Vans Warped Tour celebrated its 15th anniversary in Los Angeles on Sept. 18 with a star-studded concert at Club Nokia. A one-night presentation of this concert was played in select movie theaters across America. The special included live and recorded performances and interviews with Warped Tour alumni and several other bands.
Vans Warped Tour is a touring music and extreme sports festival started by Kevin Lyman in 1994. Each year, this festival has gained momentum with musical acts from various genres such as punk, reggae, metal and hip-hop. Each band is assigned a random time slot for each date of the tour and plays for 30 minutes. This is a strict rule of the festival to ensure that all bands are on a level playing field, regardless of their fame.
The performers throughout the concert-night celebration were as varied as the festival itself, with performances from Ice-T, Bad Religion, Underoath, NOFX, All-American Rejects and Katy Perry. All of the performances got the crowd excited and more importantly, commemorated the festival. The Decaydence All-Stars, a new band with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Brenden Urie, Spencer Smith and Ian Crawford from Panic at the Disco, performed Blink-182’s “Dammit.” Blink-182 was there in spirit at the performance, in a video they created for this special night. In the video, the band takes a check from their production company that was intended to pay for a new music video and cashed it. They then went around Los Angeles throwing money off of rooftops, giving a homeless man a makeover and handing out skateboards to kids.
One of the tour’s musicians this year, Ice-T said he admired the festival because 90 percent of the bands on the roster are unknown but are still given a stage to perform on. The band 3OH!3 described Warped Tour as a personal festival since most of the bands do signings everyday for their fans.
According to Ice-T, Warped Tour was not one for bands too big to get dirty — something he noticed especially after learning what a “sun shower” was — when you take a bag of water, let it sit out in the sun to warm up and then throw it over yourself. Little lifestyle changes like this could be why Pete Wentz described the festival as a right of passage for bands. Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 said that it is the hardest, yet most fun tour. Bands are often eager to hop on Warped Tour because it takes place over a summer where they become family with hundreds of other bands — it’s the best punk rock summer camp out there.
The aired concert ended with Warped Tour regulars Pennywise joining Bad Religion to play “Bro Hymm” with all the previous performers joining them on the stage. Tim McIlrath of Rise Against and Ice-T sang along as Fat Mike from NOFX jumped onto Fletcher Dragge from Pennywise’s back and knocked him into the ground, initiating a light mosh pit on the stage that included festival founder Kevin Lyman. It was the perfect finale to the Warped Tour anniversary.
The most compelling content of this special presentation was during the credits when Kevin Lyman explained his creation of the festival as well as its evolution. This showed the man behind this enormous festival and his true passion for bringing music and this lifestyle across the nation. Almost every band mentioned the lengths that Lyman would go to for any of them throughout this tour. The past 15 years of the Warped Tour is testament to Lyman’s passion and dedication to this alternative lifestyle. Fans of the Warped Tour can only hope that this passion will lead to another 15 years of the festival.
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