Some people don’t like hippies

According to one webzine’s coverage of Bonnaroo last year (the site is rivalfish.com, from which we borrowed the picture of winged dancers--all the other pictures here are from today!), the festival is “America's biggest, most impressive, most eclectic gathering of hippies, hipsters, former frat boys, former sorority girls, former Deadheads, backpack clad drug dealers, and as of 2006, some of our nation's most notable corporations.”

But just saying the word “hippy” causes all kinds of knee-jerk reactions. In fact, an entire sub-genre of Bonnaroo Inc.’s media and public relations should be devoted to dealing with the hippy question. Why has a word once associated with enlightened, laid-back, and loving attitudes suddenly become such a catch-all curse, an-all-purpose pejorative pruned for permanent patchouli-bashing?

Also in 2006, an entire blog (thesequitur.com) focused on the “Daily Dirty Hippie Update,” complete with such brilliantly analytical statements such as: “not only are hippies dirty, but they are stupid too.” Then, when the Nashville Rage published a Bonnaroo preview last week, the whole project seemed fueled by a passionate desire to bust the Bonnaroo myth-makers. So, in a talking-points fashion, they went-a-debunking:

MYTH: Bonnaroo is only for people who wear their hair in dreadlocks, don't bathe, take in strays off the side of the road, make their clothes out of hemp and travel crosscountry in Volkswagen bus caravans.

MYTHBUSTER: Bonnaroo is for anyone anywhere who likes music. It regularly attracts more than 80,000 music fans from across the world of every color, age and ethnicity.

Now, while I genuinely appreciate the Rage for all they do to keep the other Nashville weekly (known Hippie-phobes who have reported a deep allergy to natural human body odor and drum circles) from owning the audience, the “mythbusting” mission did not deal with the core issue. Why do people love to hate hippies? What’s the big deal? Amazingly, the hippies are feeling the heat and may even suggest that they are marginalized and oppressed in their own jamtastic utopia.

A young Deadhead asked on one of the Bonnaroo message boards whether the festival was still “Dead-friendly,” bemoaning, among other things, the non-headline status of Bob Weir and Ratdog. As a post-Dead closet-Deadhead friend-of-Jerry for whom indy-rock is a much more relevant passion, I wish the jammie scene would take off the blinders and realize how something like Bonnaroo encompasses everything it needs and so much more it wants to discover.

Last year when the Dresden Dolls played an impeccable cover of “White Rabbit,” we “got it” without needing to download a primer on smashing stereotypes and breathing the eclectic that the Bonnaroo programmers brag about.

Don’t we know it’s about time that the notions of “jam” and “psychedelic” and other such labeling limits need to crack the code of convergence that popular music has achieved in the space odyssey that is the twenty-first century? If Jeff Tweedy and Wilco or Jim James and My Morning Jacket or Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips have anything to do with it, we should be able to lay these desperately dumb dichotomies into the Clean Vibes refuse pile once and for all.

I have my own hippy issues. We know it’s a predictable and cheesy song to lay into the mix, but the only theme song for the pre-Roo week that’s not from a current record by a band on the 2007 bill was the classic “Tennessee Jed” by the Grateful Dead—from the Live Europe 72 record.

Having my inner punk and indy-rock-snob beat the living crap out of my inner hippy for the last twenty-odd years has not stopped me becoming again the love-child that I am: arm-waving, patchouli-soaked, convulsively-grooving-as-barefoot-and-shiny-happy as some might predict to see at Bonnaroo.

It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love!! In honor of all the acid that your parents and grandparents ate that year, can we finally and fundamentally lay this debate to rest?

Instead of arguing about who hates hippies the most (even as these same anti-hippy dogmatics enjoy all kinds of hippy pastimes—not just the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll), let’s find a new Bonnaroo hobby. One I discovered today is inventing a new deity, based on one of my camping companions outfits. Our new God is Jallah, a hybrid patriarch who is equal parts Jah, Allah, and Jello Biafra.

Out with the old god and in with the new god. Now who has my goddamn stash?