Festival Fever

coachella-2015

It’s officially festival season. South by Southwest currently is underway, and Coachella is coming up next month.

Thanks to some great friends, I’ll be attending Coachella with an artist pass – which grants you access to restricted areas and can get you backstage for some performances. I don’t know how these things happen, but I’m just going with it. There is no way I would go otherwise to squish into the safety barriers (both indoor and outdoor options) with the 100,000 other mostly-Millennial crowds. That ship has sailed.

All my youthful energy comes back, though, clicking through the lineup on Coachella’s website. Flume, AlunaGeorge, Beach House, Foals, Zhu, The 1975, Grimes and the reunion of LCD Soundsystem (!!!!) are only a few on my long list.

The festival circuit has been gaining traction in recent years (Coachella broke its own attendance record last year), and apps geared specifically for these events have popped up. Coachella 2016 has its own app that will allow users to search the lineup, activate their wristbands and get updates. Coachella 2016 is available for free for both iOS and Android, and pretty much all the large festivals have their own apps, too.

If you’re not lucky enough to attend Coachella for real, there’s always Couchella. The festival offers live-streams of select shows – meaning you can sit back, relax and have the best view without all the sweat and dust. A live-stream webcast is featured on YouTube via Spacelab TV (thespacelab.tv). This is actually sounding better than going to me now, but there is nothing that can stop me from finally having a chance to see a music festival of this caliber since 1991.

Growing up in Washington state in the ‘90s means I’m no stranger to live music. Since before I could drive I was sneaking in to see bands like Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, L7 and The Posies. My first big festival was the first-ever Lollapalooza, where I had to do the whole “staying at a friend’s house” thing to attend. I remember Ice T came out for a duet with Perry Farrell, and my friend caught the drum stick from Fishbone’s Philip Fisher, which was the greatest thing to ever happen to us in our young lives. (That is, until her brother caught the lead singer of Sky Cries Mary’s wallet at Bumbershoot three years later and all of us got to go backstage to return it.)

Driving down to that first Lollapalooza, I’ll never forget how a car of kids pulled up next to us on the freeway, proudly holding their tickets in the window. There was this crazy camaraderie with strangers that I had never really experienced before. That’s the best part of these large music events: the oneness.

But oneness can easily turn into aloneness – in the crowd, someone in your group probably will get lost at some point. One app that can help with that is Find My Friends (for iPhone and iPad), which allows users to share their location and set up alerts when others arrive at a certain place. Plus, it also allows you to hide your location if you don’t want to be found. After all, getting lost and making new friends is part of the festival fun.

@SUPERCW

CHRISTA WITTMIER IS “SUPERCW” ON ALL SOCIAL MEDIA. FIND HER ON SNAPCHAT, SOUNDCLOUD, TWITTER, VINE AND INSTAGRAM. BY NIGHT, SHE IS KNOWN AS DJ SUPERCW. BY DAY, SHE IS KNOWN AS SENIOR MARKETING DIRECTOR FOR YOUNG’S MARKET COMPANY OF HAWAII. HER NIGHTLIFE BLOG SUPERCITY RUNS EVERY WEDNESDAY ON HONOLULUPULSE.COM