As it enters its 13th year as an annual touring festival, Vans Warped Tour has gone back to its roots.

“I kind of sat back and [asked], ‘What is the Warped Tour really about?’ and it’s always been about discovering music,” says tour organizer Kevin Lyman. “At least the initial concept of this tour was to bring bands [in] that you might never have ever seen [and] maybe expose you to different genres of music.”

Lyman knows that having Warped return to its initial concept of showcasing fresh talent won’t be embraced by some fans. Last year, the tour was criticized for not offering the same star power that some previous editions of the tour possessed.

“I think last year there were a lot of expectations,” Lyman says. “We never count on bands being top-selling record sellers, and just by fluke or by luck or by chance or by fate, at the end of the [2005] tour, we had four top 20 bands with Fall Out Boy, My Chem [My Chemical Romance], Hawthorne Heights and All-American Rejects, where last year we had one band in the top 200 — Underoath. We didn’t set out to have that lineup [in 2005]. It just happened.”

The shortage of breakout acts last summer translated to the box office. For the first year in Warped Tour’s history, counts fell 100,000 tickets from the previous year.

Lyman, though, will be satisfied if the 2007 tour merely matches ticket sales from 2006.

“I think we settled into what our niche is,” he says. “I think the Warped Tour is a niche of about 600,000 concert-goers.”

This year’s lineup for Warped doesn’t have an obvious headliner, with Bad Religion, Coheed & Cambria, the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Killswitch Engage among the better-known acts.

Lyman hopes to have made up for quantity and any lack of lineup sizzle with sheer quality.

“Last year, in some places we had over 100 bands a day,” he says. “I think we’re looking at 60 [or] 62 bands a day [this year] … People were kind of getting burned out. There was just too much going on. The quality of the music may have been going down a bit. So we worked on quality live shows.”

—Alan Sculley

Indys resident rock star: NUVO interviews Alkaline Trio’s Derek Grant

As a pre-teen in late-’80s Detroit, Derek Grant, drummer for goth-punk champions Alkaline Trio, became infatuated with goth-punk originators, the Misfits. “I got really into it, to the point where I grew my hair out into a devil lock and dressed like I thought the Misfits would dress … and I would wear it to school,” he says.

But this was no dead-end obsession. Unlike millions of suburban teenagers who move from fad to fad until they become bored adults, Grant pursued his love of the Misfits and other punk bands into more fruitful territory.

“I was 10 or 11 when I got into the Misfits, and I started writing songs that sounded like [them] and recording them myself because I didn’t know anyone else that played an instrument,” he says.

“Somehow I got the phone number of Jerry Only [the bassist for the then-disbanded Misfits], and I called him at his work, because his family owns a business. I called, I got a receptionist [and] I asked for ‘Jerry.’ I was just a kid; she probably thought I was his nephew or something. Well, she transferred me and he got on the phone,” Grant says. “I told him who I was and that I was a fan, and he was really polite to me and basically told me to call him whenever I wanted to.”

If you’ve seen pictures of Jerry Only in his stage get-up, you know that he doesn’t exactly look like “father” material, but for Grant, it was just what he needed in his life at the time. Grant would even send his home recordings to Only for approval. After a while, though, the tri-weekly phone conversations with Only dried up as Grant grew up and pursued his musical interests.

Grant’s one career began while serving as the drummer for the influential Detroit ska-punk band the Suicide Machines. But following the release of their second album, Battle Hymns, in 1998, Grant decided to leave the Suicide Machines and settle down. “My plans were to get a regular job and not play music for a while,” he says. “[I] didn’t touch drums; I barely even thought about playing music or writing music.”

The musical bug that Grant contracted from those Misfits LPs years before went dormant, but never died. Before too long, word of his talent spread, and he was recruited by punk veterans the Vandals to fill in for their own legendary drummer, Josh Freeze, while he pursued other projects.

At the same time, he was contacted by Chicago’s Alkaline Trio, who were searching for a replacement drummer themselves. After finishing up a tour with the Vandals in Europe, Grant joined the Trio for their Plea for Peace Tour and recorded with the band for their split with Hot Water Music.

In addition to Alkaline Trio, Grant now calls Indianapolis “home” as well. “It’s where my wife’s family lives,” he says. “She just got sick of hanging out in an apartment in Chicago for nine months out of the year when I was on tour. She wanted to go somewhere that was more familiar.”

After leaving longtime label Vagrant Records, Alkaline Trio moved to V2, which was at the time home to Indianapolis natives Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s. A few months later, though, after signing to V2, the label dissolved, leaving all its bands label-less.

This threw a wrench into the band’s recording schedule, but it was also a blessing in disguise. “It’s the most amount of time I’ve had ‘home,’ period, since I was 15,” Grant says. “I’ve had a big chunk of time to figure out what’s going on in Indiana and make some connections and just hang out and check places out.”

While Alkaline Trio remains label-less, the band intends to make it into the studio to record their sixth album by August, following their brief stint on the Vans Warped Tour, which ends in Indianapolis on Aug. 7.

—Nick Selm

New Found Glory

In the months leading up to the release of New Found Glory’s latest CD, Coming Home, there was plenty of speculation that it would mark a musical departure for the band.

Some of that talk grew from interviews guitarist Chad Gilbert did in fall 2005 in which he hinted at new musical directions for the CD.

Coming Home does in fact offer significant musical contrasts to New Found Glory’s previous three CDs. What hasn’t received as much attention is that Coming Home is also a notable departure for the band on a lyrical level.

The group’s previous CD, the 2004 release Catalyst, had hinted at a lyrical shift, as the band’s primary lyricists, singer Jordan Pundik and guitarist Steve Klein, began to move away from writing the kind of light-hearted and sarcastic tales of teen romance that are typical for many young pop-punk bands.

Catalyst marked a move toward slightly more mature and serious material about relationships and life issues. That lyrical direction is even more pronounced on Coming Home, the group’s fifth CD.

“This record definitely has more of a theme,” Pundik says. “It’s about taking responsibility in relationships and being away from people and people you love.”

Life indeed is changing for the guys in New Found Glory.

When the south Florida band came together in 1997, the five band members — Pundik, Gilbert, Klein, bassist Ian Grushka and original drummer Joe Moreno (replaced after the first CD by Cyrus Bolooki) — were still in their teens. Today, various band members are married (including Pundik), engaged or have become fathers.

By Catalyst, the band had begun to move slightly away from the catchy pop-punk sound that had defined the earlier New Found Glory records. Coming Home pretty much leaves the punk element behind. The songs still rock, though. Just note the wallop delivered by “Hold My Hand” or “Connected.” The group’s firmly established talent for writing strong melodies is also intact throughout the CD.

Pundik says there was no premeditated plan to slow song tempos and step away from the punk element of earlier songs.

“It wasn’t a conscious effort for us to say, ‘OK, no punk songs on this record,’ because we did write some,” he says, noting the 13 songs on Coming Home were chosen from a pool of about 30 tunes. “There were some fast songs. But [they] didn’t really fit.”

—Alan Sculley

Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

When Ronnie Winter and Duke Kitchens formed the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, they spent 18 months writing and jamming. Only after suggestions from friends did they take the band out in public and begin gigging. But don’t take that sequence of events as a sign they lacked confidence or ambition.

“All of my friends were musicians, for starters,” Winter says. “We were all in our respective bands. They all happened to come and hang out at my house because I was living on my own. At the beginning, we just hung out. We didn’t always jam. It wasn’t necessarily something we had planned out.”

As time went on, though, an original lineup of the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus came together and songs started getting written. By early 2004, it became clear it was time for the music to be heard outside of Winter’s house.

“When we had a couple of our most musically critical friends tell us that we were very good and they would probably listen to us, like people whose opinion we really respected, then at that point we were like, ‘OK, they’re comparing us to bands they listen to nowadays,’” Winter says. “That’s pretty good for them to say that … We’re like, ‘Well, everybody’s so passionate about it, let’s give it a try.’”

It didn’t take long for Winter and Kitchens to see that their friends weren’t blowing smoke. The group, in fact, sold out its third show ever, at the Art Bar in the band’s home base of Jacksonville, Fla.

The band, though, didn’t just zoom ahead from there. First there were several showcases for record labels that failed to produce a record deal. Then came a major shift in personnel as guitarist Elias Reidy, bassist Joey Westwood and drummer Jon Wilkes replaced earlier band members.

Winter says he never lost his confidence in the band’s future, and with the new lineup in place and the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus still enjoying a strong local and regional following, Virgin Records eventually offered a deal.

The label’s enthusiasm has been rewarded with a debut CD, Don’t You Fake It, that has sold more than 500,000 copies, and produced a top five modern rock single in “Face Down.”

The band will feature songs from Don’t You Fake It on the Warped Tour this summer. But fans can expect the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus to bring a dimension to its live show that may not completely translate on album, Winter says.

“I think that we bring a certain honest element live, which would be something that is not so easily explainable, but very easy to understand if you see one of our shows,” he says.

—Alan Sculley

The Matches

Shawn Harris, singer/guitarist of the Matches, doesn’t shy away from setting the bar high for the kind of career he’d like the band to have.

“If we’re able to do this on our terms, I’d love to be a huge act, an act that lasts many years and people refer to as breaking some musical ground and inspiring people,” he says. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Harris is realistic in noting that his band is just beginning to make a name in the rock world. But if the ambition and adventurous nature the group shows on its recently released third CD, Decomposer, is any indication, the Matches may just have the right outlook and makeup to be a band that lasts and covers some distinctive musical ground along the way.

In fact, the Matches took a bold enough step forward on Decomposer that the band risked confusing some fans of its previous CD, E. Von Dahl Killed the Locals.

That second CD fell comfortably within the guitar rock/pop sound favored by many modern rock acts. The same can’t be said of Decomposer, which is apparent almost from the opening notes of the CD.

The lead track, “Salty Eyes,” opens to the strains of violins, and the Matches weave their way through this taste of chamber pop. From there, things only diversify. “Drive” and “Little Maggots” mix elements of techno and guitar rock. “Didi (My Doe, Part 2)” offers a bit of sugary high-energy pop, while “You (Don’t) Know Me” goes giddy with its hyper dance-pop sound. “Sunburn Versus the Rhinovirus” takes concise guitar rock to twisted and thorny extremes, while on “Lazier Than the Furniture” the group goes punk.

The diversity of Decomposer extended to the actual recording process. For the CD, the Matches (Harris, bassist Justin SanSouci, guitarist Jon Devoto and drummer Matt Whalen) took the unconventional approach of having nine producers record the CD’s 13 tracks.

Included in that group were Brett Gurewitz (owner of Epitaph Records and member of Bad Religion), Nick Hexum (311), John Feldmann (Goldfinger), Mark Hoppus (+44 and Blink-182) and Tim Armstrong (Rancid) — all musicians the Matches had met over the course of touring.

There were worries about whether the various tracks would sound cohesive with so many producers, but the band found a solution to that issue by having a good friend, Matt Radosevich, mix Decomposer. (Radosevich also produced a pair of songs on the CD.)

“I knew that I could sit there over his shoulder for however many weeks it took as he was mixing this record and could just have a heavy influence in making sure it came together,” Harris says.

—Alan Sculley

Killswitch Engage

The band’s previous CD, the 2004 Grammy-nominated release The End of the Heartache, is poised to be certified gold, with sales currently just shy of the 500,000 copies needed for the honor. Few bands in extreme metal or metalcore have ever approached those numbers.

“We just kind of do what we do and hope for the best,” singer HowardJones says. “If you want to dissect it, that’s fine. But we just got lucky.”

Formed in 1998 in Westfield, Mass., by bassist Mike D’Antonio, guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz (who started on drums for the group), guitarist Joe Stroetzel and singer Jesse Leach, the band made an early breakthrough with their second CD in 2002, Alive or Just Breathing. It earned rave reviews and a top 40 entry on Billboard’s Heatseeker chart.

But just as Killswitch Engage seemed to be gaining serious momentum, the band went through a major shakeup with the departures in 2002 of Leach and in 2003 of drummer Tom Gomes.

But Jones helped avert the crisis by stepping in as vocalist and allowing Killswitch Engage to keep touring behind Alive or Just Breathing, almost without missing a beat.

And then with new drummer Justin Foley on board, the band went right into the studio after touring and came out sounding strong on The End of Heartache.

Perhaps because of that success, Jones isn’t worried about Killswitch Engage having to live up to greater expectations with As Daylight Dies, because of its success.

“Things have gone much better than we ever thought they would, and so you really couldn’t ask for better than that. So if things progress, cool. Music in and of itself is just strange, because you never know what’s going to happen the next day. We could fall off of the face of the planet tomorrow.”

—Alan Sculley

Take Action! Village

Social activism at Warped Tour

The tents of the Take Action! Village at Warped Tour stand out amidst a seemingly endless array of over-priced concession stands and merchandise booths that line the lawn of Verizon Wireless Music Center every summer.

Rather than selling band T-shirts, posters and the like, these tents offer young concert-goers the opportunity to learn more about a variety of social, environmental, political and health issues.

This summer, organizations like Amnesty International, The One campaign, Save Darfur and the Rainforest Action Network are participating in the event, as well as a number of lesser-known groups, all aiming to reach the socially conscious young adult.

Several of the organizations cater to Warped Tour’s likely audience of teenagers and young adults with an interest in punk and/or extreme sports and are fairly unique, such as Boarding for Breast Cancer “youth-focused education, awareness and fund-raising foundation” that was created by a young woman with breast cancer and four of her close friends. Frustrated by the ignorance of many young women to the disease, the women decided to use their “mutual passions, music and snowboarding, to communicate the message of awareness.”

Many of the other organizations on the tour focus on activism through music, like Rock the Earth, a nonprofit group that takes on environmental issues important to musicians and their fans and “educates and activates” to pursue more global sustainability and environmental responsibility.

For Marc Ross, Rock the Earth’s executive director, Warped Tour gives his organization a chance to reach out to a new community. In the past, Rock the Earth has worked with prominent musicians like Bonnie Raitt, Dave Matthews and Bon Jovi, but this summer is the first time the organization has participated in Warped Tour.

“We always wanted to get involved in Warped Tour because of their commitment to environmental and social activism,” Ross said.

So far the tour has not been disappointing, according to Ross, who notes that on the dates of the tour he’s worked a large number of concert-goers have shown enthusiasm for the organization’s cause.

“It’s been wonderfully effective in terms of activating and educating a youthful and conscious audience,” he said.

What about the schedule?

You’ll find six stages at the Verizon Wireless Music Center during the Vans Warped Tour Tuesday, Aug. 7. Although the Warped Tour never announces the band lineup until the day of the show, you can pick up a copy of this year’s schedule at the NUVO tent at VWMC the morning of Aug. 7.

And we can at least fill you in on what bands are supposed to be performing. They include: A Static Lullaby, Alkaline Trio, All Time Low, Amber Pacific, As I Lay Dying, Bad Religion, Bayside, Biffy Clyro, Big D and the Kids Table, Bleed the Dream,
blessthefall, Boys Like Girls, Chiodos, Circa Survive, Coheed and Cambria, Cute is What We Aim For, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Envy on the Coast, Escape the Fate, Evaline, Family Force Five, Flogging Molly, Gallows, Hawthorne Heights, Hot Rod Circuit, IainTerry band, It Dies Today, Jonzetta, K-OS, kaddisfly, Killswitch Engage, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, MC Chris, Meg and Dia, Monty Are I, My American Heart CA, New Found Glory, Paramore, Parkway Drive, Pepper, Poison the Well, POS, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Revolution Mother, So They Say, Still Remains, Street Drum Corps, The Almost, The Confession, The Fabulous Rudies, The Fold, The Matches, The Rocket Summer, the spill canvas, The Starting Line, The Toasters, The Unseen, The Vincent Black Shadow, Throwdown, Tiger Army and Underoath.

WHAT: Vans Warped Tour
WHERE: Verizon Wireless Music Center, Noblesville, Ind.
WHEN: Tuesday, Aug. 7, 11 a.m.
TICKETS: $35 day of show, all-ages