IS BONNAROO THE NEXT NASCAR?

by Jonah "Ticklebass" Ansell, photography by Julie Elders

When your Rivalfish boys heard that Major League Baseball was sponsoring a tent at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival this past weekend, we knew we had to make the trip from Chicago to Tennessee. While other sports outlets were busy covering some of the more traditional big-time sporting events, for you laymen, we'll call these events the NBA Finals, Stanley Cup and World Cup, we decided it was time to take a Hunter S. Thompson plunge to visit our nation's modern day Woodstock. The musical acts included Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Phil Lesh, Bela Fleck, Cypress Hill, Blackalicious, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and many, MANY more. We'd dive into the seemingly meaningless, and hopefully, with a little luck, and a lot of hallucinogens, find something meaningful.

After all, with 6,500,000 sports bloggers watching ABC, reading ESPN.com, copying and pasting a picture from Google Images, stealing a video from YouTube, and then penning six-lines of snarky, regurgitated wit and then telling mom and dad that despite their $26,000 a year office job that they're actually making it as a "writer," we knew we couldn't just join the fray.

So we rented a 30-foot barn hoss of an RV and headed down to a 700 acre farm in Manchester, TN to find out exactly, why was Major League Baseball trying to market to hippies? And as a former college baseball player turned music lover, all the stars seemed to align for our momentous journey.

Bonnaroo began five years ago as a grass-roots jam-band festival but has since grown to become North 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. Listen up potheads, it's not 1969 anymore, and corporate America knows how to mobilize when given an opportunity to reach 80,000 "like-minded consumers." Aside from Major League Baseball, AT&T, Budweiser, Volkswagon, Cisco, Dolby, Napster, XBox, Tower Records and others all stuck a corporate spoon into the opportunistic creme brulee of Bonnaroo.

But that is why Bonnaroo impressed so much. The corporations didn't intrude and the identity-seeking 19-year-old butterfly wing wearing hippies didn't annoy. Perhaps it's simply because RedBull (who thankfully wasn't a sponsor) didn't go so far to brand those wings.


Not to get all McLean-Virginia-carpooling-mother-of-three on y'all, but as a lifelong Cub fan who knows how abrasive hundreds of fellow bleacher bums can get after a few beers in the hot Chicago sun, it was invigorating and refreshing to see 80,000+ people living and camping for days underneath a 90+ degree ball of home-grown Tennessee fire, upholding nothing but good vibes and friendly banter. If only our modern sewage systems could support this way of life for more than a 4-day period, I'd be the first to drop all things zero-sum and start oiling my Wilson A2000 with Patchouli.

We Rivalfish boys took a "when in Rome" approach to the weekend. And because we weren't there to mock, we were able to appreciate some of the startling similarities between sports fandom and music fandom. Is it just me, or is the sea of cars and RVs of the Bonnaroo experience not too far from the NASCAR experience? Could hippies and hicks be onto something that us Chicago-city-boys just don't grasp? By dropping all preconceived notions, we were able to better understand not only the scene, but ourselves. Or so declares the psilocybin that may still be piping through my bloodstream.

With Tello Real at my side as we took some hacks at the MLB Authentic Collection's batting cages, hacks that certainly would've been more potent a few years back, before our muscles descended into their awkward mid-20s stage where they look like a Jello mold that hasn't spent quite enough time in the fridge, we realized that Bonnaroo offered many oracles who might be able to give us guidance.

The Daily Show's Lewis Black and a barrage of half-named comedians you've seen randomly on Comedy Central at 9:30 pm on Friday nights only because you're not as popular as you think, were performing in Yet Another Comedy Tent. We had a chance to meet up with Lewis at a press conference to get his insight on the prevalence of steroids and lack of Jews in major league baseball. Drugs were on the mind because Bonnaroo featured dozens of Victor Contes roaming the dirt paths, offering partygoers four hours of 73-home-run-like-mind-fucks, guaranteed to catapult your cerebellum into McCovey's Cove.

"You came to a rock festival in the middle of Tennessee to ask me why there aren't Jews in baseball?" Black cried out, with his angry, ranting, Jewish persona enveloping the entire room.

"Absolutely," Rivalfish Editor Tello Real replied, with Leslie Nielsen deadpan.

Black's long-winded response taught us that "Jews aren't good at anything," which made me question the Bar Mitzvah certificate of completion given to me by the sisterhood at B'Nai Abraham Zion, but didn't help answer one of life's bigger questions. Why was Major League Baseball trying to reach these music fans? Was Bonnaroo the next NASCAR and were free-loving hippies and hipsters the next pond of fiercely loyal consumers, waiting to be snagged by a shrewd Madison Avenue fisherman and an eco-friendly lure?

To understand what the corporations are trying to prey upon and why they are so effective when they find the right pond (An astounding 72% of NASCAR fans buy sponsor products, whereas brand loyalty in the other major sports is only 34%), we must first understand what it is that one truly seeks by being a fan. What is a fan looking to get out of the experience? A fan of anything, not just a fan within the rigid categories of sports and music -- which have overlapped, often not for the better in recent years.

So, in the true Derek Zoolander intonation of asking "Who Am I?" let me ask, "What is a fan?"

The literate folk over at Dictionary.com define a fan as: an ardent supporter, a devotee.

But that "definition" leads my relatively newfound stoner ass (thanks Bonnaroo) to more questions. A supporter of what? The team? I'm a supporter of the Chicago Cubs, but they're shitting the bed this year. I'm not a fair-weather fan, but there is simply no short-term return on supporting a loser.

Ok, so it's more than just the team.

Is it because I need to feel part of a larger group?

Maybe, because the unbridled, infectious energy in Wrigley Field when Derrek Lee drops a lead changing bomb onto Waveland in the bottom of the 7th inning and puts the Cubs ahead of the Cards is the exact moment that baseball was made for. 40,000 fans kinetically bouncing like bullets in a Christian Conservative's vision of a South Central, LA gunfight. Those are the moments I live for as a fan, they make all the bad, good, all the wrong, right, and all differences are temporarily forever forgotton, and for that minute and a half when I'm still high-fiving random people, six rows away from me, I get a glimpse of the infinite.

But as a Cub fan, those blasts are few and far between.

And it truly blows to walk around Wrigleyville in my Cubs hat and be automatically perceived by an outsider as part of the choad-fest that is every Holsum white bread Big Ten-graduated, striped-shirt wearing, bar-hopping foursome. You know these guys -- in high school, they chased underclassman virginal poon a lot harder than we did, and now, they'll settle for lightly treaded poon, as long as it sits beneath a Forever 21 halter and dyed blonde locks.

So it's not about feeling like part of that larger group, because for 99.9% of the time, I resent every bit of that group. Those are the bastards that I fruitlessly warned my little sister about. Which reminds me to tell all you readers to NEVER CHECK YOUR LITTLE SISTER'S SPRING BREAK PICS, NO MATTER HOW CHEERFUL OR INVITING HER AOL IM AWAY MESSAGE!

Is it about projecting yourself onto the field or onto the stage and transporting yourself into the body of the leader, the performer? Is it you leaving the confines of your own body, you know, the one that breathes heavily after two flights of stairs, to literally become Kirk Gibson in game 1 of the 1988 World Series and having those thousands of fans cheer for YOU? Is this why we watch great highlights b/c each time we watch Michael Jordan drop that game-winner over Craig Ehlo, we BECOME Jordan?

I think I'm on to something here, but the reality is, I'm still on something, sold from that Victor Conte impersonator with that nifty backpack. Plus, if sobriety can't eventually ground me, Lewis Black's take on Jews in sports will. And despite the fact that my grandmother once called me the next Sandy Koufax, my average height, average weight, average looks, shot rotator cuff and long-winded writing style is my own sad attempt at distinguishing myself from the thousands of regurgitating bloggers.

I've failed to answer the simple question that I've set out to answer: What is a fan? That may be a bleak forecast for Rivalfish's fall line of rivalry T-shirt sales, a classy way of saying 'your team sucks' for all you in the market for a bad ass Urban Outfittersesque sports tee, but perhaps it's good that I cannot put a finger on that simple yet elusive question.

From Derrek Lee to Kirk Gibson to Michael Jordan, to four days of great music down in the heart of Tennessee, being part of these timeless experiences is to access a gateway to the infinite. The best MLB hitters fail seven out of ten times. When Bela Fleck picks up his banjo, the return rate is much higher.

With my Cubs sitting just one rung out of the NL Central cellar and Roger Clemens making his return to Major League Baseball this evening, perhaps I now know just why MLB and all the other Madison Avenue types had a presence at this year's Bonnaroo. It's the only non zero-sum game in town where you can always win.