Camping. Live music. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

No it’s not Woodstock – but close. Today’s neo-hippies are enjoying a new kind of music festival.

After the final hours of Woodstock 99 – complete with raging fires, outrageous prices and sexual assaults – the image of music festivals was seemingly soiled forever. It seemed that never again would our generation have an experience comparable to our parents’ at Woodstock.

Enter Bonnaroo.

In the summer of 2002, over 70,000 jam-band lovers descended on a 500-acre farm in Manchester, TN to recreate the three days of peace, love and music back in 1969.

The mix of eclectic music including Ben Harper, Jurassic 5 and Norah Jones grabbed the attention of music lovers, while the fact that the festival went off without a hitch – save a bit of traffic – grabbed the attention of critics.

“All of these people had Woodstock on their mind,” concert promoter Bob Goldstone told The Tennessean.

“They all look back to that period that their heroes came out of, and they would like to relive it with their own peers and their own music,” he added. “It’s all about letting the music move you. This lifestyle is not going away.”

This year the organizers of Bonnaroo will try their luck again. On June 13, 14 and 15 an expected 80,000 music fanatics will descend again on Manchester, TN, including Maureen Hession, ’06.

“There are lots of things about the concert I’m looking forward to – the road trip, to meeting lots of people from all over the country, to camping out and listening to music for 72-hours straight. Some of my friends went last year, and they said it was a great experience,” said Hession.

Since the original Bonnaroo many other festivals have sprung up, while smaller festivals have found their way into the spotlight.

This August will mark the birth of Bonnaroo NE, a sister festival to Bonnaroo which will be held August 8-10 in Riverhead, NY. The festival will include acts such as The Dead, Dave Matthews, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Talib Kweli.

“Bonnaroo NE is modeled after the original Bonnaroo. The event will be a camping-and-music festival, featuring several performance stages, and a unique lineup of major headline artists and high-quality emerging acts. The festival will be similar in purpose and set-up to the original Bonnaroo, with its own individual character,” the festivals website explained.

This summer will also see the re-emergence of Lollapalooza for the first time in five years. The traveling festival – featuring acts such as The Donna’s and Jane’s Addiction – will tour the entire country with dates throughout the summer.

Hitting the festival scene is West Virginia’s Higher Ground Music Festival featuring Soulive, Jurassic 5 and DJ Logic, while Phish caps off their summer tour with It (aka Phishfest) in the remote Limestone, ME, featuring – you guessed it – two days of non-stop Phish jamming.

This will also mark the fifth year of Gathering of the Vibes, a grassroots festival held in Mariabille, NY. From July 10-13 thousands of fans will descend upon Mariabille to see grassroot favorites such as Keller Williams and Susan Tedeski, along with bigger acts such as James Brown and the Allman Brothers.

The newfound popularity of music festivals has even had concert promoters considering a Woodstock 2004 – a notion that wasn’t crossing anyone’s minds after the Woodstock debacle in 1999.

Along with the revival of the festival fans have seen ticket prices skyrocket. Forget the $8 your parents dropped to get into the original Woodstock. This year Bonnaroo fans dropped upwards of $120 to get into thse sold-out festival, while those headed for the new Bonnaroo NE will let go of $164.50 for the cheapest tickets.

Still, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter for music lovers like Hession.

“It’s a lot of money, but I think it’s worth it. Just in general I think the experience itself is worth the money. This is my first music festival, but definitely not my last.”

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