6 things you missed at Bonnaroo Sunday
MANCHESTER, Tenn. — The Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival wrapped up its 14th year Sunday, with Billy Joel playing a festival-closing set for nearly two hours. The rest of the day featured acts like Awolnation, Spoon, Shakey Graves and Brandi Carlile, as well as a bluegrass jam session helmed by actor Ed Helms. Festival organizers managed to save some of the best shows for the last day.
For Twenty One Pilots, it's a long way to the top. As a mid-afternoon festival act, Twenty One Pilots doesn't have a big budget for staging. But Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun make the most of low-tech production elements that include a small crane-like structure with a microphone hanging from it and large boards that allow them to crowdsurf while playing drums.
Apologizing for starting 20 minutes late Sunday, Joseph said, "They made me sign a piece of paper saying I wouldn't climb anything" like he did when he ascended the lighting rig two years ago while playing a smaller tent. That piece of paper didn't really stop him, though: During the duo's 2014 hit Car Radio, Joseph jumped down from the stage, ran through the audience and up the stairs of the lighting scaffolding behind the soundboard, finishing the song from there.
The Wind and the Wave goodbye. On Saturday, Patricia Lynn of Austin duo The Wind and the Wave woke up with laryngitis. She and Dwight Baker flew to Tennessee on Sunday anyway, in the hope that Lynn would regain enough of her voice for the duo, known for , tomake its Bonnaroo debut Sunday evening.
"She woke up this morning with some tone in her voice, but now there's nothing," Baker said Sunday afternoon, a few hours before their scheduled set time. "She's basically drinking anything warm — or cold. She's just overhydrating, seeing what happens." Lynn and Baker ended up pulling the plug on their set shortly before they were scheduled to take the stage. "If there were some notes there, we'd get up and just suffer," Baker said. "But there's nothing there."
Too bad Florence's Machine isn't an air conditioner. Florence + the Machine frontwoman Florence Welch might have been comfortable performing in her light white pantsuit and bare feet, but she seemed concert about her audience, which endured temperatures in the mid-90s to watch Welch and her 11 backing musicians.
"Are you surviving?" she asked after singing Ship to Wreck, a song from the group's new How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album. "It's so hot out there. Is everyone drinking enough?" When the crowd assured her that it was staying properly hydrated, she said, "I'm so proud of you." She then asked the audience to be her choir for Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) — "the hottest choir in the world."
Robert Plant's songs didn't remain quite the same. With Sunday's set, Robert Plant has played Bonnaroo three times, fronting three different bands. His current backing group. the Legendary Space Shifters, favors bluesy, riff-based rock with a West African influence. That allowed Plant to explore new musical directions for Led Zeppelin tunes like Black Dog, Going to California and Dazed and Confused, as well as a pair of covers of tunes by blues great Howling Wolf, No Place to Go and Killing Floor.
Billy Joel, slayer of bugs. Never let it be said Billy Joel doesn't play to his audience. Joel, perhaps the only act in Bonnaroo history to twirl a flyswatter while singing, played a rousing instrumental chorus of Dixie before his first number, My Life, and a few bars of The Legend of Davy Crockett before his last one, Only the Good Die Young.
Some acts that perform at events like Bonnaroo, knowing they'll be in front of thousands of people who've never seen them before, play what's known as a "festival set," a show packed full of hits and familiar songs. Not Joel. For the first hour and 20 minutes, Joel went deep into his '70s catalog, interspersed with a handful of mid-'80s hits like Pressure, Allentown and We Didn't Start the Fire. But with album cuts like The Entertainer, Zanzibar, All for Leyna and Sometimes a Fantasy, he was practically recreating a set list he might have played at Nashville's Municipal Auditorium in 1979. After closing his main set with Piano Man, he returned with an extended encore of big singles: Uptown Girl, It's Still Rock 'n' Roll to Me, Big Shot, You May Be Right and Only the Good Die Young.
As he left the stage, the last act to play Bonnaroo 2015 encouraged the festivalgoers not to drink and drive home. Instead, he said, "Do what I do: Drink and take a big limo."