Andy HermannOh, so you were in the front row for Kendrick? You crowd-surfed during The Black Lips' set? You saw 25 bands and your feet are soooo sore now? Well, good for you. You did FYF Fest the right way, and we salute you.
But we regret to inform you that you are not the most hardcore FYF fan. (Nope, not even you, bro we saw carrying four cups of rosé back to his other three bro friends. Although you do score major points for busting stereotypes.) After two grueling days of scouring the sprawling expanses of Exposition Park, we can confidently report that we found the seven most totally hardcore attendees at FYF 2016. Meet them. Admire them. Learn from them. And above all, bow down to them. If they weren't so hardcore, FYF would be nowhere near as awesome.
He was dancing his ass off to Jaguar Ma mere moments before this photo was taken.; Credit: Andy Hermann
1. The dude dancing around in a suit who is somehow less sweaty than you.
“You want to make sure when you come to a music festival like this that you wear a lot of layers, so that if you ever get too hot, breathing the hot air, then you can cool down by taking a layer off,” explained John, a 24-year-old actor from the East Coast, attending his third FYF. Style is critical, too: “If I dress well, then people are like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy. That’s the guy who’s ready to dance when good music comes on.’”
She and her brother were up front for DIIV.; Credit: Andy Hermann
2. The girl who broke her shin and still came anyway.
“I tripped over a doorframe” at a party, says Alicia from Simi Valley, whom we caught up with after she had just finished watching Peter Bjorn & John from the handicap-accessible viewing platform. “It was a pretty freak accident.”
At first, Alicia was ambivalent about doing FYF in a wheelchair. “But then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not missing all these people that I’ve been looking forward to seeing for months.’” She and her brother, Armando — “He came because I'm broken,” said Alicia — got their tickets the day before the festival. “I don’t really think this is my scene,” Armando admitted, but said he was enjoying himself anyway, in part because accompanying his sister was getting him access to the viewing platforms. “This is pretty cool, being above the crowd.”
The baby, they report, loves that bass.; Credit: Andy Hermann
3. The lady who's eight months pregnant.
“He was liking Vince Staples,” said Atwater Village resident Carissa of her unborn son, who has been a few shows now with her and dad-to-be Adam (a sometime L.A. Weekly contributor). As her Oct. 18 due date gets closer, Carissa's been trying to squeeze in more concerts and festivals, because once you have a newborn, “That shit gets shut down.”
Not everyone approves of fetuses at festivals. When Carissa went to get her 21-plus wristband, the staffer gave her the stink-eye. “She just kinda looked at me like, ‘You’re a terrible mother.’” Not that she's planning to drink. “I just want to sit down,” she explained. Plus, “I’m with a guy who might wanna have a beer.”
Even without the elephant, Lexi's outfit alone makes her more hardcore than 99 percent of FYF attendees.; Credit: Andy Hermann
4. The girl who brought her elephant.
“They’re called Tsum Tsums,” Lexi from Las Vegas explained of her pachyderm companion. She's collected a few, but Dumbo is her first and her favorite. “When I go places, I usually take him. Like I took him to Disneyland; I brought him here; I took him to Universal Studios.”
When we met Lexi, she was posing Dumbo for pics in front of the mainstage before Grimes' set. “I put him on Snapchat sometimes,” she said, “but he doesn’t have an Instagram.”
Oh, so you wear Doc Martens when you mosh? Wimp.; Credit: Andy Hermann
5. The woman who wore her new white shoes in the pit for Ty Segall.
“I already knew that my white shoes were going to be messed up after the show, but I figured it wouldn't be anything a little bleach couldn't handle,” said the diehard Ty fan, who asked not to be identified. But once she got in the pit for Segall's blistering set with his band The Muggers, she realized she might have overestimated her shoes' resilience. “I ended up busting a hole out of the top around the same time a guy's arm got stuck in my purse and flung me face-first into someone's elbow.”
When we met her, she was on her way back to the pit for Saves the Day. “At least now I've got more than a bunch of bruises for a badge of honor.”
6. The 65-year-old who's dancing way harder than you.
Woodland Hills resident Howard Mordoh loves music festivals. He also happens to be older than most FYF attendees' parents, but so what? At 65, the retired former medical lab scientist goes to so many shows around L.A. that he's become something of a local celebrity, written up in LAist and the L.A. Daily News.
“I really just used to do Coachella, and then I added FYF,” Howard told us when we found him busting some serious moves to The Black Madonna's Sunday afternoon Chicago house set. He's also been to Hard Summer, as you can see. “And I went to Outside Lands for the first time this year; I loved it.”
So where does he get his dance moves, which make him immediately recognizable even without the flying mane of gray hair? “My sister used to watch Soul Train and American Bandstand. We tried to imitate those and my own moves grew from that. But my mother says I could dance before I could walk.”
“Put me down! I gotta get back to the dance floor!”; Credit: Andy Hermann
7. The 4-year-old, and the brave parents who brought the 4-year-old.
FYF is all-ages and stroller-friendly, so why not bring the rugrats? At first, Abby and Ryan didn't think it was such a good idea. “We saw a bunch of kids at Coachella and we were like, we don’t want to take her to festivals,” said Ryan. But since they live in Koreatown and, as The Black Madonna's manager, Ryan had to be at FYF anyway, they decided to bring along their daughter Elliot.
As of Sunday afternoon, Elliot seemed to be thoroughly enjoying her first music festival. “She’s dancing better than I do,” Ryan noted. Naturally, the performer she was most excited to see was her dad's client, The Black Madonna. “She's excited for Floating Points, too, but we haven’t told her she has to go to bed before he goes on.”
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