Well, after 10 minutes browsing the Vans Warped Tour website, I feel old and bitter.
Old because I went to my first Warped Tour in the summer of 2002: a seminal gap between the awkward doldrums of middle school and what I saw as the raging freedom (Dazed and Confused, anyone?) that was high school.
Bitter because I'll never be able to experience that feeling again.
I fancied myself a little punk rocker at 14, because, as we all know, living in a gated community and sitting shotgun in mom's Sienna are sure signifiers of the next Henry Rollins. The van would transport me to Best Buy or Sound Exchange on weekends where I could pick out the next CD, like, actual CD (weird right?) that the older and much cooler kid down the street had shown me earlier that week or that I'd read about in Alternative Press or heard playing hours of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Rancid, Social Distortion, Lagwagon, Alkaline Trio, the list goes on and on … Basically, if it was offensive or had a cartoon-y album cover I was game. The punk circuit was a whole new world of paradigm-breaking, angry music and, essentially, aural crack for a 14-year-old angsty and self-righteous turd like myself.
Needless to say, Warped Tour was the Promised Land in my eager eyes, and it completely delivered. The sun beat down hard on my black shirt. The sweat melted the gluey pomade infrastructure of my dyed-black shag in minutes and my friend Dave had his mom come pick him up about halfway through after barfing up his sun-curdled nachos, thus leaving me to my own devices for the festival's latter half.
But seeing all these bands I'd mythologized — their music pounding into my young, impressionable skull, their throats barking tales of rebellion and fuck-authorityisms — made me realize that there are really interesting people, nay, heroes in this world who don't necessarily write the next Lord of the Flies or figure the shit out of Pythagorean theorems, but play guitars, say "fuck" a lot and sleep on floors for five months out of the year.
It was a simple revelation, but quite transformative. I'd rather castrate myself than watch the bulk of bands playing Warped now (bitter, remember?), but really, I hope some kid, somewhere gets that feeling and starts an awesome band — or just becomes a crabby rock critic — sometime in the near future.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.