warped tour wall of death

Warped Tour act claims ban on terms like “mosh pit” and “wall of death”

By law I'm no longer allowed to say mosh pit or wall of death or anything of the like… So whatever you do- DON'T MOSH. Too many parents [are] suing

(Though the singer said "by law," the rule appears to have been put in place by the Warped Tour, not President Obama or something.)

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How 23 Years of Warped Tour Changed America

Please try again

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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Watch 10 of the craziest mosh pits we've ever seen

From attempts at a Guinness World Record to, ahem, 'intimate relations' in the middle of a death metal crowd, here are 10 times moshing was taken to a whole new level

Every metalhead loves a good circle pit every so often – but what happens when that love gets pushed to its furthest extremes? When you’ve got arenas or field-sized festivals crammed with a legion of amped-up headbangers, anything can happen. These insane moshes prove that. Whether it’s because of their size, their ruthlessness, or just the antics of a few loons in the middle, these are 10 of the wildest pits that have ever been caught on camera.

DevilDriver (Download Festival, 2007)

When Dez Fafara’s groove metal force levelled Download , they tried to ignite a pit enormous enough for the Guinness Book Of World Records. Ultimately, they did an awe-inspiring job of it, getting tens of thousands of fans to circle in a packed tent, but their efforts were shot down, “as there is no way you can physically define where any circle/mosh pit starts and ends”. Boo!

Exodus (Wacken Open Air, 2008)

With Exodus often getting called the first ever thrash band and Bonded By Blood being a genre masterpiece, it’s no surprise that the Bay Area brutes are mosh machines. Their Live At Wacken 2008 DVD is full of batshit pits, but our favourite is the one opened up midway through Strike Of The Beast . We don’t want to know how many bones that riff broke.

Slayer (Greece, 2013)

Disclaimer: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. During a Greek show in 2013, one particularly avid Slayer fan apparently thought it’d be a good idea to bring a flare into the pit and light it. It’s not. However, there’s no denying that the results are stunning – not to mention an apt visual to accompany the hellish sound of Raining Blood .

Gojira (Resurrection Festival, 2014)

Flying Whales is a bona fide moshpit-starter, and it inspired one hell of a wall of death at the 2014 edition of Spain’s Resurrection Festival. However, even better are Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier’s instructions to his bizarrely dressed crowd. “Hey! The banana! Step back!” is a pearl we especially love, almost outdone by the Frenchman barking, “Get that French flag outta here!”

Knuckle Puck (Warped Tour, 2016)

If you’re seeking the world’s craziest moshpits, emo B-listers Knuckle Puck probably aren’t the first band you’d see. However, when the Chicagoans were on the 2016 Warped Tour, they played on a stage that was directly in front of a swimming pool. Cue hundreds of hyped-up fans leaping into the water, singing along and lobbing beach balls about during their set. We want in.

.@KnucklePuckIL pool party pic.twitter.com/x0K4WnEo4H August 10, 2016

Slayer… again (California, 2018)

Slayer fans continued to prove that they’re a wilder species than the rest of us at this 2018 California show. During Hell Awaits , police and fire fighters stepped into the crowd, reportedly in response to a fire. The pit’s response? Just mosh around them until they move. While this was certainly… something, no one should ever endorse harassing emergency services doing their job.

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Lamb Of God (VOA Heavy Rock Festival, 2019)

Lamb Of God supported Slayer at Lisbon’s VOA Heavy Rock Festival in 2019 but stole the show. In the run-up to Redneck , Randy Blythe’s wrecking crew turned the entire floor of the 12,500-capacity Altice Arena into a vortex, with two smaller pits beside the sound desk. Bonus points to these whirlpools of humanity for deafeningly screaming the song’s first lyric as well.

Autopsy (Maryland Deathfest, 2022)

Few people would ever consider California’s death/doom pioneers as a soundtrack to sexytime. In fact, only two of them would – and fortunately for them, they were both in attendance for Autopsy’s set at the 2022 Maryland Deathfest. The results are way too NSFW for us to embed here, but video footage can still be found on Twitter , if that’s your thing (do NOT say we didn't warn you, though!)

Malevolence (London, 2023)

Malevolence were only the opening band when they played London supporting Trivium earlier this year, yet they were still able to incite a moshpit so massive that it went viral. Dudes span their mates about on their backs, others were doing push-ups, all while cameras captured the entire thing. One Instagram user even declared it “the biggest circle pit I have ever seen for an opening band” .

Archspire (Essen, 2023)

We’ve seen flares in the pit, bananas in the pit and oral in the pit – now, board games in the pit. For reasons unknown, Archspire split their crowd at a 2023 Essen show and made two of them, mid-set, play competitive Twister for a t-shirt. Then they got the rest of the audience to smash into them in a wall of death. Cruel? Possibly. Hilarious? Definitely.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

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• Cover Story

Here's What Really Caused The Downfall of Warped Tour

Founder Kevin Lyman explains how the scene that built Warped Tour ripped the festival apart from within.

It's always sad when a big yearly festival or event comes to an end, and such was certainly the case with Vans Warped Tour , the massive traveling punk rock event that took the world by storm for 25 years. Sadly, 2018 was the year's last as a touring festival, with this year's three fests across the country acting as its memorial. When the fest ended, rumors circulated about what ended the festival -- most notably financial losses. But now, the man behind Warped Tour has stated that it was something much more human behind the festival's downfall -- the loss of punk rock community.

In the latest episode of Inside Track -- our podcast in which the true stories behind rock's most important moments are told by the people who lived them -- Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman explains what led to him winding down the traveling festival after 25 years.

"Ultimately, when I started to think about winding this down after 25 years, it was, ‘I think we’ve lost the sense of community,'" says Kevin. "It took a community to make Warped Tour go. Some of that was self-inflicted… I thought you addressed the fans that complain on Twitter! I was addressing everyone and tried to keep that conversation going, but you realize that you can’t really negotiate, debate, or educate on social media!"

Not only did Kevin find that the unity that built Warped Tour was no longer present, but preconceived notions about bands resulted in great musicians turning down the gig, lest they come off as a "Warped" act.

"This is what kind of pissed me off," says Kevin. "Because in 1997, ‘98, Pennywise couldn’t judge a band until you met ‘em in the parking lot. You’d be in line at catering because of this community setting with no dressing rooms. You’d meet these people, and they were musicians too. Then I started watching this community tear itself apart from within, with this band — not even meeting these people, just disagreeing with them or with how they look — bashing that band online.

"People would come up to me on Warped Tour, and say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be on Warped Tour because Attila are on Warped Tour,’" he continues. "Have you met the guys in Attila? We’re not here to judge each other’s music. The fans will judge each other’s music.’ Atilla brings people. Do I personally run around screaming ‘Suck my fuck?’ No. Do you? No. But they’re good musicians and they’re not bad people. I’ve never seen them do a bad thing to someone."

"Every year, I’d send offers, and just — ‘We don’t want to tour with those bands. We don’t wanna be a Warped-esque bands,'" sighs Lyman. And it’s like, dude, Warped-esque bands — you mean Bad Religion . A Day To Remember . Paramore … it got very frustrating."

Listen to the full episode below:

And don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE to Inside Track to hear more of the insane, wonderful, highly-unlikely and totally true stories behind some of the greatest moments in rock history:

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What is crowd Surfing?

Whats a mosh pitt, what is the wall of death.

R.I.P. Warped Tour: The End of an Era

November 30, 2017 Rob Piersall A&E 0

Earlier this month, Kevin Lyman, the founder of the Vans Warped Tour announced that 2018 would be the last full cross-country run of the festival.

Needless to say, a part of the emo, punk lad inside me died. 

“I have been a very lucky person to have traveled across the country and sometimes around the world as one of the founders and producers of the Vans Warped Tour,” Lyman said in a statement. “Today, with many mixed feelings, I am here to announce that next year will be the final, full cross-country run of the Vans Warped Tour. I sit here reflecting on the tour’s incredible history, what the final run means for our community, and look forward to what’s to come as we commemorate the tour’s historic 25th anniversary in 2019.”

Though I lived vicariously through many summers on the Warped Tour through YouTube videos and stories from my older siblings, I’m glad I got to attend the festival when I did in 2011.

While the lineup wasn’t nearly as stacked as it was in 2005 (My Chemical Romance, Thrice, Armor For Sleep, Fall Out Boy, Senses Fail and Tsunami Bomb among others), you can’t fully experience what it’s like to see band after band in the blistering heat unless you go there. 

Mike Terry, whose band The Jukebox Romantics appeared on the tour for runs in 2010 and 2012 said while it’s sad, he understands why it’s ending.

“Festivals like Riot Fest last for just a couple days. Warped Tour is everyday,” Terry said. “Having to secure venues, cities, food and water. There are a lot of logistics that go into it. Kevin Lyman is the Vince McMahon of Warped Tour. From the largest to smallest scale, everything is covered and he’s put his whole life into it.

As someone who has seen the tour from both perspectives, Terry said that a goal of his was to be on Warped as a band because him and all of his friends went as fans growing up.

“It’s super fun, but it’s a lot of traveling,” he said. “You arrive at 7 or 8 a.m. find your stage and then promote all day. There’s an old adage that if you can survive Warped Tour, you can survive any tour. There are a lot of long commutes and no time to sleep in a bed.”

I also caught up with Josh Eppard, drummer of Coheed and Cambria recently and asked what it was like to be on the festival the entire summer and some fond memories he remembers.

“Jesus. I mean, the whole thing,” he said. “It’s an experience unlike any other. For me, that first three weeks in a van on Warped almost killed me. If you asked me this question while I was in the midst of that first run I’d have told you how awful it was, but that’s part of it. The sun burn. The sweat and dirt. The summer camp feel of it all. It was pretty ludicrous.”

Eppard went on to say that while Warped Tour was cliquey, the veteran bands of the tour warmed up to Coheed after Dr. Know from Bad Brains came out and played with them.

All of a sudden with Doc playing with us, a lot of those dudes warmed up to us,” he said. “It was cool. I’m talking Bad Religion, NOFX, Pennywise. All those guys were cool and all but we were outsiders. It was cool to get love from all those legendary punk groups even though we weren’t really a punk band.”

Perhaps my fondest memory from attending the tour was getting to see and meet one of my favorite bands from high school, Less Than Jake. I also got elbowed in the face while moshing to Attack! Attack! But that’s for another day. 

The night ended when Jeremy McKinnon from A Day to Remember walked across the crowd in a giant hamster ball and then the band split the crowd down the middle, creating a wall of death. I was bitter because my friends wouldn’t let me see Relient K instead of A Day to Remember so I boycotted the wall of death. Needless to say, I’m kicking myself now.

Katie Chirichillo attended the tour from 2005-08 talked about a day in the life of what going to the tour was like. 

“At Warped Tour 2006, I was 16, and got kicked in the face during The Early November from a crowd surfer,” she said. “It was the first time that ever happened to me, and 12 years later, I consider that some sort of rite of passage.”

The tour will pass through downstate New York on July 28 at Nikon at Jones Beach Theatre. Make sure you get your final moshing in, because this is it.

• coheed and cambria
• Fall Out Boy
• josh eppard
• Katie Chirichillo
• kevin lyman
• Rob Piersall
• vans warped tour
• warped tour
• warped tour 2018

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