is the warped tour ending

Warped Tour Was a Music Institution. And It Will Not Be Missed.

An examination of the iconic pop, punk, and emo music festival that's ending after a two-decade run.

Pour out some Monster Energy Drink (but please not onto plant life, because God knows what might happen); next year’s Warped Tour will be its last .

In an interview with Billboard this week , Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman cited dwindling ticket sales, a smaller pool of potential bands, and pure exhaustion as the reasons to hang up his Vans: “To be honest, I’m just tired.”

He has reason to be. The Warped Tour began in 1995, featuring newcomers No Doubt, plus L7, The Deftones, and a Sublime that had yet to go into the studio for their major-label debut. Through the rest of the decade, they hosted up-and-comers 311, Limp Bizkit, and Blink-182, SoCal legends Social Distortion and Pennywise, as well as legit greats The Get Up Kids, Lagwagon, and Sense Field. Also, Kid Rock, Incubus and a pre-Fergie Black Eyed Peas, because the 1990s were weirder than you remember.

Around the turn of the millennium, things took a turn toward the Hot Topic, with bands like The All-American Rejects, Simple Plan, and Something Corporate taking over, and later A Thorn For Every Heart, Upon A Burning Body, The Receiving End of Sirens, and other bands you can’t convince us aren’t self-published vampire romance novels. It’s been quite a ride.

So now that we’ve come to the end, how do you feel? Were you there at the beginning? Were you ever there? Are you a festivals guy, or do you do the sensible thing and stream it from the comfort of your own couch? We discuss the long-running festival tour's legacy.

LUKE: I’ve been a Warped Tour attendee at heart, if not always in body, for my entire life. This is my music, these are my people, this is my scene. I’ve been multiple times over the decades—although not for a few years now—and I can honestly say I won’t miss it. Neither, I think, will the culture at large. And yes, that has a lot to do with the fact that I am too old at this point to be able to enjoy it, but it also seems as if the Warped Tour as a brand has run its course, for reasons both silly and deadly serious.

DAVE: It’s not my type of music, but I do have experience with the Warped Tour. My boyfriend Ben’s old Celtic punk band The Mighty Regis played it in the summer of 2010. I only got to see a couple of stops: once in the Warped Tour’s ancestral home of Southern California, and once in my hometown of St. Louis, with my octogenarian parents in tow. They didn’t know what to make of The Pretty Reckless, either.

The Mighty Regis started the summer with such hope and promise! Ben bought a medical-transport van and turned it into a tour bus, which they loaded full of CDs and t-shirts they’d silk-screened themselves. They mapped out all the Wal-Marts where they could park and sleep for the night, and the handful of Motel 6s to which they would treat themselves once a week. We sent them off one dewy June morning, off to punk rock glory.

What I remember hearing about that summer was how much begging the job entailed. As soon as the gates opened each day, the band had to approach the kids, give them stickers and postcards, make sure they all knew where and when to come see them. There was a lot of competition, a lot of stages, a lot of bands, and everyone had to put in the work to get those eyeballs and earholes. It sounds exhausting, and that’s before they took the stage on hard asphalt in the middle of an August afternoon to play punk music that largely got drowned out by Andrew WK from clear at the other end of the fairground. On the plus side, I heard there were a lot of good vegan options at catering.

The experience took a lot out of The Mighty Regis, and they didn’t last long past that summer. Now Ben and two of the others are a folk trio, the bus has been sold to an eager baby band, and the lead singer is a pundit on Fox News. Life comes at you fast.

LUKE: That idea of having to really bust your ass to stand out is something that is either a damning condemnation or a ringing endorsement of Warped, depending on how much of a get-in-the-van hardass you are about music. The sense that I get from having interviewed bands about it over the years is that it can feel like playing a tour where you’re not even really there. The pay is hell, the call times are out of whack, and the experience in short is a microcosm of the entire awful music industry crammed into one afternoon. Capitalism, baby! Only the strong survive. Not that there’s anything wrong with hard work for a band, but Warped, and tours like it, sort of exacerbate the problem by taking all of the normal drawbacks of touring and elevating them to 11.

Aside from that, there’s also been some other really bad stuff associated with Warped of late. In a way, Warped announcing the end of its run at this particular moment seems appropriate, the likely demise of scene favorite Brand New coming at the same time being fitting as well. I am not sure if Warped is in and of itself uniquely problematic in terms of its issues with abuse and harassment—rock and roll at large has a pretty long list of issues—but it does seem to have had a pretty dreadful run over the past few years when it comes to abuse, particularly involving minors. I wrote a big story about it a couple of years ago for Alternative Press , something other writers have tackled as well in depth . But the big sticking point seems to have been founder Kevin Lyman’s perceived inability or unwillingness to fully rectify the issue, despite making overtures at doing just that many times. The sheer number of bands that have been accused of assault or sexual abuse, and then been allowed back on the tour, would make for a full day-long festival on its own. Particularly galling to a lot of observers were the allegations against the act Front Porch Step, who was let back onto the tour that same year. Lyman really, really fumbled that one .

I think the general sense, at least from listening to women and young people and advocacy groups who’ve talked about and written about Warped, is that it just wasn’t seen as a safe place anymore. And once you’ve lost that in a punk rock scene, you might as well close up shop.

Dave, have stories about all that stuff crossed over into your radar as well?

DAVE: It’s hard to keep up with all the stories of people being creeps, but I don’t specifically remember having heard about any of this. In fact, up close, the whole thing seemed so (oh God, this word) woke. All sorts of booths for suicide prevention and eating disorder awareness and organ donation. But I guess people are just animals no matter what.

LUKE: It is woke, for sure, but with a specific blindspot. Although I do think they’ve invited some groups dedicated to this issue on the road of late if I’m not mistaken. That said, this aspect of Warped will likely be thoroughly discussed elsewhere online soon, so in the meantime, speaking of it as a festival reminds me of all my other problems with it. Here in Massachusetts it’s always at this amphitheater type venue, with a half-dozen stages erected in the middle of the parking lot. And it has never not been either 90 degrees or raining whenever it comes through. Respect to the production team for being able to pull something of that size and scope off and bring it on the road day after day, by the way, but—and this isn’t just me being an old crank—I really do not think music of any kind—and in particular, punk, metal, and hard core—is meant to be enjoyed outside, in the day, standing in a parking lot. It’s just not. It’s like watching a baseball game on a basketball court to me. Punk is meant to be played and listened to and moshed to inside a dingy club.

The last Warped I went to, probably like 4 years ago, reminded me of this. You often cannot see, unless you elbow your way to the front. And with so many different stages and staggered start times, you have to make that herring-like swim upstream over and over again. You cannot hear, because the sound is bouncing off the pavement and bleeding into the next stage over, and you are subjected to the vagaries of the elements. I think I saw Taking Back Sunday on the last Warped I went to, a band I’ve seen many times in clubs, and it sucked. There’s no point in me being here, I thought. And all of the newer bands at the time—Story So Far, Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! (I know, that name)—played on smaller stages to a much less enthusiastic crowd than they might if they were in a local club.

DAVE: Can I tell you something else I learned about the Warped Tour by being a band wife? The first time I saw The Mighty Regis, I got way up close to the stage, and as they were sound-checking, I noticed that each one of them was drinking a Monster Energy Drink. This is a healthy bunch of people in their 30s we’re talking about here, and I’d seen their medical-transport tour bus off just days before. Had the Vans ethos infected their spirits so thoroughly, so quickly? That much sugar, guarana seed extract, and green dye #6, in this heat? Who were these people all of the sudden?

I will tolerate many things, but Monster usage is not one of them. I confronted Ben just after their set as he popped open another can. And then he handed it to me. Spring water, disguised as an extreme beverage. A marketing ploy, as disgusting and unhealthy as Monster itself.

LUKE: There is nothing more that the teens love more than punk and emo than brands. They cannot get enough of the brands. I think it’s ironic then that that’s what Warped will be remembered as most in the end. A tour that turned a scene into a brand. It was fun while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever. I think I saw Fun While It Lasted and Nothing Lasts Forever on Warped in 2010, by the way.

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‘The Life and Death of the Warped Tour': Kevin Lyman Looks Back

It's the end of an era: last week, the final Warped Tour kicked off in Ponoma, California. When the tour started in 1995 with a ragged group of punk rock bands and skaters, it would have been hard to predict that it would last nearly a quarter of a century and would introduce a wealth of bands to new, young audiences, including Sublime, No Doubt, Taking Back Sunday, Pararmore, Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy, among others.

The festival's founder, Kevin Lyman, looked back on the tour's entire history in this extensive interview. After this summer, he's taking a position as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California . He has also recently launched FEND , an app to help fight the opioid crisis. and he was eager to talk to us about that.

This is the Warped Tour's final year, but you're just starting a new initiative, FEND. The Warped Tour, when we started, had a three-pronged approach. It was music, philanthropy, and education. And as we’re kind of winding down this last year, the philanthropy side has been my biggest concern. How are we going to carry that mission forward?

I’ve traveled around the country, and I'm on the board of MusiCares . Each summer I have these little mini-family reunions [with different bands at the Warped Tour]. And our conversations drift to the effects of opioids. I also show up in venues each morning and ask, “Where is that person?” or “Where is this person?” And I’d say one out of five days, someone would say, "Oh, he passed away from opioids."

So I was approached by a technology company from Australia called iPug , they had this concept [for an app]. A lot of research went into it, and they’d done some initiatives in Australia on gamification. We all love games, whether it’s to get points to get cheaper gas, or at the grocery store or to get [free] things. Everyone’s playing games. So how do we educate through games?

The audience at Warped Tour has always been open to new ideas, and if we could create the right product for them, maybe they would help us refine this. And that became the FEND app. FEND stands for "Full Energy No Drugs."

We’re trying to build a baseline for the future, similar to what Truth did, [provide] a baseline of education [about opioids]. So eventually, after Warped Tour, we could maybe take it into motocross, or you can take it into metal music or country music or sports because everyone’s being affected by it.

Our goal is to have 50,000 people download the app by the end of the summer. The only way we’re gonna tackle this crisis is from the bottom up. Killing drug dealers is not gonna solve the problem, [contrary to] certain people’s ideas in this country. It’s going to come from education.

The opioid crisis seems to be the rare issue that Democrats and Republicans are equally concerned about. And that’s the thing. It’s bipartisan. Every racial profile, financial profile, every demographic is being affected by this. The greatest number of people [struggling with addiction] are stay-at-home moms. This is not something that’s going to be fixed overnight. I think it’s gonna take a generation or two to really do this, similar the success of Truth in reducing the level of teen smoking. It’s gonna be a long road ahead, but you gotta try.

We’re educating people on how to recognize overdoses, that there are Good Samaritan laws. So many people don’t know that if you call to get help for someone, you can’t be charged. And people aren’t calling. We’re seeing that, especially, in teenagers. They’re grabbing few pills out of Mom’s medicine cabinet, they’re mixing it with some alcohol, the friend ODs, and they’re scared for themselves, so they don’t call for help, and the person’s dead before they could’ve gotten help. A shot of Narcan can bring a lot of people back.

The end of Warped Tour just means that I have more time to work on the philanthropic and education side. This will be a street level [initiative], but using technology, because the demographics of who I tend to work with is very tech savvy.

That's true, and I feel like the Warped Tour audience has gotten younger over the years.  No, we’re getting older and older. They’re the same age. We’re just getting older.

I went to the first Warped Tour in 1995; it was Quicksand , L7 , Sublime , Sick Of It All ... That was definitely a little older. When I started out, I was traveling with my peers and touring with my peers. Since then, we’ve settled in around that 18-, 19-year-old age group. Probably back then we were all about 22 to 25.

I remember hearing that a lot of the people on your staff had been through rehab, or even jail; you gave a lot of people a second chance.  Punk rock was always about redemption. We had a community in L.A., and we were about redemption. You could screw up in life, and if you put the effort in, you could come back into the community. The majority of my early Warped Tour crew guys all had to spend a little time in jail for stupid decisions. A lot of them were selling meth or whatever and did their time, and I gave them their second chance. And that built a loyalty, giving a second chance to people. In this day and age, it’s harder, because everyone’s prejudged on social media. I don’t believe in that. I believe that there are bad people that have to be weeded out in this world, and we tend to do that. We used to have ways where we were able to deal with that. And now there’s no sense of redemption. Everyone’s so quick to judge, but I’ve always been about redemption.

In 1995, Sublime was on our tour. And Brad Nowell, as we all know, had a very serious problem. And I was close with Brad. I have his first cassette demo tape somewhere. Our first children were born just 30 days apart, and we would talk about becoming parents and doing all these things when we were on the road. And then he died. He died of an overdose.

I don’t know if I could’ve helped. But everything I’ve learned, and now being part of MusiCares, I'm deep into that community and understanding it, I wish I had those tools in 1995. But I was a production guy just out there trying to create something. And that’s why I say there was no book written on how to do the Warped Tour because no one had done anything like that.

When I saw the Warped Tour in 1995, it was at Nassau Coliseum, on Long Island. But it wasn't in the venue; you guys set up everything in the parking lot. Oh yeah, we couldn’t park six buses in the space that we used to use there.

I think a lot of people thought we were gonna be just like Lollapalooza. I remember someone saying, “Kevin Lyman’s trying to beat a dead horse” or something like that.

People ask what your legacy will be, and I go, "My legacy is going out and seeing all the people working in the [music] business that either got inspired by being a fan at that tour at some point, or it inspired them to be in a band, or inspired them to work for a brand or to become a crew member, or a member of the press."

People tell me their first show was Warped Tour or the first time they got a press credential was to cover the Warped Tour because none of the old writers wanted to go. They couldn’t understand it, so they sent the young guys out and young girls out to cover it. So that’ll be the legacy I leave.

Talk about your experience working on Lollapalooza.  In ’91 I was the first stage manager of Lollapalooza. That scene was blowing up, Jane's Addiction, Chili Peppers . I’d never been on the road. I was a guy who worked at the clubs every day and ran the shows, but I never went on the road.

Young people want to get into the music business. I go, "You wanna work in a club? That’s the hardest job, because not only do you have to load the gear, you have to set up the catering, you have to sometimes do security." I had to know enough to run a lighting rig and a monitor rig -- not so well, but I could pull it off if I had to. So I thought I could do everything in ’91. I pretty much crashed and burned in 48 hours. All the old crew guys laughed at me and said, “This guy’s done.” I pulled myself back together and finished that tour, finished it strong.

And then in ’92 I went out again as a stage manager but ended up assuming a lot of the production manager roles, because one of our touring production people had a very serious addiction problem. I didn't know how to deal with it. All I did was know how to do his job for him. And then in ’93 I became the "Artist Liaison," because at that point Lollapalooza, there were people running Lollapalooza who didn’t necessarily wanna deal with the bands on a day-to-day basis, so my job was... I was being paid money to teach the [Tibetan] monks who traveled with the Beastie Boys how to play basketball and do things like that.

By ’94 I [also] did some site coordination, and I found sites and places for them to play.  I just felt like [Lollapalooza's producers] kinda changed their vision. And it’s great they found that vision again in Chicago, and now in places like Chile and Argentina and all of the places they’re doing it.

Warped came together pretty quick. I put the first one on in ’95. But the blending of sports and music was happening out in California. We were doing events. I’d pay the Chili Peppers $250 to play on top of a skate ramp. And Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi, Chris Miller and all the early skaters, we’d do these Vision Skate Escapes and Swatch Impact tours.

And then I heard about the X-Games. I was doing a Board Aid event for charity. I was sitting in the snow. I’d gotten Perry Farrell to play [Jane's Addiction's] "Mountain Song," He hadn’t played any Jane's Addiction songs since he started Porno for Pyros, and he played that song. And it was just one of those moments: snowballs are flying, the stage was getting overrun, snowboarders, skateboarders. There was that moment I sat in the snow and I said, “You know, this whole lifestyle is gonna get promoted by the X-Games. Maybe we should go out and try to do it ourselves.”

So you started booking the first Warped Tour. Pretty much rounded up friends, only people that were close, Sublime, No Doubt, Quicksand, L7, Seaweed, No Use for a Name. It was a very eclectic lineup for that time. And then I grabbed some skaters. Steve Salvo was a friend of mine, and he rounded up a few other skaters. And we headed out on the road, got it together within a few months and went out and did 25 cities. I always tell young people I was allowed to fail because of all the work I’d put in before.

And then ’96, Pennywise and NOFX brought legitimacy, maybe, in the artists’ eyes, because they were much bigger bands. By then, Sublime and No Doubt were massive, but on that first year, they weren’t that well-known yet. We made a video, we called it “Punk Rock Summer Camp.” So then we got known as "The Punk Rock Tour," even though it’s been a very eclectic tour. It’s covered every genre of music from country to rap to punk to metal to everything in between.

And Vans got involved. I almost made a really bad deal, and it almost became "The Calvin Klein Warped Tour." Can you imagine? We wouldn’t be sitting here talking. That would’ve been just a big branding mistake. And Vans got involved, and I promised them I would promote amateur skating as long as they wanted to. And 24 years later I’m now in this new phase of winding it down, and a couple weeks after it ends, I’ll be starting as a professor at the University of Southern California.

Lollapalooza always seemed very high minded. Another way to put it -- if you didn't like Lollapalooza -- was that it was pretentious. I spoke to one artist who did Lollapalooza one year and the Warped Tour the following year, and he said that he was so much more comfortable on Warped. I became friends with the vendors out on Lollapalooza, but they weren’t allowed backstage to take showers. There was always a level of hierarchy. So I’d sneak them back and let them take showers in the dressing rooms when they were done.

People didn't really mingle. They hung out in their dressing rooms, they weren't really becoming a community. But a few things I learned from Lollapalooza were: number one, no dressing rooms. Warped has never had dressing rooms. Everyone’s treated equally. It builds community.

Number two, write the [lineup] schedule every day. On Lollapalooza, I would have to watch Henry Rollins up there just killing it, and he was playing to a bunch of empty seats, because he had to play at 1:20 PM every afternoon. And I would be like, "Oh man, I wish I could put him on right before Jane’s Addiction, [he'd] just blow their heads off." And I saw that when the few shows we played that were general admission shows, there would be kids coming down front by the end of his set.

Three, general admission, whenever possible. Warped Tour, even when we had seats, it’s general admission.

Lollapalooza was great; it broke a lot of ground. It brought a lot of bands out, especially the second year, with Pearl Jam . My whole job was to hold the fort as it was getting attacked by the 10,000 kids trying to charge the stage [during Pearl Jam's set], and then get it back in order, because everyone knew we could get it back in order when the Jesus and Mary Chain came on, because they’re the absolute most boring band in the world, and we could put that back together.

So I learned a lot out there that I didn’t know was leading to something else. And I think I learned a lot through Warped, which is leading me to the next phase of my life.

Warped was also a mostly daytime concert, right? I remember going to a Warped show in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and it went late until after it was dark out. You guys had one huge floodlight on the stage; not the usual lighting rig. There’s a great video from Asbury Park where the Specials were playing “Ghost Town” as their closing song. And it was all dark, and we had that one light, and we were shining it, and [singer] Neville [Staple]’s dreadlocks was shining on one of those burned-out buildings. And it shined up and picked up a shadow, and you saw a homeless person cooking over a fire stove up in the building, and it was like, this town is a ghost town. It was pretty epic.

But [we didn't use] lights for multiple reasons. One: we have to move very quickly. But two: 90% of the problems are caused by 10% of the people under cover of darkness. I think that’s a footnote in life. But when I worked in the punk rock clubs in Los Angeles, it was very violent. So when I did the Warped tour, I thought, "Let's take it out in the sunshine, because people become a lot less bold in the sunshine."

Were there sponsors before Vans signed on? The first year, actually, we’d gotten a few sponsors. That came from my watching the community and saying, "We’re supporting these brands. Maybe we could get some of their money to help support the bands and music of the kids who are buying their products." So our first sponsor on Warped Tour, I believe, was Converse the first year, and Sony PlayStation. It was an evolution of learning how to work with brands. And that’s what kind of created that whole atmosphere because I’d seen brands working at certain other events and things, but they were never part of the event. The brand groups would come in, and then they would leave right after the show. They never mingled.

So that’s where those barbeques came into play. Bring everyone backstage to hang out and mingle, because everyone on Warped Tour is important. There’s no one more important than anyone else. And I really think that it really worked at the beginning, because the Black Eyed Peas didn’t know Pennywise. But they hung out at the barbeque together, and they realized they're just musicians, they’re people and they became friends.

Now, in this era, you’ve got so many bands that prejudge each other on social media. They’ve never met them face to face. There are people that prejudge the tour that I created without ever meeting me face to face. And that’s the problem. This broke down all that. It really broke it down. So the sponsors rode on the buses. The first year some of the companies sent out a bunch of guys in golf shirts. I called them "the golf shirt people," because you should never trust a person in a golf shirt unless they’re on a golf course. And I would say, “Wait, how is a kid gonna come up and trust your brand unless you have kids that live this lifestyle in your brand?”

So we started being able to work with the brands to hire people from our community. And tattoos were OK. Piercings are OK. Colored hair’s OK. They’re living this culture, so bring them in as brand ambassadors. But we were the first people that said, “Get them in uniform.” So we would go to Hurley and have them design the clothes for PlayStation or something. And they would show up, and they would be part of the culture. And I think we figured it out how we went through trial and error, mistakes, and moving forward.

How did you almost end up partnering with Calvin Klien? An ex-partner had a friend there, and he actually flew to New York with some of the last money we had; we were so broke after the first tour. I was working shows every day of the week. And they got caught in the giant blizzard of 1996 . So they got stuck on the runway.

Meanwhile, I got a call from Vans, the same day. They said, “Can you come down here for a meeting?” “Sure, I'd love to.” Immediately I thought, "They wanna get involved in the Warped Tour." I think they just wanted me to help them with their amateur skate program.

There’s a moment in life when you have nothing to lose, and I said, “No one’s gonna watch amateur skating unless you’re involved in an amazing music festival. I have this thing called the Warped Tour, it’s so successful.” In fifteen minutes we had a deal.

We had a lawyer involved [in the Calvin Klein deal], and lawyers don’t make deals, they break deals. So I used him to help break the deal at Calvin Klein. I guess he was a total asshole when he walked in there, and they kicked him out in fifteen minutes, and it became the Van’s Warped Tour.

We were the first music festival to do a deal with Target. And then I convinced them to create a space in their stores for new music. Back then they weren’t carrying CDs. So our agreement was that we had 10 slots, we would put the Warped compilation in there, and then Rancid went in there and a few other bands. And then Fletcher Dragge from Pennywise decided that it was time to kick my ass because I was "selling out punk rock." He’s like, "I’m gonna kick Kevin Lyman’s ass. He’s selling out the Warped Tour." That’s the cool thing; these bands took it real seriously. And Tim Armstrong from Rancid told him, “Hey look, I can only afford to shop at Target. If my music’s in there now, that’s cool with me.”

I really admire Ian MacKaye, but hardly anyone could make a living off of selling CDs for $8 and concert tickets for $5. And no one ever has, except for him. And me and Ian MacKaye have great conversations. We believe in a lot of the same things. I did [club] shows with Fugazi. If you did a show with Fugazi, that gave you credibility. You never made money on a Fugazi show. It wouldn’t be a good business model to do a hundred bands like Fugazi.

Lagwagon would call and wanna do a $5 ticket. I’m like, "Dude, we only can afford to do one $5 ticket a year. We gotta charge $10 for your shows." But yeah, Ian's a person who I look up to.

The first year, there was a band hierarchy as far as the lineup: Quicksand were the headliners, followed by L7 and Sublime and everyone else's name was smaller. But in later years, you started listing the bands in alphabetical order. We waste so much time in this industry arguing over logo size. It’s unbelievable. It’s one of the reasons I can’t do it anymore. It’s like, when you’re sitting there with the manager of Korn and the manager of Slipknot , and you’re arguing over the logo size, and you’re doing it in the same font. I’m going, “Your logo’s never gonna look as big as Slipknot. It’s got more letters. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

The Warped Tour was around at the same time as Lollapalooza, the H.O.R.D.E. Festival , the Lilith Fair , and Ozzfest. All of those tours had great runs, but nothing comes close to the Warped Tour's longevity. What do you attribute that to? Keeping it simple. It still feels like a backyard party. That’s what I wanted it to be, an accessible backyard party, the kind of things we used to have at our house. A band playing, a plywood ramp, me barbequing. Some people would say the Warped Tour became a formula in some ways, but it was my thing, I just never changed a whole lot.

At some point, you had to make the decision to create a younger audience, rather than grow old with your audience. If you wanna keep doing this, you have to evolve. The die-hards would say "That’s bullshit, you have to say true." Brett Gurewitz from Epitaph has evolved to remain in existence. Side One Dummy, we’re evolving as a record label because we wanna continue to do this kind of thing. Those hardcore types who said, “I only sign this type of music and band,” most of them are not here anymore.

So you evolve. the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, they spoke to me in a certain way at a certain age in my life, and it was so relevant and were so important. I’m not gonna argue that A Day to Remember or Mayday Parade or Every Time I Die are not speaking the same way to that fan and touching them the same way. I watch the kids in the front row at the barricade singing as hard and passionately as the kids were when I was working shows and starting out.

Were there bands that you wanted to book, that you just couldn't get? Twenty One Pilots, I had them booked, but then their agent got involved and they didn’t play. Go figure. And then there were two acts: the Ramones , I always tried to get to play. By then they all had different bands [the Ramones broke up in 1996]. And I’d be like, “Look guys, we’ll have an all-Ramones, all-the-time stage. So you can have all your little side projects play all day, but just play thirty minutes of Ramones songs together.”

And then I had Joe Strummer [of the Clash] booked. And I had just seen Joe Strummer in November. We hung out at the Troubadour, he was stoked to be on the Warped Tour, I was so excited. He passed away that December.

There was Green Day , but they said two things in life they'd never do: they would never play the Warped Tour or watch Titanic . So when they played the Warped Tour, the first day I sent out for a copy of Titanic  and taped it to the bus and said, “Now you can say you’ve done both.” But they played. I just wrote a forward for their book that just came out.

Who are some of the bands who you feel the Warped Tour helped to break? Black Eyed Peas: legend is that they met Fergie in the parking lot at the barbecue one night. I can’t dispute that. I’ve been told that a few times. Bebe Rexha was on Warped Tour a couple years ago.  Machine Gun Kelly , Yelawolf, those acts all got their first touring chances on Warped Tour. Deftones kind of broke out of Warped Tour early on. My Chemical Romance , Fall Out Boy, all those bands. Paramore, Hayley Williams started out with an acoustic guitar, played one show on a pink truck one year, then moved up to the next stage. A Day to Remember. Mayday Parade, they started out selling CDs in the parking lot.

Every Time I Die, who I’ve always thought has been probably underappreciated. I think they’re getting that appreciation now because they kill it. They bring it, and their shows have been selling out now, they’re headlining. And then Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish, and Bowling for Soup.

We the Kings, Simple Plan, the Used are coming back and doing part of the tour. We’re announcing a bunch more guests coming up this summer. People will be dropping in. We’ll have the cardboard sign like we did years ago when Linkin Park showed up; they’ll be some of that going on. And then we’re bringing the younger bands that I think can become the next headliners.

And then, you know what? It’s gonna be up to someone else because I’ve laid the groundwork. I’ve laid down 25 years of work on how to do a festival. And some people complain about the way I run it, but now you can take the pieces and bypass some of the mistakes I’ve made, and you can create your own utopian festival, and you can have a world where it’s perfect for you and the bands can be just what you want all the time. And I’ll go into this next phase of being a professor at USC.

You were producing the metal festival Mayhem a few years ago, and I remember an interview where you said that metal headliners wouldn't take less money to do the tour and support the scene the way that the punk bands did for Warped. They don't. [But] I think it was misconstrued in an interview I did once, where I was kind of calling metal out in a way, but it was like: you need to start nurturing new headliners because you can’t keep repackaging these bands. We needed new headliners in metal. And I was saying, “Give younger bands a chance,” and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t giving bands like Bring Me the Horizon the chance to come with them and bring younger fans into metal.

So after this article, certain people in metal got really mad. There were firestorms of “Kevin Lyman’s an asshole,” whatever. But I got a lot of phone calls, of course, saying, “Hey, someone needed to say that.” And it was nice the last few years seeing some of these younger acts getting the chance to play with some of these bigger acts.

But you have to refill the scene, or you’re just gonna [have to admit] admit that you’re "classic rock." So of course, in some flippant way, I’ve said things that of course got misconstrued. But if you stand for something, 50% of the people are gonna hate you, and 50% are gonna call you, and some of them won’t come out in public, but they’re gonna go, “Dude, thanks for saying that.” I got a lot of that.

What have you learned about not being able to please everyone? I realized that not everyone’s going to like Kevin Lyman. I think when you start out, especially, you think everyone’s gonna like you. I realized that sometimes people are just not gonna like you, and that’s OK.

So I learned that you’ve gotta learn how to say no. I still have a hard time at times, and really having a hard time last year, because there are so many people that want to be part of the last tour.

Will the Warped Tour live on in any other form after this summer? Could it become a destination festival like Lollapalooza and Ozzfest have done? I think for our 25th anniversary [in 2020] we’re definitely looking at a couple locations. Beyond that, I wouldn’t say. If I ever did it, I don’t think I’d do it as a one-city destination festival, I’d try to move it around. The Warped Cruise was great. Maybe we’ll do another Warped Cruise. It was so much fun. We’ll see.

What's your take on the state of the scene? I really think before you pass judgment on people, you need to meet them face to face. I think these bands are passing judgment on each other. People say, “I don’t wanna play Warped Tour because those bands play Warped Tour.” No, go play Warped Tour and steal their fans. A lot of people go, “I don’t wanna be on a tour with Attila .” And if you spend time with Attila, they’re not bad. They’re not causing problems. I look at Attila; they draw a lot of kids. And you know what? Maybe at 15 singing “Suck My Fuck” is cool, but by the time you’re 18 you’re probably gonna grow out and like another band.

Now, their music’s good. Attila got a lot of respect last summer from the musicians because they were like, “These guys know how to play.” Maybe the lyrics are a little wacky, but you know what? Maybe these bands are gonna grow up and realize that there’s other people saying other things.

So to alienate yourself and say “I’m not going to play with this band” or “I’m not gonna tour with these kinds of bands”... I call it "The La Dispute Syndrome." I don’t care if they hate me. I wanted those bands, La Dispute, Balance and Composure, Touche Amore. They should’ve been playing Warped Tour to broaden their audiences because those audiences are growing and ever-shifting and exposing themselves into new things. Because if you play to the same couple hundred kids in a basement or in a small club, eventually they’re gonna grow out. They’re not gonna be coming to see you. So I always tell these bands that have alienated themselves, “Come hang out with me. Spend some time with me.” That’s how we used to do it in punk rock. You never pass judgment on someone until you’ve spent some time with them. Now we use social media to pass judgment on each other, and that’s wrong. That’s one of the big reasons that I’m leaving is it makes me fuckin’ sick. And then I hear the local scenes, and they’re saying, "These bands are tearing down these bands," and the kids ask me, “What do you do about that?” You just have to ignore those bands, alienate the bands that are causing disruption within your local scene.

I’ve done a good run, and I could be proud of what I’ve done, and I’ll challenge anyone to stack up the good and negative of Warped Tour in a pile, and I’m sure the good is a lot higher than the negative. There has been some negative stuff, but we try to figure it out.

One more question about the first Warped Tour: tell me a story about Sublime's dog, Lou Dog.  I hated that dog. It was the only animal in the world I hated. When we booked Sublime, Lou Dog would come, crap all over the stage, snap at people and fight with people. I hated him. So then I made a rule when I booked Sublime. I knew them well enough. I said, “No friends and no dog.”  So they flew their friends and the dog flew and came to Asbury Park. They showed up at the show; I was pissed. We’re struggling, we have no food. We’re living off my friend’s beer company. Oatmeal stout was breakfast. There were no stagehands. We were just doing this because we believed in it. And the dog shows up.

There used to be the gay cowboy bar behind the Stone Pony [in Asbury Park], and we all went over there for a party, and the dog bit two people. I’m like, “Oh my god, now I’m gonna get sued for this.”

So I said, “Get rid of the dog!”

We go up to Melody Fair up in Buffalo. It was a rainy, muddy day. They’d been partying all night with their friends, so they’re all high, fist fighting, like Brad and Eric [Wilson] are fighting before the show. They got onstage. They were a mess. People were throwing mud at them, it was horrible. The dog’s there, he bit someone on a skateboard that morning before we’d even played. And I’m like, “Brad! He’s gotta go!”

“Well, man, he hates skateboarders.”

I go, “We’re on a fucking skateboarding tour. Everyone’s on skateboards! If I see the dog again, you’re off the tour.”

We go down to Nassau Coliseum. We actually had a few boxes of cereal and milk, and guess who I saw eating the cereal and milk. Fuckin’ Lou Dog is eating the cereal. And then I kicked them off the tour that day. I sent them home because I was barely hanging on. The promoters were losing money, we’re losing money. I’m like, “I can’t stand this. Go home.” So I kicked them off the tour that day and sent them home for a week. I had this old Southern redneck bus driver who I still know, and he really felt sorry for me, so he took them down and smacked them around and put them on a plane home. Then they met up with us about a week later in Seattle.

Oh yeah, Lou Dog was psychotic. He was a dog that should not have been around. And you know what? They weren’t good owners. I don’t blame it on him. There’s really only bad owners. There’s not a lot of bad dogs. They were bad dog owners.

Finally, tell me about the classes you're going to be teaching at USC.  It’s interesting because I thought I’d either go run summer camp or be a teacher. I’ve always loved teaching. I was approached, and timing’s everything. A position opened up after like 20 years at USC. I don’t think they thought I was open to the idea. And I had to dig out that old college degree that I said I would put on a resume one day. I did my first resume.

It’s four to five classes two days a week, so it’s a full professorship. I’ll be teaching live event production, philanthropy in music, music history, things like that.

It’s weird to have “professor” before your name. And that puts you in a different world, as we take these initiatives like FEND into a different world. Because "Kevin Lyman of the Warped Tour" gets you certain cred with a certain group of people, but when you’re talking politics and things like that, USC’s going to be a good calling card.

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• Cover Story

"I Cried When I First Heard About Warped Tour Ending"

We head to Warped to find out how the fans feel about it being over...

As the Vans Warped Tour rolls to a close, we've seen a plethora of bands talk about how sad they are, and what Warped Tour meant to them. But, there's another set of people who'll miss it dearly: the fans.

The unique thing about Warped was how it gave music lovers the opportunity to connect with their favourite artists through intimate meet and greets and workshops.

So, with that in mind, we asked those attending the Holmdel, NJ and Scranton, PA dates how they felt about the festival's demise and the impact it's had on their lives.

Check it out...

Katie (left)

“I’m sad, but this was also the best Warped Tour yet! It’s kind of nostalgic that I’ve been coming here for years and it’s ending. There were a lot of great bands playing that I listened to growing up, which was exciting; I loved seeing Simple Plan. One of the best things about Warped Tour is that you come and discover so many new bands. It also sucks that most of the festivals in New Jersey, with this type of music, are basically over. Bamboozle and Skate And Surf ended... and now this."

Sam (right)

“Oh yeah, it definitely makes me sad! Especially since now that I’ve gotten older, it’s a lot more fun. It’s not fair! It’s so hard to see individual bands throughout the year and it’s so nice to be able to come here and see everyone. Broadside blew me out of the park. I like that smaller bands have more of a chance at Warped, but you’re also able to see the bigger ones, too.”

“I’ve been coming since 2014! I cried when I first heard about Warped Tour ending. It has a lot of sentimental value to me. A lot of the memories I experienced were quite personal and nothing could compare to them, so I’m pretty bummed. I’m glad that I got to go to it when I was younger.”

Gabby (left)

“It’s really sad because this is my first and my last. I always went to Bamboozle and the same kind of music played here, and it makes me sad that I never really came to Warped. I love this place.”

“It’s sad to see it end, but I’m really happy that it is, which is also kind of sad - I think they had a good run! A lot of bands got a lot of good exposure that they deserve, a lot of people have learned from this and I love coming and being able to see all of my friends. I think it’s really super-sweet that whole families are coming here. So whether it was the first Warped Tour or the last, it’s so cool to see little babies running around with their parents."

A.J. Khah (Bassist, Sleep On It)

“I’m bummed it’s the last ever Warped Tour! I grew up going to this, I went to '05 Warped Tour, which was the craziest one ever, because I love Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. My band has played one-off shows and battle of the bands here, so it feels like a part of me is dying with this. On the other hand, it’s such an honour to be a part of the the last one, and for it to be the first Warped Tour that we’re a part of. I just couldn’t ask for a better way to be a part of it, especially being on the last date of the last one - it’s such an honour.”

Words and photos: Abby Clare

Header image: Jordan Mizrahi

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-the-warped-tour-helped-artists-and-fans-find-themselves

How the Warped Tour helped artists (and fans) find themselves

Musicians and fans alike are mourning the end of the Vans Warped Tour, whose founder announced last month that the traveling music festival would end in 2018 after 23 years.

Since 1995, the “punk rock summer camp” has been a rite of passage for many big-name artists.

Katy Perry has said she “ got her bearings ” on Warped in 2008. Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman tells a story that The Black Eyed Peas met lead singer Fergie at a barbecue during the festival. Eminem, G-Eazy, and Bebe Rexha all got a kick start from the tour, which attracts an average of 600,000 concertgoers each summer.

Announcing the end “felt like my funeral,” Lyman said. For artists and fans, the buildup to the last tour is a reason to reflect on how much it’s meant to them.

Alex Gaskarth of Baltimore-based pop punk band All Time Low, who played Warped Tour four times, tweeted that without Warped Tour, “I probably would not be where I am today.” Kevin McCallister, drummer for pop rockers Set it Off, wrote on Twitter that the tour was something he looked forward to every summer and was instrumental in shaping his love of music.

Neck Deep, a Welsh pop punk band that built up an American audience on Warped Tour, thanked Lyman for giving them the opportunity to play, tweeting that , “The Warped Tour was something we all grew up dreaming about … some of the best days of our lives.”

In the alternative rock scene, playing the Vans Warped Tour could make careers. Before they played sold-out arenas, Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Blink 182, No Doubt and Paramore joined Lyman’s lineup to perform for whomever showed up.

“To play the entire Warped Tour on a bus is very prestigious in the punk rock world,” said Shane Henderson, former frontman of pop punk band Valencia .

Henderson played Warped Tour five times with Valencia. The band slowly worked its way up from a week of dates in 2005 to eventually joining the tour for all of the 28-plus cities. He remembers walking around the festival playing his music through a set of headphones to drum up support. Later, he sold the band’s record for a dollar to get his music out there.

“Warped Tour makes you take a hard look at yourself and your performance. How can we be more entertaining? How can we make people come back and see us?” Henderson, 32, said. “There’s a lot of competition there.”

Warped Tour has no age limit and its core audience skews young — 15 to 25 years old. Lyman credits that to the kind of bands he booked. Seventy percent of his lineup were the bands popular with teens, like Fall Out Boy, Paramore, the All American Rejects and All Time Low. He remembers standing in the pit, watching bands like My Chemical Romance draw in hundreds of kids who couldn’t even drink yet, and immediately booking the band for another stint on the tour.

“[Warped Tour] had the ability, through access to popular bands and brands, to harness a style and sound kids loved,” said Stephen Thompson, writer for NPR Music. “Because the music tended to have a darker, outcast-y edge to it, Warped Tour could bring together lots of kids who felt alienated and frustrated.”

The tour averages 40 dates a summer, and 20,000-plus young fans attend each stop. To keep everyone safe, Lyman admits chaperones free of charge and sets up air-conditioned tents for them, known as “reverse daycare.”

Set times for specific bands are intentionally kept a secret from not only the fans, but from the musicians as well. Lyman said Warped helps musicians learn to tour, part of which means being ready to go at any time, and making an effort to draw an audience. “There’s no elitism on Warped Tour,” Lyman said. “You just have to be a great live performer.”

Caroline Shaw, 19, brought her 51-year-old father to one of the three Warped Tour shows she’s attended, dragging him into the pit so he could feel the energy that she loves so much. “Warped Tour is loud and chaotic,” Shaw said. “But it’s this tiny piece of chaos that makes sense to me.”

At Warped Tour, Shaw, then an engineering major at Iowa State University and hating it, decided to become a music journalist. Today, she’s the music writer for her college newspaper and uses that platform as a way to chase the feeling she first experienced at Warped Tour.

“I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to Warped,” Shaw said. “Warped Tour is, or was, this place where young people could be themselves and not be hidden.”

Warped Tour set itself apart by traveling to the cities that many arena or club tours often ignore. For 17-year-old Natalie Lindsey, seeing bands like Sleeping with Sirens or Pierce the Veil play her tiny Kansas hometown was a huge deal. She’s attended the tour three times now, and considers the festival “a relief” from the conservatism she’s grown up in.

“The bands on Warped Tour talk about things other bands don’t want to talk about, like addiction and mental health and confidence,” Lindsey said. “Warped Tour allows me to find friends who have gone through the same struggles I have. It’s a sense of family.”

Family values are what Lyman had in mind when he chose a sponsor for the tour in 1996. After declining to have Calvin Klein fund the tour, Lyman was approached by Steve Van Doren, whose family founded the California skate shoe company Vans in 1966.

“Music wasn’t my forte — I was a shoe guy,” Van Doren said. “But we had always seen bands with shoes and we wanted to get into that.”

Vans shoes became a quintessential punk rock staple, and Van Doren says it all started on Warped Tour.

The tour has also brought a philanthropic aim to its merchandising, holding blood drives, collecting canned goods and providing support services for substance abuse and mental health, in addition to working with groups devoted to animal rights advocacy and suicide awareness.

“Warped Tour is the kind of place that can change you as a person,” Lindsey said. “It really showed me that you’re more than just yourself, and inspired me to help other people.”

The final Vans Warped Tour will cross the country June 21 – Aug. 5, 2018. Fans have begged for Warped-Tour greats like Fall Out Boy, All Time Low and My Chemical Romance to play the final round. Henderson has offered to reunite Valencia just to play Warped one last time.

And what does the end of the tour mean for the music? “That’s going to be for the next generation to figure out,” Lyman said. “One of those kids out there has to step up and take the scene forward.”

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Warped Tour Is Over; Long Live Warped Tour

Warped Tour was flawed, but no more flawed than the many homes I chose for myself outside of it.

BuzzFeed Contributor

Warped Tour is over for good and I am bummed about it, even though my days of stomping around the grounds of some amphitheater are long gone. To be at Warped was to continually have the question of What disaffection carried you here? asked and answered. It started in 1995, founded by music promoter Kevin Lyman with just 19 bands, mostly hailing from some iteration of the punk genre, spread out over 25 shows across 25 cities. No Doubt and Sublime were the biggest names on the bill, and L7, and a young Deftones. In the following year, Vans became the tour’s main sponsor and by 2001 — my first year attending — there were over 100 bands, sprawled out over five different stages. Back then, I hadn’t been to a festival, and I'd hardly been to any concerts. I hitched a ride up to Cleveland with some friends because it was summer, and the thought of growing up and going to college terrified me, and I wanted to place two hands at the edge of summer and stretch it out for as long as I could. It seemed like a way to do that was to walk around listening to music I liked but hadn’t fallen in love with yet.

There is a particular moment in the grand story of music discovery, where a person, no longer moved by what they’re currently listening to, has a tape slid across a school bus aisle by an older kid, or blows the dust off a record jacket unearthed in the catacombs of their childhood home. In that moment, the music found on that tape, or on that record, or in the glow of the television screen past bedtime is always transcendent, and it alters the musical direction of the person who discovers it. For me, this moment happened under a tree in 10th grade, when the kind of punk kid who wears a leather jacket in 90% humidity handed me a CD-R. “Sex Pistols” was scrawled across the CD’s silver face in a thin Sharpie so that the edges of every letter appeared dangerous, or violent. The songs were loud and fast and short, a departure from the narrative-driven rap and soul songs I’d attached myself to, or the silent, more meditative rock music I’d grown to enjoy.

The Sex Pistols aren’t the greatest musical introduction to the genre of punk, but the performance of rallying against something, anything — was appealing, and allowed me to chart a map toward more punk, and then its many offshoots: post-punk, garage punk, hardcore, and pop punk. I liked what this music awakened in me, but I didn’t yet have a landscape where I felt like I could fall in love with it. So much of the music and its messaging relied on communal measures as a vehicle to get out both joy and rage, and until my first Warped Tour, I didn’t see, up close, what the music was capable of pulling out of people who I imagined to be like me.

Outsiders are sometimes born out of an unfulfilled desire for inclusion, or sometimes from a desire for exclusion from whatever the mainstream represents, and Warped Tour offered a vision for both of those groups in almost equal measure. Few of the bands who were on Warped, beyond its headliners, could reasonably be considered mainstream, and many of the bands with their names in the small- to medium-sized font on the promotional posters were upstarts or local underground stalwarts. This fostered a sense of intimacy. You could plausibly end up in line to get a shitty slice of pizza behind a person you just saw onstage, or strike up a conversation with band members while waiting to use the same scattered bathroom stalls. There was a draw to this — a commingling out of sounds and groups and experiences that made it impossible for you to not be able to find your people somewhere among the masses.

Mosh pit action during the Vans Warped Tour in 2000.

And so I went to Warped Tour again in 2002. I was there when it touched down in Columbus, Ohio, for the first time, and again in the middle of Noblesville, Indiana, where Glassjaw played on a violently humid day and the crowd was so tight that it was hard to tell where my sweat ended and my neighbor’s sweat began, even as I sat underneath a fan in the Uptown Cafe late that night in front of a plate of cheese fries. I was there in Darien, New York, and in Camden, New Jersey , in 2003, for the first taste of Taking Back Sunday and the theatrics of Adam Lazzara, who would twirl a long microphone cord around like a yo-yo, in a manner which seemed both reckless and romantic, the mic swinging but always returning to his body. I was there in Columbus in 2004 to see Fall Out Boy make their Warped Tour debut after following them around Midwest dives and basements for the past two years. In that moment, it felt like watching one of your friends make it as far as they ever would, with everyone who didn’t know your friends there right as they were falling in love with them.

I was there in 2005 for one of the most memorable Warped lineups of all time. The newest emo boom really took off in the time between Warped 2004 and Warped 2005, and so 2005 meant that one could not just peep sets from MxPx and the Transplants, but also see bands like My Chemical Romance play Warped for one last time before they went mainstream. That year also offered new bands to love, like Paramore, who made their Warped debut in 2005. I was at four stops in 2006, dancing alone in the grass at one and sleeping in the car of a stranger while some band played a forgettable set at another. I was there when a storm came in Cleveland in 2007, and I was there in Illinois that same year, when the clouds were white and puffed themselves harmlessly along the deep blue of the sky.

Katy Perry performs at Warped Tour on Aug. 17, 2008, in Carson, California.

I went in 2008, when a young Katy Perry was added to the lineup, an exhausting moment which made the festival feel cheaper, a little more desperate. It is a cop-out to say that Katy Perry ruined the spirit of Warped for me, but it’s a cop-out I cling to because the truth is a bit harder to come to terms with. I was getting older. I had, in the seven summers I had devoted to Warped, accumulated more responsibilities. I was a teenager when I attended my first Warped, and by 2008, I was approaching my mid-twenties. This is by no means old, but the festival felt more like an obligation than a place of excitement.

I began to consider time differently. There are countless rock ‘n’ roll mantras about wanting to die before growing old, or before you are separated permanently from whatever ideas of youth you once held, and I get it. But for all the waxing poetic about how the soul and spirit can stay young forever, some of us have to survive in a manner that simply won’t allow for it. Some of us have to go to a job where we punch a timecard and then come home too exhausted to drive three hours on a weekend. Time makes fools of the people who plant flags in the ground of their imagined, immovable youth. I sulked through Warped Tour in 2009, went once more in 2010 out of some imagined obligation, and then finally gave in and retired my Warped Tour Road Trip streak.

I didn’t go this final year, though I told myself I should have. I remembered the way my crew and I would look at the early to mid-thirtysomethings who would roam the grounds of Warped somewhat aimlessly. We either assumed they were in a band or, if they weren’t, they were someone trying to relive glory days that were long gone, like the old high school quarterback who pops back into high school parties because no one cares who he is in college. It is an imagined anxiety, sure — but one strong enough for me to wave a dismissing hand and say Let the kids have their fun . I couldn’t have found the time in my calendar if I wanted to, I told myself. The summer is too hot and the bands aren’t good enough and I ain’t getting in anyone’s pit so to hell with it anyway.

The crowd at the Vans Warped Tour's stop in San Diego, California during the first week of the festival's final summer run.

Thinking about Warped Tour’s end, I posed a question on Twitter, asking people to share their favorite Warped Tour memories. A quilt of nostalgia emerged, each square detailed with someone’s mosh pit, or someone else’s scream into a microphone handed down from on high by a singer, or someone else’s time seeing one band bring out guests from another band, and so on and so on. A surprising number of people responded to the tweet saying that they remember a time in 2007 when the rain came from a few threatening clouds over the Tower City Amphitheater in Cleveland and didn’t stop.

They remembered the moments after the storm really picked up, when the bands all ran to their trailers or buses while the winds blew apart stages and the crowd chanted along to a jukebox of their own making, as the water pooled at our feet and grew seemingly higher by the minute. We were no longer running from the rain; we were giving into it entirely.

I knew then that I would miss Warped Tour a lot, though I had found myself ambivalent about its winding down. There was something beautiful about those people who reached across the divide of a timeline to say I was there with you. It was all real.

Fans throw devil horns in the air.

Many festivals, by nature, are at least a little bit predatory. They function in part by cashing in on the grand desire for a communal experience, and the fact that that desire can overshadow the need for all other elements. I can speak beauty into the communal moments of a storm overtaking a festival and soaking its participants while a stage collapsed. And if I speak enough beauty into those moments, you don’t have to ask why there wasn’t adequate cover for a day with a storm in the forecast, or why a stage was not built to safely withstand wind.

This is the gift of a festival, particularly a festival in the open air. There is more room for romanticism, and the margin for error is wider than a concert. If one band at Warped Tour put on a memorable enough set, an attendee could forgive the sets they walked away from displeased. But this, too, is a function of Warped catering to a very specific scene. Many bigger festivals can balance the amount of music with the quality, but with Warped, packing a bunch of bands into a single day over a tight schedule means that you might not see any exciting bands beyond the ones that drove you to buy a ticket in the first place. To gorge oneself on mediocrity is another path to fulfillment, and in the moment, the feeling of fullness outweighs the journey it took to get there.

Warped Tour is over and I say good night and good riddance. It was a festival, after all, and festivals are beholden to their own bottom line first, and the fan experience is a far distant second. Even for those deeply immersed in the nuances of its best moments, Warped was sometimes the poorest reflections of the scenes in the cities where it took place. This wasn’t surprising, but in my times attending, there were few protocols for violence enacted against attendees, and even fewer protocols for the lack of safety felt by women or queer folks. Warped isn’t unique in this way — many festivals fail their attendees in this manner — but for a festival catering to an audience of people who might not feel safe and/or comfortable in their own home communities, actually creating a safe space should be a priority.

At Warped 2015, festival producer Kevin Lyman allowed Jake McElfresh (who performed under the name Front Porch Step) to join the tour in Nashville after being accused of sexual misconduct with minors earlier in the year. Lyman insisted the move was to grant McElfresh a “second chance,” while seemingly ignoring that giving McElfresh access and power to the young women he was accused of preying on wasn’t a great idea.

As a result, many bands who would have shared a stage with McElfresh canceled their performances, and bands who weren’t sharing a stage with him called on festivalgoers to boycott his performance. (A performance that included McElfresh taunting an audience member who heckled him.) This was just the latest misstep for Lyman, who often claimed to be listening to conversations about sexual safety at Warped, but remained confident that Warped was doing a good job policing itself, capable of dealing with sexual harassment only on its own terms, in a manner that largely served its artists first.

But the festival reflects the scene that reflects the music, which was largely born out of the emotional turmoil of men who imagined themselves to be tortured without considering how they might be capable of torture.

Concertgoers front row at the Vans Warped Tour.

Warped Tour is over and I will miss it as much as you might miss it, friends. Warped Tour is over and I hated it as much as you hated it sometimes. Warped Tour crawled off into the dark gray sky last week and I hung art in an apartment and shopped for winter clothes before summer was even ending and researched retirement accounts while mumbling about how none of us are going to be alive to spend the money we’ve saved. There is no more Warped Tour as I type this now, and I don’t desire the sweat of another person pressed into my back while my ears ring, but I do desire a memory of it, kept in a box where the moment looks more beautiful than it actually was. I don’t miss the 36-hour romances with girls met on the same road to the same show or in line for the same band T-shirt. I don’t miss the false promises to call and stay in touch with the people I deemed family over the howl of some lyrics we both knew, but then never spoke to again. Warped Tour was always going to fail because it was loved as a concept first, and loved by too many people who came to it vulnerable and looking for more answers than it could provide. But it served enough moments. Warped Tour was a flawed home, but no more flawed than the many homes I chose for myself outside of it. Long live the parts of Warped Tour that still echo beautifully in the hearts and minds of those who need it most. ●

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain't Worth Much was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us , was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio.

End of the Warped Tour: What the loss of rock’s ‘cheap, scruffy’ roadshow means for the concert biz

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Days before Andy Biersack joined his first Vans Warped Tour as an artist, the singer for the L.A. glam-metal band Black Veil Brides got a little overexuberant onstage. His band was playing a pre-Warped warm-up show in 2011 when, in a fugue state over finally making it on the bill, he stage dived off a piece of rigging.

He missed the landing. Biersack fractured several bones and had to spend the rest of his first Warped Tour wrapped in a protective body brace. But he wouldn’t have missed those dates for anything.

“When I was a kid, there was no greater dream than to be on the other side of that fence as an artist,” Biersack said. “It’s next to impossible to describe the importance of Warped Tour in my life.”

A lot of bands, fans and music-industry pros are thinking the same thing this summer. Warped Tour, the traveling punk and skate-culture festival, a teenage summertime fixture since 1995, is finally hanging up its Vans sneakers for good. This summer’s edition — with Black Veil Brides co-headlining among dozens of acts — will be its last as an annual traveling festival.

Festival pioneer

Warped arguably laid the groundwork for modern U.S. festival culture. Its influence trickled up into mainstream pop, inspiring a hit Blink-182 lyric (“I couldn’t wait for the summer at the Warped Tour…”) and landing some of Beck, No Doubt and Katy Perry’s major early tour dates. They were even among the first fests to mix hard rock and hip-hop: Eminem, Ice-T, Joan Jett and the Black Eyed Peas are all Warped alumni.

But as tastes, values and the music economy changed, Warped’s model of cheap tickets, scruffy amenities and a genre mix that waxed and waned in fashion seemed to run its natural course. Evolving standards around diversity and #MeToo led to some soul-searching behind the scenes, especially after an artist was accused of misconduct while on Warped Tour.

Founder Kevin Lyman’s legacy as a pioneer of American festival culture is indisputable, however. As preparations were underway for Warped’s final run, which begins June 21 in Pomona and concludes Aug. 5 in West Palm Beach, Fla., he was seeming relieved, melancholy and hopeful.

“I’m getting notes from people in the business saying, ‘You inspired me and showed me it was OK to be me,’ or that ‘I went to Warped where there were only 2,000 people there but I’ve never felt more energy at a show,’” he said. “We developed a way to reach youth and it’s been a groundbreaking platform. Warped inspired kids to pick up instruments and start bands, and If you look at Coachella, so many of their department heads started on Warped Tour. The spirit will live on.”

I created this fest for the other 90%. We made it close and accessible. Sweat, crowds, down and dirty.

— Kevin Lyman, founder of the Vans Warped Tour

Lyman’s vision for the show proved more durable than even he imagined: it’s closing up as the longest-running touring music festival in America. For generations of hard rockers, now with their own kids in tow at the parent chill-out zone, Warped Tour was often their first music festival or live concert (this Times reporter included).

“When Warped began, there just wasn’t a festival culture in the U.S.,” said Epitaph Records founder (and Bad Religion founding member) Brett Gurewitz. Epitaph bands like Pennywise and Bad Religion were fixtures on Warped for its entire life as a festival, and defined the sound it’s known for. “Kevin brought it to the country,” Gurewitz said. “He gave Epitaph bands a chance that they otherwise never would have had.”

For Lyman, who worked at Goldenvoice during its pre-Coachella days as an underground punk promoter, his model for the show was unheard of at the time: pack as many punk, metal and other rabble-rousing acts as he could on the bill, pay them just enough to pencil out with a notably low ticket price, and put them in front of markets (often rural or suburban) that major acts ignored. No VIP ‘influencers’ or glamping packages. Bands ate from the same backstage BBQ pit.

Lollapalooza came first, but Lyman saw something few other promoters did: that there were tons of underserved young rock fans in America, and if you brought the show to them, they’d become loyal. Festival culture would later shift toward luxury destination packages. But Warped’s unlikely success with a neglected audience was a genuine revolution in American live music.

“I created this fest for the other 90%. We made it close and accessible. Sweat, crowds, down and dirty,” Lyman said. “But festivals are like society as a whole now: it’s all changing toward that top 10%. Bands would play Warped because they knew they were replenishing their audience. Now you make all your money on touring and no one can give that up. When you look at the box office, Warped always had the lowest ticket prices. Today we judge on money in music, and Warped was never about that.”

Fast reckoning

For as much as Warped pioneered festival culture in the U.S., any concert that lasts this long will see change around it. The last few years of reckonings have come especially fast at Warped Tour.

As with many music scenes, punk had longstanding issues around sexual harassment and misconduct — most recently with Brand New’s Jesse Lacey apologizing after allegations that he’d solicited nude pictures from underage fans. In 2015, Warped Tour had its own pre-MeToo reckoning when Jake McElfresh, who performs as the folk-punk act Front Porch Step, played the festival after being accused of online sexual misconduct with fans (prompting one disappointed Warped veteran, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, to ask “What happened to our scene?”).

“I learned a lot during that period,” said Lyman. “I wasn’t an expert on all this. But I took expert advice and now I’m more educated. Even before #MeToo, Warped was run by women. But I realized it’s an issue that we can’t handle the way we used to.”

Last year, Warped gave the politically outspoken group War On Women a major slot, and incorporated singer Shawna Potter’s organization Safer Scenes into its activism programming. The gesture was well-received, but some of the dark streaks in punk emerged when the singer from the Dickies erupted with a violent, misogynist onstage rant toward a woman from Safer Spaces who held up a sign during the band’s set that read, “Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men!”

“They were brave enough to bring an outspoken band like ours out with them and not everyone is,” Potter said. “I want people to know they can ask for advice on how to make their shows safer, what proactive measures they can take, as well as how to handle specific incidents. Because we take an overtly political stance, people that are searching for that in music, or even just wanting to feel secure that a band they like has their back, they’d seek us out and express gratitude for us being there.”

For a variety of reasons, Warped Tour may not be the ideal format for reaching those young fans anymore. Even Lyman himself says that he’s seen changes in the reasons people go to festivals, and how social media has turned a nominally freewheeling staple of teenage life into an occasional viper pit — a cultural shift that other promoters should worry about too.

As tastes, values and the music economy changed, Warped’s model of cheap tickets, scruffy amenities and [an idiosyncratic] genre mix ... [has] run its course.

“Before, you’d show up and stand in line and you’d judge a band face-to-face. Now you decide you don’t like someone just based on social media,” Lyman said. “Like, acts will say, ‘I don’t wanna be a ‘Warped Tour band.’ But there are bands that have been around 25 years who are ‘Warped Tour Bands.’”

“When you’re 14 to 17, you used to come to festivals to explore, and that’s pretty much disappeared from festivals now,” Lyman added. “Now kids want to stay home, and we’re headed for dark clouds as an industry when those 15-year-olds become 18-year-olds.”

Yet for those former teens who passed through Warped’s gates every summer for nearly 25 years, Lyman’s big idea reshaped their lives and ambitions for music, which in turn transformed the entire U.S. concert industry in its influence.

“Yeah, bittersweet is apt,” Black Veil Brides’ Biersack said. “If you’re 19 to 35 today, I don’t know of anything else that’s had a similar impact. What he created will always be the best thing that could have happened to this genre and culture. I met my wife on Warped Tour, so Kevin Lyman has had a bigger impact on my life than just about anyone.”

As for Lyman himself, he’s far from retiring. He’s taken a new position as an associate professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music, where he’ll teach a new generation of promoters and artists about building a lasting concert brand in an ever-faster-evolving industry. He’s also using Warped’s platform to start a new initiative around fighting opioid addiction in youth.

He doesn’t believe that any one thing will rise to fill the void left by Warped (or even that something should). Fans have different expectations and demands for concerts today, and the music business may well not be interested in supporting a similar vision for a dusty, low-cost madcap punk festival again.

But as he prepares to wind down Warped, Lyman is confident someone will think of something brand-new instead.

“Any time anything feels too formulaic, there will always be young people who create it for themselves,” Lyman said. “Like me in 1995, I know there’s a kid out there right now thinking about how to kick Lyman’s ass.”

1999: Warped Tour charms fans with punk, hip-hop extremes

2000: Warped Tour brings music, not mayhem to rock fans

2002: Rebellion pays off for Warped Tour

2015: Warped Tour giving away free tickets to parents of under-18 attendees as the festival turns 21

2007: A Warped Tour photo gallery the year Pennywise, Bad Religion, Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks, New Found Glory and Yellowcard played

1997: Sunchild is on rise with Warped Tour

For breaking music news, follow @augustbrown on Twitter.

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The Untold Truth Of Vans Warped Tour

From 1995 to 2019, Vans Warped Tour became the mecca of alternative music. Fans would flock to the traveling festival to see their favorite artists and to discover the next big thing, while musicians would know a spot on this coveted tour could elevate their career. After all, there's no disputing the impact it had in the ascension of the careers of groundbreaking acts like Paramore, My Chemical Romance , and Fall Out Boy .

Founded by Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour is widely associated with the punk rock movement and a strong ethos of the do-it-yourself attitude, being seen as the everyday person's music event. However, in the later years, controversy engulfed the tour. From scene politics to giving a platform to disgraced musicians, there were accusations that it was no longer the same place it was in the beginning. For some, it simply didn't feel like home anymore. As a result, there were mixed feelings when Lyman announced the tour would officially call it a day after its 25-year celebration.

Regardless of the sentiment toward the Vans Warped Tour, no one can deny the importance it played in the music scene throughout its run. It outlasted many of its peers and inspired others to start their own events, too. With that said, let's take a look back at the untold truth of Vans Warped Tour and if it is due to make a comeback.

The founder cut his teeth on Lollapalooza

Anyone who has worked on the live side of the music industry understands it is a demanding and grueling job. Not only is there the physical aspect of setting up the equipment and ensuring everything is in working order before the doors open, but there is also the marketing element and understanding of how to deal with unexpected issues that may arise on the day. Think of it like organizing a big birthday bash, but times the difficulty level by 100.

Kevin Lyman was no rookie when he decided to start his own tour, since he had already spent time working as a stage manager at another famous music festival. "Before Warped I was on three years of Lollapalooza, so [it's been] 26 straight summers out on the road," he told Billboard .

Having experience, Lyman also understood that he needed significant sponsorship to make this dream tour a reality. As revealed by Vans Vice President Steve Van Doren, Lyman approached the sneaker manufacturer for finance, and Vans saw it as a mutually beneficial opportunity to expand its reach throughout North America.

Vans Warped Tour gave a lot of people second chances

When applying for jobs, background checks have become the norm. However, that hasn't stopped people from being prejudiced against for having a criminal or substance abuse history, as research has shown, per Criminology . There's a stigma that sticks with people long afterward and makes it exponentially more difficult for them to find work and rebuild their lives.

Speaking to Loudwire , Kevin Lyman discussed the importance of affording people second chances, explaining how it is something deeply personal to him and his value system. "The majority of my early Warped Tour crew guys all had to spend a little time in jail for stupid decisions," Lyman said. "A lot of them were selling meth or whatever and did their time, and I gave them their second chance. And that built a loyalty, giving a second chance to people."

It is also one of the main reasons Lyman became involved in other organizations and philanthropy projects, such as MusiCares and FEND, which address addiction. He believes a large portion of society is still reluctant to allow others back into the community after they have shown remorse and tried to make amends, so he wanted to do his part in inspiring change.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Why the schedule for the Vans Warped Tour changed daily

Vans Warped Tour would take the acts across the country, performing sweaty day-long sets in numerous cities and states. There were even groups of fans who would follow the tour and try to attend as many shows as possible. To keep the shows fresh and unpredictable, the tour's organizer switched up the order of the lineup on a daily basis.

In an interview with Forbes , Kevin Lyman brought up his past as a stage manager for Lollapalooza and how this influenced his decision with Warped Tour's schedule. He explained how he would notice the same acts performed at the same time every day, and the predictability reflected in the audience attendance, as a majority of the people would only show up when it was time for the headliner to go on stage.

"So I said, if I ever get to do this, I'm going to mix it up," Lyman said. "It just spurred in my mind what I thought I'd do. I'll write the schedule each day. It keeps people engaged — you never knew who you were playing before or after, or what time you were playing. It keeps everyone on their toes." The unpredictability encouraged the audience to hang out for the whole day since they never knew who would be playing and when, while it excited the bands too. As Every Time I Die's ex-vocalist Keith Buckley explained, no one knew when they would be hitting the stage, which provided an element of surprise.

How the BBQ Band concept came to be

With all those bands on the road for Vans Warped Tour, there were bound to be a lot of hungry stomachs after a show. However, the tour figured out a way of solving this problem while also giving a group a unique opportunity every year. In return for working the grill after every show, a musical act would be given a spot on the tour's lineup. Hence the birth of what became known as the "BBQ band."

Kevin Lyman revealed to Vice where the initial idea stemmed from. He explained how punk rockers Lagwagon had their own barbeque after a show, but only bands with laminate passes sourced from Lagwagon themselves could get any. Lyman thought that every group deserved access to this and that it shouldn't be limited to the friends of the band, so he came up with a plan where a single act would be responsible for the barbeque at every stop for everyone.

Explaining what the group would get in return, Lyman said, "Yeah, they get a full set, they sell merchandise, they sell albums, and I pay 'em some money on top."

The time when Deftones set a Porta-Potty on fire

If there isn't an element of danger involved, can it really be considered rock 'n' roll? While no one decided to put their head inside a tiger's mouth or challenge a bear to an exploding barbed wire death match, other outlandish shenanigans took place throughout Vans Warped Tour's history.

Alternative Press interviewed numerous people who participated in the tour, and the stories ranged from a golf cart being wrecked to Sublime's trusty dog biting people. However, it was Kevin Lyman who recollected one of the wildest tour tales.

Lyman explained how he intended to take a few days off in 1997 after the birth of his child, but when he stepped off the plane, he was alerted to the chaos taking place in his absence. "It turned into the 'Lord of the Flies' out there," he said. "Deftones got fireworks and set a portable toilet on fire. My production manager's quick decision was to take the Porta-Potty on a forklift and push it into the river. The city's mayor had been running on this 'clean up the river' platform, and that was on the front page of the newspaper the next morning."

The presence of the controversial anti-abortion clinic

The spirit of punk rock is built on progressive values and fighting against oppressive systems. As a result, many non-profit organizations set up tents to promote their causes at Vans Warped Tour throughout its 25-year run; however, there was one that raised more than a few eyebrows. In 2016, the anti-abortion organization known as Rock for Life became a part of the tour, and it drew ire from many attendees and online commentators. The next year, Rock for Life returned to Warped Tour, again reigniting the debate about the presence of a pro-life organization there.

Speaking to Spin , Kevin Lyman explained how Rock for Life's values didn't necessarily align with his pro-choice stance, but that he included various other NPOs on Warped Tour with differing ideologies so that debate and conversation could take place between people.

He said: "I go to the booth, and I see people talk to them. They're really promoting adoption, and other things besides abortion. I'm adopted. I'm not supporting them, but they can have the spot. They're not hassling people."

13,000 people signed a petition to stop a musician from playing, but he did

In late 2014, disturbing accusations surfaced regarding Jake McElfresh, aka Front Porch Step. According to the allegations, McElfresh had sent inappropriate messages and images to minors. Considering Front Porch Step had performed at the 2014 Vans Warped Tour and was relatively well known within the music scene, the news spread fast and wide among the community.

Over 13,000 individuals signed a change.org petition to not allow Front Porch Step to play at Vans Warped Tour again. However, in 2015, McElfresh was confirmed to appear on the tour. This resulted in backlash from fans and other musicians, who couldn't believe Front Porch Step had been allowed this platform — especially considering how many young fans attended Warped Tour and the harrowing nature of the allegations.

Speaking to Alternative Press , Kevin Lyman stated that McElfresh had not been formally charged with any crime and his appearance was part of a rehabilitation program, based upon discussions with his counselor. In a later 2018 interview , Lyman expressed regret at allowing Front Porch Step to have performed at the 2015 Vans Warped Tour.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

The accusation of being a boys' club for the most part

The Vans Warped Tour faced accusations of being a boys' club from certain sections, with  The New York Times citing how only seven percent of the bands listed for the 2018 edition featured female members. Although the tour had shown improvement in its numbers and given more opportunity to women over the years, especially as headliners, there was no disputing that the acts on display were predominantly male throughout the years. Coupled with this was the prevalence of a bro culture that boasted bad behavior. 

The publication spoke to several women and nonbinary artists to get their perspectives of the tour. Each person had their own unique experience, with some stating they hadn't seen misogynistic behavior, while others expressed opposite views.

Five Iron Frenzy's Leanor Ortega Till, for example, explained how there was a need to be cautious with tour buses as an example. "One of the bands we went out with had a little inflatable pool," Till said. "They'd get in their underwear and go out there and hang out. And I knew what they were up to, which was get girls into their underwear to hang out, too."

Kevin Lyman said 2017's Vans Warped Tour was a bad one financially

When Kevin Lyman announced the end of Vans Warped Tour, there was a lot of debate about the real reasons for doing so among fans. One of them was that the tour had stopped making money. However, Lyman dispelled this notion in an interview with "All Punked Up" podcast, revealing that Warped Tour made money — except for one year.

"I had one bad year: 2017," Lyman said. "It was one of those years where everything goes wrong that could possibly go wrong, went wrong in 2017."

While Lyman didn't delve into exactly what his challenges were, the initial announcement of the lineup for the Vans Warped Tour 2017 wasn't warmly received by the fans. There were notable acts such as Anti-Flag, Andy Black, Gwar, and Hawthorne Heights on the bill, but the audience felt it didn't have the star power of the previous year's edition, which had featured the likes of Good Charlotte and New Found Glory. Undoubtedly, the lack of excitement for the artists might have factored into the decision for many fans to give it a skip that year.

The one thing that the Warped Tour never managed to do

From Katy Perry to My Chemical Romance and Blink-182, there was no shortage of world-renowned musicians who performed at Vans Warped Tour. Considering the traveling festival ran for a quarter of a century, there can't be much that it failed to achieve in this time. However, for Kevin Lyman, there is something he wanted to do that he never managed to. When asked by Outburn what that is, he replied: "Have a Ramones reunion."

The seminal New York punk band called it a day in 1996 — a year after the formation of Vans Warped Tour. At that early stage, it might have been difficult for Lyman to attract a band of that caliber to the tour — plus, it would have been mighty costly, since the Ramones were bona fide legends and wouldn't come at a discount price.

Unfortunately, by the time Warped Tour had become a force to be reckoned with in the early 2000s and could probably afford the Blitzkrieg Boppers, most of the members of the Ramones had already died . 

Scene politics contributed to its demise

Music brings people together, but the community also has the potential to divide like no other. Much like with any other fandom on Planet Earth — just ask "Star Wars" fans — there is a lot of politics, elitism, and people disliking each other for random reasons. Heck, even the bands themselves partake in this peculiar behavior, with social media feuds becoming equally the most hilarious and sad things to witness online.

Appearing on Kerrang's "Inside Track" podcast, Kevin Lyman opened up about how scene politics contributed to the demise of Vans Warped Tour. The promoter explained how he would reach out to various groups that he found talented and would offer them a slot on the tour; however, they would spurn his advances, citing how they didn't want to perform alongside X band or be seen as a "Warped-esque" band. They either had preconceived negative notions about other acts on the tour or didn't want to be bracketed with the type of genre artists the tour attracted.

Lyman didn't understand the logic, as most bands wouldn't even know the others and acted based on impressions rather than facts. Plus, he considered this a self-limiting behavior that impacted a band's ability to grow their fanbase and reach different audiences. Consequently, Lyman started to feel a disconnect from the community and the very reason he started the tour in the first place.

Fronzilla wants to bring back the tour

Since Vans Warped Tour hit the stop button in 2019, a massive gap has been left open in the music festival scene. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic did no favors to live music, and many have pondered if the return of Warped Tour could help bring back the crowds in droves. Appearing on "No Jumper" in 2020, Attila frontman Chris Fronzak explained what Warped Tour meant to bands. "It's not glamorous, but it's an opportunity for bands to play in front of a huge audience that they wouldn't normally have," he said.

Fronzak added that Kevin Lyman offered to sell him Warped Tour in the past, but Fronzak didn't have the funds at the time to strike a deal. When that changed, the musician reached out to Lyman again in 2020.

"He explained to me that for legal reasons, which I can't go into depth, Warped Tour can't come back for at least another three years or so," Fronzak said, "but after that I'm happy to re-open conversation, and hopefully I'm the one that brings it back because I have a really good plan for how to make it sustainable and make Warped Tour even bigger than it's ever been."

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The Summer Punk Went Pop: Oral History of the 2005 Warped Tour

On the first day of Warped’s final run, we present the firsthand story of its watershed year - when Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and others became stars.

By Chris Payne

Chris Payne

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This summer, the Vans Warped Tour — music’s last major traveling festival — is  calling it quits , citing fatigue, disinterested teens, and a marketplace shift towards blowout weekends over season-long treks. But 13 years ago, Warped nearly collapsed beneath the weight of its own success.

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Hayley Williams

The storm had been brewing for some time. Warped was 11 years old in 2005, and it’d played an integral role in bringing the likes of Green Day, Blink-182, No Doubt, Sublime, and even Eminem to suburban superstardom during the ’90s and early ’00s. An annual Warped trip had become a summertime staple for teens raised on bratty skate punk and ska, but by the middle of the aughts, it had morphed into something completely new. And bigger.

In 2005, a more sensitive, precocious, fashion-focused brand of punk exploded into popular culture. Its eventual poster kids spent the decade’s early years grinding it out in America’s VFW halls, the venerable ethos of Thursday, Saves the Day, and Jimmy Eat World their guiding light. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance played Warped in ‘04 and after drawing fervent crowds, were signed on for the next year early; by the time June ‘05 rolled around, “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” and “Helena” were MTV staples, improbably climbing the Hot 100. 700,000 kids came out that summer, more than any Warped before or since (for context, last year pulled 300,000). Individual bands regularly sold over $30,000 of merch  per day . Bodyguards were needed for the first time. At summer’s end, the tour’s profits hit seven figures. But Warped’s summer-long slog paid another price; across 48 shows in 59 days, musicians and personnel grappled with oversized egos, volatile — if not occasionally hostile — environments, and a sideshow’s worth of distractions far from home, with a massive mainstream audience suddenly watching.

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On the first day of Warped’s final trek, we present the firsthand story of its watershed year.

I. “This Was Like the Moon Landing For This Type of Music”

Tyson Ritter, All-American Rejects vocalist-bassist:  2005 Warped Tour was everything people think about when they want to make Warped something of folklore. It was the real thing.

Kevin Lyman, Warped Tour founder & producer:  The Warped Tour’s only made money on tickets once, and 2005 was the year. If we turn a profit, it’s from sponsorships and merchandise.

Buddy Nielsen, Senses Fail vocalist:  It had everything to do with the scene’s success. This was like the moon landing for this type of music.

Lyman:  We’d done some early bookings. The year before, I had Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance on the smaller stage. The audiences weren’t huge at this point, but they were so engaged, so I said, “Gotta bring them on the main [stage].”

Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy bassist:  That was a surreal moment for us. That was when us and My Chemical Romance were both getting on  TRL  at the same time. It was wild because we’d never experienced that.  (Note: all Fall Out Boy quotes in this piece come from a  previous Billboard interview ).

Lyman:  TRL  was so popular… everyone was watching. They grabbed onto these bands, and radio was playing them.

Nielsen:  Senses Fail did Warped the year before. My Chem wasn’t My Chem yet, as we know them. Senses Fail wasn’t Senses Fail yet. On Warped Tour 2005, everybody was everybody. Fall Out Boy was Fall Out Boy. You had the most bands that were not only successful but, like,  pop music  successful.

Matt Watts, The Starting Line guitarist:  The whole scene started as a left-of-center, DIY thing. Lots of these bands started at VFW or Knights of Columbus Halls. It was such a personal connection with fans. In 2005, it hit a critical mass.

Nielsen:  It was the first time bands had security guards. Pete Wentz and Gerard Way couldn’t get around without them.

Ritter:  The difference between those bands and All-American Rejects? Fall Out Boy, three bodyguards. My Chem had a bodyguard.

Lyman:  The audience coming to Warped Tour transformed from that hardcore person who was out skating or going to the beach to a crowd that was watching TV all summer. We managed to get them off their couches for one day! But they weren’t ready to be in the sun for nine hours. They would stand in front of the stages all day long waiting for those hit songs. It wasn’t like you could just come, watch those bands and leave; you were there the whole day. By the time the band went on stage, these people hadn’t eaten, hadn’t drank water, hadn’t put sunscreen on, so many of them just collapsed. Our medical tents were full.

Lisa Brownlee, Warped Tour tour manager:  I often think of Kevin Lyman as a mad scientist, crossing boundaries that ought not to be crossed when putting together a lineup.

Al Barr, Dropkick Murphys vocalist:  Fall Out Turds and My Chemical Shit Pants — that’s what we called them — were both blowing up, and I kept going around Warped Tour the whole day going, “Jesus Christ, this singer must be so tired because he sings for every band!” Because it all sounded the same to an old timer like me. But that’s when I realized I sound like my dad! Those bands? Not my cup of tea at all. But they were working their asses off, just like we did, and nothing was handed to them. They worked for everything they got.

Lyman:  The core audience was pretty pissed. We talk about punk rock being all-accepting, but a lot of times, it’s still very niche and very “who’s in their club.” This was before Twitter, so they verbalized it to me on message boards. Well, the club got a lot bigger.

II. “They Were Connecting on a Much Deeper Level Than Most of the Other Bands”

Watts:  In the VFW halls, Fall Out Boy put in their 10,000 hours and beyond.

Nielsen:   From Under the Cork Tree  had just come out. Fall Out Boy was huge.

Watts:  They put out the right record at the right time.

Wentz:  It was like, Warped Tour happening at the same time [and hearing], “You guys are super famous, but maybe just on Warped Tour!”

Watts:  Pete Wentz is a captivating dude. Patrick Stump is a great writer.

Justin Pierre, Motion City Soundtrack vocalist-guitarist:  I thought Patrick Stump had an amazing voice. I was very upset at how effortless it seemed. I would have to work 10 times as hard just to pull it off. He was kind of a weirdo, kind of a nerd. I really liked that. There was an unspoken nerd quality we kind of shared. I [recently] found a  picture online  of us coming back from a Target run… I really dug Patrick a lot.

Watts:  Once “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” caught on, it opened up the floodgates.

Andy Hurley, Fall Out Boy drummer:  I remember going to a water park right after we’d gotten to number one on  TRL  that day. I was like, “Yeah, we’re number one!” going down the slides and no one in the park knew at all who we were.

Wentz:  They were like, fucking losers!

Lyman:  Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, I put them on at three or four in the afternoon. All the kids would be in the venue by then, but I knew their fans couldn’t hold up til the end of the day.

Watts:  My Chemical Romance was connecting on a much deeper level than most of the other bands.

Lyman:  A lot of merchandise was being sold. This is where Kate Truscott — who [now] helps run my company — was recognized because she was the merchandise person for My Chemical Romance. They were selling half a semi-truck of merchandise a day at that point. It was crazy.

Kate Truscott, My Chemical Romance merch manager:  I was out on the road with Chevelle, working for a company called BandMerch. I got a call that this new band needed somebody because they were suddenly doing way bigger numbers than anybody expected. They had some guy doing their merch and frankly, he was blowing it. Heather Hannoura [now Heather Gabel] did some shirts for us. Some of the stuff I was selling then is still for sale at Hot Topic. There were gloves with bones on them. They had fingers and no one bought them, so I would cut the fingertips off and then kids loved them!

Watts:  There were tons of kids coming out dressed in My Chem-appropriate attire. I use the term “goth vibes” responsibly: dark hair, black or red t-shirt, eye makeup.

Truscott:  One part of the summer, [guitarist] Frank Iero thought he was having some sort of brain bleed; He was blowing his nose and this red stuff was coming out. A doctor looked at it and was like, “Dude, that’s makeup.”

Lyman:  Some days, I heard they were doing $30,000 to $50,000 in merchandise.

Truscott:  Our highest day was $60,000, which to my knowledge, is a record that’s yet to be beaten by any band on Warped. It was in Detroit, a 30,000-person show at the Silverdome. Headed to banks on days off, our tour manager would be like, “What’s in your backpack? You can’t walk to the bank with $250,000 on you!”

Watts:  When you see bands changing pop culture, you see fans embracing their style.

Truscott:  The only band that had more items for sale than us was the Murphys. They used Warped as a warehouse sale every summer [ Laughs ].

Lyman:  Dropkick Murphys were probably the highest paid band on that year’s tour. Them and the Offspring were probably both making $15,000 to $17,000 [per show]. I had to book Fall Out Boy, $1,500. Atreyu, $1,500. Story of the Year, probably $750. I was delivering this whole package of bands. I don’t have the exact price, but I could probably tell you it was about $125,000 a show, talent-wise. You had to try to be right on the edge.

Nielsen:  Everybody was literally printing money. Everybody was stoked.

Lyman:  Fall Out Boy tended to go out, hang around the parties a little more… My Chemical Romance, I don’t think anyone in the band was really a partier.

Truscott:  There was nothing salacious. Frank is still married to the girl he was dating back then. [Guitarist] Ray [Toro] is still with the same girl. Gerard’s had a couple different girlfriends, but it was like, three in the 20 years I’ve known him, and now he’s married.

Lyman:  They were always nice to the women on our tour, the girls working with these bands.

Truscott:  I had a boxset of the  Charmed  DVDs. Gerard came by asking what they were about. I’m like, “It’s about witches that own a bar,” and he was like, “I can get behind that.”

Ritter:  You’d stroll this alley of buses and see Gerard doing a sketch in front of the headlights on the ground in front of his bus. He was too shy to talk to the group, but he could still sit out in front of his bus drawing a piece of art, which I thought was so fun. He would get in front of the headlights and show off his talent.

Truscott:  Gerard was always doing art. He hung out by himself a lot, drank coffee. A lot of coffee.

Pierre:  I think someone was like, “Oh he’s sober, too! You should hang out!”

Truscott:  We all lived on the same bus together. They turned the back lounge of our bus into a studio. My bunk was right up against it. I remember when they were writing “I Don’t Love You” [from 2006’s  Welcome to the Black Parade ]. Bob [Bryar] put a drum kit in the back and Gerard was doing vocals. It was four in the morning and I remember hearing the lyrics and opening the door like, “That’s a fucking brutal song!”

III. “Rockstar Shit Was Going On”

Lyman:  We were at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit and 30,000 people showed up. That might’ve been the second biggest Warped show of all time. We had this massive show at the sports arena at Long Beach State, outside of L.A.. That was probably the biggest show.

Truscott:  I was selling merch out of a 10 foot by 10 foot tent. The crowd would push into it, start crushing into us. I had to get up on the table a couple times and say nobody was getting anything until everybody calmed down. There was a day in Camden, NJ — the site was too small for the crowd there — I had to stand on my table and wave down security because kids were moshing and throwing themselves inside our tent.

Watts:  There’d be signings all day. There was no barrier between the artists and the fans.

Ritter:  All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, and My Chem — we’d do signings all day, every day. You’d try to get through 400 people in two hours. It became a chore, literally sitting for 400 people that walked by you asking, “Hi, how are ya?”

Pierre:  I always liked hanging out, signing things, meeting the people that liked our music. That was my favorite thing I did, next to performing.

Watts:  I bought a Metro scooter —  basically a fake Vespa — for like $500. I would cruise around after shows to find hotel swimming pools and go swimming a bunch. Because the shower situation at Warped is sometimes less than ideal.

Brownlee:  I couldn’t get from stage to stage fast enough to see the bands I wanted to see. The bill was so stacked.

Ritter:  When you play Warped, you get thirty minutes. These were thirty-minute sets.

Watts:  There are no “set” set times. It’s sort of drawn from a lottery in the morning.

Nielsen:  How did our sets sound? Fucking terrible [ Laughs ]. Back then we were still figuring it out. Generally nobody really sounds that great at Warped Tour. It’s windy and hot.

Lyman:  We had a massive storm July 15 at Race City Motorsport Park in Calgary, Alberta. We had a lot of storms through the years, but that one was crazy. It looked like just clouds coming, but it was actually clouds of dust and wind. It blew tents 25 feet in the air. When it hit, the Transplants were onstage. I’ll never forget them playing while I was trying to hold all the tents down.

Barr: Transplants were on that tour. I spent a ton of time with my friend [Transplants vocalist] Skinhead Rob [Aston].

Nielsen: You had [Transplants drummer] Travis Barker walking around with his television show Meet the Barkers .

Barr: One day I was going over to see Skinhead Rob, and this guy from MTV was getting thrown out of their bus because he had asked Travis and Rob if they got dressed up in monkey suits for fun. Rob just lost his shit on the guy.

Lyman:  Billy Idol was trying to make a reconnection with fans, so they wanted him to play some Warped dates in between his own tour routing.

Nielsen:  Billy Idol! Billy Idol was fucking hilarious. He did not know what Warped Tour was. You never wanted to be playing near him because you had to deal with him starting late and his set going over 10 minutes. He didn’t give a shit.

Lyman:  You don’t start the stage next door until the other band is done. In Minnesota, it was a nightmare. My stage managers weren’t communicating and there was a meltdown onstage and they started both stages, so you had Billy Idol singing “Rebel Yell” and then Fall Out Boy singing something. It was merging into this mashup by my tour bus.

Nielsen:  He’d come out of the bus shirtless talking to himself like, “WHITE WEDDING!”, practicing his vocals. Billy Idol was fucking wild, just on another planet.

Barr:  I remember walking around thinking, who is this heavy, ferocious punk band playing? And I’m like, oh my god, it’s the Offspring. Now the Offspring are a great band but they’re not a ferocious punk band. But on the backdrop of all these pop-punk and emo bands…

Nielsen:  [Frontman]   Dexter [Holland] was flying in a plane from show to show. One time he took our tour manager: “Come fly to the next show!”

Lyman:  He didn’t know these bands but he’d invite them to go to the next city with him. If you were sitting here in Cincinnati and he would say, “Hey Kevin, I want to take so-and-so to Chicago with me. Can you put them on by 6 so we can be at the airport by 8?” He would fly the band, pick up a couple hotel rooms for them, and go party in the city.

Nielsen:  Rockstar shit was going on.

Lyman:  Then you had Avenged Sevenfold. You knew they were gonna be big because they were the first band that ever showed up on Warped Tour with a smoke machine.

Nielsen:  You’d look up in the sky and see a cloud of smoke and be like, “Avenged Sevenfold must be on!” Broad daylight, it looks like the stage is on fire.

Lyman:  Avenged Sevenfold always liked to gamble — dice and poker. The Offspring, too, but not Dexter. Cee-lo, I’m sure the Murphys were in the middle of that.

Barr:  I myself wasn’t, but our crew were big into poker. They’d play with Avenged Sevenfold almost every night.

Watts:  The first night of tour, I remember our drummer, Tom Gryskewicz cleaning up against… I think it was one of the Transplants dudes. Tom came back to the bus with money and we were all like, “What did you do?” I think he probably ended up losing it back to those dudes at some point.

Spencer Chamberlain, Underoath vocalist:  A band — who we won’t name — needed money. We let them borrow money and they all came back with new clothes and tattoos.

Aaron Gillespie, Underoath drummer-vocalist:  Oh my god, that’s right! They were struggling on the tour…

Chamberlain:  They were struggling with something else. But we can’t say, because people might know. They went to the Christian band, knowing we’d be giving.

Gillespie:  Did we give them a bunch of money or a little bit?

Chamberlain:  A bunch.

IV. “I’ve Got These Girl Bands, Can I Set Up?” 

Lyman:  Shira? My God. How do these people come into your life, you know?

Shira Yevin, Shiragirl vocalist; Shiragirl Stage founder and producer:  I was on the tour in 2003, working for the Truth campaign as an emcee. I noticed there were very few, if any, females onstage. I didn’t understand why. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and was friends with all sorts of all-girl punk and hardcore bands. My band approached Kevin in 2004.

Lyman:  Shira just showed up with her stage. Just showed up. In Englishtown, NJ, with this pink truck: “I’ve got these girl bands, can I set up?”

Yevin:  He said, “Okay, great idea, maybe next year. It’s the tour’s tenth anniversary, we got a lot going on.” I said, “Next year?!”

Lyman:  She’s from New Jersey, so you know how progressive people from New Jersey won’t take no for an answer.

Yevin:  We ended up crashing the tour. I drove in with my pink RV and just set up — super scrappy punk rock. Kevin walked by and loved it: “Shira, this is great. So are you on for the whole tour now?”

Lyman:  Next thing you know, she’s hanging over by my bus, hitting me up about how she’s going to do the Shiragirl Stage in 2005.

Shiragirl Talks Hitting the Road For Final Warped Tour, Shares Punk Pop Anthem 'Summers Comin'…

Yevin:  2005 was the year we made it legit. His team helped us get sponsorships for the stage. MySpace was our media partner. We hand-painted their logo on our truck. We did the whole application process for the Shiragirl Stage through MySpace. In the 2005 music scene, MySpace was a big platform for how new artists came up. The Dollyrots played that year and were amazing. L7’s bassist Jennifer Finch had this side project called The Shocker — it was really cool to have them on Shiragirl. They repped old-school Warped.

Truscott:  We were a pretty strong bunch of babes, the other women on Warped Tour. We stuck together and the guys were really supportive of us. It was probably the opposite of what everybody would expect me to say — that it was really hard and that I had to really earn my stripes. But that wasn’t a big issue. They saw me work hard and we all respected each other. I remember there was a day some kid stole from me at My Chem’s merch table. A bunch of the other guys saw it and chased him down and brought him back to me.

Yevin:  We were not taken seriously. At first, especially. We showed up in this beat-up truck and there were bets against how long we would last. By the end, they respected us a lot more.

V. “I Know a Lot of Real Hard Motherfuckers”

Watts:  The cookouts were probably the highlight of Warped Tour. The sun goes down and it’s not 100 degrees anymore!

Pierre:  Everybody had to come to lunch and dinner, if you wanted to eat. It made me kind of nervous, like high school in a way. If I’m by myself, shit, where do I sit? I kind of know these people, but I kind of don’t. I heard that people thought I was a huge asshole because I didn’t talk to anyone, but I was too nervous.

Watts:  Justin was a little bit more introverted, but he was always incredibly welcoming to us. I remember Motion City Soundtrack hitting their stride that year.  Commit This to Memory  had just come out. They were one of the few indie-alternative, left-of-center-leaning bands. They came from a different world, but still hit all the boxes for a fan going to Warped Tour.

Pierre:  I bonded with Gerard over Coke Zero, which had just come out. I was in their bus for some reason: “Oh my god, you got Coke Zero?” If I’m drinking Coke Zero in ’05, I think I was sober then, because that’s when I basically went from alcohol to caffeine. I would drink four or five Monster Energy Drinks a day. It was really bad. I’d reward myself after playing a show with two Monster Energy Drinks [ Laughs ].

Watts:  This was before people were on their cell phones 24/7. So it was one of the last times in my life I remember just hanging out with a bunch of people and not having a phone, not being interrupted by anything like that. Just shared experiences, shared connections.

Senses Fail's Buddy Nielsen Fights to Survive a Chaotic Present & His Band's Toxic Past

Nielsen:  There used to be huge parties afterwards, sort of a teen movie set thing.

Ritter:  It was like  Grease  on the road. Everybody was looking for their Sandra Dee.

Nielsen:  There’d be 20,000 people at each show and afterwards, two or three thousand would wind up getting backstage. It was a different time. You weren’t as worried about five thousand people partying at the end of the night — epic bonfire parties with every band and also people that found a way to stay. If you stayed long enough, security left, so…

Ritter:  I was 20. I’m 34 now. So think I remember my M-O was, okay the show’s over, who’s gonna get me stoned?

? Lyman:  Warped kind of self-regulates on drugs and alcohol because it’s such a hard-working tour and you don’t know when you’re gonna play. I was out every night; if someone goes a little hard at a party, what’s the best cure for that? Put them on 11:30 the next morning. Be the first band up. That’ll cure people.

Gillespie:  We drank, but we weren’t like, partying hard.

Watts:  There was definitely drinking, but there weren’t a lot of drugs. We were never a drug band, so if there was, it didn’t hit our orbit.

Nielsen:  I was pretty much YOLO-ing every moment of every day. I was 21 running around smoking weed, drinking beer, hanging out.

Lyman:  During this period, there were maybe some pills going around Warped, but I don’t know.

Ritter:  It was all about the nomadic journey of the night. You’d bounce from bus to bus, picking up a beer, hitting on a girl, hitting on whoever you were hitting on.

Barr:  I’ll omit their name, but there was a band that got drunk and decided to disrespect Steve O’Sullivan, who was head of Warped Tour’s security at the time. We were in Phoenix, his wife was pregnant with their first kid, and he was riding in the car with her and this band was drunk and standing in the way. They asked him to move and got in his face, in his wife’s face. The next day I assembled a group of characters you’d look at and say, “I don’t want to fight one of these guys, let alone have one of them come into my tent.” I know a lot of real hard motherfuckers. [We confronted the band and] said, “So you’re the band that decided to disrespect Steve O’Sullivan and his pregnant wife? Shut your little tent down, you’re gonna find Steve, and you’re gonna throw yourself down at his knees and apologize to him. If we don’t hear you’ve done this in the next twenty minutes, we’re gonna be back.” Five minutes later, Steve pulls up on his golf cart like, “What did you do? They were so apologetic and so polite!”

Nielsen:  People would throw water. It was like, dude, it’s 90 degrees out — don’t throw it. Every day, you’re getting nailed with water being thrown from the crowd.

Lyman:  Buddy from Senses Fail, to be honest, was a shithead mostly. He hadn’t grown up yet.

Nielsen:  We were playing Phoenix and someone threw a fucking jug of water. I caught it by the handle and whipped it back into the crowd as hard as I could and literally watched it bee-line a hundred yards and slam this girl right in the face. This poor young girl, I think she was like 16 years old. I ended up knocking out one of her teeth, totally by accident. I wound up corresponding with her father and her afterwards. I remember we invited her to a show, gave her some merch and were really sorry.

Lyman:  Buddy was one of those kids that we knew we had redeeming qualities. So we kept working with Buddy. You don’t want to write him off, you know? Another member of Senses Fail [now ex-member] got taken behind the bus, because he wore a shirt that had the C-word on it. I know the Dropkick Murphys and the Transplants were involved. He got taken behind the bus and they said, “Look, you’re going to either get rid of that shirt because you see all the women running this, or you’re going to eat the shirt. If you ever wear it again you’re going to lose option one.”

VI. “This Was Paramore ’s First Tour”

Lyman:  We had [the traveling punk and hardcore tour] Taste of Chaos [in early 2005] and Livia Tortella [of Atlantic Records] goes, “Hey, Kevin you’ve got to check out this girl Hayley Williams and Paramore.”

Gillespie:  We were friends with Paramore. We met Hayley when she was 16 and [drummer] Zac [Farro] was 14. Hayley opened up acoustic for us on Taste of Chaos.

Lyman:  I put her on right before Killswitch Engage. She held her own. I was like, “Okay, we have to figure this out for Warped.” But I didn’t have anywhere to put them because I already booked the tour…  So I turned Shira on to her and she figured it out for the Shiragirl Stage.

Yevin:  The label flew me down to see the band in Orlando, and once I saw it, I got it. They were amazing — 16 years old! Hayley’s dad was the tour manager.

Lyman:  I remember the station wagon… Dad was still driving them around at that point.

Yevin:  This was Paramore’s first tour.

Chamberlain:  Paramore were like our little brothers. We hung out with them. They had similar viewpoints on life and we just got along with those kids. I think we all knew they were gonna be big.

Yevin:  They were actually signed to Atlantic, but their music was put out by Fueled By Ramen. So they had label support, but they were a new band. They were doing a lot of the Christian rock festivals. They came out on Warped right when their first album was coming out. The kids just loved it. The early crowds were huge.

Chamberlain:  Zac was like a little mini-Aaron. He would hit [the drums] so hard that the drum riser broke once.

Yevin:  Hayley was just one of the guys. That was sort of her thing. She wore the same t-shirt every day, the red and blue striped shirt  she wears in the “All We Know” video . She was very sweet, polite, very reserved. No makeup. Just came on, did her set, went back in the van, read her book. It was a little bit of a culture shock for us. We were these radical feminist punk rock riot grrrls. They were a very reserved band. They prayed before they went onstage. They kinda kept to themselves, but they killed it onstage.

Gillespie:  Hayley’s the real fucking deal. Deserves everything she’s got.

VII. “Sonny Moore’s Halo Name Was Skrillex”

Chamberlain:  ’05 was the first Warped Tour with [Tampa/L.A.-based post-hardcore band] From First to Last. We’d taken them on their first tour with [vocalist] Sonny Moore, so we were already buddies.

Nielsen:  This was when Wes Borland was in From First to Last. That blew my mind. Why the hell is a guy from Limp Bizkit here? I remember hanging out with Sonny and giving him a hard time, as a joke. And then he fucking turns into Skrillex [ Laughs ]. Ridiculous.

Chamberlain:  They used to come to our tour bus to play  Halo . Sonny Moore’s Halo name was Skrillex.

Gillespie:  He was having trouble with his voice back then.

Chamberlain:  He was such a sweetheart, and he had a lil’ personality on him, too. He would ask me, “How do you guys sing every night?”

Lyman:  The following year, he kind of changed to a kid named Skrillex. He came to Pomona, Cali. and played one of his first shows… Then I tried to book him that following summer and I think I could have got him for $1,500. I said, “He’s just sitting playing music on a computer, who the hell’s gonna care about this?” But I liked him a lot. Then by that next year, he was making $100,000 a gig or something.

VIII. “Equal Parts Relief and Sadness”

Ritter:  I think we played 19, 20 days in a row. By the end of it I wasn’t even talking. I was just giving sign language to people, clicks and whistles!

Truscott:  It ended in Boston: pouring rain, muddy, muggy New England summer day. Everybody was just done.

Pierre:  When it ended? Equal parts relief and sadness.

Yevin:  We were just grateful to have survived on our end. And we knew we were gonna do it the next year. There were bets against us saying we weren’t gonna make it. But we did. We got an MTV Warpie Award — “most punk rock way to win a place in the family.”

Lyman:  What were our profits that year? That year was seven figures.

Warped Tour 2018 Lineup: All Time Low, Simple Plan & 3OH!3 Return for Final Run

Watts:  The Starting Line toured with Fall Out Boy again in the fall, on the Nintendo Fusion Tour alongside Motion City Soundtrack, Boys Night Out, and Panic! At the Disco. I wonder what venues that tour would get if it happened in 2018; Panic! is bigger than they ever were. Same thing with Fall Out Boy. We’d be happy to be along for the ride. We’d play outdoors if we had to!

Chamberlain:  I think a lot of the younger bands now are kind of why Warped Tour’s ending. Warped Tour was a place where kids went to see bands they loved and discover new bands. Somehow over the last couple years it changed to bands on their first record with two busses, bodyguards, personal assistants. I think kids weren’t feeling as connected.

Gillespie:  It was so about discovery.

Chamberlain:  It got to be about how big of a rockstar you are.

Gillespie:  And that’s not why Kevin started it.

Lyman:  Relationships in this business were a lot different then. You could talk to someone and plan on working with them for a few years, you know? And they would understand that the first couple years, they weren’t helping you sell tickets. But hopefully that third year, they were actually helping to pull other bands like them along. A Day To Remember played one show in 2005, on the Ernie Ball battle of the Bands Stage. And then they fell into that same cycle, playing four more years… Now, that doesn’t exist in this world. Bands say, “Oh, we need Warped Tour to get to an audience” and then they decide to change their direction as a band.

Brownlee:  If you have been on Warped Tour as long as I have (and you’re as old as I am), it’s very difficult to have recall memory on specifics, including years. I wish I had the foresight to keep a journal for times like these… Our memories are a series of embellished half-truths. But in terms of the Vans Warped Tour, truth has always been stranger than fiction.

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Warped Tour Founder Kevin Lyman Says Festival Ended Due to Band and Fan Elitism & Loss of Community, Not Financial Issues

Aaron Grech

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How 23 Years of Warped Tour Changed America

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After almost a quarter of a century, and having showcased upwards of 1700 bands, Warped Tour as we know it will come to an end when summer 2018 does. For the most mainstream of Americans who never attended, the tour always looked like an outlier -- a noisy summertime day out for the same kids that shopped at Hot Topic, wore too much eyeliner, and learned HTML by editing their MySpace profiles. Truthfully though, Warped Tour's impact on mainstream pop culture was enormous.

Warped Tour started out scrappy. It was 1995, pop punk was just starting to explode out of the underground -- thanks to Green Day's major label debut, Dookie -- and founder Kevin Lyman , having spent three years working on the Lollapalooza tour, recognized a gap in the festival market. That first Warped was 25 dates -- a breeze for bands and crews who later got used to the jaunt going on for twice as long. No one could foresee back then just how big -- or long-running -- this juggernaut would become.

While Warped's biggest impact has been taking underground culture and smearing it across America in broad daylight every summer, what is so often forgotten is that this was also the venue used by the likes of Katy Perry and Eminem to launch their careers to wider audiences. It's where Sonny Moore started out (in a band named From First to Last ) before he metamorphosed into EDM megastar, Skrillex . It's where No Doubt spent their summer the year before they exploded on a global scale.

Dominic Davi , Oakland-based bassist of  Tsunami Bomb , has been attending Warped since 1995 and playing it since 2001. "It's so easy to forget now," he says, "but when it started, and for a long time into it, the bands Warped Tour was assembling did not get played on the radio. They were not featured on festival lineups. Kevin Lyman helped shine a light onto all these bands that were drawing various amounts on their own, but together could fill a festival. That took a lot of vision."

"In the end," Davi continues, "Warped launched all these careers and was directly responsible for the punk rock explosion that happened in the early 2000s. That's quite a feat."

Warped Tour, especially in its earliest years, acted this way, year upon year, launching artists out of obscurity and into the eyeline of the mainstream. Blink 182, a band that was long considered too crude and provocative for mainstream success, appeared on three out of the four Warpeds between 1996 and 1999. It's no coincidence that by 2000, they were one of the biggest bands in the country.

Not only did Warped change how punk rock was treated by mainstream music culture, it had an indelible impact on the lives of the thousands of people who lived and worked on the tour over the years, some of whom came back annually, without fail. Along the way, it also helped to further unify a nationwide community of punks, rebels, and renegades.

Dominic Davi compares spending a summer on the tour to "running away with the circus." Photographer Lisa Johnson , whose work documenting Warped Tour has been featured on the covers of several official compilations, as well as in the book, Misfit Summer Camp: 20 Years on the Road With Vans , elaborates: "Warped Tour is a place where seemingly anything is possible. Utopia. Hard work and happiness, plus some fun in the sun. There is just always something magic in the air."

The unique spirit of Warped is precisely why hundreds of people have stepped up, year after year, to work in unbearably high temperatures, notoriously dusty environs, facing parking lot after parking lot with few views of the outside world (unless you count the occasional midnight trip to Wal-Mart) for weeks on end.

It's difficult to fathom why anybody would want to spend an entire summer in those conditions -- until you actually do it. In 2006, I joined Warped Tour for five days to write a story for a British rock magazine. Somehow, five days turned into seven weeks. I skipped my flight home to sell merch for one of the bands I had met along the way, and had zero regrets about hitting 'pause' on the rest of my life to do so.

For thousands of us, Warped has always been that way -- once you get caught in its vortex, it's hard to extricate yourself from it. "It's this huge production," Davi says, "with so many moving parts. It's hard work. You are moving all day. I think you have to be a particular personality to love that life. I always did."

The video below that Lisa Johnson took at a backstage party in 2014, effectively sums up the hilarity, unified chaos, and good-natured anarchy of Warped Tour (and also why the nightly after-show barbecues have become the stuff of legend). Take into account that the people you see in this clip are the people working the tour -- crew members, band members, merch people, stage hands. Work days may be long and conditions may sometimes be hard, but on the best nights, this is what happens once the ticket-buying public leaves:

There's no doubting that in recent years Warped Tour has, to some degree at least, lost its niche, while also weathering some damaging storms. "In many ways," Davi notes, "I think when the bands on the tour became bands that the radio and MTV embraced, it became harder to preserve that core exclusivity and unique feeling that Warped Tour had. At first it made the tour bigger, but having to chase the trends and adapt to bands with more exposure, I think made it more difficult to make the tour a special experience. By trying to please everyone they had a harder time pleasing anyone."

The summer tour's time might be drawing to a close, but Warped promises to live on in other capacities: there will be some sort of 25th anniversary celebration, and the first Warped Rewind at Sea cruise just happened last month. More than that though, the tour leaves behind a legacy. It impacted a couple of generations of punk, emo and hardcore bands, as well as their fans. Warped brought a newfound acceptance of alternative culture to all corners of the country. It was a confidence builder for teens who felt alienated in their suburban high schools; it was a training camp for small bands, and a springboard for larger ones; and, for a long while there, it fundamentally changed the fabric of alternative music in America.

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Warped Tour: A Look Back in Photos in Honor of Its Last Hurrah

Last year, Warped Tour’s founder, Kevin Lyman, announced the end of an era: After nearly a quarter of a century, the monumental fest would make its “final, full cross-country run.” The news is now sinking in as a reality as the tour’s final date, August 5th, fast approaches. What’s been known as Vans Warped Tour since 1996 has equally officially been known as a place for aspiring alts trapped in the suburbs to flourish—one that just so happened to make history in the process. Warped Tour was not only a launching pad for Green Day, Katy Perry , Blink-182, and even Eminem; it was also a documentation of the birth of emo as we know it in the aughts, seen through its lineups’ shift from punk acts like Bad Religion, Rancid, the Casualties, NOFX, and Anti-Flag to bands like All Time Low, Simple Plan, Sum 41, Taking Back Sunday, the Used, and From First to Last—the latter of which featured one long-haired, screaming emo heartthrob Sonny Moore, now better known as Skrillex . In case you hadn’t noticed, pretty much all of the above feature almost exclusively white men—a lack of diversity that’s unfortunately continued into the 50-plus bands chosen to make up Warped Tour’s last hurrah. (Joan Jett is putting in her usual appearance, but Paramore’s flamed-hair Hayley Williams, essentially the only woman who managed to become a face of Warped Tour throughout its history, is noticeably missing from this year’s lineup.) Take a look back at that history, flaws and all, with the best photos of its glory days, including flashbacks to Perry’s guitar, Oli Sykes’s neck tats, Benji Madden’s snake bites, Jared Leto’s lipstick, Pete Wentz’s popped collar, Demi Lovato ‘s sweeping side bangs, and Jeffree Star’s infamous hot-pink mop, here.

Skrillex, when he was Sonny Moore of From First to Last, at the 2006 Vans Warped tour in San Francisco.

A pre-pop-fame Katy Perry performing at the 2008 Warped Tour in Carson, California.

Hayley Williams of Paramore, with her signature neon hair, performing at the 2011 Vans Warped Tour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Chris Barker of Anti-Flag performing at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Wheatland, California.

Jared Leto of 30 Seconds to Mars performing at the 2006 Vans Warped Tour in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Simple Plan performing at the 2004 Vans Warped Tour in Bonner Springs, Kansas.

Before his makeup line became an empire, Jeffree Star, seen her at the 2011 Vans Warped Tour in Carson, California, was a Warped Tour regular.

Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance performing at the 2005 Vans Warped Tour in Columbus, Ohio.

Katy Perry performing at the 2009 15th Anniversary Vans Warped Tour in Los Angeles, California.

The Casualties performing at the 2006 Vans Warped Tour in Uniondale, New York.

Demi Lovato posing backstage at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Ventura, California.

Taylor Momsen of the Pretty Reckless (and more famously of Gossip Girl ) performing at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Marysville, California.

Taylor Momsen’s shoes during her performance at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Mountain View, California.

Bert McCracken of The Used performing at the 2002 Vans Warped Tour in San Francisco, California

Benji Madden of Good Charlotte performing at the 2004 10th Anniversary Vans Warped Tour in Boston, Massachusetts.

Katy Perry performing at the 2008 Vans Warped Tour in Carson, California.

Joe Trohman, Patrick Stump, Andy Hurley, and Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy at the 2005 Vans Warped Tour in Columbus, Ohio.

Billy Idol performing at the 2005 Vans Warped Tour in Pomona, California.

Lars Frederiksen and Tim Armstrong of Rancid performing at the 2003 Vans Warped Tour in San Francisco, California.

Joan Jett performing at the 2006 Vans Warped Tour in Detroit, Michigan.

Travis Barker of The Transplants performing at the 2005 Vans Warped Tour in Randall’s Island, New York.

Oli Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon performing at the 2013 Vans Warped Tour in Ventura, California.

Jeffree Star at the 2013 Vans Warped Tour press conference and kick-off party in Los Angeles, California.

Andrew W.K. performing at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Mountain View, California.

William Beckett of The Academy Is… performing at the 2008 Vans Warped Tour in Englishtown, New Jersey.

Hayley Williams of Paramore performing at the 2011 Vans Warped Tour in San Diego, California.

Ice-T performing in a surprise appearance at the 2003 Vans Warped Tour in San Francisco, California.

Hayley Williams of Paramore performing at the 2008 Vans Warped Tour in San Antonio, Texas.

Katy Perry signing a fan’s cast at the 2008 Warped Tour in Ventura, California.

Joan Jett performing at the 2006 Vans Warped Tour in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bebe Rexha performing at the 2015 Vans Warped Tour in Ventura, California.

Riff Raff and bassist Andy Glass of We Came as Romans performing during the 2015 Vans Warped Tour in Ventura, California.

Tyson Ritter of the All-American Rejects performing at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in Carson, California.

Katy Perry performing at the 2008 Vans Warped Tour in Ventura, Caliornia.

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Facing the End of an Era: The Final Warped Tour Is Sadly Here

It’s almost summertime, which means one thing to the kids who are really into punk, alternative and just great music in general: Warped Tour. From June to August, teens and young adults from across the country come together for an all-day set list that comprises roughly over 20 bands.

If you are unfamiliar with Warped Tour, let me break it down for you. Warped Tour is the punk rock , alternative equivalent to Coachella. Filled with mosh pits, crowd surfing and much more, the non-stop music festival goes from late morning to sunset. The energy at Warped is unmatched to most concerts.

With over 30 cities nationwide and different bands coming together and headlining each concert, every show is jammed packed with music, food and even educational aspects. It’s hard to believe that the final stretch of the tour will be on August 8 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Yes, you heard right. On Nov. 15, Kevin Lyman, coordinator and founder of Warped Tour, announced that 2018 will be the last year that the cross-country show will headline. In a public statement , Lyman said that all good things must come to an end.

Starting in 1995, Lyman brought bands like the Black Eyed Peas, Green Day, Sum 41 and Simple Plan to the stage for millions of concert watchers to see. Thanks to the tour, bands were born on stages in cities like Dallas, Philadelphia and Columbia.

This isn’t to say that Warped is gone forever — just the aspects of an actual “tour” will be missing. In an interview with Huffington Post, Lyman said, “Maybe we’ll do a one-year-off, one-year-on type thing, maybe I’ll pick a city and we’ll do a week-long festival with education, nonprofits and some concerts.”

That’s all that’s been said on Warped Tour’s fate, so, for now, concertgoers will have to deal with the unknown and look forward to the last “hoorah” of Warped this summer.

Various genres have often found their way to the Warped stage over the years. Rock and rap artists have been paired alongside post-hardcore and soft pop-punk bands. Artists like Ice T, Eminem, All Time Low, No Doubt, Fall Out Boy and so many more blasted their anthems out of the speakers while young adults moshed and mouthed along to the lyrics of their favorite songs.

Because of Lyman, a Warped music community was born; the microcosm that Lyman created 23 years ago became a part of every teen’s summer plans. As Warped Tour is heading into its final tour, it’s time to look back on just how influential Warped has been to the young adult community.

A major staple of Warped Tour, which it has provided to its concertgoers for years, is a 101 guide for all things Warped because if you go, you will be there for hours, constantly moving back and forth between sets and tents. You need to be prepped for essentially the longest, but the best day of your life.

Grab a backpack, wear light clothing, sunscreen (because according to some hardcore fans, you will indeed get very, very burned), bring cash for merchandise, a sharpie for autographs, a snack and lastly, hold on tight to your things because you’re ready for the best time of your life.

For first-timers, the guide is super essential to make your concert experience the best it can be. There are videos, blogs and posts on the Warped website to make every person feel properly prepped for the day. You can find this “Survival Guide” that encompasses everything you will need for the farewell Warped Tour right here .

Unbeknownst to others who have never been to a show at Warped, the tour is more than just a place to get whiplash from headbanging really hard. There are also non-profit organizations that are in attendance, which are meant to provide awareness and educate attendees. Unlike many other concerts, the inclusion of non-profits brings Warped to a multi-facet level.

Some of the non-profits will give you little incentives like passes to get into the show early or even backstage access, all while supporting a worldly cause and educating the public. Bring some canned food for the Feed Our Children Now tent and get into the show a bit earlier than everyone else. Donate blood to Music Saves Lives and get a backstage pass.

Warped Tour is one of, if not the only cross-country tour where there are advocacy groups and non-profits on-site to educate crowds of music fans. A list of all the non-profit organizations can be found on their website here .

Additionally, in each city that Warped stops in, tents line the areas that host not only the bands that play each day but also the non-profit organizations, providing food and first aid access.

The philanthropic and educational work that Lyman has done for the last 20 plus years has truly set Warped Tour apart from other music festivals. For instance, the tour has donated to causes like Hurricane Katrina and Hollywood Heart, actions that are not generally done by other festivals and tours.

If you are looking for a unique concert experience, Warped Tour has a community where all young teens and adults can come together to listen to the music that they love. The unexpected end of Warped brings the loss of a much loved national (and slightly international) tour.

The diversity and the community that has been created within Warped has brought people together to celebrate two things: music and generally being a good human being. For that, Warped has and will forever hold a special place in every teen and young adult’s heart.

Tickets are now on sale, so grab them before Warped is gone for good. You can buy them on the Warped Tour site here .

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• Vans Warped Tour
• Warped Tour

Gillian Farnan, SUNY Cortland

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R.I.P. Warped Tour. At Least We Still Have Vans.

The skater company says goodbye to the music festival that made it cool.

By Medea Giordano

The Vans Warped Tour — the music festival that has crossed the country each year since 1995, and is frequently called a “punk rock summer camp” — is on its last run.

For 24 years, the Warped Tour created spaces for metal, punk and ska fans to meet their idols and mosh together under the hot sun: Each summer, about 70 bands and artists would play in some 40 locations, welcoming hundreds of thousands of tattooed concertgoers clad in band tees and Vans checkered slip-ons. Many musical acts that helped define the late 1990s and early 2000s graced Warped Tour’s stages, including Blink-182, Reel Big Fish and Eminem .

But recently, the show’s popularity has declined, among both bands and attendees. Some music festivals are bigger than ever — Coachella drew more than 200,000 people to the California desert for two days in April — but the Warped Tour doesn’t have the same cultural cache it once had.

“The die-hard Warped fan was still coming, but the ones for the future seemed to drop off,” said the festival’s founder and longtime producer Kevin Lyman in an email.

He said there is the possibility for other Warped Tour events down the line — including for the 25th anniversary next summer — but 2018 will be the final cross-country blowout. “I’ve done everything I can in this format,” he said. “I’m just tired. It’s time for someone else to continue or start something new.”

The final tour not only marks the end of an era in music, but of a particularly intimate brand collaboration. Vans has sponsored the Warped Tour since its second year and credits the festival with burnishing its countercultural image.

“Until we got involved with the Warped Tour, we didn’t have a national footprint to talk about who we are,” said Doug Palladini, the skate apparel company’s global brand president. “Vans is a brand that really embraces individuality, and Warped Tour is very much the same.”

Vans representatives said that the Warped Tour — which the company has a 75 percent stake in — isn’t ending because of a decline in ticket sales, and that its retirement shouldn’t be seen as divestment in music or skater culture. House of Vans, an indoor skate park and music venue with locations in Brooklyn, Chicago and London, and pop-ups around the world, will continue to host famous musicians and local, unsigned performers, and admission is free.

But the collaboration between Vans and the Warped Tour has run its course.

“We’re going to make this a part of Vans history and always hold it up as a really, really important part of who we are,” Mr. Palladini said. “It’s just the right time to put a bow on it and say thank you to all the bands and all the fans that made Warped Tour was it is.”

“One Big Family”

Vans was already synonymous with southern California skateboard culture in the 1990s when the Warped Tour started, thanks to the sneakers’ sticky soles. (They have good grip.) But the tour’s national popularity helped establish Vans as a punk brand, and that image has made the company incredibly appealing, especially to shoppers ages 16 to 34 .

In 2004, when Vans was acquired by VF Corporation — which owns JanSport, Timberland and the North Face — it was making about $325 million in sales a year. This year, Mr. Palladini said, Vans is on track to surpass $3 billion.

The first Vans store, which was known at the time as the Van Doren Rubber Company and opened its doors in Anaheim, Calif., in March 1966, was a much humbler affair. It was founded by Paul and Jim Van Doren, brothers who would take custom orders and manufacture shoes on site. Eventually the shoes’ waffle soles attracted skateboarders, and in 1976, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta — pro-skaters who were immortalized by Victor Rasuk and John Robinson in the 2005 film “Lords of Dogtown” — designed the Era , a low-top sneaker that became a Vans classic.

There were other moments in which Vans shoes were in the countercultural spotlight, including a 1982 cameo courtesy of Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli character in the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High .” But the company’s punk identity wasn’t forged until Mr. Lyman met Steve Van Doren.

A former Lollapalooza stage manager, Mr. Lyman had put together the first Warped Tour in 1995, with bands like Sublime and No Doubt on the original lineup. But he needed financial support to keep it going and was seeking sponsorship.

Steve Van Doren, the son of the Vans co-founder Paul Van Doren, was on a different mission. Separately, he was searching for someone to help him plan an amateur skate contest that would tour across the U.S. and the world. He met with Mr. Lyman, who said Vans would draw more people to skate events if live music were on the lineup.

In “Vans: Off the Wall,” a book about the company, Mr. Van Doren said that a deal was forged between the two men within 15 minutes of their meeting. Thus, the Vans Warped Tour was born.

“ Steve Van Doren. He always got it and was the driving force early in this relationship,” Mr. Lyman said. “After our first year with Vans, Airwalk approached me and offered a bunch of money to leave and go with them. I said hell no, and it was all because of Steve. Steve Van Doren continues to be the soul of Vans in my mind.”

“The Vans Warped Tour is one big family,” Mr. Van Doren said in an interview. He recalled his first summer, in which he drove from stop to stop on the tour in a van with his daughter. Though he opted to take the relatively cushy bus after that, he said he went to every Warped Tour show for 15 years.

The People’s Music Festival

Today’s popular music festivals often charge a steep price for big-name performers. A three-day general admission pass to Coachella, for example, can run $500, or close to $1,000 for a V.I.P. ticket. The Warped Tour, by comparison, costs about $45, and there is no hierarchy to the ticketing system. Even the bigger bands are never given special treatment, Mr. Van Doren said. The whole point is accessibility: There are no extra fees to meet artists, and fans can visit bands at their tents or run into them in the crowd during another performance.

“When you monetize a handshake, it changes the whole relationship,” Mr. Lyman said.

The Warped founder guessed that, of all the tour’s performers, Andrew W.K. probably spent the most time with fans. He would “sign for six hours and then go outside and sign some more. I would have to ask him to move since we needed to load the trucks to get to the next city,” Mr. Lyman said.

“Warped is a festival for the music and for the organizations that travel with it,” said Victoria Hudgins, a 23-year-old Warped Tour fan who has attended twice before. “I feel as though the younger crowd these days are more interested in putting their picture from Coachella on Instagram than they are actually going to and enjoying the festival itself. You don’t go to Warped for an Instagram picture, you go to Warped to be a part of something so big and so crazy.”

Ms. Hudgins had planned to buy tickets for two stops on the Warped Tour this summer — one in her home state of Michigan and the tour’s final show in Florida — before she got the opportunity to work on the tour full-time. (She is working for Support Tattoos and Piercings at Work, which sets up a tent at each city the tour visits, after volunteering for the organization last year.)

“To me this is going to be a summer where I feel like I’m going to fit in everywhere I am,” she said. “This is going to be a summer meeting an entire country of people. I can be a part of something so much bigger than just myself.”

Loyalty, Loyalty, Loyalty

While the Warped Tour has declined in popularity, Vans has become a global phenomenon. Between 2010 and 2014, it saw double-digit growth every year, and in 2017, the company surpassed the North Face as the VF Corporation’s top-selling brand. The shoes are just as visible in high fashion as they are in the skate park, and they have gotten musical shout-outs from young artists like Travis Mills and Ty Dolla $ign . (In 2011, the actress Kristen Stewart literally cemented the shoes into pop culture history when she wore a pair to her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony .)

“All of a sudden, everywhere I looked, it was Vans,” said Samantha Brown , a stylist and video director who has worked with Nylon magazine, Marc Jacobs and Oscar de la Renta. “They kind of make everything look cooler.”

But just as the Warped Tour kept its ticket prices down out of loyalty to its fan base — and even let parents in for free — Vans has no plans to charge more for their increasingly popular apparel. (Shoes run from about $60 to $100.) The company’s prevailing wisdom, Mr. Palladini said, is around inclusivity. “And a part of inclusivity is accessible price points.”

For Steve Van Doren, who is now the vice president of events and promotions, it’s important that the company not forget its roots. “Skaters in the mid ’70s adopted us, and I thank them still four decades later because they gave us meaning,” he said. “They gave us purpose.”

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An Oral History of the Warped Tour

The hard-partying music festival holds its last Denver show this month.

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In August 1995, a traveling alt-rock music festival called the Warped Tour played at the University of Colorado’s Franklin Field in Boulder—the tour’s second show. Over the next 23 years, it helped launch the careers of big names like Eminem and Paramore, plus hundreds of less-famous talents. These days, the Warped Tour is best known as an epic musical carnival filled with nearly as much debauchery as music. Jon Shockness, of the Denver band Air Dubai, compares it to a never-ending summer block party set to ear-drum-damaging decibels. Unfortunately for the festival’s fans, the party is over: 2018 will be the Warped Tour’s final encore. In advance of its last Denver stop this month, we asked bands and promoters to recall the best, and worst, of Warped.

“Bill Bass was the promoter with [the late] Barry Fey. They were so busy with other shows they assigned an intern to run the Warped Tour. About an hour before, we realized they had no concessions. We bought two Weber barbecue grills and $1 sodas and hot dogs at the supermarket. Barry called and yelled at us because the show was a piece of crap and he lost money. All I could think was, We made $500 selling hot dogs.” – Kevin Lyman , Warped Tour founder

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“Warped Tour isn’t glamorous. Katy Perry’s going in a port-a-potty like everyone else. Toward the end of the tour, she had a number one song. She threw a crazy party in a hotel room in Portland. She was dragging us across the floor of a booze-stained hotel room. It was a rock ‘n’ roll moment.

When we did the whole tour for the first time [in 2008], we shared a bus with another band and two sponsors. This was in the emo era of music—off-center, straight, asymmetrical haircuts were in vogue. I could count the seconds until the bus was going to short out because the bands were flat-ironing their hair. The bus would just power down and go bzzzzsh. It was like clockwork.” – Nathaniel Motte of Boulder electronic duo 3OH!3, which played the entire tour three times

“Playing the show is 35 minutes of the day, and you’re there for 24 hours. My fun didn’t start till 5 or 6 at night. I got the word ‘f—’ tattooed on my back one year; I tattooed ‘f—’ on somebody else’s back.

We rode in inflatable rafts that went out into the crowd every day. Sometimes the rafts reached another stage. I’d have to grab a mic and run back to the [original] stage.” – David Schmitt of Breathe Carolina, a Denver-born EDM band that played the Warped Tour four times

“Some of [the Warped Tour’s stops] are isolated. One time, I did not want to use the port-a-potty, so I walked like five miles to find an office building in the middle of nowhere. Awesome tour. Horrible bathrooms.

Once the doors would close, the barbecue grills would light up. The parties were awesome.” – Jon Shockness , whose band Air Dubai played Warped in 2009 and 2014

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Pope urges end to Papua New Guinea tribal conflicts and fair, sustainable extraction of resources

Aptopix papua new guinea asia pope.

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea (AP) — Pope Francis called Saturday for an end to tribal conflicts that have wracked Papua New Guinea for decades and appealed for equitable development of its natural resources during a visit where the country's problem of violence against women was also raised.

Dancers in swishing grass skirts performed for Francis as he opened his first full day in the South Pacific nation with a mix of political and church business. He met with the governor general and dignitaries from around the region before visiting with disabled children who performed for him and drew laughs from the pope as he handed out candies to them.

Francis is on an 11-day, four-nation tour through Southeast Asia and Oceania, the longest and most challenging of his pontificate. He landed on Friday evening in Port Moresby, the capital of the Commonwealth nation, from Jakarta, Indonesia, for the second leg of his journey.

During his speech to government authorities and diplomats, Francis marveled at the diversity of Papua New Guinea’s people — there are some 800 languages spoken here — saying their variety must be “a challenge to the Holy Spirit, who creates harmony amid differences!”

But he also noted that such diversity has long created conflict here, a reference to the tribal violence over land and other disputes that have long characterized the country's culture but have grown more lethal in recent years. Francis appealed for a sense of civic responsibility and cooperation to prevail, to benefit everyone.

“It is my particular hope that tribal violence will come to an end, for it causes many victims, prevents people from living in peace and hinders development,” he said.

If people agree to sacrifice their personal interests for the common good, he said, “the necessary forces can be used to improve infrastructure, address the health and educational needs of the population and increase opportunities for dignified work."

The poor but strategically important Commonwealth nation is home to more than 10 million people, most of whom are subsistence farmers.

Papua New Guinea’s governor general, Bob Dadae, referred to the violence in his remarks, calling in particular for greater protection of women and respect for their rights. It was a reference to the gender violence that has been normalized in a country where allegations of sorcery are common.

According to U.N. Women, 60% of the country's women have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner at some time in their lives, double the global average. Papua New Guinea ranked 151 out of 166 countries on a U.N. gender inequality index in 2022.

“We want to acknowledge the role of the woman and air the need for protection," Dadae said. “We also recognize the physical and the spiritual care that the church continues to give to those that are being abused, neglected or rejected by families and communities.”

Francis amended his remarks to pick up on the theme, saying women “are the ones who carry the country forward, they give life, build and grow a country. Let us not forget the women who are on the front line of human and spiritual development.”

The issue of women and inequality is particularly fraught for the Catholic Church, given women are barred from the priesthood and are often treated as second-class citizens by the all-male hierarchy. Francis has denounced gender-based violence, appointed women to top Vatican positions and called for women to have greater decision-making roles in the church, but he has reaffirmed the ban on women’s ordination.

Francis also called for fair and environmentally sustainable extraction of country’s vast natural resources, which include gold, nickel and natural gas. Disputes over how wealth should be distributed and who is entitled to mining royalties have often led to conflicts.

Francis, who has written entire encyclicals about the environment, has long insisted that development of natural resources must benefit local people, not just the multinational companies that extract them, and be pursued in an environmentally responsible way to preserve them for future generations.

He made that argument again Saturday, saying Papua New Guinea’s resources “are destined by God for the entire community.”

“Even if outside experts and large international companies must be involved in the harnessing of these resources, it is only right that the needs of local people are given due consideration when distributing the proceeds and employing workers,” he said.

“These environmental and cultural treasures represent at the same time a great responsibility, because they require everyone, civil authorities and all citizens, to promote initiatives that develop natural and human resources in a sustainable and equitable manner,” he said.

Finally, Francis called for a “definitive solution” to the question of Bougainville , an island region whose people voted overwhelmingly to become independent from Papua New Guinea in 2019. The outcome of the nonbinding referendum has not been implemented.

Later Saturday, Francis was visiting with charity workers who care for street children and then meeting with Papua New Guinea’s clergy and religious sisters at a Marian sanctuary. On Sunday, he travels deep into the jungle to meet with Argentine missionaries.

Despite the rigors of the trip and jet lag — Papua New Guinea is eight hours ahead of Rome time — the 87-year-old Francis appeared in relatively good form, though he coughed through his speech. He smiled and laughed as he handed out candies to young children dressed in traditional clothes who had performed for him, and even took a turn playing a kundu drum, a traditional hand-held hourglass-shaped drum that one group of children gave him.

He was warmly welcomed by crowds outside at each of his stops, with people young and old dressed in traditional grass skirts, facepaint and headdresses dancing and singing to drums. And several South Pacific leaders came to Port Moresby for the rare chance to greet the pope, including the prime minister of Vanuatu, the president of Nauru and the prime minister of Tonga.

Francis is the second pope to visit Papua New Guinea, after St. John Paul II visited first in 1984, then in 1995 to beatify Peter To Rot, a Catholic layman who was declared a martyr for the faith after he died in prison during World War II.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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• What’s Up With Linkin Park’s New Singer?

In the end, it wasn’t actually the end for Linkin Park . The rock band is back with new music for the first time in seven years — and a new singer as well. Emily Armstrong joined the band , replacing the late Chester Bennington , who died in 2017. Armstrong has sung in the band Dead Sara since 2005 and makes her Linkin Park debut on new single “The Emptiness Machine,” sharing vocal duties with Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda. (Colin Brittain is also joining Linkin Park as their new drummer with Rob Bourdon not returning.) She joined the band onstage for the first time September 5 and will feature on their new album, From Zero , out November 15. But Armstrong’s addition has already been controversial, as fans scrutinize her history with Scientology and convicted rapist Danny Masterson. She has since addressed her past support of Masterson in an Instagram Story statement.

Who is Emily Armstrong, anyway?

Armstrong has been playing music for over 20 years, forming her band Dead Sara with guitarist Siouxsie Medley in the early aughts. The band released its first EP in 2008 but didn’t break out until 2012, when they independently released a self-titled debut album and their single “Weatherman” cracked the rock and alternative charts. Maybe you remember them from Warped Tour 2012 or season four of Vampire Diaries ? Dead Sara has since released two more albums: Pleasure to Meet You in 2015 and Ain’t It Tragic in 2021. More recently, they featured on Demi Lovato’s song “Help Me” off Holy Fvck and opened for her corresponding tour.

Armstrong had a lot of respect in the rock world before joining Linkin Park. She sang on Courtney Love’s 2010 album, Nobody’s Daughter , and has been praised by Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl. And she’s a Linkin Park fan: She told Billboard she especially loved the band’s 2000 album, Hybrid Theory, when it came out and the song “One Step Closer.”

Why did Linkin Park add a new singer?

After Bennington’s death in 2017, Linkin Park went on hiatus, only performing publicly for a tribute concert. In the years that followed, Shinoda and the band went back and forth publicly about the future of Linkin Park. “I’m unable to say what will happen with the band,” Shinoda told Vulture in 2018 . The band’s members soon started spending time together again afterward but didn’t intend to make another album. “I would float the idea of getting together, [we’d] get together and it was fun, but there wasn’t any creative momentum,” Shinoda told Billboard .

Linkin Park invited Armstrong to Shinoda’s studio for “maybe three” days in 2019, she said, but she hadn’t joined the band. A few years later, Shinoda started working with her again, along with some other singers. Once Linkin Park started booking shows, Shinoda began wondering how to handle vocals. “Am I going to be carrying a bunch of vocals?” he told Apple Music. “Are we going to have another vocalist? Are we going to have multiple vocalists onstage?” He said the band considered making Armstrong a featured artist, before inviting her to be a member. “When I started to hear Emily’s voice on things, my brain, it was like the first time that my brain would accept it as a Linkin Park song,” Shinoda said. And yes, she can scream — the band’s DJ, Joe Hahn, said the first time Shinoda asked Armstrong to scream, “for me, that did it.”

But uh, is Armstrong a Scientologist?

That’s the big question! Armstrong has never publicly identified with the Church of Scientology, though she did attend a gala in 2013. More recently, Armstrong supported actor and prominent Scientologist Danny Masterson at his 2020 rape trial, where he was convicted on two counts.

How have people responded to Armstrong joining the band?

Masterson accuser Chrissie Carnell-Bixler and her husband, Mars Volta singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala — both former Scientologists — each spoke out against Armstrong after she joined the band. Carnell-Bixler called Armstrong “a hardcore Scientologist who supported convicted serial rapist both in and out of court” on her Instagram Story. (Carnell-Bixler’s specific accusation resulted in a hung jury.) “Emily Armstrong is a true believer of the Scientology cult/criminal organization that engages in human and child trafficking, child and elder abuse, the cover ups of countless SAs [sexual assaults] on children and adults,” she continued. Bixler-Zavala, meanwhile, reposted a comment he’d previously left on Dead Sara’s Instagram about Armstrong’s support of Masterson. “Remember Emily? Remember how your fellow scientologist goon squad surrounded one of the Jane Doe’s when she was trying to leave the elevators?” he wrote. “The court sheriffs had to escort her away from your awful cult …” He also called Armstrong “a born in Scientologist” and called her “corny ass” multiple times. Bixler-Zavala since deleted the Instagram Story, but Carnell-Bixler still has his comment up.

Meanwhile, many Linkin Park fans online quickly expressed dismay at Armstrong’s Scientology associations. “Growing up really is just your favorite bands disappointing you,” one wrote .

What has Armstrong said?

Without identifying Masterson by name, Armstrong walked back her past support of him in a brief Notes-app statement posted to her Instagram Story in the evening on September 6. The singer, who said she “wanted to clear the air about something that happened a while back,” described being asked to support “someone I considered a friend” at a court appearance and attending an early court hearing as an observer. “Soon after, I realized I shouldn’t have,” she said. “I always try to see the good in people, and I misjudged him. I have never spoken with him since.” Armstrong added that “unimaginable details” emerged, and the person was found guilty. “To say it as clearly as possible: I do not condone abuse or violence against women, and I empathize with the victims of these crimes,” she concluded.

• linkin park
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• emily armstrong
• scientology
• danny masterson
• chester bennington
• mike shinoda

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‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Netflix Drama Is a Mesmerizing Character Study

Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen are sisters waiting for their father to die in Azazel Jacobs’ heartbreaking film

I believe it was George Michael who sang that “time can never mend these careless sisters,” but then again my cassette was badly warped and I may have misheard him. In any case, he was wrong. I suspect time can indeed mend sisters who struggle to care for each other, for I have seen Azazel Jacobs’ exquisite new drama “His Three Daughters,” which features not one but three incredible performances from three incredible stars.

“His Three Daughters” stars Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as Katie, Rachel and Christina. They’re sisters, their father is in hospice, and he could die at any moment. Or days from now. Or weeks. If you’ve ever lived through a similar situation then you know it can involve an awful lot of waiting, an awful lot of worrying and an awful lot of soul-searching. It’s just awful.

Everyone keeps telling Katie, Rachel and Christina that they’re lucky they don’t have to go through this alone, but they’re not so sure. Katie and Christina couldn’t be more different — Katie is hyper-controlling and passive-aggressive, Christina is airy and considerate to a fault — but they’re close enough that they have their own twin-speak, which only they can understand. Rachel is their stepsister, and although they treat her like the black sheep, questioning all her choices and judging her for not taking up as many responsibilities in their father’s final moments, they seem oblivious to the fact that Rachel was the one living with and taking care of him for years, while they barely even visited.

The first half of “His Three Daughters” is a tour de force of miscommunication, in which Rachel shuts down in the face of her domineering siblings, and is forced to rework her whole life around their needs. They make her leave her own house to smoke weed, which gets her through her stressful days. “That’s how I do shit,” she simply explains, but now she has to do shit outside, a gesture of respect they don’t give her in return. Not at all.

It would be easy to sympathize exclusively with Rachel. Azazel Jacobs’ screenplay is incredibly even-handed but Lyonne’s quietude is all the more potent in the face of Coon’s and Olsen’s verbose anxieties. Next to her sisters, Rachel is quiet and non-confrontational, just trying to survive in a harsh environment. Outside she’s friendly and confident, a beloved member of her community, not that her sisters seem to notice.

But this is a noble three-hander, a showcase for all three performers, and they all rise to their occasions. Katie’s micromanagement is an upsetting way to love people, and it’s made her resentful of the leadership role she thinks she has to take. She hides her judgment behind unconvincing apologies and rambling monologues designed to make her feel better about herself, even as it makes others feel worse. But she also feels bad that they feel worse, at least after she’s confronted with how mean she is.

And poor Christina, she’s a former Grateful Deadhead who now has a child of her own, and seems desperate to take on the maternal qualities that were apparently quite absent in their lives. But she doesn’t know how to care for Rachel, in particular, because for a variety of reasons — mostly bad, but all understandable — she doesn’t know her own sister. The horror of “His Three Daughters” is the encroaching, sad suspicion that maybe these rifts can’t be healed. These sisters don’t have enough care. Time can never mend them. Cue the saxophone solo.

There isn’t much plot to parse through but there’s an overwhelming amount of story. Jacobs films “His Three Daughters” in limited locations, with cinematography — by Sam Levy, who seems to specialize in thoughtful dramas about women and their relationships (“Lady Bird,” “Frances Ha”) — that rarely calls attention to how thoughtful and precise it is. The film takes place in a working class apartment, complete with those sickly yellow bulbs that make everything look like an old memory even as it’s happening. It’s a place we know well, full of little details that are specific to these characters.

As for their father, he’s dying in the other room, and we don’t spend time in there. He’s Katie, Rachel and Christina’s heart, their connection, and yet he’s also a problem to be solved. A story that’s waiting to end. And it’s uncertain whether there will be any new stories without him; at least not with all of these women, who may or may not ever figure out how to be a family without that shared figurehead between them.

“His Three Daughters” is a mesmerizing study anchored by three incredible leads, each working at the height of their craft. The material is rife for exploration, rich with nuance and discoveries. And the ending packs a wallop. This is — to quote George Michael again (and slightly more accurately) — the silver screen, with all its sad goodbyes.

“His Three Daughters” is now playing in select theaters and premieres on Netflix on Sept. 20.

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