“A man carried a monkey about for a show, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men.”
—William Blake
from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
A Memorable Fancy
May 27, 2010
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Posted by The JoeBot
Bonnaroo Love Pats
May 25, 2010
Bonnaroo and I have been indulging a warped, sadomasochistic relationship since the festival’s first year. For days I prep and pamper her, get her ready for the big show, and what thanks do I get? She snaps at me on a whim, feeds me sickening meals, and leaves me to die of pneumonia in a moldy communal tent. Still, I love her backstage, night after night, taking all that she has to give.
It might be shameful that I proceeded to abuse her in public. Back in 2007, I published “How Bonnaroo Killed My Rock n Roll Fantasy” in the Knoxville Voice (another paper which has sadly gone the way of the fish wrapper.) I was set to do a big write up again in 2008, but my touring schedule didn’t allow for my attendance. Perhaps that was the Hand of God protecting her from my venomous tongue.
Last year, she finally lashed out at me. Maybe she’d had enough of my shit. Maybe I’d had enough of hers, too. Either way, she kicked my ass.
What happened was, after working for days in the hot sun, getting fucked by production’s budget cuts and choking down the slop served in Plebian Catering, I needed to unwind.
There is this bridge out on the country roads of Manchester, TN, a little ways from the Bonnaroo site. Like many young bucks before me, I leapt from the concrete wall over the catwalk and plunged into the river 40 feet below. I splashed and hooted and paddled to shore.
I discovered a rope swing under the bridge. I pulled it up to the highest bank. Having jumped the bridge, I thought, What could be the harm in a 15 foot swing on a rope?
I have one rule when it comes to dare-devil activities: Try anything once, after you’ve seen someone else do it first. Well, it turns out that the second part is the most important.
My feet gently grazed the rocks on the edge of the shore. But I found plenty more about 6 inches beneath the surface of the river. As the pain shot into my guts from my knee and feet—making me want to puke and cry simultaneously, but unable to do either—I thought to myself, That wasn’t very graceful.
Not very smart, either, but so it goes with anything fun. Not that hobbling up that muddy embankment on the battered purple soles of my feet was a blast. Examining the cuts and abrasions and the blood pouring from a hole in my knee, my rigger buddies put it to me straight.
“You’re shit’s all fucked up, man.”
Should I go home?
“Don’t be such a pussy! Just walk it off.”
That seemed reasonable. So I walked it off all night, pounding drinks—and whatever—from one end of the festival site to the other. Mile after limping mile, I just walked it off.
I woke up in my car the next morning, late for work, and as I stood up to piss out the door, it was clear that I wouldn’t be walking anymore.
Laying on my couch with an elevated leg, I missed Nine Inch Nails’ last show in America—or so it is said. As I licked my wounds, acts like Rodrigo y Gabriela and Band of Horses took the stage for rosey-faced dolls and camel-backed jocks seeing the light. I could have seen The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Mars Volta, or Erika Badu, but I had my swollen toe X-rayed instead.
Sometimes you act like you’re 19, then wake up feeling 40.
Of course, by Monday I was good to go. Prancing across the empty stage, I climbed the steel all afternoon—one of my favorite things in the world—but even that had lost its luster somehow. I blamed it on the 3-day old casserole, but it was probably jealousy. Bonnaroo had loved her lovers, and forgotten all about me.
Fucking Bonnaroo. Maybe I deserved it for mocking her all those years. It would be hypocritical to ignore the fact that I have lavished in the milk of her teet. I thought that, since she was 100,000 times bigger than me, it was justified self-defense. Well, apparently she knows how to defend herself pretty well, too.
I’m sorry, baby. Be good to me this year, and I promise—we’ve all heard this one before—I’ll never hurt you again.
[The fruits of these domestic squabbles---"An Open Letter to Ashley Capps" and "How Bonnaroo Killed My Rock n Roll Fantasy"---are posted below.]
1 Comment | A-Z, True Story | Tagged: Bonnaroo, Bridge Diving, Domestic Abuse, Music Festicles, Rigger May Care, Sado-Masochist Entertainment | Permalink
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An Open Letter to Ashley Capps
May 25, 2010
[This was sent out to various news outlets in 2009.]
Dear Ashley Capps,
I speak for everyone when I say:
What are you thinking, relegating the workers of Bonnaroo to Plebian Catering? Some of them live on site for a month!
When I started working the festival in 2003, site workers had a full salad bar, the meals were hearty, and every man and woman got ice cream. As the years went on—and profits soared—our sustenance has degenerated. Now the catering is divided between the plebians and patricians.
In Plebian Catering we got powdered eggs, burnt meatloaf leftovers, soggy french fries, and a wilted pile of iceberg lettuce turning brown in the heat. Of course, no ice cream. We would sit down to our gruel, praying to be spared from gastroenteritis, as the scent of savory delights wafted over to us from Patrician Catering next door. Walking out into the hot sun, we saw toga-wrapped nobles filing out of their dining tent with ice cream dripping in hand.
Ideals aside, Bonnaroo is not aloof from iniquity. Your burly security guards beat the living damnit out of that skinny, spun-out kid after Radiohead’s show in 2006—every year the independent vendors get shut down because they have failed to pay tribute to your bottom-line trolls—a dead body or two is always swept under the hay-bales. That’s all water off this duck’s back, man. But when I found out that our shitty, mushed-up broccoli casserole was delicious days ago in Patrician Catering—before coming down to us plebians—I became furious.
The manual laborers of Bonnaroo live in that poison ivy strewn field, slaving in the muggy heat day after day, only to find two-day-old dried chicken on their plate. Granted, Bonnaroo pays better than the average gig: 8-hour minis, decent hourly rates, air-conditioned circus tents for us to build our Wal-Mart furnished version of Mexico City in. But this isn’t some privilege for us—it is our due compensation. We get paid more because we don’t go home. And if we are forced to feed from your trough by proxy, then surely the 80,000 tickets sold at $250 (plus merch, plus vending fees) could pay for healthy meals.
We tighten every shackle in the rigging, dude. We unload every truck, bolt every truss, fly every speaker cluster. Every nutritionist knows that hard work requires vitamins and minerals. How does that elude AC Entertainment and Superfly?
When we eat Aldi-style corned beef while watching the Whole Foods truck kick up dust through the site, drinking bitter NASA-grade Gatorade mix from unwashed coolers as your preferred brood saunters about with popsicles in hand, it kills morale. Who wants to push road cases through dirt for a withered carrot?
This sort of indifferent elitism has become a dominant trend in the music industry. The workers, even the touring personnel, often land on the shit side of the bottom line. Blanketed as a human resource, we are paid—but paid no respect; encouraged—but encouraged to stay out of sight; and fed—a lot of corporate bullshit.
Maybe we (the stagehands, security guards, trash cleaners, site crew, and death-defying riggers—shout out!) seem like scumbags to you. Pack mules for your mountaintop circus. I can’t deny that. We are selfish bastards, one and all. But if I recall correctly, you and I attended the same Religious Studies department at the University of Tennessee (myself a few years behind.)
You obviously learned that the opiate of the masses will line your pockets if accompanied by enough light and sound. But what about the guys strapping the lighting truss or hoisting your two-ton Bonnaroo sign on Whatever-the-Fuck Stage? Surely, if God can cause his sun to rise on the evil and the good, to send the rain onto the righteous and the unrighteous, your profit-saturated production office could budget in a decent bite to eat for the hired hands.
You might have missed this one from class—out of the Gnostic Gospels—those secret teachings of Jesus that were hidden for centuries at Nag Hammadi:
Said the disciples to the Master: “But if we give them a salad bar, they will ask for more dressing.”
To which Jesus replied: “Perhaps. But even scumbags deserve ice cream.”
Peace, Love, and Deck Chain,
Joseph Allen
Local 1099
Nashville, TN
[Though no one published the piece, someone did send it on to Mr. Capps. I am told that he considered my point-of-view carefully.]
Leave a Comment » | A-Z, Open Letters | Tagged: Ashley Capps, Bonnaroo, Entertainment Industry, Exploited Workers, Muckraking as a Hobby, Music Festicles, Rigger May Care | Permalink
Posted by The JoeBot
How Bonnaroo Killed My Rock n Roll Fantasy
May 25, 2010
[Originally published in the Knoxville Voice, 2007]
Once again, I witnessed Bonnaroo from backstage.
Back in 2002 I bought a ticket for kicks. I watched revelers kick up ten tons of dust, peddling dope and baring their breasts. After the last show, I hitch-hiked home with suburban neohippies in an RV. There were drugs and dreams of a new generation and two matching cold sores on mirrored corners of these two kids’ mouths. They were all so willing to share.
I was immediately struck by two notions: 1) that ecstatic communalism is a primal desire in the hearts of most young people, and 2) that ecstatic communalism can be sold for incredible amounts of money.
The second year, 2003, I started work as a low-level plebian for a Detroit-based labor pimp outfit who dealt in riggers and stagehands from all over the country. I worked Bonnaroo backstage, side-by-side with drunk bikers, certified psychotics, charred hippies from the old school, and inner city crackwhores. We were given All Access passes and stuffed into massive tents at night.
I don’t think the production manager had accounted for our ravenous sense of adventure. Chaos erupted everywhere as we all lost sight of those dividing lines between stage-crew, crowd, and artist. The promoters were extremely pissed and our labor company soon went down in flames.
That was probably my best year. I don’t think I saw a single set in its entirety, but I did get to meet Sonic Youth, drink with one of the lingering members of the Dead in the VIP tent, consume drugs like a fat kid in the lunch line, and crash stolen golf carts.
That weekend erased my place in the crowd and began my days of traveling the country, first as a grimy-pawed prole, then as a stagehand, finally climbing up to the world of rigging where I now spend most workdays a hundred feet in the air, swinging like a monkey, soaked in adrenaline and mopping up cash. I sold my soul for rock n’ roll, and all I’ve got are these local crew t-shirts!
Nowadays I see Bonnaroo from between a hundred thousand people on one side of the barricade, and umpteen million dollars on the other. I just snatch up my 100-dollar crumbs and go on my way.
These music festivals don’t look much different to me than Billy Graham’s Last Crusade in Queens, where millions of starved souls showed up to see an old guy talk about heaven on his supernatural microphone—or Kenny Chesney turning thousands of Bostonians into hillbilly impersonators dancing to fiddle-laced synthpop—or Jay Z hyping “big pimpin’” and “spendin’ cheese” to destitute kids in Detroit—or even the gay atheistic rock n’ roll Christmas Carol Choir down in West Palm Beach. A show is a show, a crowd is a crowd. You’re all a PT Barnum quote to me, and I am your willing slave.
I love my job. I risk my life up in the steel for you guys, risk killing people who trust me not to drop steel on their heads, traveling the country like an endless season of blue-collar Kung Fu episodes, just so I can watch you mongrels drool and hoot for tailor-made heroes, hypnotized by their high-tech prosthetics, the pretty lights and loud sounds tickling your senses while they soak up your money. For me, Bonnaroo is just another party in the irony factory; just another day at the office. You guys are only visiting.
The Bonnaroo quirk is its commodified communalism. It’s “The Summer of Love”, canned and tagged and out on the shelf. I’m amazed at how much a person is willing to pay to spend their weekend in a WalMart-furnished Third World shantytown, getting seared by the hot sun. Is this how you’re going to save the world from soul-crushing corporate aesthetics, bourgeoisie mediocrity, political corruption, and ecological collapse? By buying pre-tattered gear, eating drugs, and creating Middle Tennessee’s most prolonged traffic jam? Now that’s a revolution!
Don’t get me wrong, the line-up was incredible, so many great acts from so many genres, a pop-culture buffet to end all others. Tool’s high tech psychedelic epiphany stirred the heart, The Flaming Lips’ political diatribe sparked the mind, the ancient physical art of Knoxville’s lovely Gypsy Hands belly dancers got the blood pumping. It was a great time, no doubt. Still, festivals are not just about what is on stage; they are also about the crowd.
I don’t imagine that John Lennon or Jerry Garcia would be particularly impressed with the current incarnation of Woodstock’s anarchic abandon. Bonnaroo looks more like tie-dye on the wrong side of a cattle-prod than a flower-stuffed rifle tip. These are “good times” for the new millennium. Turn on, tune in, sell out.
I’m not completely cynical though. Maybe there is still hope for our parents’ free love dreams of Utopia. Maybe Rock n’ Roll is a spirit that can never die. Beneath the general milieu of a County Fair on acid, Bonnaroo left a lingering impression of young people who just want to get together and love life. I was honored to meet the occasional free spirits, the adventurers and couples in love, to see those random moments of friendship and kindness that keep me hoping that the nobility of the human spirit may be powerful enough to withstand the sharp blades of the cookie cutter. Perhaps some part of the soul survives the spiritual death of becoming another cog in the machine. It survives in kisses and jubilant toasts, it survives in a sincere sense of family shared by strangers lost in America.
I don’t have too much time to think about it though. My check’s in the bank and I’m off to the next gig. Hope you suckers had a good time. Now get back to work.
Leave a Comment » | A-Z, Social Studies | Tagged: Bonnaroo, Muckraking as a Hobby, Music Festicles, Neo-Hippies, Rigger May Care, Woodstock | Permalink
Posted by The JoeBot
What Happened to “My Black Eyed Apocalypse”
May 21, 2010
Now entitled: “Why I Quit Touring With The Black Eyed Peas.”
It is now published in Taki’s Magazine, a Libertarian publication founded by renowned writer and lascivious adventurer, Taki Theodoracopulos.
Last year I toured with the Black Eyed Peas on their Japan/Australia run. It was dubbed The E.N.D. – World Tour, which was appropriate. The production is a dazzling metaphor for the end of civilization.
As I get older, I frequently find myself forced to compromise my principles—whether ethical or aesthetic—for a higher standard of living. My job is to fly lights, sound, and video—not to judge the artists. My crew chief said this a dozen times. After all, I was paid well, enjoyed fine meals and plush hotel rooms, had fantastic adventures on the streets of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Melbourne, and Auckland, and I only had to wear a BEP t-shirt one time—when my laundry was dirty. Still, the damage is evident.
I began to absorb the insidious beats and lobotomizing lyrics through constant exposure. To make matters worse, I was born with a hyperactive cerebral sequencer that will sample and loop any catchy tune within a 100′ radius. You hear about nuclear lab technicians who glow green when the lights go out. Well, for months after I came home you could hear “Boom Boom Pow” playing from my head in a quiet room. Just another occupational hazard…
Check out the rest at www.takimag.com!
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