Festival-goers waiting to get in to Centeroo to see the Sunday shows.

So by now everyone’s been kicked out of the Bonnaroo complex. The volunteers are striking the sets, cleaning the trash, looking around for the cell phones, clothes and iPods that got left. And everyone’s headed home to get back to work, back to the normalcy of everyday.

There’s something about Bonnaroo’s atmosphere that made it such a distinct experience. Between the push for sustainability, the incredible lineup and the feel of not showering for four days, the festival lives up to its hype. People are friendly and almost everyone there is a music lover. You can mention in passing to a vendor that you just came from a National show and you’ll end up talking to them for twenty minutes about the modern recording industry.

The packed Weezer show

Maybe the only bad thing about this weekend was leaving before Phoenix played. Of all the bands that were there, that was one I was particularly excited for. But overall, the rest of the experience was unique, falling somewhere between being hot, exciting, relaxing, dirty, friendly and just plain fun.

It’s worth seeing, that’s for sure, this epic congregation of people hoping to see music, hang out and have a good time. Whether you are into the festival scene or you’re a huge music lover — or a small one — the festival is something that should be experienced. Just seeing nearly 100,000 people at a Weezer concert is amazing enough to make Bonnaroo worth going to, not to mention the varying types of shows you can see. Within the same hour, you get a bluegrassy-folk band, an indie rock band and a well-known band like Kings Of Leon; then later that night you could be headbanging to a metal band and getting lost in an electronica dance party.

And at the end of the day, the best reason to go really just comes down to Bonnaroo being such a unique experience that you won’t get at a regular concert.

Once there was a big circle in the middle of the audience, Deacon sent out two guys to start the dance off: a guy in a bunny mask and a guy dressed as Gumbi. They started off the dancing, something Deacon said he’d been trying to set up for a while, and then they tagged people from the audience to go in and take their place.

After a while of this, Deacon yelled, “Now everybody,” and the audience ran to the middle to mosh.

The packed Weezer show

In what may have been the most surprising moment of Bonnaroo so far, Weezer played for an audience so large about a third of them couldn’t even see the stage. The mass of people extended throughout most of the Centeroo compound, with people packed in behind trees, vendors and bleachers.

Through most of the weekend, the anticipation has been that the crowd at Weezer wouldn’t be very big. After all, the last few albums have received nowhere near the love the 1990′s Blue Album enjoys, and many people just didn’t think Bonnaroo was Weezer’s scene — at least not anymore.

When I was talking to someone about it here, we came to this conclusion: everyone at Bonnaroo knows they like Weezer enough to put up with crowd reaching almost 100,000 people. They just may not want to admit it. Maybe they don’t like any of the new stuff and may be disappointed with the recent albums, but they can’t say no to seeing songs from the Blue Album performed.

A panorama of the Weezer show

After all, it seemed that because Jack White’s recent project The Dead Weather was finishing up their set while Weezer was starting, Bonnaroo-goers would be more interested in that.

But they weren’t. Almost everyone at Bonnaroo was watching Weezer as they played.

A view from the fence on the side of the compound

As for the concert itself, it was pretty good — it seemed obvious that Weezer knew they should play a lot of their old stuff to entertain a Bonnaroo crowd. So there was a good mix of old and new – they played Buddy Holly, The Sweater Song, Surf Wax America from the Blue Album, and most of the singles from the newer albums, including Beverly Hills and Can’t Stop Partying.

So overall that show kicked off the rest of the night pretty well — energy’s high and there are some good shows ahead.

A true Avett Brothers fan

From The Avett Brothers’ newest album, I and Love and You, to Emotionalism, A Carolina Jubilee and Four Thieves Gone, the band played a wide range of their music at their Bonnaroo show Saturday. The crowd was into it, too — they played for a packed venue, slightly bigger than what had showed up to the Norah Jones show just before.

It was a show that went against some of the norms of smaller bands playing big shows. They didn’t bother to only play the hits and the ones people would recognize. The show was simultaneously for people who know the Avett Brothers really well and people who don’t — everyone would recognize them and there were some classics for the true fans.

And it was obvious who the true fans were. As soon as Jones ended, a crowd pushed toward the stage while swapping Avett Brothers concert stories and talking about the times they’ve met the band members or the songs that they loved the most. And once the songs came on, the people in the front of the audience were belting out the lyrics, jumping up and down, hands in the air.

The show was one of the best of the day, too, and the crowd support proved it. People came out and wanted to see them, surprising some people in the audience who were used to smaller crowds for the Avett Brothers.

Norah Jones plays to the Bonnaroo crowd

Eight years since her last time at Bonnaroo — the first year of the festival — Norah Jones took stage in front of a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. She started with mostly songs from her new album, The Fall, which she released in November. Most of these have a much more country feel than her older, jazzy songs like “Sunrise.”

It was apparent right off that Jones was someone people at Bonnaroo wanted to see. Well before she started playing, the crowd was full of energy and people had packed in early to get a good spot for her set.

It wasn’t until her fifth or sixth song that she played a famous one — “Sunrise.” Then she followed that with a slow, rambling blues song, with a heavy driving piano to keep the beat.

It got really hot as she played — the sun bore down on the crowd from directly above the stage. But people stayed. They pulled out battery-powered fans, used papers as fans or just dumped water on themselves. A few, the lucky ones, had remembered their umbrellas — Jones joked about how the last time she played at Bonnaroo there had been a lot of umbrellas, but it was because of the rain.

She was the kind of performer that talks to her crowd a lot, joking around and responding to the things people yell. She’s also one of those artists that plays around with her songs when she plays them live. Her version of “Come Away With Me” was quieter than the album version, simply a soft guitar and a drum set, occasionally a lead guitar.

She liked covers, too. She covered Tom Waits and the Kinks, venturing from the set people might have expected her to play. It’s easy to tell the artists that really know their music when they explore their own and covers. Jones proved that to her crowd, ending with this response to a man in the audience: “I will come away with you, dude!”

Norah Jones. Mumford and Sons. The Avett Brothers. Weezer. Jay-Z. deadmau5. Stevie Wonder.

Photos and updates to come on these shows and more.