Yesterday the Fyre Festival started to trend on social media, there were many people who were planning on attending the event, but unfortunately, they were met with the complete opposite of their expectations.
Co-organizer’s Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule were put on blast as festival-goers shared photos and videos of the conditions they were met with.
Billy McFarland exclusively spoke to Rolling Stone and explained the mishaps that caused the festival to fail and his promises to make everything better come next year.
McFarland started off by saying, “Today is definitely the toughest day of my life.” He then went on to talk about the development of the festival, and what caused everything to go downhill.
Naming computers, the ocean and rap music as his hobbies, he talked about meeting Ja Rule and the two later became friends and business partners. The two had taken flying lessons together and flew from New York to the Bahamas.
McFarland and Ja Rule ran out of gas and landed in Exumas, falling in love with the location, it sparked the idea for the two of them to develop the Fyre Festival.
McFarland said, “The Exumas didn’t have a really great infrastructure – there wasn’t a great way to get guests in here – we were a little bit ambitious.”
He continued, “There wasn’t water or sewage. It was almost like we tried building a city out of nothing and it took almost all of our personal resources to make this happen.”
Nonetheless, with their resources, they were able to build two different festival sites.
When it comes what went wrong, McFarland says the morning of the festival a bad storm came in and took down half of their tents and busted their water pipes. While they quickly tried to fix everything guests started to arrive for the festival.
According to McFarland, the weather also delayed some of the flights as well. He continued to talk about accommodating everyone due to the issues they were presented with.
“We thought we were making timeframes that were correct. We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves. Next year, we will definitely start earlier. The reality is, we weren’t experienced enough to keep up,” said McFarland.
Despite all that has occurred, McFarland is still looking forward to attempting to put on the festival again next year. He mentioned make-up dates for 2018, free entry for those who signed up and donating $1.50 per ticket to the Bahamian Red Cross.
Check out the whole interview here.
