Bonnaroo 2014 Saturday: Lionel Richie, Jack White Keep Fans Dancing All Night Long

Saturday, the busiest day at Manchester, Tennessee's Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, was packed with enough frustrating scheduling conflicts to enrage even the mellowest Bonnaroo hippie. Cut Copy competed with James Blake and Zedd. Skrillex's Superjam went up against Frank Ocean. And in one double-booking that really ought to get some Bonnaroo agent fired, festival-goers were forced to choose between the Flaming Lips and Nick Cave.

[Photos: Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival 2014]

But as all these artists went head-to-head, some were head-and-shoulders above the rest. One, specifically, rose Afro-and-shoulders above the fray: the one, the only, Mr. Lionel Richie.

Forget about all the hipster acts at 'Roo. Did James Blake play the Commodores' "Brick House" mashed up with the Ohio Players' "Fire," "Running With the Night" mixed with Laid Back's "White Horse," or "Stuck on You" with a snippet of the keyboard riff from Van Halen's "Jump" thrown in? Did Phosphorescent play air guitar to "Penny Lover"? Did Grouplove conclude their set with "Hello" and "All Night Long"? Did Cage the Elephant sell merch like this?:

Nope, they sure didn't. But during his hits-packed, 90-minute set on the main stage, consummate entertainer Lionel did all of these things and more.

Lionel's Vegas-style performance may have been cheesier than the fare at the Grilled Cheese Truck over in the festival's Food Truck Oasis, but he embraced, celebrated, and sold his own cheese. And fans ate it up. Emerging onstage to his own piped-in theme music — "Hello," of course — wearing a massive grin and a Sgt. Pepper jacket, he proclaimed, self-deprecatingly: "There are two groups [of people] here. Some of you were here from the beginning. The other group, they're the ones that call me 'Mr. Richie' and say these words to me: 'My mama, my daddy, my brother, my sister played your records when I was growing up!'"

[Related: Indie Rock Rules Bonnaroo Day 1]

He also sipped goblet after goblet of rancid "Bonnaroo juice" until, Goldilocks-style, he found a tasty mystery vintage that he actually liked; he suggested fans pick up his music on "cassette or eight-track"; and when he spotted one superfan in the front row wearing an '80s Afro wig and Richie-inspired mustache, he pointed and quipped, "There's nothing like coming to a show and finding your son here!"

But Lionel's funniest moment might have been when he introduced his hit 1981 movie theme "Endless Love" by announcing, "I'd like to welcome to the stage, Ms. Diana Ross! [Cue wild applause.] Well, I'd like to, but I called and asked her if she'd come and she said… NO." D'oh! However, when Lionel asked the crowd to become "30,000 Diana Rosses" and sing all of his absent duet partner's lines instead, everyone seemed happy to oblige and showered Lionel with endless love. "Who needs Diana?" Lionel shouted rhetorically.

Lionel had spectators of all ages dancing in earnest, if not on the ceiling, throughout his 'Roo revue, and a few enthusiastic fans even crowd-surfed — to "Three Times a Lady" and "Easy," yet. Declared a beaming, Bonnaroo-juice-swilling Lionel: "I haven't seen dancing like that since 1992."

And then Lionel encored with a 30,000-strong audience singalong of "We Are the World" and basically won Bonnaroo.

Lionel the onetime Commodore wasn't the only iconic former frontman bringing the nostalgic jams to Bonnaroo on Saturday. Earlier in the day on the main stage, Damon Albarn, of Blur/Gorillaz fame, delighted with a show that he told the audience was a "dream come true." Damon played tracks from his recently released first solo album, Everyday Robots, and dipped into the catalogs of Blur ("Out of Time," "All Your Life") and his one-off supergroup the Good, the Bad & the Queen ("Three Changes," "Kingdom of Doom"). But it was his Gorillaz material — particularly "Feel Good Inc." and "Clint Eastwood," respectively and awesomely assisted by surprise guests De La Soul and Del the Funky Homosapien — that really brought the feelgood festival vibes.

Another iconic alt-rock frontman gone solo, Jack White, wowed in his headlining slot. (Side note: Only at Bonnaroo would Damon Albarn, Lionel Richie, and Jack White appear consecutively on the same stage.) The Tennessee transplant was warmly received like an honorary local by the Bonnaroo masses, charging through solo cuts as well as hits by the Raconteurs ("Steady As She Goes," "Top Yourself"), Led Zeppelin ("The Lemon Song"), and of course the White Stripes ("Icky Thump," "Hotel Yorba," "We Are Going to Be Friends," "I'm Slowly Turning Into You," "Ball and Biscuit"). And all the while, he was backed by a stellar Americana combo featuring fiddle, standup bass, two pianos, slide guitar… and a theremin, just for kicks.

Jack did almost as much talking as he did rocking, making existentialist observations about the vastness of the universe and giving shoutouts to auto workers in his native Detroit, studio musicians in his adopted hometown of nearby Nashville, homeless touring musicians, 1930s blues artists, his mother, his children, Johnny Depp, Arctic Monkeys, Jim Jarmusch, and Nick Cave. He also followed the lead of fellow Bonnaroo headliner Kanye West (who'd blasted the press during his own set the night before), yelling: "Who makes music happen? Does a tabloid like Rolling Stone make music happen? Just because they write about it doesn't make it exist. Me and you make it exist!"

[Related: Kanye West Returns to Bonnaroo for Epic Set of Hits, Rants]

It was an interesting comment, considering that Jack had graced the cover of Rolling Stone only a couple weeks before. But he put on such a fantastic two-hour show that surely Rolling Stone and all other music media would give it a rave review. As soon as Jack and his band left the stage, fans clamored for more, specifically chanting the instantly recognizable, thudding bassline of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army." Jack returned to obligingly play that classic, but not before he charged through nine other songs in his epic encore, including the Stripes' "Hardest Button to Button" and "Hello Operator," "Blue Blood Blues" by his side-project the Dead Weather, and a cover of Dick Dale's "Misirlou."

Over on the Which Stage, another alt-rock hero, Wayne Coyne, and his mighty Flaming Lips presented one of their signature festival spectacles, complete with Wayne in a Visible Man onesie, shaggy Mylar coat, and silver groin prosthetic, throwing buckets of glitter on the dazed crowd as inflatable 10-feet-tall caterpillars, yellow suns, and aliens shimmied behind him. (Typical Lips, then.) Wayne slipped in his own shoutout to the media, repeatedly crying out in a mock-Kanye voice, "Where's the press? Where's the press?" (Incidentally, during a Saturday afternoon public Q&A session with Wayne over on the Solar Stage, he'd praised Kanye, saying, "I like that he's so abrasive!")

Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds kept it classier with their evening-closing set in That Tent, playing the hushed and gorgeous "Push the Sky Away" and intense "Weeping Song" under a full moon to a shamefully small but very reverent crowd. The Seeds' encore performance of "We Real Cool" was marred when Nick couldn't hear himself over the din of the festival's neighboring competing stages, but after he halted that number and rebooted with "Henry's Dream," Nick ended the night in his usual gallant style.

Bonnaroo concludes Sunday with performances by everyone from the above-mentioned Arctic Monkeys to Wiz Khalifa to Elton John. Will any of them blast the media? Will any of them play as many hits as Lionel Richie did? Well, Sir Elton is a famously surly fellow, and he has an even more impressive deep catalog than Lionel's, so watch this space.

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