, which Segarra said she wrote partly in response to being labeled a "country songwriter." It was as remarkable for its craft in portraying the drama and boredom of big-city life as it was for obliquely revealing how similar these experiences are to the small-town narratives that are the group's signature. 

Making the most of a mixed blessing — a main stage, afternoon slot in scorching midday sun — heavy Americana buzz act Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear, who played the Which Stage at 2 p.m., may have seen their crowd thinned by withering heat, but those who persevered knew they'd seen something special. The duo of 26-year-old Ward and his 63-year-old mother Ruth were augmented by a spare rhythm section plus Nashville club fixture Larissa Maestro on cello (and marquee-name rock photog Danny Clinch on blues harp). But the magic lies in the chemistry between son and mom, who complement each other's acoustic fretwork and singing with preternatural ease. When their voices raised the word "free" to the heavens at the climax of "Sorrows and Woes," listeners got chills in 90-degree weather.  

Next we caught a somewhat sparsely attended set from North Carolinians Hiss Golden Messenger at That Tent. Those who did show up largely looked day-four fatigued, languishing on blankets or swaying slowly to the band’s unfurling, expansive, soulful country-rock progressions, like that of the epic “Brother, Do You Know the Road?” Central HGM member M.C. Taylor’s band included not only brothers Phil and Brad Cook of Megafaun, but also Nashville’s own six-string virtuoso William Tyler on lead guitar. With North Carolina’s flag displayed on the screen behind them, Taylor & Co. stretched out for long, jammy interludes between verses that sounded a touch like Phosphorescent with just a bit of Tony Joe White’s country-funk in the equation.

Meanwhile, Digable Planets-affiliated, Sub Pop Records-endorsed hip-hop experimentalists Shabazz Palaces' midday set benefited from a perfect mix, no small feat for a sound built on hypnotic dub basslines that also prominently features acoustic instruments like thumb piano and hand percussion. We weren't as sold, however, on Palaceer Lazaro (née Ishmael Butler) as an MC. His stage presence was aloof and his delivery a bit sloppy at times, his proficiency at others leading one to wonder if the Seattle group is trying to be avant-garde simply for the sake of being avant-garde.

Given the elements, the fact L.A. disco punks De Lux were able to incite a dance party at The Who stage on Sunday afternoon speaks volumes to their credit. Not only is it one of the festival’s smallest stages, it has no lighting and most challenging of all, unlike the tent stages, it is completely exposed to the unforgiving sun. So here we were, on the most haggard day of the weekend, standing directly in the sun’s path, amidst a hardcore pack of fans who wouldn’t let any of that stop them from cutting loose to the band’s obvious nods to Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem. And over at the similarly small (but shaded) On Tap Lounge, Road to Bonnaroo winners Future Unlimited battled the sun by summoning some ominous gloom in this sizzling heat. In the process the band got some overwhelming support from a host familiar Nashville fixtures in attendance who obviously would have enjoyed these synth-washed darkwave gloom-pop gems under any conditions.

After Future Unlimited, catching AWOLNATION at Which Stage was literally a matter of rotating 45 degrees counter clockwise. Though, The Spin had to move in a bit closer for a double-take or two, checking our schedule two or three times to reassure us we were watching the right artist. Familiar only with the band’s killer club bangers, a little homework might have warned us their live show is more of a bro-fi pop punk affair, mixing electro-tinged pop melodies with blistering rock guitars that didn’t sound much of anything like the selections sitting in our playlists at home. Bummer. 

Over at The Other Tent, Danish electro-pop singer MØ was a hell of a lot more up our alley. Her wintry mix of glitchy beats and soulful melodies washed across this scant gaggle of party people like a glacier of aural Gatorade. The Diplo-produced “XXX 88” was a particularly effective catalyst wherein the lack of other bodies under The Other Tent simply meant there was more room for everyone to dance. 

A little earlier, just around the Centeroo bend, First Couple of Banjo Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn held court in That Tent. The pair were full of goofy fun, reprising the cover of Europe's hair-metal masterpiece "The Final Countdown" that they first performed for The A.V. Club last month and riffing on murder ballads as a marital buffer zone. But they were also sneakily erudite, stirring in historical context along with their wealth of multicultural influences, which they brought together with a virtuoso duet on "New South Africa," a shape-shifting instrumental Fleck wrote for his band The Flecktones around the time Nelson Mandela was inaugurated.

Although Americana vibes were in full effect across the festival, Sunday did also offer a global world's fair of of other talent. Representing Malawi, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S., The Very Best took over This Tent early in the evening, and though it at first appeared that most people were using the tent cover for shade rather than staking a claim for a good vantage point, the charismatic four-piece soon had everyone moving with their upbeat, bass-heavy danceable tunes. To get an earnest sing-along going with a couple thousand people who are wilted from the heat is a very impressive thing indeed, especially for a band that's still relatively obscure. 

Much like the crowd that stuck around to watch them as the weekend wound down, Spoon came onto the What Stage looking pretty lethargic. But mirroring the band's own career — they began in the late '90s as an unspectacular Wire/Pixies homage before finding their niche in more crisp, classic pop about three albums in and with 2005's Gimme Fiction — the hourlong late-afternoon perfomance rewarded listeners' patience. Appropriately, “The Beast and Dragon Adored,” the Beatles-homaging number which opened that pivotal 2005 record, was the first song of the set to turn heads, and momentum never wavered after that. Clad in all black, his bandmates all in white, singer-guitarist Britt Daniel clearly calls the shots in Spoon, but at this show the lead guitarist was the MVP, throwing out surprisingly gritty, dissonant leads on the Fiction material especially, gleefully harshing the crowd's collective mellow.

The late afternoon sun burning through the dust cloud created the perfect setting for local rockers Sol Cat's hazy electro-noir. A decent-sized crowd camped to catch the Road to Bonnaroo winners, who wielded a studio's worth of synthesizers and amplifiers on the On Tap Lounge stage. We saw plenty of shirts, patches and other paraphernalia indicating the assembled fans weren't all locals, either, the signs of substantial touring and promo behind the group's recent EP, Uno, paying off.

Crossing a rapper from Gary, Ind. whose feel-bad vibes have earned their fair share of DMX comparisons probably isn't the best idea, so the less said about Freddie Gibbs' one-note Other Tent set the better. Subject matter pretty much begun and ended with “titties,” “cocaine,” “I'm drunk” and “fuck police" (no "the") no less than 30 times. Gibbs' producer and serial collaborator Madlib mostly sticking to the sidelines.

Running on fumes, sunburnt and salivating, we reluctantly dragged ourselves across the dusty path back to the On Tap Lounge to catch Huntsville, Ala. rapper Mick Jenkins. The stage is intended for new and unknown artists to get some Bonnaroo exposure (not just from the sun), but many of the shows on the small stage had been sparsely attended. In our state of filth and delirium, the last thing we wanted to do was endure a rapper trying to work a tiny crowd of casual observers merely there to escape the heat. But our low expectations were shattered, as we turned the corner and were gratefully sprayed with cool water slinging out of a stranger's bottle. 

The welcome surprise was a packed house of good-timing, rump-shaking campers. The two raised decks were bouncing with the rhythm of the dancers to Jenkins and his DJ. During the half-hour we watched, we only caught a glimpse of Jenkins two or three times for all Roovians blocking the stage with their hands up in the air. Between songs, the MC offered his own PSA encouraging everyone to drink a lot of water. He even tossed a few bottles to folks who didn't have any, inciting a call and response of “DRINK MORE!” and “WAT-ER!” among the couple hundred parched party people in the tent. So we all did. As it turns out, Jenkins may have had an ulterior motive. His most recent album, The Water[s], has been one of the hottest underground hip-hop releases of the last year. Whatever the motivation, hydration or marketing, it worked. The Chicago MC earned a lot of new fans that afternoon, including The Spin.

By 8 p.m., the crowd's response to just about anything short of someone on fire is going to be muted by four days of oppressive heat and sleep deprivation. In the hands of a frontwoman like energetic Austrialian electro-pop siren Betty Who, however, the crowd at The Who Stage (natch) caught their umpteenth wind and raged like there was no going back to work tomorrow. Who and crew had to stick to a tightly choreographed program of slick, dazzling vintage beats, but they made it infectiously fun. We're eagerly waiting to see what they can do off the leash of a click track.

As sunset approached, the hypnotic strains of “Our Love” from last year’s album of the same name summoned us to The Other Tent for Caribou’s performance. Central member Dan Snaith and his band were clad in all white as they merged the synthetic sounds of keyboards, MIDI controllers and other gizmos with live drums, bass and guitar. Throughout the set, Snaith would often hop onto a second drum kit that faced the first drummer’s, matching and accentuating beats and fills. Extended, shape-shifting dance numbers like “All I Ever Needed” are a far cry from the more rock-leaning electronic psych-pop that sold us on Caribou back when they released Andorra in 2007, but the sounds got a chunk of the late-Sunday crowd moving and shaking. The two-headed-drummer freak-outs, strobing lights and blue LEDs were impressive and fun, but at nearly an hour in, it didn’t sound like we were going to get any old stuff. Thus, it was time to head to Billy Joel.