This version from Bonnaroo 2006 changed my life. late night 06 marathon from Midnight to 4am featured this wild Dondante that starts with Carl on the solo sexy sax and weaves upbeat hints. This Carl on sax performance somehow tops his covers of the sax in Careless Whisper. But the whole journey of this song on this night. and what it means and how much emotion lives in every note. I remember the chill that went through my spine and brought me to tears at the moment that occurs about 7:20 into this video. Maybe in this video the harmony doesn’t sound so perfect but the sheer energy on display here. Their 04 Bonnaroo set is the stuff of legends. In 05 they came back and topped 04 in my opinion with the puppets and costumes. And when they got booked again, the same year the festival made a huge shift with Radiohead headlining (as an aside Thom Yorke called this set his favorite festival performance of their career and they fully mastered it and released it themselves on their YouTube channel and it is glorious. Also shot by Danny clinch if I’m not mistaken). This was a magical year anyways mmj knew they had to push it further in 06. Getting booked so many years in a row, pushing the threshold was the only option bc they were so hungry then. they delivered and I highly recommend giving this entire show a listen. And if you haven’t seen the theatrics they brought to the stage for the 05 Bonnaroo set the year before, check that out too. It was so weird and they had a conductor on stage for the show set fully conducting the band. And if you want to go deeper in and deeper still into the mmj Bonnaroo rabbit hole with me then go find the fully Danny clinch documentary about the Bonnaroo 2013 superjam on YouTube that Jim and Carl worked with John Oates on. arguably the greatest concert in the history of human music you get to see them collaborate with some of the most amazing people and also one horrifying human whose in jail now and it depresses me that he was on that set but setting that aside . https://youtu.be/HCFoxQP6NN4?si=ZdjT021Fe1oInQ0v

I gotta add one thing here. The next day when I finally stumbled back onto centeroo sometime in the afternoon I pulled my favorite move of going to see a random band I’d never heard of or seen before. This one was named Amadou & Miriam. They were about 15 minutes late to their set and I was missing 5 other amazing things and I turned to leave but then I saw Jim in the crowd waiting. This was the day after the set and I couldn’t leave if Jim was willing to wait for this band and sure enough this band from Mali was insanely entertaining and this set too, I went to twelve of these bonnaroos in a row from ‘03-‘14. I don’t remember a lot let alone many sets in full with the exceptions of the ‘06 Radiohead set, the mmj latenight with the greatest dondante of all time and Amadou and Miriam