by Natasha Wolff | April 24, 2017 1:00 pm
When I think of summer, I think of camping, crowd surfing and concerts—the essential things that make up that one-of-a-kind beast, the music festival[1]. To me, there’s nothing like packing up all of my most colorful clothing, jumping into an RV with my friends and spending four days immersed in this sacred world.
The top-billed artists always seem to get the credit for making a music festival popular. For me personally, seeing Paul McCartney’s name plastered across a lineup poster is definitely a draw, but my eyes always land at the bottom of the poster, skimming through the names that you can barely make out because the type is so small.
That’s how I stumbled upon this artist called Halsey[2] a few years back, when I saw her perform a 4pm set to a crowd of about 75 people.
At Firefly Festival[3], when lightning flashed over the crowd as Kings of Leon performed, I was forced to evacuate the grounds and sleep in a car as a safety precaution. At Lollapalooza[4] in Chicago, when The Struts took the stage in the blazing mid-afternoon heat, Luke Spiller[5] could not have been more of a rock star as he roared through the sun-soaked crowd dressed in a shimmering poncho.
The rush of being tossed into a pulsating crowd during a Blink-182 concert and surfing up to the stage and into the arms of a burly security guard could only be topped by doing it twice after that. Sometimes once isn’t enough.
From the three-day festivals in the heart of New York City[6] to four-day adventures on the Gulf Shores of Alabama[7], these moments always create a shared bond between concert-goers, from first-timers who forgot their sunscreen (the most basic of festival essentials) to those 60-year-old men who have been attending Lollapalooza since its inception.
Each time, after a weekend of sunburns, mud-stained shoes and new friends, I pack up the car on Monday morning and head back to reality, telling myself that this is my last summer of festivals. I think, you can’t escape adulthood for days at a time any longer. But inevitably, when those lineups are released and early bird deals offered, I know I’ll be in attendance.
For a look at my festival must-have items, scroll through the gallery above.
Main image: instagram[8]
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