Tool Ratchets Up the Energy, Tobe Nwigwe Takes Command at Bonnaroo

Day 3 of Bonnaroo 2022 began quite hot — as you’ll expect if you’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes outdoors in June in the South — but turned almost chilly as the sun dipped behind the horizon. Centeroo felt the quietest it had been all weekend during the magic hour on Saturday. But the crowd returned as darkness fell over the Farm and we approached the headline set from art-metal aces Tool.

Our Saturday itinerary began at That Tent with Joy Oladokun, a Nashville favorite whose insightful and heartfelt folk-pop has become well-loved all over. She brought her strong and resonant voice and mighty talented band to bear on “If You Got a Problem” from her 2021 album In Defense of My Own Happiness. Oladokun glided through the emotional, inward-looking songs that characterize her catalog, but she balanced out the heaviness of some of the things she sings about with sardonic jokes, a contagious chuckle, a pair of pot-leaf glasses she put on to sing “Smoke” and an absolutely electric mash-up of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and her own “I See America.” Coming off on an extensive spring tour, Oladokun has mastered her stage presence. If you haven’t been able to catch her yet, mark your calendar for August and September when she’ll be back on the road for dates with Maren Morris and My Morning Jacket and headlining a few shows of her own. 

As Oladokun finished up, Femi Kuti and the Positive Force got their high-energy set of Afrobeat started at Which Stage. In the back half of the Nigerian musician’s set, he led the supersized ensemble singing “You Can’t Fight Corruption With Corruption” from their latest album Stop the Hate. Kuti, who is a son and bandmate of the late Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, explained that the song addresses politics in Nigeria. Even still, that piece and others touch on topics all too familiar in the U.S., emphasizing the universality of Kuti’s music. Like his father before him, his work illustrates his sensitivity to the world’s suffering and serves as a means to call out evil, process it and try to heal from it. On this day before Father’s Day, Femi Kuti shared the stage with one of his sons, Mádé Kuti. The pair engaged in an epic saxophone duo before the elder Kuti left the stage and let Mádé close out the set.

A welcome cool breeze whipped across the What Stage field, adding a layer of realism to the animations of a dark, foreboding castle interior projected onto the stage setup for 21 Savage. (There was also an enormous sword in a stone, which looked cool but didn’t really get used.) The U.K.-born, Atlanta-raised MC’s hype man stirred up the late-afternoon crowd and remained in his booth at stage left throughout the set, checking the crowd’s vibe and introducing songs as the show progressed. It’s a common enough practice in hip-hop shows, and a reliable way to maneuver between runs of original cuts, medleys of feature appearances and other segments of the set list. Savage’s hype man did a great job, but it almost felt like having him there kept a leash on the energy, and made it just a little tougher to connect with the star. 

For his part, Savage was chill but in tune with the crowd, who clearly loved him and seemed to sing back more lines of his — from solo songs to Metro Boomin collabs to features on J. Cole and Post Malone tracks — than they did during Cole’s show the night before. Savage’s delivery has palpable swagger, and his bars are clever in the utmost, and not even the slight awkwardness of the format could diminish that.

Just 30 minutes after a surprise appearance at Jack Antonoff's ’80s-themed Superjam, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry took the Which Stage by storm. Alongside bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, she twirled and glided in an elaborate gown as glitched-out, neon-hued video provided an electrifying backdrop behind them. The Scottish synth-pop trio's sound has noticeably evolved since their last stop at Bonnaroo in 2016, experimenting with new layers and elements on their latest record Screen Violence. They leaned into this new material for their set, rolling through album standouts “He Said She Said,” “Final Girl” and “Asking for a Friend,” alongside earlier favorites “Recover” and “Bury It.” Toward the end, Mayberry kicked up the drama by covering herself in fake blood before wrapping with the one-two punch of the band’s breakout hit “The Mother We Share” and anthemic crowd pleaser “Clearest Blue.”

Houston rapper and bandleader Tobe Nwigwe excels in his roles as both an MC and an emcee; he’s charismatic to the nth degree, and he rocks his bars like he’s doing parkour. It took about 20 extra minutes to get everything ready for his show at That Tent, but when he and his crew — a full band with backup singers and a dance troupe — blasted onto the stage, the delay was totally understandable and instantly forgotten. Where some artists avoid having anyone around who could possibly upstage them, Nwigwe draws strength from sharing the limelight with dynamite players and singers, including his wife Martica “Fat” Nwigwe, who’s as powerful a rapper as he is, if not even stronger.

The enveloping, posi-vibing, spiritually rooted performance was something akin to Chance the Rapper with some Texas heat that left a hearty, wholesome afterburn. Nwigwe mentioned this was his crew’s first Bonnaroo and that they were having a blast. Here’s hoping that they both appear on future lineups and pop up every now and then just to partake in the experience, like Chance often did in years past. 

Over at What Stage, Billy Strings and his red-hot band picked and choogled their way through some tunes that do their best to wear down the barriers between psych rock and bluegrass. Sometimes even a great ’grasser will stomp on an effect pedal and it’ll feel just a little out-of-place. But not so when Strings, say, kicks on a delay; it’s clear that he wrote the song with an echoing sound in mind. Strings is a guitar wiz, a fine songwriter and a singer whose mellow tenor turns up at the corners of the phrases. His voice sounds the tiniest bit like the late, great Ralph Stanley, but the overall effect of his work is something like Willie Nelson as a youngster. As the end of the set neared, with just an hour to change over the stage for Tool, Strings quipped with a grin: “We’re near time, and I don’t dare go over. Wouldn’t want Maynard to skull-fuck me, or Danny Carey to beat on me with that dildo drumstick thing.”

Why do you come to a Tool concert? It’s probably not for the visualizer-like animations of foreboding aliens gestating and Frankenstein’s monster coming to life, though they’re part of the experience for sure. It’s not for an immersive theatrical presentation with costumes and dancers, or to see the band reimagine beloved songs — those were difficult enough to come up with in the first place. Like other artists in the Venn diagram where prog and metal overlap, Tool uses the studio as an instrument, and with help from talented engineers, they carry that experience to the stage; their headlining set on Saturday boasted one of the richest, highest-fidelity mixes you could ask for. If we’re being a little snide but completely honest, you could replicate many aspects of the show with a fancy home-theater system.

But if you did that, you wouldn’t get to be a couple hundred feet from singer Maynard James Keenan as he howled into the void. Even if you’ve got nice speakers, you probably can’t crank them loud enough to have your gut rumbled by bassman Justin Chancellor’s impossibly low notes, and you wouldn’t feel it in your collarbones when Adam Jones makes his guitar yowl like a wounded panther out for blood. You also wouldn’t get mesmerized watching legendary drummer Danny Carey barreling through polyrhythms like he’s got eight arms and a few extra legs. There were some aspects of Tool’s show that were comparable to watching a movie, but the reason that seeing a movie in the theater is so much better also applies to their concert. If you were at home Saturday night, you didn’t get to be with the Tool fans who let out a roar you could hear a mile away when the band busted out “Opiate,” the titular song from their 1992 debut EP, or cheering on their heroes as they conquered difficult passages in “Pushit,” “Pneuma” or “Invincible.”

As the crowd dispersed for late-night activities, many made their way to the Which Stage field for Aussie DJ Flume. Considering the previous night’s pyro-and-lasers kickoff for Illennium’s set — and memories of a sprawling, thunderous rave led by Pretty Lights in the same spot a few years back — Flume kicked off in a somewhat unexpected way. The lights came up on him, standing at his rig in a sea of fog. While an animated car wheel spun and warped on the screen behind him, he ratcheted up the tension by playing a tone that warbled faster and faster as its pitch rose. But where you might expect a big bass drop leading to an explosion of four-on-the-floor beats, he instead cued up a light and groovy dance-pop track. Eventually, he got to the heavy-beat bangers, but it was on his own time.

Meanwhile, over at The Other, 29-year-old electro-house DJ and record producer Porter Robinson coaxed songs in his anime and video game-inspired sound from an array of instruments including a piano and sampler. On the screens surrounding Robinson, the feed switched between live reactions from the crowd to scenes from the A1 Pictures and Crunchyroll co-produced animated music vid for “Shelter,” a collaborative track with French producer-DJ Madeon. The entranced and enthusiastic jumped and bobbed in unison as Robinson continued on through his Vocaloid-assisted tune “Sad Machine” and beyond.

Hyperpop dynamic duo 100 gecs made their frantically joyous Bonnaroo debut at That Tent. Laura Les and Dylan Brady’s wildly catchy sound explores an array of influences — from ska to pop punk to nightcore (that’s a digital equivalent to the “33 RPM record played back on 45” sound) — with an extra layer of electronic sheen. The crowd was extraordinarily hyped for the pair, who responded with warp-speed songs from their 2019 debut 1000 Gecs — notably “800db Cloud” and “Stupid Horse” — to numbers from their highly anticipated follow-up 10,000 Gecs — “757” and “Hollywood Baby” — and even a ballad for people who’ve had a tooth removed.

Over at the mushroom fountain, Marc Rebillet was attempting a special live-on-the-scene start to his set that only passersby and the audience watching the livestream on Hulu would see. However, technical difficulties forced him to call an audible, and he and the film crew hauled ass, keyboard and laptop aloft, through the audience waiting for him to take the stage at This Tent. Naturally, this unexpected turn of events was fodder for the improvising musical comic to craft a bit, which he did in short order. 

He cajoled the crowd into handing him up some “evening wear” — a bathrobe, his customary attire — and started to throw together a house-inspired beat and some “Let’s Go Crazy” synth organ chords. “You thought this was a concert, with fun, and music and shit?” he bellowed, riffing on variations of the question until he’d turned it into his first song. As he wound down this opening number, he clambered to the front of the stage to retrieve other presents from fans. Along with a few bras, which he put on over his robe, Rebillet received a well-endowed blow-up doll with his trademark scruff of beard scrawled on its face with a Sharpie. “Now that’s the energy I like to see!” he said.

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