Bonnaroo 2-Thousand & 2-An email tranmission Alley Whipple 06.25.02-Manchester, TN

Hey Jethro, First of all, I sincerely apologize for my flakiness concerning e- mail and other methods of communication… it’s definitely not that I hate you and in fact, I’m not really that “comfortable with my present situation,” quite often, because I’m stuck contemplating ideas that no one else really wants to think about or discuss…except, maybe my dad…and probably people like you and Gordon… which is why, as I said in Ashtabula, I wish I lived in the same city with you guys so we could contemplate and discuss things all the time…

I just got back from Bonnaroo, a music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, featuring various jam bands/hippie music- Moe, Trey, Phil Lesh, String Cheese, Widespread, Bela Fleck, Soulive, Kellar Williams, etc. etc. etc…. Anyway, the music was really awesome for those that like that sort of music… I don’t know if you do or not, but I do, except that I enjoy the music on the premise of listening to talented artists, rather than being someone who is passionate about the music to an almost absurd degree, where their groupie behavior borders upon bowing down to the artists as if they were god-like idols……

We camped out for 4 nights amongst 75,000 of the dirtiest hippies I’ve ever seen… but an unspoken law was that we were not allowed to complain about the extreme crowdedness of the event because as hippies, we were expected to embrace the togetherness of the thousands of souls (bums) coming together to celebrate the music… and it was so hot that all we could do to keep from fainting was to go to the sinks next to the foul-smelling port-o-potties, and douse our entire bodies with water, but the experience of going to get water almost reminded me of being in a concentration camp, where we’re all desperately struggling for survival, having waited in line only to step up to the sink and realize that your feet have sunk so deep in the mud that you can hardly get unstuck…. and the port-o-potties, occasionally, you might find one with toilet paper, but generally you’d have to walk a long distance to find one like that or even to find one that wasn’t overflowing with shit, as most of them were, not because the toilets had simply overflown on their own, but because the dirty hippies had shat in them until the crap had piled so high above toilet seat that it would be impossible for anyone else to even enter without immediately throwing up from the odor…. Sorry to be so graphic, but I wanted to give you a feel for the experience…and I’m glad I had the experience, despite the inconviences of camping with 75,000 people and despite the shit/crap… but, it also made me realize that there is a reason why these sorts of festivals only last for a few days because in truth, even if no one is willing to admit it, we couldn’t survive like that forever…we’d turn into “Lord of the Flies,” and thus, the hippie mentallity of “lovin’ your brother” would go out the window… maybe, we’d all stop pretending to ‘nice’ and begin being ‘real’…

The most valuable lesson of my experience: Just as I’ve always known that Communism is ideal, but unrealistic, I’ve realized that Hippism is also ideal, but also unrealistic…. Do you know what I mean? I couldn’t possibly have discussed any of these issues with anyone there because I would have surely been shunned from the entire community…because in protecting the ‘ideals’ of hippism, hippies seem to be almost as brainwashed and products of conspirational thought as communists in the Soviet Union were about maintaining isolation from the rest of the world… You, yourself, may be a hippie, but I certainly know that you’re not brainwashed and I suspect you might have some insight concerning the matter…

-Alley