My living room is covered in camping gear, I'm stocked up on memory cards and batteries, and I need to find somebody to babysit my cat, which can mean only one thing: Bonnaroo is just days away. Following up on my first Dane 101 story about Bonnaroo, I sat down with 27 year old Kevin Kopplin the other night for a chat about Madison and Bonnaroo.

Dane 101: First off, who are you, how old are you, and what do you do?

Kevin Kopplin: My name's Kevin Kopplin, I'm 27, originally from Watertown, and living in Madison since 1999. I'm a recent college grad, getting a BA in political science from UW Madison, and I'm a convenience store clerk, Wii owner, and disc golfer.

D101: When was your first Bonnaroo?

KK: My first Bonnaroo was in 2003, and I've gone every year since.

D101: Why didn't you go the first year?

KK: I'd heard about it from my old roommate Katya and her friend Jon, but I was underemployed and in summer school that year. They came back with such great stories I had to consider going the following year.

D101: How does one decide to make that trip from Madison to Tennessee?

KK: I saw the lineup. I heard it had such great reviews. Back four or five years ago there were only a few big festivals in the game, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Austin City Limits (ACL).

D101: When did you start hitting up live music shows?

KK: Probably junior year once I had a drivers license and enough disposable income to go to The Rave once a week. Watertown was halfway between Madison and Milwaukee so both of their media kind of rubbed off on me and I'd go check out shows in Milwaukee or at the Barrymore or something in Madison, like Goldfinger and Save Ferris back in about 1998. The first time I went to the Barrymore was February 1998; I got lost as hell. I got into Goldfinger's bus that night and got their manager's phone number and I got on their guest list for when they were coming two months later with Sugar Ray and Save Ferris.

D101: What do you think of Madison's current live music scene?

KK: I think that the potential is only starting to be tapped. I think the Madison scene largely gets overlooked compared to a lot of larger cities in our radius, the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Milwaukee get more concert attention than we do.

D101: You said you went to ACL, when was that?

KK: I went to ACL in 2004.

D101: Ok, because a lot of people compare Madison to Austin.

KK: I can see that. I can see how you could set up an SAT question like "Austin is to Texas as Madison is to Wisconsin." That makes sense to me.

D101: Do you ever see Madison becoming a festival destination?

KK: Not on the scale of ACL or even South by Southwest (SXSW). I've been to 6th Street in Austin where a lot of ACL goes down. It's probably longer than State St. and it's almost exclusively bars and convenience stores, you don't have, you know, the specialty shops or coffee places. It's mostly all bars, and they're all geared up for live music. 6th Street in Austin just has a better concert infrastructure than what we have throughout Madison.

D101: So what about Bonnaroo, in the middle of bumfuck Tennessee. How did Manchester, TN end up landing the country's biggest music festival?

KK: I think part of that has got to be that it is not so, and I'm going to use my quote fingers here, "civilized." It is a 700 acre farm. From what I understand, it used to be either a large-scale hippie commune, or was owned by an independent winemaker. They have a much larger space than a lot of these festivals like Coachella, which is next to a downtown area in a polo field. Lollapalooza is held in a city park downtown, ACL is also held in a city park downtown. When you have 700 acres to use, and it's on private property, you can invite everybody to actually stay in this makeshift concert city for a weekend.

D101: So how did Hedgpeth fail?

KK: Hedgpeth failed for a couple reasons. First of all, they were scheduled against Pitchfork in IL the same weekend. It was poorly advertised. The lineup they had was actually pretty great. I think the Hedgpeth organizers bit off more than they could chew, trying to start a festival in a place with a capacity of 10,000 that had four stages going. Two would've worked just fine. Devotchka, the Flaming Lips, Minus the Bear, The Go! Team, They Might Be Giants - that was a great lineup, it was just poorly executed. It was like communism, it was brilliant in theory, and disastrous in execution."

D101: How do you think Madison relates to Bonnaroo?

KK: They're both isolated enclaves from reality. They're both pretty relaxed, easy-going, non-judgemental and yeah, like I said, enclaves from reality. It's almost like Bonnaroo might as well be a separatist, anarchic state, for the weekend that it exists.

D101: Does that happen at other festivals?

KK: Most of the other festivals, it's kind of just like you're going to rock concerts all day for 3 days in a row. And Bonnaroo is that, but Bonnaroo is something more. Bonnaroo, like I said, is a makeshift city, and a community, there is this je-ne-sais-quoi about Bonnaroo that none of the other festivals have. You all just disperse and go to your various hotel rooms. At Bonnaroo, you have an address in this makeshift city, and you're all there, stuck, sweating, not showering, dealing with all the same crap. There's more of a shared experience at Bonnaroo than you'll see at a lot of the other festivals.

D101: How is it that Madison meshes that well with Bonnaroo?

KK: Well, I see a significant overlap between the Madison mindset and the Bonnaroo mindset. Accepting, easy-going, non-judgemental. Madison is largely defined by the university, it attracts a lot of intellectuals. I don't know if Bonnaroo would be... Politically, they'd both be very liberal. I'm sure Kucinich or Nader would win the presidency if it were decided by either of those two places. On second thought, if Bonnaroo could send delegates to a convention, they'd be pledged to Jerry Garcia.

D101: What's some weird shit you've seen at Bonnaroo?

KK: It's not unusual to be standing in a crowd, watching a band play, and uh, you'll see like, you know, a girl whose body's dyed entirely green walking past on stilts, or you'll see a random parade break out and there'll be a dude wearing a suit, looking kind of pimped out, swigging on a bottle of Jack Daniels with some scantily clad women in tow. It's like Madison in some of its finer moments.

D101: So... What is Bonnaroo?

KK: On one level, it's a destination festival. On another level, it's this semi-autonomous tent city that springs up for four days. It's a community, it's that mindset that doesn't just apply to Bonnaroo, you see it in Madison, in San Francisco, in Austin, Berkley, and, you know, a lot of these place you could argue are surrounded by reality. It's not a particular geographic location. It's a mindset.

D101: What's is like running into other folks around town that have been to Bonnaroo?

KK: Oh, well sometimes you'll be in a classroom or at work, and someone will see you in your Bonnaroo shirt, or you'll see them in their Bonnaroo shirt. It's kind of like a secret society, you can just look at each other and give a knowing nod. You can use it as kind of a litmus test like if you know that someone's been to Bonnaroo, they're automatically from the start, cooler.

D101: Have you ever used Bonnaroo as a pickup line or an approach?

KK: I actually have. I scored a date back in 2004 with this girl I met at the King Club. She had noticed my shirt, it was in July of that year, about a month after I got back, and she noticed some of the bands on my shirt, and we started talking, and we got into a conversation about Wilco. The next week we went and saw Wilco together, and then we went to ACL together. That shirt was the icebreaker that got me into my first date in a couple years.

D101: What about customers? Do you have any customers that come to mind as Bonnaroo attendees?

KK: I remember sitting at my campsite one morning, and some people came by with goodies to sell, and I just did a double-take, and it was some guys from Madison I'd just seen in my store.

D101: What do you think about the mix of politics and Bonnaroo?

KK: Well, as far as being a political scientist, you know, I feel like I'm charged with making the world as good or better a place than when I entered it.

D101: So what do you think about a lot of the hippie shit about changing the world through music festivals, you know, like that South Park episode?

KK: Last time there was a presidential election, there were voter registration drives. You can register to vote at Bonnaroo.

D101: Does that make a difference?

KK: Every person that you can bring to participate in democracy is a good thing. If they register one person to vote who hasn't voted, then yeah, they've made a difference. I'm just out of school. I'm not jaded yet.

D101: Anything else to add?

KK: Let's see... FUCK BEASTERS!