Bands ate from the same backstage BBQ pit. Festival culture would later shift toward luxury destination packages. Bands would play Warped because they knew they were replenishing their audience. Now you make all your money on touring and no one can give that up.
When you look at the box office, Warped always had the lowest ticket prices. Today we judge on money in music, and Warped was never about that. For as much as Warped pioneered festival culture in the U.
The last few years of reckonings have come especially fast at Warped Tour. Even before MeToo, Warped was run by women. For a variety of reasons, Warped Tour may not be the ideal format for reaching those young fans anymore. What he created will always be the best thing that could have happened to this genre and culture.
I met my wife on Warped Tour, so Kevin Lyman has had a bigger impact on my life than just about anyone. Go to the tables too early and you were stuck lugging around the extra baggage all day, but go too late and you risked the chance of missing out on a shirt in your size.
Right now, we wish carrying around excessive amounts of band merch was our biggest problem. It was overwhelming and sometimes foul, but there was something about the familiarity of it, knowing that the smell meant you were at one of the happiest places on Earth, that leaves us with a nostalgic hole in our hearts. Sign in. Log into your account. Privacy Policy. The time was ripe for something like Warped to exist, though in order to get it off the ground, Lyman needed to buck one of the central tenets of punk and get a few executives to break out their checkbooks.
We were buying their brands; we were using their products. To keep it going, he was desperate enough to consider brokering a deal with the decidedly not-punk Calvin Klein to become the title sponsor. Fortuitously, the meeting with the fashion brand was delayed by the devastating East Coast blizzard of , and before they could go any further with the arrangements, Lyman got a call from Vans CEO Walter Schoenfeld. He also introduced amateur skateboarding competitions to the tour, giving contestants the chance to win pro contracts with Vans.
Even with the Vans investment, Lyman had to hustle to keep the tour afloat in the early years. Another was Jeffree Star Cosmetics. Before Star was a beauty mogul, he was a MySpace-famous scene kid who performed on the tour as a solo artist in and In the following years, he came back to host meet-and-greets with his YouTube fans and, when he launched his makeup empire in , set up shop among the merch tents.
Among the panoply of shoppable teenage rebellion are booths with a cause, like Hope for the Day , a suicide prevention organization, and A Voice for the Innocent , a nonprofit that offers resources to survivors of rape and sexual abuse, which was brought on board in the wake of a series of sexual assault and harassment allegations involving artists who had performed on the tour. The exception: the parking lot of any Grateful Dead concert, long a thriving marketplace of tie-dye tees , beaded jewelry, DIY taco stands, and any drug you might fancy, collectively known as Shakedown Street.
Band T-shirts still make up the bulk of the merch at Warped, just as they do at most concerts these days. And a little dangerous, because there were so many kids coming over the barricade constantly. But at the same time, how fantastic is that? Of course, not everyone agreed. About Feedback Funders Support Jobs. Close Menu. Email Address Subscribe. What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.
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