My first music festival . . . and panic attack

Just a few rows back from the front of the stage, I watched as patches of brown, well-trodden grass  — once largely visible minutes earlier — became steadily occluded by hundreds of feet. I felt shoulders pressing against mine and a noticeable shift in pressure at my back. My arms were suddenly pinned at my sides. 

Kendrick Lamar wasn’t set to come onstage for another 45 minutes, but the crowd — mostly drunk teenagers in backward caps and shiny basketball jerseys — was already riled up.

My breathing began to quicken, and I tossed frantic glances to my three siblings, who were standing around me. The August sun, formerly a welcome source of warmth, now beat down mercilessly. The air around me was sour and stale, transmogrified by a mass of sweating bodies.

“Hey — make some room!” my brother, who towered over most of the crowd, said to no one in particular as soon as he saw my face. Skinny frames ricocheted off of each other, punch drunk on cheap vodka and the vibrations of the thrumming bass from the interim performer. They paid no heed to my brother’s order or the cries of girls much shorter than I, being slowly dragged under the crowd. 

I can’t breathe. 

Then the tears came, and I began to think about death. 

Last summer, at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, I experienced my first fully realized panic attack. As someone who has dealt with near-lifelong anxiety and bouts of claustrophobia, it may not come as a surprise that a surging and swaying crowd of thousands would be triggering for me. And yet, as someone who has attended a litany of concerts in my 26 years of life, I still don’t think I could have accurately anticipated the intensity of my reaction. 

My parents, certified concert junkies and once moshers extraordinaire, drove to the first iteration of Lollapalooza in 1991 — then a multi-stop touring festival conceived as a farewell tour for one of their favorite rock bands, Jane’s Addiction — in a surf van with some friends from the Jersey Shore. Their lifelong love and appreciation for music, a trait they passed on to their five kids, drove my adult siblings and me to want to experience a version of it for ourselves, at a festival. 

After reviewing the lineup, which ranged in genres from pop and rap to electronic dance music and folk rock, we decided to buy two-day passes. Though the music featured at current Lollapaloozas has changed quite a bit (as my dad often grumbles to us), the chance to see another one of my parents’ favorite ensembles, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on the second day was too good to pass up. Plus, my brother’s living in downtown Chicago made the whole setup proximally accessible and relatively affordable. On paper, it was the quintessential family activity, melding fun with familiarity — an updated version of Mom and Dad’s old haunt, surrounded by my best friends, while throwing our heads around to “Can’t Stop” and “Parallel Universe.” I could hardly contain my excitement. This was all blissfully compounded by the fact that we had dined at the same pancake joint as Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis — decked out in a bejeweled, oversized leather Moschino jacket — the day before seeing them at Lollapalooza. We’d even had a brief interaction with him on the way out; he'd made our group’s hearts collectively stop when he joked that their set at the festival the following day had been canceled. 

Part of this romanticization also came from my conceptions of other popular music festivals, like Woodstock. The whole braiding of peace, love, art, rock-n-roll and your hallucinogenic drug of choice is one that I’ve always found culturally appealing, insofar as lore and historical context are concerned. My perpetual preoccupation and fascination with other generations (and the music that defined them) has led me to fantasize about what it would have been like to hear “All Along the Watchtower” live many a time.

As a self-admitted melophile in a way that feels closely tethered to my family identity, it was all the more disconcerting that my first festival revealed such a deeply triggering anxiety. In the moment, between darting thoughts of suffocation, I thought of the Astroworld crowd crush in 2021 that left 10 people dead and many more injured. I ultimately asked a festival attendant to help pull me out of the crowd once the anxiety became too overwhelming; yet, my nerves lingered from the hilltop where I found myself sitting at a considerable distance, worried that my sisters — pressed against the metal gates below the stage — would end up being pulled beneath the sea of people.

More than that, however, my uncontrollable reaction to the impending crowd crush, which thankfully remained in the hypothetical realm, subverted another quintessential feature of festivals: other than the more obvious focus on music, these large-scale gatherings are founded on principles of community. Music’s magnetic ability to unite like-minded people is perhaps the most wholesome nugget of festival culture, not to mention a key structural component of my family dynamic. My inability to stay literally grounded in the moment incited a sense of being unmoored from a piece of myself. 

That’s precisely why I forced myself to surmount my anxiety on the second day of Lollapalooza when we were slated to see the Chilis. I knew my siblings wanted to be front row again, as did I. But getting there took a full day of onerous prep work. I meditated to will my mind to have the fortitude to “get through” the worst moments and spoke at length to brother my brother and his fellow 6-foot 4-inch friend about crafting a “box-out” strategy — rec basketball style — to plant themselves and effectively barricade our group from bouncing high schoolers.

Though I made it through the rest of the festival physically unscathed, I couldn’t shake the experience for some time afterward. I questioned my own mental integrity. Could my anxiety really be that acute? How could I not have foreseen this reaction? 

It doesn’t seem to be a modern-day issue, either. Eleven people fatally asphyxiated in 1979 at a concert for The Who at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum. In 2000, nine people died in a mosh stampede at Denmark’s Roskilde festival during a performance by Pearl Jam. And in March of 2023, a concert for rapper Glorilla saw two crowd-crush-related deaths. Setting aside the ethical queries, at one point, the physical power of the horde is simply too great to overcome. 

I couldn’t help but feel somewhat jaded by these breaches of concert etiquette. How could people ignore another human being who was crying and pleading to stop jostling them into a churning crowd? Or were these fans simply too entranced by the beat, unable to break concentration, their senses dulled under the influence of ecstasy or weed or fruit-flavored liquor? I suppose the power of music, ostensibly rife with positive potential, also has its own unique drawbacks.

The experience won’t stop me from going to festivals, but if there’s one thing my first Lollapalooza taught me, it’s to always tread carefully — literally and figuratively — before diving headlong into any new situation. You never know when you’re going to find yourself in need of fresher air.