With festival season fast approaching it’s important to choose who you invite into your camp with you.

These people will not just be going to shows with you, you will also be sleeping next to them, eating with them, and will be impacted by any and all types of shitshowery that follows them around. I like to choose my “rave fam” the same way a team of Navy SEALs choose a team when they are off spreading “freedom” to third world countries. Each member needs to be completely self-reliant, while simultaneously contributing a specialized skill to the group that can be utilized to survive this festival experience with as few casualties and arrests as possible. I have outlined these skillsets into an Ocean’s 11-esque format that we are all familiar with: 

The Brains:
This is likely the most important rave fam role. This person coordinates all the essentials from implementing macro ticket bots to ensure the whole team has reliable tickets, to organizing transportation to and from the venue. This person often has experience in every major music market in the US and can tell you what the security will be like at the gates, as well as where the best tacos are between the venue and the airport. While many people think they are the brains of their rave fam, many do not have the experience to get a group of idiots to and from a festival without incident. In my youth, I followed a brazen hopeful who thought he had what it took into the most unorganized shitstorm first (and only) year:  South Park Music Festival. We lost a lot of good men that weekend.

The BPM Expert: Bookings, Planning, and Mayhem
If you are reading this and are currently in a group chat for an upcoming festival, whoever started that group chat is your BPM expert. Consider them your communications liaison. They are the person who is going to know when and where to be, down to the minute, for the best possible festival experience. Want to know how to see a massive headliner playing on one side of the venue while a promising up and comer is playing for the first time simultaneously? The BPM expert will have you on a golf cart speeding through the woods while saying something witty like, “This path ain’t on no site maps,” as if they were folding time and space on to themselves. Need to take a shit? This expert will bust out a chart of porta-potty cleaning schedules that will leave you wondering how you ever raved without them. 

The Rave Mom (or Dad):
This is possibly one of the most underrated roles in the fam. They don’t get the credit they deserve, but when you find yourself with a sprained ankle from tripping on a tent stake, you will be happy they were around to wrap it up in an old pashmina with some ice from the beer cooler. The rave parent is like a modern day tribal healer. They can handle anything from chasing your toxic ex out of the camp long enough for you to stop crying,  to recommending the right crystals or essential oils for your energy imbalance. Sure, most of these things could probably be solved by drinking enough water and getting more than 47 minutes of sleep in a weekend, but isn’t it more fun to have a modern mystic to reassure you that the drugs will eventually wear off, and maybe reconsider your fight with the raptor at Lost Lands who was “looking at you weird”? 

The Wildcard:
If you are reading this and think that I am going into way too much detail about choosing your team and that you can just roll up with anyone and have a good time then guess what? YOU are the wildcard. This person shows up on the second day of the fest with no job, no money, no ticket and wanders into your camp with a half bottle of tequila and everyone just screams “AYE CODY!” You don’t know how they did it, they don’t know how they did it, but it wouldn’t be the same without them. The trade off with the wildcard is simple, you feed them, and they show you an entire side of the festival most people never see. Wandering through a sea of scaffolding until you are somehow under a stage watching Subtronics? Wildcard. Hopping a fence to deliver some fireworks to a renegade stage in the VIP section? Wildcard. Shooting off those same fireworks to distract festival security from kicking you out for puking into an LED art installation? You guessed it.