45 Best Things We Saw at Bonnaroo 2014

Yeah, we were surprised too. With a sense of humor and a backing band more professional than anyone at the fest (not to mention a drummer that could probably dunk on the sticksman for Meshuggah), Richie made soft rock… kind of rock. His set has the tight gags and masterful improv of a good stand-up, even painting the singer as sort of an easy-listening superhero to the heartbroken. ("So you go home. You grab your album. You grab your cassette. You grab your 8-track… You call on… Lionel… Richie"). He plays every song you wanted to hear ("Dancing on the Ceiling") and every song you didn't know you wanted to hear (as someone pointed out to us this weekend, it's easy to forget that "Brick House" is a Commodores song). He also retreated for some "Bonnaroo juice" and joked, "This is terrible." (Read our recent Richie Q&A here.)

Not that you exactly have to prove anything when you're the "Number One motherfucking rock star on the planet" (his words, but we're not arguing it). But after 2008's fiasco — where he hit the stage late (after 4:30 a.m.) and left to "Fuck Kanye" spraypainted on the fences… Well, we'll let the man take it from here.

"I did Bonnaroo six months after my mama passed. Pearl Jam went three hours late. Fuckin' daylight was coming on, they said I was running late. They blamed my motherfuckin' tanks, with all my pyro. They wrote Fuck Kanye on that shit. Y'all wrote that shit in the press. Where the press at? Is y'all gonna write about all these motherfuckers puttin' their hands up right now? Where the press at? Where the press at? Where the press at?"

As for the show itself, it worked almost like a send-up of his own fame. The press is going to blow him up and make him look negative? Well, he'll get a jumbo screen to play reflect him blown-up and in negative. He'll do a festival set with lots of hits, but not the hit. He'll stand silently in a spotlight or rap in a mask. He'll get 90,000 people to sing along to "There's leaders and there's followers." He'll perform noise-rap as a shadow on a red LED Rothko and then say, "If y'all are having a good time, make some noise." Heart-bearing, fang-baring and smarter than the press will give him credit for.

The Sunday night headliner at Bonnaroo is usually greeted with dwindling crowds as festivalgoers rush to beat the traffic. Not Elton John, as it seemed like half of Tennessee packed onto the lawn to watch the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer close out the 2014 Bonnaroo. Even though some of the songs were four decades old, Elton managed to breathe new life into them, either through new arrangements or different approaches or extended codas. Take "Rocket Man" for example: Thanks to a jazzier, almost-Shatner-esque intro and an outro that soared to an interstellar climax, hearing "Rocket Man" at Bonnaroo wasn't the same as hearing "Rocket Man" on the radio. In many ways, it was better. Elton's set did feature one surprise: Ben Folds — in town for the Superjam — guested on "Grey Seal." In the performance's most tender moment, Elton dedicated "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" to Casey Kasem, who passed away earlier in the day.

If you didn't jump on board with Skrillex and Kaskade this weekend, you're gonna find yourself staring back from the wrong side of history, but Jack White's all-analog blues-rock explosion is maybe the best thing going before the robots take over. It was a true testament to human ability — everyone in his band is a power player, from his over-extending drummer to his mustachioed steel guitarist — but it was also a true testament to the importance of occasionally ignoring those abilities — as evidenced by what they could do with the simple pound of the White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba."

As tempting to think of this as "the moment that Mickey Hart and Mystikal were on the same stage, briefly," the Skrillex Superjam was really just an all-star salute to the songs that make people lose their minds. The stars got the headlines and they all took turns doing rap (A$AP Ferg handling Biggie's "Juicy") or jock jams (Warpaint helping with Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam") or classic R&B (comedian Craig Robinson did Bill Withers' "Use Me"). But it first took flight when Janelle Monáe launched into James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)." Second time was Cage the Elephant's Matt Shultz covering "Break on Through" with one of the actual Doors, guitarist Robbie Krieger. No amount of A$AP Ferg asking for moshpits and Fatman Scoop calling out bass drops can compete with the classics.

The ingredients are simple: warm, cottony dough and glaze so sweet it put Krispy Kreme's to shame. At a festival with big name food trucks, culinary choices spanning from Chinese to Greek to Cajun, and bacon from multiple states, the Amish Baking Company's donuts were the best thing to hit our taste buds all weekend — and at one of the lowest price points ($4) of any food offering festival-wide. The legend of these donuts spread quickly throughout the Farm, and there was always a long queue to grab one. 

The last time Vampire Weekend played Bonnaroo, in 2008, they played a festival-opening Thursday gig at the comfy That Tent. Six years later, the worldy New York rockers have graduated to the main stage and a slot serving as warm-up for Saturday night headliner Jack White. The group was up for the challenge, electrifying the audience with cuts off all three of their albums. They also received a big assist from Mother Nature as the temperatures cooled down after a hot day, giving festivalgoers a second wind to dance along with "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Cousins."

"OK, real quick. Who's high as a motherfucker right now?" asks Wiz Khalifa's DJ Bonics. "Where my stoners? … We about to get high Bonnaroo."

Then Wiz comes out in sandals. "Where my smokers at," he says. "Y'all smoking that good weed out there? … Y'all smokin' with Wiz Khalifa tonight."

Ukrainian folkdrone Björkpunk quartet Dakhabrakha went into Bonnaroo as unknowns but ended up with one of the most receptive crowds of the weekend. They got cheers for mournful accordion and apocalyptic cello sawing. Animal noises and bird whistles and howls got the audience to return favor, turning the tent into a happy menagerie. 

Despite only being on the scene for only a year, Disclosure has somehow already attained festival-favorite status, packing the Other Tent before Kanye West even capped off his set with "Blood on the Leaves." "This set is the place to be," Disclosure told the crowd minutes into their midnight set. Armed with one of the weekend's more impressive stage designs, the U.K. dance duo blistered through an hour-long set of hits like "When a Fire Starts to Burn," "F for You" and "White Noise." To the surprise of no one, Sam Smith, who performed on the same stage earlier in the day, returned to assist Disclosure with their joint hit "Latch."

"Let's be clear," said Pusha T. "G.O.O.D. Music makes the hardest records in hip-hop," which could be one of the kindest ways to say that he's only performing one Clipse song in a 60-minute set. That didn’t matter, though, because the Virginia rapper was hard-driving and sweat-soaked, opening with "King Push" ("I don't sing hooks"), headbutting on the "headbutt" line in "Numbers on the Boards," yelling "Yah!" and letting his DJ go berserk on manic scratch solos. If you think an opening week of 74k does not a superstar make, then you haven't heard a crowd react to Pusha T. However, Kanye West is indisputably a superstar, and the run of "So Appalled" (an album track, by the way), "Mercy," "Runaway" and "I Don't Like (Remix)" was the set's most palpable crescendo of energy.

If audience reaction is any indication, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of Broad City are next in line to be Dane Cook-style comedy rock stars. After a flight cancellation grounded them on Saturday, they finally hit the stage on Sunday with a half-baked, nearly half-hour bit about songs to score your life (e.g., Papa Roach for hair removal). It lacked the sharpness of their cult hit Comedy Central sitcom, but their personalities were so infectious that they still had the crowd in the palm of their hands.

The Channel Orange singer packed the Other Tent with thousands of disciples who joined Ocean in singing every single lyric to every single song. The only people who didn't know all the words were those who didn't get the mass text message informing them that Skrillex's Superjam had been moved from the Other Tent to That Tent. Even "Crack Rock," a track about social injustice, took on a campfire feel. When the crowd finally did stop singing along — during the last third of his opus "Pyramids" — he abruptly stopped the song and demanded the crowd sing along, then restarted the section with audience participation.

Her new reggae-rock arrangements may not please everyone (and the whole 27-minutes late thing never stops being annoying), but when Ms. Lauryn Hill goes into one of the raps from her classic days — like "Lost Ones" or "Final Hour" — she hits them running like Twista, pushing herself to lightning speeds. In the process it reminds everyone that before she was a reclusive genius eccentric song-writer, she was one of the most valuable lyricists in hip-hop.

Kaskade's late, late Saturday night set was enough to make everyone forget that Daft Punk keeps turning down festival invites: Their dual-level LCD screens, smoke and confetti machines and amazing laser works were every bit the eye candy as the French duo's storied pyramid. At 4 a.m., when the DJ dropped an EDM rendition of Foo Fighters' "Best of You," the glow sticks were still flying in the night sky.

Yes, you can purchase a "bacon flight" at Baconland  — that's applewood smoked, hickory smoked, peppered and sugar-cured bacon from five different states. But no one goes ham like the Sparseland collective, who cooked two pigs inside of this flame-shooting steampunk mecha-piggy. "They were torturing us with their bacon this morning," says collective member Scott about the smells coming from nearby Baconland. "So we're going to torture them with our pig."

The only place tougher to endure than a hot Bonnaroo Port-a-Potty was the pit at the Danny Brown show. Those kids crowd-surfing to the stage weren't thrill seekers; they were people just looking for an exit out of the suffocating, impenetrable human wall that had formed as the crowd anticipated the rapper's arrival. The pit for the Danny Brown set was easily the rowdiest, craziest, most aggressive of the whole weekend, and it was emblematic of the bro-ification of the Bonnaroo demographic. The Widespread Panic-loving hippies that graced the festival in its early days are in the minority as tank-topped dudes acting wild because the semester just ended now dominate. However, Brown's performance was awesome enough to satisfy the boisterous crowd.

"I've never played a gig like this in America, it's a dream come true," Damon Albarn told the What Stage crowd during his midday set. Although Albarn is the frontman of two wildly successful bands — Blur and Gorillaz — he'd never performed a U.S. solo show of this magnitude, so he brought a little help with him. Like Jack White later that night, working as a solo entity allowed Albarn to roam his entire catalog, so when the time arrived to perform Gorillaz' "Feel Good Inc.," De La Soul came running out onstage. Del the Funky Homosapien reprised his role on "Clint Eastwood" and a brass ensemble and a vocal group came onstage for "Broken." That's all in addition to Albarn's new backing band the Heavy Seas, who helped sharpen the Blur material and even busted out "Kingdom of Doom" from Albarn's the Good, the Bad, and the Queen side project.

He's pushing 50, his stage movements are mostly walking around and clapping and his stage banter is "Hello" or "Hey, hey, hey!" Still, the crowd treated Syrian dabke singer Omar Souleyman like a hot superstar DJ. Well, obviously he makes dance music, but his trebly, winding keyboard lines aren't exactly the powerful bass drops coming from Skrillex. At Bonnaroo, Souleyman's performance was full of all the fun and chaos of a great EDM set — flags, beach balls, a guy in a Gumby suit, inflatable lobsters, thrown water and even a few crowd surfers.

Living in the future is pretty cool.

In what has to be the first black metal set at Roo (though that "black metal" is in quotation marks), Deafheaven brought a unique level of extreme to the weekend. Live, they're best thought of as four shoegaze/mathrock/art-metal sound-sculptors (yeah, that includes vocalist George Clarke's precise screeches too), all anchored by sinewy drummer Daniel Tracy. Together they're a wash of triumphant, majestic noise over a high-volume, high-speed throb that could probably sooth any aching muscles close enough to the speakers. Clarke responded to the gush of sound with a gentle crowd surf and an evocative stage ballet that was once theatrical, intense, sensitive, and a little humorless — an metal combo of Bono, Rollins and Morrissey.

Basketball fans lined up for hours outside the Cinema Tent to watch Game 4 of the NBA Finals. As the hordes of San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat fans filled the auditorium, the room took on an almost soccer-arena atmosphere as chants of "Let's Go Spurs" and the Heat's interpolation of "Seven Nation Army" were volleyed back and forth. At tip-off, the air-conditioned area was completely packed, but by the time the Heat entered halftime down 20, Spurs fans had conquered the Cinema Tent like it was the Alamo, driving their opponents back out into the festival.

The ArchAndroid singer sure knows how to make a cinematic entrance. After her band took their places to the sounds of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Monae was wheeled onto the stage Hannibal Lecter-style, wearing a straitjacket. When she was finally freed, she showed her charisma and personality was big enough to fill the main stage, captivating the audience with hits "Tightrope," "Cold War" and "Electric Lady."

With two songs, Neutral Milk Hotel turned the This Tent into a screening of The Fault in Our Stars. The devastating combo of "Ferris Wheel on Fire" and "Oh Comely" — two poignant, beautiful tunes about destruction and atrocity — had tears pooling in festivalgoers' eyes. For many, it was an emotionally overwhelming moment to see the near-mythical Jeff Mangum — now with a long gray beard but the same unmistakable voice — and his merry henchmen perform these 16-year-old songs live, a possibility that seemed implausible just a few years ago.

We'd potty train 'em but we'd imagine they poop Skittles

"It's time to get ratchet. Feel free to mosh pit." For his debut Bonnaroo gig, A$AP Ferg pulled out all the elements of a good rock show: Crowd surfing, mosh pitting, stage diving. There was even some Girls Gone Wild-style debacuhery during an interlude where Ferg and his hypeman brought female audience members onstage to flash the crowd. To Ferg's frustration, none of them did. 

"This is my first festival in America, I didn't think anyone would show up," Sam Smith told a crowd that was uncomfortably packed with Bonnaroovians, a rarity for any 2 p.m. slot. This concert served as an album release party for Smith: His debut LP In the Lonely Hour finally arrives in the U.S. on June 17th. Highlights from the set included the single "Money On My Mind," Smith's Naughty Boy hit "La La La," and a cover of Arctic Monkeys' "Do I Wanna Know."

Zedd's blinking, bursting lights looked great from the clear across the festival and looked even better close up. Though he usually makes the kind of house music robot would fight to, it was his gentle hit "Clarity" that provided a peak before his set's final minutes.

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If 73-year-old blues funkateer Bobby Rush doesn't get a full Syl Johnson-style renaissance in 2014, someone is dropping the ball. In Take Me to the River, a film where Tennessee and Delta legends explore what narrator Terrance Blanchard calls the "integrated music utopia" of Memphis and pioneers are teamed with contemporary talent, he collaborates with a geeked Frayser Boy, Yo Gotti is sprung on Bobby "Blue" Bland and Skip Pitts spends studio time with Snoop.

At Bonnaroo the film came to life with a performance by a 13-piece band (including Bar-Kays trumpet player Ben Cauley, the only survivor of the plane crash that killed Otis Redding) that blasted through nearly 50 years of Southern music history as one revue. Stax hitmaker William Bell brought stunning theatricality and dynamics to his 1968 smash "I Forgot to be Your Lover" and Al Kapone used the same band to tear through 2005 get-buck anthem "Whoop That Trick." Rush and Frayser made a great team on Rufus Thomas' "Push and Pull," but none of this monster band's power could match Rush's solo harmonica blues rendition of "Garbage Man" — at once gorgeous, deep, moving and hilarious.

The SNL freshman has some serious stand-up and improv chops. After his hellos, he leapt into a short anecdote: "7.5 hours ago … at that festival … a man's ponytail touched my mouth … So that's what I've been thinking about." 

Sound-art duo Darkside treated nighthawks to a beautifully doomy set of not-especially-deep bass tones, artificial bursts of synth and ricocheting guitar. House music by the loosest definition (more like "darkwave jazz"), the duo pulsed into the night with serious venetian-blind creep-out vibes while many Rooers were snuggling in their sleeping bags. The mood was enhanced by smoke and mirrors — literally, as their eclipse-centric stage set-up was little more than the interplay between smoke machines (at the back of the tent), a rotating mirror and some beams of light.

The brand new Kalliope Stage wasn't anything fancy — just a large LCD screen, some speakers and a DJ booth — but it was major addition to a festival that keeps improving. Every day during the fest, thousands of soccer fans, a population too big to fit in the still-too-small Cinema Tent, would congregate in the field surrounding the Kalliope to watch World Cup games on the giant screen. When the day's matches ended, the screen would broadcast random sporting events — we caught a Mets game — until sundown. That's when the Kalliope Stage transformed into a hot dance club with DJs pumping out EDM and hip-hop until 4 a.m.

Let's be honest: The Shins, although great in the studio, were notoriously lousy in a live setting. With Broken Bells, James Mercer has redeemed himself. Guided by Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton on bass, Broken Bells perform with a self-confidence and meticulousness that eluded Mercer's other band.

Folk troubadour Cass McCombs provided some much-needed alt-country to the Tennessee crowd, bringout out a lap steel guitar and some intense six-string interplay. McCombs played the type of music we wish Wilco still made, including a beautiful rendition of "County Line."

Eager to get their midnight set at the That Tent going, White Denim started 10 minutes before scheduled. They made the most of that extra time as the Austin indie rockers jammed out their usually condensed songs. In the crowd, an exorbitant number of gray hairs filled the air with weed smoke, which makes sense, since White Denim play the type of music old dudes like to get stoned to: Bluesy grooves that lay the foundations for Phishy guitar solos and vocal melodies that sound like Jack White checking into the Mars Hotel.

Hours before the Flaming Lips performed to tens of thousands of festivalgoers, frontman Wayne Coyne sat down for an interview at the Solar Stage with just a few hundred fans. The topic of the conversation was "Social Change Through Music," so Coyne discussed his work with helping homeless dogs in Oklahoma City and Amnesty International. Coyne is one of the most loquacious dudes in rock, so the topic often veered into unexpected areas, like Coyne's love of Barack Obama and why he considers R.E.M. to be punk rock. Coyne also revealed that the Lips' Sgt. Pepper's cover album should be finished by October, and that some proceeds from the release would go to causes that he supports.

North Carolina old-time folk historians Carolina Chocolate Drops stopped by the Solar Stage to break down the weighty history behind their songs and talk about breathing new life into old compositions. One of the best ways they do the latter is by playing the bones, the clicking clacking castanet-like wooden sticks that helped power folk musics of America, Ireland and Canada. Their triplet rhythms couldn't be further removed from contemporary dance music around Bonnaroo — to the point where this old instrument sounded weirdly fresh. 

Before the Allah-Las hit the stage, they had their work cut out for them: The "Hey Ya" sing-along broke out during the pre-set music a somber reminder Bonnaroo is probably the only music festival that the reunited Outkast didn't attend. The Los Angeles rockers quickly overcame this with their brand of psychedelic garage by way of the Modern Lovers — deep bass grooves, rich distortion and messy harmonies. Sound problems plagued the early portion of the set, creating a sunny, reverbed stew.

People would lay under it and teamwork would do the rest. Just like gym class without the fear of dodgeball day looming on the horizon.

You could sense tension in the air as security streamed into Miller Lite's cozy, cramped New Music on Tap Lounge, bracing for what frantic shred-metallers Animals as Leaders were about to unleash with 20 fingers on 16 strings. However, their set ended up being more like a crunchy, gnashing jazz-fusion record arranged for distortion pedals. The crowd in the packed house mostly headbanged politely, watched in awe or went for a quick crowd-surf in a banana costume. 

Ottawa's A Tribe Called Red are "an all First Nation DJ crew" that "remix traditional pow wow music with contemporary club sounds." Their live show works as the funkiest socio-political experiment around, exploring European relationships with Native American culture … in real time. When they drop the problematic Atlanta Braves "tomahawk chop" into a song, are you supposed to dance or riot? When white people appropriating headdresses stop by to dance, do you lecture them or simply gawk at their ignorance?

This bluesy singer-songwriter gave the festival its first "passersby stopping in their tracks" moment Thursday when she shared her bouncy, acoustic rendition of Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home" on an unsuspecting crowd.

The plainness of the New Jersey indie rockers — their software engineer style with the wire glasses and the polo-and-khakis combo — was popular among thousands of Bonnaroovians, so much so that even our photographer was tricked into believing that the fellows posed here actually were the Atlas crew.

This Australia quintet were given the unenviable position of That Stage's Welcome Mat slot — a 3 p.m. Thursday gig when the majority of festivalgoers were still stuck on Highway 24 — but lead singer Isabella Manfredi immediately won the crowd over with her dream pop arrangements. The performance also showed how amped Bonnaroovians were for the World Cup: Drummer Luke Davison's USA shirt elicited chants from the crowd.

Just passing by the Silent Disco, you could tell what DJ Logic was spinning by what the raucous crowd would be singing, in unison, into the air — the hooks to "ABC," "Gold Digger," "Rapper's Delight" and "Mo Money Mo Problems." Though he's known for downtempo beats and jazz-scratch excursions, nothing was going to keep DJ Logic from playing the hits. Once we actually got our headphones on, you could hear that he was blazing through all of them with deft cutting — DJ sets are a dime a dozen at every festival, so how rare is it to hear actual scratching in a mix set?