By Josh Fleet, July 2008

Members of the Gainesville-based family band Morningbell entered an OurStage.com contest to play at Bonnaroo, one of America’s biggest summer-rock ‘n’ roll festivals and then forgot about it.

They planned a tour that would take them up from Gainesville, through the belly of the American South, winding within 70 miles of Bonnaroo’s 2008 site in Manchester, Tenn., before heading on to New York City and back. That they were so close to the festival was a coincidence.

Just weeks before the tour and the forgotten festival, Morningbell, the band that started because two brothers wanted to fulfill a life-long dream of playing in a rock band, got a call.

“I was walking around the house in circles,” frontman and guitar-player Travis Atria said about hearing the news.

“College Battle for the Roo Channel” had ended, and victory was in the hands of Morningbell. This contest was one of dozens of similar contests put on by the Web site OurStage.com. The site is a point of collaboration between musicians and their fans. Basically, bands upload their tunes, the folks at OurStage pair two bands with similar sounds and fans judge which groups they like best in the head-to-head musical meetings without knowing the bands’ names.

A friend’s suggestion that they enter and a few clicks was all the effort it took, but Morningbell ended up being rated high enough that they were awarded one of four OurStage.com slots on a Bonnaroo stage.

The band members—brothers Eric and Travis Atria, Eric’s wife Stacie and the self- proclaimed “red-headed step-child” Chris Hillman—called everyone they knew and then got on the road, bringing along friend and fellow Gainesville musician Evan Garfield from Umoja Orchestra to lay down some beats at the festival.

At the seventh installment of Bonnaroo, a festival that featured more than 150 performers on close to a dozen stages and was attended by at least 80,000 people, Morningbell’s 30-minute set at the Sonic Stage on June 15 was a blip on the schedule.

But that blip made band members feel something like rock stars.

“They snubbed Béla Fleck for us,” Eric said in the artists’ tent behind the stage after Morningbell played its set.

Backstage, earlier in the weekend, the band members were picked up for a complimentary golf-cart ride that was denied to the busy, veteran banjo player. (At Bonnaroo this year, Béla played one set with The Bluegrass Allstars, ripped through two more with Abigail Washburn’s The Sparrow Quartet, and had his documentary, “Throw Down Your Heart,” featured in the Cinema Tent.) Though the driver realized his mistake and dumped Morningbell for the shinier loot, the smiles from such recognition long remained on the band members’ faces.

“Nobody here knows what’s going on,” said Travis, who attended Bonnaroo in ’06 as a music fan with a press pass but not as a performer. 

Playing at the festival was more than a dream-turned-reality for the band.

“It’s like Christmas came a thousand times,” Travis said into an OurStage.com camera after the set.

Though the band played its brand of psychedelic-infused pop-rock in the earliest time slot on Sunday morning on one of the festival’s smallest stages, the exposure was priceless. That’s what the festival is supposed to be about, Eric said. Exposure.

Morningbell was exposed to new music, art and culture (like comedian, musician, social commentator Reggie Watts who opened for comedian Zach Galifianakis in The Bonnaroo Comedy Theater) and the band got to play in front of people from every corner of the country. The boys even handed out a fat stack of free CDs to hungry hands toward the end of the set.

“Too bad that Bonnaroo didn’t get to see the $100 light show,” said Ryan Ray, a former Gainesville resident who now lives in Orlando but attended several Morningbell shows from 2006-2007.

Ray, 29, was talking about the special effects the band usually uses during its shows, which includes the Atria brothers bedecked in jackets bedecked in flashing Christmas lights backed by a wall of more flashing lights and patterns.  

Ray bought tickets for Bonnaroo mainly to see Pearl Jam, Saturday’s headliner, but was surprised when she later found out the Morningbell was playing a set.

“It’s an extra-special thing that Morningbell is here,” Ken Ray, her husband, said.

The couple got up “early” Sunday to catch their old hometown heroes despite having stayed up to the predawn hours for the thumping and blinding electronic energy of Ghostland Observatory.

“This is the Sunday brunch,” Ken said.

While going through some of the old stuff like “Learning By Musical Montage,” the band also tested out new material, including a song called “Good Morning, I’m Here,” during its Bonnaroo set.

But playing at Bonnaroo didn’t make the tour any shorter or the road any straighter. It hasn’t brought the end in sight, and the musicians haven’t quit their day jobs to follow the road forever.

“We just try to focus on what we’re doing,” Eric said. “That way it’s easy to reach our goals.”

Morningbell will begin work on its fourth album starting in July. And whereas the last album, “Through the Belly of the Sea,” was atmospheric and conceptual, Travis said the new effort will be more straightforward and poppier.

For band members, who will play a free, two-set show on July 25 in the Downtown Plaza of Gainesville and look forward to collaborating with the Umoja Orchestra for a back-to-school show in early September, the short set at ‘Roo was like a jolt of electricity. The band was charged by it, Eric said.

For all things Morningbell, including free and streaming albums, show dates and more, go to morningbellonline.com