Warped tour: the long road to success

This summer the Vans Warped Tour returns for its 11th year and remains the longest-running, most continually successful traveling multiband show in rock.

But Kevin Lyman, founder and producer of the modern rock festival tour, said if Warped was being introduced now, he doubts the festival would have been able to return even for a second year.

“It’s building a brand, being patient,” Lyman said, zeroing in on two of the reasons the Warped tour has thrived. “I think right now, I mean, I don’t know if we would have gotten to a second year. So many projects that lose money the first year, you don’t get a second one.”

The Warped tour was, in fact, nowhere near a success when it made its maiden voyage to venues across the United States in 1994.

“The first year was kind of a disaster,” said Lyman, who had been working at Los Angeles clubs up to that point. “I went right back to working really hard in the clubs. We all had to get back to work. The second year we were pretty much starting to pay back the promoters who invested in the first year. And then maybe by the third year we started to see a little bit of profit.”

Since then there’s been no looking back.

This year’s tour figures to be another winner. Once again, each of the nearly 50 dates on the tour will feature upwards of 40 bands at each tour stop playing on two main stages, a second stage and eight side stages.

The lineup includes such familiar acts as Offspring, the Transplants, Thrice, MxPx and the Dropkick Murphys, alongside such rising stars as My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Matchbook Romance, Hawthorne Heights, Avenged Sevenfold, Underoath and Senses Fail.

In addition to the music, a variety of other activities will be part of the festivities at each venue. This year, organizers are introducing the Amateur Skate Jam, a daily contest where 20 local amateur skateboarders will get to show off their moves in front of a judging panel of professional skaters. Returning attractions include the Fanzine Region, the Monster VIP truck booth, the Button Booth and the Reverse Day Care area (where kids can drop off their parents for the day).

Such attractions, Lyman said, are important for creating an enjoyable full-day experience for the Warped fans, who are predominantly college age and younger.

“You can’t just come and be at a festival and watch music for nine hours,” Lyman said, noting that he hears from plenty of kids who attend the Warped tour even though they don’t like or know many bands on the bill. “A lot of kids come for the social aspect and just being able to hang out.”

That said, music is the main attraction of the Warped tour, and the festival’s format makes it a great way to sample the many subgenres of modern rock (such as pop-punk, emo, post-hardcore and ska), see a few favorite bands and discover good new bands that fans might not otherwise encounter.

At the Warped tour, there are no traditional headliners, as the order in which acts perform is switched around from day to day. Even a band with several platinum albums to their credit — such as Offspring — is as likely to play at mid-afternoon as during the evening’s wind-up slot. And with each act’s set lasting only about 30 minutes, it’s easy to move from stage to stage and see a multitude of different acts.

The musicians, obviously, don’t seem to mind the rotating stage times or the short sets. Most acts consider the Warped tour the must-do tour of the year, even if it means earning less money than they would probably get on their own club tour, no fancy dressing rooms and dealing with the wear and tear of long drives between cities and long days at the venues themselves.

Each year, Lyman receives more than 1,000 applications from acts that want to play the Warped tour. In addition to considering those applicants, Lyman spends much of the year keeping his ear to the ground for acts that are making noise in punk and alternative rock circles.

For emerging acts, the appeal of the Warped tour is obvious. With upwards of 15,000 people at each show, this is a chance to play each day in front of large numbers of fans that may not have even heard of the band — much less come to one of their own club shows.

Matchbook Romance, returning to Warped this year for the third straight summer, have seen the impact the tour can have first-hand. “There were shows that we played in some of the places we’d never been at, like Salt Lake City, and we’d have these crowd reactions,” drummer Aaron Stern said. “We’d never even played there and kids were packed in watching us rocking out. All of sudden we started turning heads and they’re like who is this band making something happen? That really got us a huge break and people noticing us.”

For Offspring, who have a new greatest hits CD in stores, the lure of doing the Warped tour was largely sentimental. This is the group’s first time on the bill.
“The Warped tour is a natural, obvious thing for us to do because it’s kind of the whole genre, the whole place we came from as a band, as people and friends,” Offspring singer Dexter Holland said. “We’ve always thought it would be a blast to do the Warped tour. It just never worked out because we were almost always doing our own stuff every summer. This summer is a little bit different because it’s not like we’re doing our own record and a whole big production. We’re doing a greatest hits record with one new song. We thought this would actually be a really good time to jump onto something like this.”

Even so, Holland acknowledged that even for an established act like Offspring, the Warped tour is a good opportunity to re-stock their audience with a younger set of fans.

“At our shows, we see a lot of high school kids, for sure. And as those kids get older, some of them do come back to the shows,” Holland said. “But of course, some of those kids grow up and they start listening to Dave Matthews or whatever. Peoples’ tastes change and they grow older, for sure … Part of why we stick around is because there are new kids who come in all the time. Doing the Warped tour is another great way of exposing us to more of these kids that maybe haven’t seen us before.”