Mac DeMarco
Mac DeMarco was one of the last sets of Bonnaroo’s Thursday lineup. Not everyone’s there yet on Thursday; the main stage has yet to be opened. It’s a lower-key preview of what’s to come, making a particularly chilled-out, Bonnaroo-friendly artist like DeMarco a fitting ringleader for the first night. Each DeMarco proclamation of “Happy fucking ‘Roo y’all!” or “Last time I was at Bonnaroo, it was a crazy night. Hopefully this one’s even crazier” met with, as you’d expect, exceeding enthusiasm from the crowd. Speaking of that crowd: a Mac DeMarco Bonnaroo crowd is the sort of one where you’ll stand next to dudes with mustaches and long hair, in nothing but overalls and a red Coors trucker hat, because of course that’s what a Mac DeMarco crowd looks like. At one point, security pulled a totally naked girl from the crowd and tried to escort her out; she tried to sit on the barricade, and then hugged the security guard when he pulled her up. Welcome to Bonnaroo! As for DeMarco’s set itself, it had the same anarchic late-night stoner cartoon vibes as always. Band members babbled over each other between almost every song, doing some mixture of goofy voices, accents, non-sequiturs, in-jokes, and proclamations of “Ornette Coleman is dead! Ornette Coleman is dead!” There was the requisite semi-joke cover, too, this time taking the form of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In The Years.”