INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Warped Tour ’06 big on starpower

2006 Vans Warped Tour
Friday, July 28, noon
Verizon Wireless Music Center
Tickets: $27.50, 317-239-5151

If you think applying for a regular job is tough and competitive, just be glad you’re not in a band that wants to play the Vans Warped Tour. This year more than 3,000 acts applied for a slot on the tour, and according to Kevin Lyman, founder and organizer for the tour, that’s only counting the ones whose applications came through record labels, management or other authentic avenues of professional representation.

Lyman doesn’t like to say no, but it’s becoming one part of running this modern rock music and lifestyle tour that gets more common year after year.

“We will still probably accommodate 300 or 400 bands this summer at some point on the tour in some fashion,” he said in a recent phone interview. “So you’re really only able to give someone a positive response 10 percent [of the time]. It’s still more than any other tour in the business. But [it’s tough] to have to say no so often.”

The Warped Tour is a plumb gig for bands for many reasons — including the exposure to large audiences, the opportunities it opens up for other touring and just the sheer fun of the tour.
This year, one can find bands that have eagerly hopped onto the Warped tour for any or all of those reasons.

For Joan Jett, one of the high profile names on this year’s tour, Warped represented a chance to reach a whole new audience. The tour gives her a chance to get in front of a lot of kids who may know little if anything about her long career as a solo artist or her stint with the groundbreaking all-female rock band the Runaways.

“I think certainly a lot of kids know [her music], but there are a lot that don’t,” Jett said. “And maybe they know the name and they may have heard [the hit song] ‘I Love Rock ’n Roll’ or something, and this will give them a chance to put the face with the name and all of that stuff. Plus, I’m pretty confident in our live performance … I think once they see us and hear the music, we’ll pick up some fans.”

Every Time I Die, a band that has played both the heavy metal Ozzfest tour and Warped, is playing the entire run of 60-plus Warped dates this summer.

For Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams, the Warped tour draws a younger and more open minded crowd than Ozzfest, where he said it seemed like many of the fans wanted to hear straight-forward classic metal — something quite different from his band’s more frenetic and raw brand of music.

“I think this is the crowd that has been waiting to see us for the eight years we’ve been around,” he said. “This is like such an opportunity, and we’re totally going to take advantage of it.”

Underoath is one band that considers Warped to have had a direct impact on its success. The group sold 350,000 copies of its previous CD, They’re Only Chasing Safety, and netted a mainstage slot this year.

“The Warped tour played a huge part [in the success],” Underoath guitarist Tim McTague said. “Three of the most major tours we did on the They’re Only Chasing Safety record cycle were Taste Of Chaos [another tour booked by Lyman] and then Warped tour of 2004 and Warped tour 2005. So I mean, those were huge tours for us.”

Every Time I Die and Underoath represent a heavy rock sound that has become a more prominent part of the Warped tour’s musical mix in recent years. But Lyman said this year he actually backed off on booking some hardcore and modern metal bands.