Posted by: Dave Berry | Aug 26, 09

There's something about the Warped Tour; maybe it's the shirking of corporate garbage to revel in counter-culture activities for a day, maybe it's being fed great food by happy vendors who charge low prices; maybe it's not paying an assload of hard-earned cash from a crappy job that you work at the mall just for a ticket to the show. Oh wait, throw all that crap out the window like the deceased and legendary Mentors drummer/front man El Duce because you ain't going to find it here. Welcome to America where the dollar rules and everybody wants yours. Yes it's sad. Yes it sucks. Yes these are the inflated prices we have to pay to willingly bake on a sheet of asphalt outside of my hallowed Mile High Stadium. Guess what? It's a damn good time no matter what financial and physical toll it takes on you.

I had a bad feeling about this one when my ticket came in the mail. I opened the envelope and was greeted with one general admission ticket to "AT&T Presents the Warped Tour," No shit; AT&T is now the major backer of this thing. Why? I have an idea; the kids can be duped into spending mad loot at these festivals and the good people at Vans quietly sold their baby for some VERY easy money. Hey man, times are tough, but you've heard that about a trillion times by now. For the record, I fully endorse selling out to the cash. I'll take any help I can get to ease my rent payment for the month. But once again it's pretty sad. Why couldn't Vans keep this thing rolling on its own? Ask Vans, not me.

For some reason I had a pretty tough time scouting out an anonymous partner in liquor law violations for this one. I Facebooked and Myspaced the crap out of this thing and got no replies. Nobody that I knew was going to this fiasco this year. Then there came a light in the dark at the drunken mini-ramp contest that my esteemed roommate and I threw in our back yard the day prior to the Warped Tour. One of my best, but sporadically-seen, drinking buddies was tossed enough to throw down for the price of admission. This bothers me because I have a few friends out there that treat the Warped Tour like it's bigger than Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, and their birthday all rolled into one (if you smell a parallel to the master Hunter S. Thompson here then cheers to you!). Whatever with that though, I was stoked that I wouldn't have to cruise this thing solo.

So by now you can accurately guess that we showed up a bit late. This is partly my fault, but in this age of passing the blame I'm throwing it squarely on Denver RTD for not posting what they call "Special Events Train Schedules" on the Light Rail boards in the stations. It is so far beyond frustrating to be walking over the Colfax Bridge and see the train that would have taken me right there pass directly under me that it seriously makes me want to move to a city with a real mass-transit system. In any event we did eventually get there via the old left-right express and as we were walking up I got to hear the end of The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band and from what I heard (all 30 seconds of it) I was impressed. They are some flavor of rock-a-billy and those 30 seconds was awesome. Check them out. After hitting will call to get my lone accomplice her ticket and peeping some awesome Japanese tech-mullets we hit the fray.

Security was a joke and I'm kicking myself for not constructing another vodka jock strap. I didn't even have to take my hat off. Haven't these guys seen Thrashin' ? Now that I think about it, I didn't even get patted down. It was so lax that I'd wager that we could have dragged a keg into this thing and got away with it as long as we just put a shirt over it.

Once inside we decided to get a beer. Well kick me over and put a bullet in my cerebellum! Yet again beers were $9. I stand by my position that $9 for a 16 oz beer is nothing short of highway robbery, or highway murder. So are no in-and-outs because there is a liquor store just up the hill from the stadium that probably made a killing that day from the more savvy attendees.

$18 and 32 oz later we tried to find a band schedule. The vendors there actually had the nerve to try and charge $2 for a schedule despite the fact that there was a giant inflatable board with every band on every stage in chronological order facing the "Vans Main Stage" so we didn't dare buy one and anybody that did is absolutely retarded. We made a plan; NOFX, more beer, Bad Religion, and just wing it from there.

I'm going to come clean here and it's a bit shameful to admit, but this was my first Warped Tour and I hadn't seen any of the bands on the roster before this day. Sorry, but I spent high school getting loaded on the curb of the smoking area while listening to Total Chaos (before they sucked), The Exploited, Doom, Catheter, Reform Control, The Homesick Abortions, and a whole slew of other thrash/grind bands that were WAY more hardcore than the fare presented here. Yes, I totally dogged on the kids that listened to NOFX because I was soooooo much punker than them and I had the mohawk to prove it. It's funny how aging makes you more open to pretty much everything. Sorry, I won't wax philosophical anymore, I promise.

We pushed up on the main stage as far as we cared to go for NOFX and we ended up pretty far back. I'm old-ish and my accomplice suffers from a height handicap so we called it good near the back. NOFX killed it. Fat Mike came out on stage and announced that he'd only been awake about an hour (it was just after 3pm) and he was already drunk off of vodka and milk first thing in the "morning," That pretty much set the tone for their set. They nailed it. All of their set sounded like the studio recordings; tight, fast, funny, and just crisp all around. Kudos to the warped tour sound guys for this one. Midway through the set Fat Mike spotted a little girl propped up on her dad's shoulders and he went into how NOFX wasn't going to describe felching, snowballing, RAHJ's, or any other grotesque sexual act you could think of while describing all the aforementioned grotesque sexual acts, and then some, as they came to his mind. Having never seen NOFX before I had no idea that there would be so many errant footwear projectiles. And it wasn't limited to shoes either; towards the end of the set some dick thought it would be a good idea to chuck a full gallon jug of water into the crowd and it totally blasted the dude standing next to me. NOFX rules. Their rabid fans suck.

After the boys wrapped up I wanted to check out some skateboarding so we plowed through the sea of humanity, which was entertaining and disgusting, over to the ramp that was set up in the corner of this goddamned thing. Why was the ramp tucked away in the corner? The warped tour used to be about the skateboarding! Thankfully we found a beer vendor along the way so we had some fresh suds for the ramp jam. Now when this whole Warped Tour thing started I used to see pics of my friends with Cab hanging out at the ramp. This doesn't happen anymore and that is totally tragic. IT USED TO BE ABOUT THE SKATING! However the dudes that were heshing the ramp were killing it. The ramp was a 6' portable metal ramp and it looked fast as hell. Either that or the dudes rocking it were just totally ripping the god-fearing hell out of it. There were a couple of BMX'ers in the mix as well but that didn't make a difference because those dudes were hucking just as hard as the skaters were. Then I heard Bad Religion fire up over some gay scream-o band and I knew it was time to migrate back to the main stage despite how hard it was to pull away from the ramp.

Bad Religion rocks it out to the max, in the mix. Words cannot describe how they shred. Everybody reading this already knows. If you don't know then go to a show and find out. My accomplice and I ended up more or less back in the same spot that we were at for NOFX and it worked out pretty good. This time around there weren't any errant gallon jugs of water but there were still a lot of shoes, beer cups, and water bottles shelling the crowd so we had to keep our heads up to avoid unnecessary injury. Typically I'm not a fan of that whole melodic punk thing but damn, they killed it.

At this point the sun and asphalt were taking their toll on us so we decided to take a break to get some food and frozen hurricanes. I ended up with a pork chop on-a-stick and it was pretty damn good. It was not the best pork chop that I've ever had by far and it would have cost about 1/3 the price at the grocery store but I was stuck. It served its purpose though. We had a nice sit on the lawn outside of Mile High for a while and then after we pigged out on our absurdly overpriced foodstuffs we headed back into this beast.

I'd like to take a paragraph to rant about how stupid this thing is set up. With over six stages stocked with bands going at all times it is physically impossible to take it all in and that is bullshit. No matter what you do you're going to miss something and that is ass given the ticket prices. The Warped Tour is an exercise in futility. You're going to miss bands, skateboarding, and parts of the scene (if you're into that gay shit) because it's designed that way. I don't know how much great music I missed because I simply didn't know it was out there. On the other hand I did hear way too much scream-o during my travels around the fest so I guess I didn't miss anything that I wouldn't have walked away from anyway. Now imagine how pissed I would have been if I had to choose between The Mars Volta and Slayer. It hurts just thinking about it. In my self-righteous opinion I think that this thing should go on for two days and only have one stage and a giant-as vert ramp right next to the stage so all of us commoners could watch skateboarding and bands at the same time.

We ran into a couple of friends so we Voltroned-up and made way over to one of the side stages to catch Streetlight Manifesto. I was told that they are a ska band, but I wasn't told that they rip super fast like Voodoo Glow Skulls. Now when I say they're like Voodoo that means musically, not vocally. Their singer does more of that mainstream ska spiel rather than Voodoo's take on vocals. It works quite well because any other way they'd just be Voodoo clones and that would suck. Their set was fantastic. It wasn't too long, short, or lame in any way. If you can't tell I really like these guys.

After that we headed back over to the main stage for the two warped tour closers: Less Than Jake and 3OH!3. I am not a big fan of Less Than Jake but after getting a good dose of ska-core from Streetlight I was ready for it. These guys put down any skepticism I harbored for them quite flat when they started playing. Music is always better live, unless the performers are totally wasted, and Less Than Jake is the perfect example of a band that I'd go see again in a heartbeat but never pick up a CD from. Sorry kids, but poppy punk doesn't do it for me at all, however a commanding stage presence and funny jabber in between songs totally does. These dudes know how to have fun on stage. I don't know who would win in a punk rock fun-off between LTJ and NOFX but I think LTJ won that night. They spotted a total MILF in this crappy VIP booth and got her to crowd surf all the way from the back of the crowd to the stage just for a beer, and to be on stage which I'm sure was pretty damn cool. As their set wrapped up a storm started rolling in. This was either going to be epic as all hell or just all hell.

Everybody was super stoked for 3OH!3 because they were the home-town band on this thing and they were closing the show down. OK, so they're from Boulder but close enough. As their stage was getting set up lightning started cracking off overhead. It was impressive and scary as all hell because there wasn't any cover in that damn parking lot, but would have provided a good backdrop for the show. 3OH!3 got up there and started rocking it. They were running back and forth across the stage while throwing their mics in the air, jumping on the monitors, and just jumping around in general. It was great. These guys know how to put on a show. But then Nature said "Get the hell out of here!" Two songs into the set the rain starting hitting. It wasn't so bad at first, but then it started getting heavy. People started filling out. We stuck it out through the third song and got soaked. Then the rain turned into hail halfway through the fourth song and we booked it for cover, which was half of a mile away under the stadium walls. It was burly. 3OH!3 kept playing though so I suppose somebody stuck it out. I didn't bother to look back. Voltron split apart and we just kept booking it. I grabbed a stray cardboard box and tore it in half so we could both have shields from the relentless hail. The only cover we could find was the only cover anybody else could find; the main service entrance to Mile High which is a ramp that goes under the stadium into shelter. Remember how lax security was when we got in? Now they decided to show up and actually do something by trying to keep people out. Are you kidding me? I didn't see any soaking wet security guards out there, but there were a couple of bone-dry ones trying to hold a line at the service entrance. Idiots. Finally they realized that they simply couldn't stop the flood of people and let us into safety. 3OH!3 got five songs off and called it. That's a drag but this storm was crazy.

Then as quickly as the storm came it was gone, leaving piles of hail and rivers of rainwater for us to negotiate on our way out. What the hell? Now I am in the ranks of all of my friends who have a story about getting rained on at the Warped Tour. It happens to everybody, but I think mine is one of very few that involves a cardboard box hail shield.

Despite $9 beers, unyielding advertising, and an impossible layout the Warped Tour kicked ass. I haven't had that much fun since Slayer, which was only a few weeks before. Slayer didn't have skateboarding though and skateboarding kicks major ass as we all know. I know I'll be back for another, most likely next summer when this thing rolls again. Go if you still can. If you missed it then you have more money in your bank than I do right now but I had a better time than you did that day so that makes it worth it.

Shred Hard,
Dave Berry.