By: Annette Hansen
In 2006 I attended my first Vans Warped Tour at the golden age of 14. I was sleep deprived when I arrived that morning because I had stayed up late the night before, unable to sleep, watching music videos for all the bands I wanted to see that day. I was also lacking a proper breakfast since my stomach was too full of butterflies to be able to really eat much of anything before arriving at the amphitheater. But most of all I was young, open-minded and hungry for everything this tour had to offer.
That first year was the first time I had ever been close enough at a show that I didn’t need binoculars, been kicked in the and nearly knocked to the ground by a crowd surfer, or been hugged by a member of a band whose music I sang loudly to. My first Warped Tour was where I first realized that I wasn’t just some music fan, I was a part of a larger music community. It was the most free and accepted I felt in my whole life. So I kept going back for 12 years.
The thing is, my story is not unique, and the impact the Vans Warped Tour has had is not just limited to any one faction of people involved in the Warped Tour community. It spans across fans, bands, crew and any person who has ever experienced what the Warped Tour has to offer.
When I left that first Warped Tour, full of a new budding love for this community, I never thought there’d be a day where I would be saying goodbye to something so special, but this year I am. We all are.
For my final Warped Tour I got the chance to go to Chicago and have many conversations throughout the day about the impact Warped Tour has had and the legacy it’s going to leave behind. Here are the highlights of those conversations.
A Place of Discovery
For 23 years the Vans Warped Tour has built a reputation for bringing the forward the best up-and-coming acts in the alternative music community and beyond. Having the opportunity to play on the tour has kickstarted countless budding music careers and has helped fans find their next musical fix. With numerous stages constantly churning out music throughout your time at Warped Tour, it’s almost impossible to avoid wandering into an unfamiliar set with unfamiliar sounds and being captivated by it. It’s that open door to new music that has brought countless fans to new artists every single summer.
“[Warped Tour] was instrumental in giving people a place to find these bands and to experience them. That’s going to be the one thing that I think is going to be lost for the music scene specifically. There’s going to be no specific place like this to go see a bunch of bands and discover new music.” – Buddy Nielsen (Senses Fail)
Andrew Bozymowski (Capstan) – “Warped tour was specifically designed for fans to find new bands. Just the way that it’s set-up. Now that we’re a part of it, we get to see the inner workings of that a little bit more. How the stages are mixed up every day, how the locations matter. What’s rewarding to me, is just when you start playing a set…it’s not a club tour where you’ve got the room and you’ve got the attention of that, it’s like you might get 100 kids that stop mid walk and they’re listening. That’s humbling and rewarding to me because there’s nowhere else you get that. That doesn’t exist on any other type of tour. It’s ‘like how many fans have we made, how many will come to our signing?’. When you get to talk with them it’s like ‘I didn’t know you guys existed but I saw you walking by’. That’s like, ‘fuck’. That’s why this opportunity, to me, is so special. That just shows you what even being here at all can do for you.”
Rob Damiani (Don Broco) – “It was always my favorite way of discovering bands. When you hear something at a festival and go ‘I’m going to check that out’. To play to new people who are just walking by the stage, checking it out and digging it, that’s the best feeling. To see your crowd grow during the set and more people come over and just get into it, that’s awesome.”
Patty Walters (As It Is) – “I think one of the things we’re going to lose when Warped Tour is not around anymore is the opportunity and freedom to discover your next favorite band. I know that we have streaming, but really discovering a band for yourself live and just like sharing a connection with yourself and that band, that’s something that I think is going to be really missed. Holding a CD or a T-Shirt physically in your hand that you bought off a member of that band, just discovering a song on Spotify isn’t the same thing.”
A Place for Bands to Grow
Over the years many bands have racked up some serious mileage with the Vans Warped Tour. If you’ve gone to the tour for years, you’ve watched bands go from the small stages to the big ones and build their audiences. The bands that have experienced this phenomenon don’t take the opportunity for granted.
“We feel completely lucky. To me, I still think about it, even though it’s obviously been years, that opportunity to play even just a small stage in Colorado one time, and now we have the opportunity to play the main stage, full band, a lot of people coming out and just hearing the lyrics sung back. It’s a sobering thing every time, every year no matter how much we drink before the show.” – Sean Foreman (3OH!3)
David Flinn (Chelsea Grin) – “The first time you come on Warped Tour you learn a lot of stuff. You learn how to get on and off the stage real fast because Warped Tour has so many bands that have to play. It teaches you how to kind of run your band a little bit better. It teaches you how to interact with fans a little bit better. Then, as you go on every year, you kind of realize how special it is, and you start thinking about all the bands who have done it and how my kids when they’re my age aren’t going to have this around. I think without Warped Tour Chelsea Grin would definitely be a different band.”
“I think every single stage on this tour is valuable, but for us it’s so nice for us to be on what’s called the main stage. We started out on Kevin Says in 2012. It was kind of the ‘give them a chance, this up-and-coming band are here from Australia with one record out’. We had nothing really to offer yet, so it’s really cool that six years later we’re here with our fourth record on our fourth Warped Tour.” – Jenna McDougall (Tonight Alive)
Dan Lambton (Real Friends) – “I feel like Warped Tour, not only us but all the bands in general, I feel like they take a lot of chances on younger bands and gives them a lot of their first shots. I think that was definitely the case with us because we’ve come up through the ranks a little bit. We did the Kevin Says stage back in 2013 when we started, and when the Journey’s stage was more of a middle stage we did that, and then we’re on the main stage. So many bands can grow and break and gain new fans, kind of expand their audience a little bit because it’s more diversified with the lineup like with all the heavy music, poppier music, punk music, whatever. It’s been a really awesome opportunity for us to grow as a band.”
A Place Where Fans Become Lifers
For so many people who have attended Warped Tour over the years, it wasn’t simply a music festival, it was life changing. It was the thing that pushed them to play music or to work on tours or write about bands *wink,wink*, or to find their place in any facet of the industry. It was an essential piece to who they were as a fan and the professional they’d eventually become.
Ira George (Movements) – “I found some of my favorite bands on Warped Tour like Silverstein, Hawthorne Heights. It’s crazy to be friends with those bands now. It just blows my mind. That’s the one thing, it’s so funny, you have fans come up to you and their like shaking because their so nervous. We’re just normal dudes and so is like most every other band. I learned how to play music based off bands that were on Warped Tour like Blink 182, who was my favorite band growing up. So yeah, [Warped Tour] has a very special place in my heart.”
“We all grew up going to Warped Tour, so to be able to play it is, I don’t know, it’s just humbling. A lot of my favorite music memories are because of the Vans Warped Tour. I just think we’re trying to provide that for kids now and just put on a great show everyday. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, like where this band has come from, where we are now and doing all of this, but we’re just along for the ride.” – TJ Horansky (Sleep On It)
A Place to Build a Music Community
Beyond anything else the Vans Warped Tour has done for the music world, probably the most significant is the community it has built in the alternative scene, a community rooted in a love of music. It’s taken broken kids across the country and given them a refuge to be young, to be wild, to be loud and to be free.
Travis Clark (We The Kings) – “When you do a club tour, we show up and we have sound check at 3 and then a meet and greet and then a show for an hour and a half and then we’re kind of done. [Warped Tour] is a little different. We show up here at 8 am and find out what time we play a couple of hours later and you just have all day to be able to go out to the merch table, to go see other bands, perform with other bands, to have this like family and community and just collectiveness with everybody which is so unlike any other tour. I think moving on, past this year, that’s what I’ll miss most, is just being able to connect with so many different people. I know that’s what kept us coming back so many years.”
“I’ve been watching a lot of bands from the crowds, like I’ve just been crowd surfing to Real Friends, I’ve watched Less Than Jake from the crowd, then I got to listen to Mest. I’m really trying to experience it as a fan of music instead of just as a band out here. I think that’s the coolest thing about Warped is when Taking Back Sunday and The Used are out everyone’s favorite bands are watching their favorite bands. It’s cool to watch your favorite band be a fan of bands. We shouldn’t be too cool to like music any more.” – Patty Walters (As It Is)
TJ Horansky (Sleep On It) – “I think Warped Tour fostered us into a community where it was acceptable to like this heavy hardcore band but also like this punk band or this ska band. I think that did a lot for our scene. I think that’s going to be a key element of this whole alternative genre that’s going to be sorely missed. It introduced me to a lot of my favorite bands. It introduced me to a mindset that you could like different styles of music and incorporate that in our own music.”
“It’s the end of an era, and it’s sad,” State Champs drummer Evan Ambrosio said during our conversation. It was a sentiment that was uttered throughout the day. It’s a sentiment that has been stated and restated all summer long, and it’s the truth.
Warped Tour is leaving behind a massive legacy that will probably never be replicated, but the community that it played a role in shaping is still going strong and will continue forward. What comes next is yet to be seen, but hopefully the death of Warped Tour can lead to the birth of a new era.
