Go all you punk rockers, hardcore metal heads, emo junkies and ska freaks. Go to the 2007 Warped Tour and gorge you ears on the best and worst that the music industry has to offer. With an ever-changing band and stage line up, there’s bound to be something you can wrap your head around.
I took this past Friday to go and went to the 22nd stop on the tour in the smelliest city in America, Detroit, Mich.
Outside the home of the Detroit Tigers and Comerica Park, nearly 20,000 fans packed around nine stages and numerous vendors selling everything from $8 beers to fake weed necklaces. The tour offers bands in variation of Los Dantes, a local indie rap group, Anberlin the Florida punk quintet, to mainstream heavy metal band Killswitch Engage.
Anberlin played for the last time on the 2007 tour at the Detroit show putting on an excellent live show.
” I love Warped Tour, its like punk rock summer camp, except my mom didn’t drop me off, and she’s not gonna pick me up,” said Anberlin lead vocalist, Stephen Christian. “Ya, and I got no care packages either.”
With most bands performing different genres of punk, the Hardcore Metal band, Killswitch Engage, just seems out of place.
“Its weird being the metal guys on a punk rock tour,” said Killswitch axeman, Joel Stroetzel. “Everyone has been pretty chill, we’re not really the exciting guys on the tour, we just get drunk and keep to ourselves.”
The tour has now been disturbing the peace and worrying parents for 13 consecutive years, all thanks to founder, Kevin Lyman. The Vans Warped Tour took its name from the short lived Warped Magazine. Shortly there after, the tour picked up the Vans skate apparel company as its leading sponsor.
A concern always is the heat at the shows. ” Its good to be out of the deep south, its just so hot and now that we are out of Florida, I’m just so happy. Its so humid man, its like breathing gravy.” Says Stroetzel from Killswitch Engage. With temperatures reaching low nineties in Detroit last Friday, people were dropping like flies. Most of the people in attendance are loyal to the bands. Christian said, ” We were scheduled to play at 7p.m., but because it got pushed back, we got pushed back till 8:30p.m. So pretty much we were the last band, but it was packed. So we were like why are you guys still here. You’ve been out in the heat, and through the rain and you’re still here to sing along with us.”
Heat will not kill this tour, with 20 more stops on the tour it will keep rocking, keeping mostly to the cooler northeast and ending in California in mid August. The next couple of shows actually throw down right here in Ohio, Cincinnati on August 1 and Cleveland on the August 2. Great music, lots of heat, good friends if you bring’em, go to a show have a blast!
