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Over the past few hours I’ve been contemplating the best way to do a review of Bonnaroo. It’s almost impossible to convey all of the sights and sounds I took in over the past 4 days. Music echoed in my ears for 10-15 hours each day starting last Thursday evening and continued on through Sunday night. Bonnaroo is the mammoth feast that even the most starving music fan cannot take in completely. There is simply not enough time to do everything you’d like to do. It’s impossible. Yet every year I set myself up to go see a hectic music schedule and try to stick to it.

[Phish on Sunday]

Sometimes, that’s not the best laid plan for the ‘Roo. Everyone’s experience is different. It depends on everything: where you’re camped, who you’re with, what time you came in, the weather forecast and who you’re actually excited to see. Never the less, here is my attempt to summarize my musical feast.

THURSDAY – Car Carrier Blues

After a rain storm in the morning, gas-filling and car-packing I made my annual trip down to Manchester for Bonnaroo 2009. It took me a while to get setup but after meeting up with some friends I finally made my trek down to Centeroo in time for People Under the Stairs. They were a great way to start out the festival right – their hip-hop performance got everyone up, moving, and most importantly celebrating the kick-off of a kick-ass music weekend.

READ ON for more of Jennifer Kirk’s Bonnaroo 2009 review…

With most eyes of the music world on ‘roo hullabaloo and all of its showy splendor, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which takes place this weekend June 18-21, has quietly assembled one of the most electric lineups of the summer. As we can all attest, festival functionality tends to improve with age, so Telluride in its 36th year looks like it should be one of the best yet.

In addition to bluegrass stalwarts like Jerry Douglas (in his 25th fest!), Bela Fleck, Peter Rowan, Tim O’Brien, Sam Bush, Yonder Mountain Strong Band, and Railroad Earth, this year’s festival continues the recent trend of expanding the crossover fan appeal with a handful of huge draws including David Byrne, Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band, Elvis Costello & the Sugarcanes, Emmylou Harris and Jenny Lewis. Finally, to round out a great lineup, there are some newer swashbucklers in the bluegrass scene like the Punch Brothers featuring former child prodigy, Chris Thile – of Nickel Creek fame, Greensky Bluegrass, and one of my personal favorites, Irish music pickers, Gaelic Storm. Not bad for a festival with a maximum capacity of 10,000 fans nestled beneath a waterfall at the foot of the gorgeous Rocky Mountains, eh?

We’ve included a sampler playlist to get you in the spirit. Click here to download or just login to imeem and listen away. Also, see below for the complete TBF schedule.

READ ON for the schedule for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival…

Shot on 06/13/2009 @ The Verizon Center in Washington D.C. Little Wing – Clapton / Winwood

The Phish reunion tour moves on to St. Louis for one of the smallest American gigs in quite some time at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis. HT Executive

Aerosmith – Unplugged: The Full Show [MP3s] In 1990, Aerosmith performed in front of an intimate audience as part of MTV’s Unplugged series of acoustic performances. The band had been

Welcome to the final installment of the second season of Randy Ray’s stellar Hidden Flick column which clues you in on films that may have slipped past your radar. But don’t fret, season three kicks off on August 4 and we’ll feature the best of season two every other Tuesday until season three begins. Here’s a Special Edition of Hidden Flick to close the season properly…

It was an old amphitheatre that was going to be torn down and replaced with…well, the owner just couldn’t say. “I had a few offers to do something with the place, but I couldn’t part with her. She’s special,” said…well, the owner just prefers to remain anonymous, almost like the Stranger, aka the Cowboy Narrator, played by Sam Elliott, in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. “Sarsaparilla for all my friends,” as Elliott channels Barfly’s Mickey Rourke in another cinematic dimension.

He seemed to get misty eyed when he spoke of how long he had owned the tiny outdoor venue—it had been used for concerts by no name acts for years, with seats up front, and then a lawn which stretched out far and wide in the back, all leading up to a lot where patrons could park, walk through the entrance booth, and go find a seat, a seat on this night, not to catch a concert, or hear any music whatsoever from any band, but to see a series of films in what is now known as “my little Hidden Theatre at the end of the road,” according to the owner, a gracious chap on this refreshingly mild pre-summer eve. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

In Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads’ magnificent 1984 concert film, you don’t see a lingering shot of the audience until the film’s final song, Crosseyed and Painless. Until this final climactic guitar workout, the audience is purposefully kept hidden — David Byrne and director Jonathan Demme did it so the film-viewing audience could form their own opinion of the show, uninfluenced by crowd reaction. When you finally do see the crowd, they’re all dancing uncontrollably, seemingly enthralled by the performance.

[Photos of David Byrne at Bonnaroo by Dave Vann]

It’s somewhat fitting then, that at Byrne’s June 6 performance at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., it took that very song — 11 songs into the 2-hour set — to finally get the typically reserved Wolf Trap crowd up and out of their seats. Maybe it’s understandable; it was the first real Heads heavy hitter in a set which — to that point — was dominant on Byrne’s other work. Perhaps it’s simple irony; just as Stop Making Sense’s Crosseyed and Painless gives visual evidence to Byrne’s power over an audience, the song still does the same thing 25 years later.

And it was the Talking Heads songs that proved most effective and garnered the biggest reactions from the crowd all night (despite Byrne never uttering the band’s name). Byrne smartly tailored his show as a back-heavy affair: after Crosseyed, he played seven Talking Heads songs, making it 11 out of 20 for the night. But where Byrne in the past had played Talking Heads songs with his various solo bands as re-arranged and re-imagined pieces (Example: a slowing down of This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)), here Byrne and his band largely stuck to the originally Byrne/Eno arrangements.

READ ON for more of Rudi’s thoughts on the David Byrne show…