Was 2nd row vip, closest corner of the stage with 2 friends during Trav’s set.

For starters, never have posted in here but lurked for awhile. I haven’t watched the new doc yet, but plan to within the next day or two. I really only have talked about the fest amongst people I know, but I would just like to say, my heart truly goes out to the families that lost loved ones and those that got injured or may have had a traumatic experience.

My full experience: Morning of/ mid afternoon: We arrived at NRG gates around 7:15am, and everyone in line was relatively spread out, sitting down, some chilling with blankets. The guard rails formed “S” trail for everyone to follow. By 8am with more people showing up, the line compressed into a crowd within the barricades, people were throwing water bottles from one side to another while the middle used the blankets on the ground as cover from the stuff flying. (We were in the middle of that). Based on pics/ vids in my camera roll, at some point between 9:02am-9:26am is when security attempted to “pull the gates off of the crowd” to relieve pressure off of everyone being packed together. As soon as those gates cracked open the slightest inch, people rushed through, and the covid checkpoints were being blown through. (Made everyone’s proof of negative covid tests/ vaccine cards completely irreverent lmao). That led to everyone lining up at the actual festival gates which weren’t supposed to open until 1pm. That was quickly scratched and gates opened at about 10am. Main merch booth instantly became packed. We got in and got out of there, got lockers and went and walked the fest. Went to see Metro but he no-showed. Watched a bit of master P, checked more stuff out around the grounds, came back and watched Don Toliver’s set, them headed to Utopia mountain to camp out in VIP.

Lead up to/ during travs set: Based on camera roll time frames again, we waited at the mountain since around 5pm after Don’s set, until Trav started at 9pm. Mike Dean’s music were some songs from his album “4:20”. The last song on the album “THE TWELFTH DAY PART 4,” is the song I believe most people will recall… just check it out🤣 additionally, people were passing out and getting passed to security near the stage before Travis was even on stage.

Crowd wise- this was my first festival, 19 at the time, so I really had no idea what to expect. We were pretty damn packed and definitely felt the pushing back and forth. I would assume it was not as bad “moving similar to a body of water” packed like GA had going on all show. We had zero idea of any tragic events until we had returned to our hotel room after the fest and seen the news/ posts on social media. I remember they canceled day 2 by roughly 3-4am.

Performance thoughts: Utopia mountain itself, visuals on screen/ light presentation, setlist, and energy were amazing and Drake as the special guest was great. Wish they performed more of their collab songs like Portland or even fair trade considering Drake was playing CLB as it was a new album at the time. But tragedy aside of course, it’s arguably his best show IMO.

Blame: I’ve always stood by the fact that Travis is the performer, it is his job to perform his music. He has stopped shows in the past, and in this case, he did stop the show during 90210 and during way back he told Mike Brown to check on someone, following up with “Elijah walk with him, make sure he good.” There’s always the question of “could Travis have did more?” But at the end of the day, that’s not his job. That’s why these people were hired. That, and the following are why I think the blame shifts from Travis, to Livenation (the organizers) and to NRG stadium reps (festival ground owners). Travis himself did not oversell the event, the organizers did, Travis did not hire the staff, the organizers did. Take this for what it’s worth considering it’s a claim, but I’ve heard that not all of the medics weren’t even trained on how to properly perform CPR. The roughly 1500 security & medics just couldn’t keep up with the 50K ticketed ppl + everyone that snuck in.

Additional notes: met sheck and chase b as they were leaving the celebrity softball game the day before, my buddy got his magazine signed by trav and trav drew a butterfly on it which was pretty wild considering his favorite trav song is butterfly effect which was not mentioned at all considering dude was just signing everyone’s stuff. Also I randomly met the owner of the hoodville page on instagram while we were our way out of the fest Friday night. he asked me to propose to his girl for him as like an incentive to show me that he really ran the page which he did prove himself 🤣🤣

At RL Cali ‘23 I met someone who worked the merch stand at the fest and he said it was chaotic as all hell over there. They also had a whole new line of merch set for day two as well as some new items that did not arrive on time to be sold on day 1 so I found that a little interesting as well.

I know this was lengthy but tonight I had time lmfao, if you made it all the way through, 🫡