“It’s Just You, God, & Bonnaroo”: Wisdom from the Experience of Clean & Soberoo

In the epic rockumenary simply called Woodstock, one of my favorite scenes comes from the yoga class. At Bonnaroo, I work in Planet Roo and witness the wonders of people doing their morning yoga each year, so whenever I watch this sequence in that movie, it takes me to those warm sunny memories. But yoga class teachings give me something else entirely to ponder that’s central to my love for Bonnaroo and life in general today, and it is true of yoga but true of still so much more than that.

The teacher makes an audacious claim that practitioners of breathwork and stretching and meditation and all that makes yoga practical and meaningful will “get high” off that experience, a high that the Woodstock instructor suggests would rival any high produced by the drugs popular among the youth countercultures. We now address the possibility that this is true, that such a natural high is entirely possible, not just in 1969, but in the 21^st century as well—and not just for yogis but for recovering addicts and alcoholics too.

Having completed four Bonnaroo music festivals as a clean and sober fan (with three before that “still out there”)—“getting high” from music, dancing, friendship, hard work, good food, and exercise, but not from drugs or alcohol—gives me gratitude and the desire to pause and reflect on some of the ingredients that make this incredible “natural high” experience possible, even easy, not just at Bonnaroo, but every day of the year. I’m not talking about a buzz but something broader and more beautiful. The sober euphoria shows up less suddenly, more gentle and subtle, without the comedown and with fewer jags of nausea and regret.

Tunneling back on life’s timeline, I remember the runner’s high achieved after competing in track and cross country. I remember the mountaintop experience given by God at the church summer camp. But I also recall when I got high on something I could put in my body, as with the epic parameters of my first drunk or my first “trip” on psychedelic substances.

Around the age of 20 in the late 1980s, life pulled in all directions: art and activism, sexuality and spirituality. But for a time, the charming and cascading colors of the counterculture captured me, and I slipped, without quite noticing it, into the lifestyle of a full-blown addict and alcoholic. So simply, what Theodore Roszak calls the “counterfeit infinity” of drug-induced mysticism provides a quick-and-easy but ultimately painful and pricey path. But at the time “one of us” discovers the alcohol and drug high, it works and works well. For me, it worked for about 20 years.

Given the progressive nature of our disease, I’d reached a period of pretty dark debauchery by the time of my first Bonnaroo in 2006. On the last morning of the festival, I hiked to the outer reaches of the dusty campgrounds in search of a strong and dirty Bloody Mary for breakfast. With a good morning buzz blistering my brain, I put on a white suit, headed to Centeroo, and convinced some friends to pass me the microphone for the Solar Stage where I preached a Sunday sermon about the glory of sin, of the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. My addictions weren’t just recreational—they were religious in nature. What may have resembled creative rebellion on the outside tumbled towards demonic possession on the inside.

At the Roo of 2007, I danced drunk, pranced drunk, stupidly ran drunk, and finally tripped, flew, and fell drunk onto a massive metal circus tent stake. After the all too compassionate crew at the medical tent said the bruise was really bad but not so bad that I had to leave the festival, I proceeded to get even drunker with the added placation of pain pills. In 2008, we ended up next to a brewery in guest camping, a brewery that had an open tap for the entire festival. Any pretenses I may have had for a moderate Roo that year were lost. Granted through all this, I thought I was having fun. I managed to stay sober enough to work. The music made me cry, but I thought they were tears of joy and gratitude. Yet in the middle of a rain-soaked Saturday morning Jacket set, I got lost inside my head, in part drawn inward by other substances. I didn’t like what I saw. My conscience confronted confusion and regret and personal demons demanding more.

Like some other playgrounds, like another festival where I finally had my “bottom” or a particular bar walking distance from my work, I could have left the music festival scene behind, beginning with Bonnaroo 2009. But with responsibility to help manage a crew, with folks depending on me, with then vague knowledge of the sober support available at the festival, I decided to go back.

In early June 2009, I went to Bonnaroo with 40 days free of alcohol. I felt as “spiritually fit” as I could be with so little time. For the first several weeks of my ride on the wagon, I immersed myself in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and was reading voraciously the literature of recovery. On a brief trip back to Michigan to see my parents, I picked up a 30-day chip at a morning meeting I’ve dubbed my “home away from home group.” It wasn’t just a chip, though, for the chair that day dug into the back room of the clubhouse to find an intricate and heavy and possibly antique one-month medallion.

Still learning about my disease, I’d been taking an undecided, wait-and-see attitude towards some other substances, such as marijuana and mushrooms. But at Bonnaroo, although alcohol-free apart from one accidental sip in camp from someone else’s cup, I indulged in the others. Just two days into it, I sensed something empty and sickly superficial about mushroom maintenance. On Sunday at noon, I found my way to the table with the yellow balloons, then to the meeting in the circle in the field behind a smoothie stand.

As I sat grateful and listened to the shares, my heart swelled and sank. I sensed something special in what I heard, something that I wanted. Some of these people came from NA, identified as much as addicts as alcoholics. As I heard their stories, a catastrophic “Duh” kicked me in the guts and kicked my brain into gear. “These people don’t do drugs,” I realized. “They are sober from everything and for everything. Sobriety for them is not just not drinking, it’s a whole new lifestyle.”

It was Sunday, and I had an afternoon show in mind. How good would the concert feel under the influence of nothing stronger than coffee and as strong as God? I’d been “clean and sober” for most of those first 40 days, but on that Sunday, it finally started to sink in what the combination of those words really meant for this alcoholic-addict. I’ll never forget dancing my butt off at that Okkervil River set at The Other Tent. Folks around me surely thought I was messed up as I flailed around and hailed the holiness of live music.

For the sake of my own personal precision and perspective these past three years, I maintained that May 2^nd was a sobriety date and June 14 was a clean date. But clinging to my convictions about those distinctions might be softening significantly to accept that Bonnaroo is my more genuine sobriety birthday. That’s when the lights really came on in terms of total abstinence from the substances that were combined in one disease to form my former higher power.

We don’t hear a lot about a program called “Shroomers Anonymous,” and even with the NA culture and NA literature and rhetoric notwithstanding, psychedelics seem to command a different kind of attitude. We all know that AA founder Bill Wilson experimented with LSD under the tutelage of Aldous Huxley well into his sobriety. And I know that on the Friday and Saturday of Bonnaroo 2009, I faced a fork in the road. Given my drug and alcohol history and spiritual experimentation, I could have easily justified continued psychedelic use as part of some kind of sacred path. But my heart knew differently. That option was no longer safe, and the freedom afforded by the choice I made that Sunday still feels phenomenal, doing more for my spiritual growth than doses ever did.

Bonnaroo since that year just gets better and better. And the Soberoo community strengthens its roots in the festival. Shocking as it may sound, I actually feared I would never cry for gratitude and joy again at a Bonnaroo show, at least not how the whiskey made me weep. But truth be told, the music moves me even more than the booze, as one of the stickers from a sober show-going fellowship states, “It’s All About The Music.” At Mumford and Sons in 2010, the lyrics to “Roll Away The Stone” lit me with spiritual lightning more than the liquor ever could. The Mumfords duet with Old Crow for “Wagon Wheel” was one of those moments when time stopped. Arms linked, my sober sweetie and I swayed with the masses.

That same year I woke up extra early one morning and found my way over to That Stage where Disco Biscuits dared to play until the sun came up. I know we recovering folks “can’t make it to the late night shows like we used to” because bodies need sleep. But just like a fisherman or hunter or truck driver can plan ahead, so might we go to bed before 11 and rise just before the first light to find a great show still in progress. Years ago, I once subscribed to the cliché that one could only get a jam band while intoxicated. But with so many in the sober fan community being followers of jammy acts, I knew there was more. It may be positive peer pressure from these fellow fans or it may be my still throbbing hippy heart, but last year’s String Cheese Incident and this year’s Phish were legitimate highlights of my entire Bonnaroo experience. And I am so looking forward to dancing to Furthur while clean and sober later this summer. When I last saw the Grateful Dead in the late 1980s, I was blazed on multiple substances.

Between high-energy dancing, listening attentively to deep lyrics, and praying constantly, I connect with my higher power throughout the festival experience, with these ingredients providing that unrivaled and now not-so-elusive “natural high.” Besides live music and Bonnaroo playing roles in my personal path of recovery, staying sober at the festival has this fabulous communal aspect found in the meetings. For an alcoholic who is known to say “I really need a meeting” like I used to say “I really need a beer,” meetings at Bonnaroo take on such transcendent qualities that I get the goose-tingles just thinking of them. This year, I listened with love as someone shared what her sponsor had said before her journey west to Tennessee from the east coast; the advice was to just focus on: “You, God, and Bonnaroo.” Because of the physical demands that the festival places on our bodies and how quickly it passes, a “keep it simple, stupid” approach especially works.

While seeing others around us drinking and using may mean temptation to some, it means teaching to others. Because Bonnaroo still equals a whoop-it-up kind of freedom to many attendees, we get to see public displays of the worst kinds of abuse. People stumbling, slurring, and shouting or pissing, puking, and passing out—these parades of indulgence don’t look like that much fun. People this wasted are generally not that appealing; no, they’re sad and disgusting. It’s only that we used to be some of the ones too wasted to notice.

Although the campsites, sober tents, and fellowships go by different names depending on the band or the festival, the clean and sober fan community is an expanding and inspiring phenomenon. With roots in the Grateful Dead group called Wharf Rats, it’s a growing grassroots movement. For the first time this year, Bonnaroo printed the Clean and Soberoo preamble (as it were) and meeting times in the official Bonnaroo Guide. For the first time this year, we had professionally-produced signage, a more prominent location near the main information booth, plus an excellent shade tent and chairs for meetings. The anti-drug language in the official Bonnaroo literature remains strong, and it seems less police-like when fully grasped in the context of the festival as a whole. (I've come to disagree with a friend who suggested to me that the corporate side of Roo covertly condones drug use while preaching against it.) 

Practicing the principles of recovery at a massive rock festival induces smiles, hugs, tears of joy. An ample supply of lollipops is there just in time to stave off an unwelcome jones. The yellow stickers function sweetly like a secret handshake. They also inspire inquiries. Who doesn’t want to support the ethos of “One Show At A Time”?

Heck, I’ll admit it. I always thought drinking and using and partying my toots off were about “living in the moment.” Facts are I never lived in the moment much back then. There are some things disturbing, disembodying, and disorienting about drug and alcohol abuse that destroy our sensitivity at the very second we think we’re heightening our senses. That I once tried to proselytize the very opposite as a post-punk disciple of Timothy Leary only makes sharing my recovery that much more of a necessity. It’s refreshing this year to meet a teenager who doesn’t drink or drug and wants one of our stickers as a reminder that she never needs to go down that road if she doesn’t want to.

The diversity inside the tent of Soberoo resembled the amazing rainbow I see at AA and NA around the rest of the continent. Share after share, people express an untenable joy, a pink cloud among pink clouds has enveloped the room. At our home groups out in the world, when we say “keep coming back,” we really mean “stay,” since the meetings are so frequent and needed as to become a healthy, daily routine. But with Bonnaroo, we need to come back, because it’s only once each year for some of the best concerts you’ll ever see and some of the most special meetings I’ve ever experienced on the planet. Like the Beach Boys sang to me this past Sunday, we experience some very “Good Vibrations.”