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Warped Tour Comes to Milwaukee
from: shepherd-express.com
by Alan Sculley
If you think applying for a regular job is 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 tour founder Kevin Lyman, 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 a regular part of running this modern rock music and lifestyle tour.
"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% [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 plum 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 my 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."
Open-Minded
Every Time I Die (ETID), 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 ETID 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 straightforward 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 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.
Instead, he tried to give fans a bigger sampling of acts that represent the roots of alternative rock. Jett, and two bands that play select Warped dates this summer—the Buzzcocks and the Germs—all were on the scene during the original punk invasion.
"With a lot of the other tours out there, Ozzfest and Sounds of the Underground, all these packages going around the country, they seem to have a very metal edge to them," Lyman said. "We still have some of those influences on this tour. But all of a sudden I went, ‘Wow, maybe this is the year we can go into some of the roots of the music, the roots of what punk is.’ I think punk’s going to have a big resurgence. I think right now, kids are trying to grab onto that."
What the 2006 tour lacks, though, is the kind of established hit-makers (Green Day, Offspring) and breakthrough bands (such as last summer with My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy) that have been big drawing cards on other Warped tours. But Lyman likes this year’s lineup and says ticket sales are in line with last year’s total of 700,000.
"This year we kind of worked on the lineup, and I think top to bottom, musically it’s a very interesting lineup," he said.
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