Stevie Nicks Casts a Spell, Sierra Ferrell Captures the Spirit at Bonnaroo

Day 4 of Bonnaroo typically has a fair bit of push and pull. There’s the lure of many more concerts balanced against being tired and knowing you’ve got to pack up camp. There's the thrill of discovery, which could get trumped by going with what you know you'll like. There’s that desire for one last funnel cake competing with the knowledge that you’ll have to walk over there to get it. Thankfully, there weren’t too many tradeoffs to weigh regarding shows to catch as we headed into the homestretch of the festival.

We began our Sunday with back-to-back acts from Nashville at That Tent. Sierra Ferrell was up first with a truly stunning set that showcased her wide-ranging sound, which pulls influence from country, European and calypso stylings. The crowd adored Ferrell from the start and gave her lots of energy to work with as she played songs from her 2021 debut album Long Time Coming.  They applauded as soon as she appeared onstage and kicked off the set with the folky “In Dreams”; they slow-danced when she honored her roots with “West Virginia Waltz”; and when she asked, they waved their hands in unison during “At the End of the Rainbow.” Ferrell’s music ranged from playful to haunting, and though her outstanding vocals were a big part of these mood shifts, they were made stronger and more pronounced by her band, featuring Josie Toney on fiddle, Joshua Rilko on mandolin and Geoff Saunders on bass. 

In a complete 180-degree turn from Ferrell’s sweet and charming tunes, All Them Witches followed with the heavy, droning, drawn-out jams they’re well-known for. Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” played over the P.A. right before the band took the stage, perfectly teeing up the group’s barrage of heavy, psychedelic, face-melting soundscapes. The group’s signature trippy graphics were projected behind them as they reeled off catalog classics like “When God Comes Back,” from 2013’s Lightning at the Door, as well as newer material from Nothing as the Ideal, the 2020 LP they recorded at the iconic Abbey Road studio. It was everything you’d hope for and expect from an ATW set.

A bit later, Puscifer, a project of Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan, took over Which Stage. Tool comes across as a somewhat solemn undertaking that doesn’t have a lot of room for the band’s sense of humor. To keep something like that going, you almost have to have an outlet like Puscifer — in which, even if present conditions suggest the outlook for humanity ain’t great, sometimes you just have to laugh. 

The whole ensemble dressed in conservative suits, with Keenan slathered in garish makeup and co-frontperson Carina Round sporting a cartoonish pompadour. While they played their warped semi-industrial funk-pop tunes, a troupe of actors in subtly grotesque near-featureless “human” masks — the kind of thing you might expect to emerge from a lab that makes synthetic human drones if you let the algorithm do the driving for too long — ominously stalked the stage and “scanned” the crowd. Two perspectives came to mind on the overall effect. First, it was a little like a music video directed by Tim Burton for The B-52s, in which the band has had some kind of industrial accident that’s being hastily covered up by management. Also, Puscifer might be what you get if you take some of the King Crimson influence out of Tool and replace it with little bit of Devo, Oingo Boingo and Weird Al.

With pink hair and nails, a rainbow sequined shirt and a carefree swagger, Machine Gun Kelly strutted his way to What Stage to a recording of My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Between songs from his two most recent LPs, 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall and this year’s Mainstream Sellout, the 32-year-old rap-schooled pop punker explained to the crowd that his pals were counting on him to perform “a drunk show.” He did as much as he could to make good on the promise — or at least to engage the crowd in lively and unpredictable ways, from running through the crowd, to climbing the camera scaffolding, to asking a fan to bring a cardboard cutout of Lil Wayne onstage.

As twilight fell over the Farm, Herbie Hancock took a seat amid a nest of keyboards far to the audience’s left at This Tent. Throughout his six-decade-plus career, Hancock has consistently been in tune with the ethereal essence of jazz while pushing its traditions to evolve. He’s one of the people you can thank for the umbrella of “jazz” covering such a wide variety of forms of expression. Hancock’s embrace of electronic instruments as well as funk — along with different African musical traditions funk is related to — also makes much of his music a whole lot of fun in the bargain. 

Hancock and his touring band — revered trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, guitarist Lionel Louecke (a protégé of both Hancock and Blanchard), veteran bassist James Genus and rising star drummer Justin Tyson — took the performance seriously, but also seemed to be having plenty of fun. Louecke has a collection of effects that rivals a shoegaze guitarist, and he used them to tweak his tone so that he could play lead parts Hancock might have played on a synth, leaving Hancock free to focus on the piano. Blanchard similarly had an effect that altered the sound of his lone horn to sound something like a full horn section. 

They settled in with an extended medley, followed by Blanchard’s arrangement of sax great Wayne Shorter’s mellow and melodious “Footprints.” To the delight of one dancer in the crowd, next came “Actual Proof,” which Hancock wrote for his 1970s band The Head Hunters; the piece moved as if the players were running from something but couldn’t help stopping periodically to break into a funky strut. The fluid and kinetic set felt like it could have kept going indefinitely, but it closed with an exclamation point in the form of Hancock’s best-known piece, “Chameleon,” with the fearless leader hauling his keytar around the stage to duel with his bandmates.

Nearby, Roddy Ricch made his Bonnaroo debut for a sizable crowd at Which Stage. The 23-year-old MC brought a bit of rock flair to fan favorites like “Real Talk.” Between songs, Compton-raised Ricch made poignant statements. Ahead of “Die Young,” he remarked on his concern about  living life to the fullest. “I just want people to appreciate life,” Ricch said. “Take every opportunity … a lot of people die young.” He also paid tribute to greats gone too soon like Nipsey Hussle and Mac Miller, and made a call to free Atlanta rappers Young Thug and Gunna, who were jailed as part of a group charged with racketeering.

There are many reasons why it became a tradition to close out Bonnaroo with a legacy act. Not least among them: When you’ve been coated in dust and sunscreen and roasted in the sun for four days, it feels good to sing along to songs you know, which may have been part of your life for a long time. When Bonnaroovians shuffled over to What Stage to end this year’s fest with rock ’n’ roll fairy godmother Stevie Nicks — the first woman solo artist to play a headline slot since the festival launched in 2002 — we certainly got that. 

Nicks and her band, led by guitar hero Waddy Wachtel, played “Dreams,” “Landslide,” “Gold Dust Woman” and “Rhiannon” — bar-setting songs that she added to the Fleetwood Mac canon in the 1970s — as well as the hard-rocking “Edge of Seventeen” from her 1981 solo debut Bella Donna. The lush, many-layered presentation felt like watching your (or your parents’) album collection come to life in vivid detail, and the songs elicited ecstatic tears from more than a few in the crowd. There were also plenty of deeper cuts, like the poignant “Destiny” from Nicks’ 1984 LP Street Angel, that stood tall next to the hits. 

That would’ve been plenty, but as seems to be her style, Nicks brought even more to the table. In one of many asides, Nicks noted that she was wearing a bespoke dress from the photo shoot for the Bella Donna album cover — and how her mom had pooh-poohed her decision to invest the equivalent of a house payment in the piece, which has since paid off. There were nods to her camaraderie with Tom Petty, from performing a gentle cover of the late rock hero’s “Free Fallin’ ” to introducing the Petty-penned “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with a story that mentioned how she’d wanted to be in The Heartbreakers. The anecdote also mentioned how condescending producer and then-boyfriend Jimmy Iovine had been at the time, one of many instances when Nicks was subject to the misogyny that seems to have always been endemic in the music business. 

The oldest song in the main set was the nuanced and rollicking gem “Crying in the Night,” which Nicks wrote for Buckingham Nicks — the lone eponymous album from her band with guitarist and then-partner Lindsey Buckingham, before the two joined the already-established Fleetwood Mac. The record has since become a cult favorite, but poor performance when it was released, coupled with unfulfilled promises that “Crying in the Night” would be released as a single, convinced her that her fledgling music career was finished. To borrow a phrase from late, great Scene editor Jim Ridley, here was one of the heads on Mount Rushmore, taking a pause from rocking out to open up about the pain of rejection and what kind of perspective five decades has afforded her.

“Not only was it not a single, the whole record actually tanked,” Nicks recalled. “Down the road, everybody thought [Buckingham Nicks] was this great record, but who knew? We certainly didn’t know. If you think your dreams are just trashing out and you’re never gonna make it to where you want to go, that’s not true. … It might take a while to get to your dreamy place, but you will get there, I promise you.”

Later, at the conclusion of an encore that seemed to be finished twice before it actually ended, Nicks & Co. fired off a ripping rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.” It made Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ thoughtful reworking from a few days prior seem sleepy by comparison, and it was the friendly push we needed to get moving back to the non-Bonnaroo world.

The Spin

The Spin: Bonnaroo 2022 With Stevie Nicks, Tool, J. Cole and More