Misfit Summer Camp: Warped Tour Alumni Discuss the Festival's Past, Present and Future

Henry Rollins, photos by Lisa Johnson

The more things change… the more (some of) the OGs tend to bitch and whine. If you were to ask ten people what their definition of “punk” is, you’ll get fifty answers, and those responses are likely to cause your head to spin clear off of your shoulders. At the end of the day, does it really matter? Music changes, and more importantly, kids change, as do their tastes and interests. You have to roll with that, and Kevin Lyman has done exactly that when it comes to keeping the Vans Warped Tour alive and thriving over the course of more than two decades. There’s only one first time for anything, and the Ramones’, the Sex Pistols’ and the Clash’s firsts (or Bad Religion’s, or Agnostic Front’s or NOFX’s) probably won’t ever resemble those experienced by Black Veil Brides, the Wonder Years or Memphis May Fire. Get over it! Our little brothers and sisters, and our kids deserve to have THEIR thing and their moment, and have their place to congregate and experience music that they care about. With the Warped Tour, tens-of-thousands have that and then some, and for this alone, we should be appreciative. (Catch up on the first two installments of Misfit Summer Camp here and here.)

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Jay Bentley (Bad Religion): If you take a band like Blink 182—regardless of what you think of them—[they] practically became the spokesmen for this type of music. Which is totally fine. They’d give great interviews. Regardless of what anybody wants to say, they opened the doors for a lot of kids to go, "I’m kind of into punk rock," and if they came to Bad Religion through Blink, that’s fine. You can’t go "Fuck them," because that is bullshit. You are not allowed to pick and choose like that, and if you do, then you need to live in a van and not ever wash your armpits ‘cause that’s cool too. It’s like any band right now, where you’d say: "I don’t like those guys." You just don’t like their music; you don’t fucking hate them. You hate these bands because they are popular, which is punk rock for you to do, so, good for you. Here’s a flag!

Kevin Lyman (Tour Founder): You look at that first year: No Doubt, ska band. Sublime, reggae surf band. Quicksand, hardcore band. Seaweed, indie band. L7… I don’t even know how to describe them. It really is the same tour [now]. We got known as "that punk rock tour." We got known for punk rock because of those bands giving it credibility, which were punk rock bands. I go back to what it really is: the bringing together of music. And even though now kids are digesting more music in terms of quantity and volume, kids love to have their iPod on shuffle.

Joel Stroetzel (Killswitch Engage): It’s something that’s been happening with a lot of the European festivals over the last few years. There’s every type of music imaginable on there: reggae, hip hop, electronic, punk and metal. It was always cool to see over there, and it’s happening here, too, now. It’s the right move. It helps get people out to shows. If there was a Norwegian black metal band on Warped…who knows? It might freak people out, but it might also be great! Anything is possible.

H20

Jay Bentley: I would say this is a young band’s tour. It’s now two-plus months. It’s no joke. It’s a grind, and the bands that are out there working it, it’s not the same as when we were first going out there. I certainly don’t expect them to build the tour around us, because to be honest, I am not sure what kind of a crowd would come for a Bad Religion, NOFX and Pennywise tour. In our minds, that’s the deal, but maybe that’s not the deal. Maybe our audience doesn’t want to stand in a parking lot. The people who are willing to stand in a parking lot are 14 and 15-year-olds, and they want to see a different kind of band. Plus, it’s more female now, and that wasn’t the case for punk rock in the beginning. It’s a cute boys’ band tour now. We’re cute, God damn it!

Toby Morse (H20): It’s a tough tour. It’s long days. You are playing in the hot sun, or you are playing in a thunderstorm. It definitely made us tighter as a band, living in those conditions, breaking down, sleeping in other people’s buses… It makes you realize that the only thing that matters is being on the stage. All of the other crazy nonsense that you deal with all day long, all of the politics and all of the other crap doesn’t matter. It made me realize all of this stress doesn’t matter. You are on stage, and that’s why you are there.

Dan Campbell (The Wonder Years): It’s cool to see it evolve. Every year there’s a rumor or joke that this is going to be its last year, but I don’t see it stopping. This is the one big thing for a lot of these kids. A lot of these kids don’t go to shows all year because they can’t due to their age. They are allowed to come to Warped Tour. I loved it growing up; I love it now.

Eminem

Jay Bentley: This all started as an alternative to what is mainstream. It is mainstream now. It’s the kind of music that is not going anywhere. I don’t know what you want to define it as, because it certainly isn’t that traditional idea of punk rock. It’s taken its lumps, and I will always be a little possessive of it. I will always feel that a lot of my life what I got beaten up for is sitting in Hot Topic, and I am totally cool with that as long as people remember that this didn’t come easy, just like rock ’n' roll in the 50s didn’t come easy. That’s sort of the big deal to me.

Punk rock, to me, was a very easy vehicle to express yourself, and I liked [that] it didn’t seem to have any boundaries. At the same time, it felt very small, and it felt very intimate. I remember watching the Adolescents that first time. I watched them play, and they were so fucking good! I remember thinking "These guys are as good as any band that I have ever liked in my life." Pre-punk rock, when it was like "I know who Van Halen is, I know who The Cars are, I know who Blondie is, I know who AC/DC is, I know who Led Zeppelin is…" And I thought, "This is as good as anything I have ever liked in my life, and there is no reason why this can’t be that thing!"

Tom DeLonge (Blink 182, Angels & Airwaves): There is something there that the kids need back: that tribal spirit. They may not be as angry as they might have been at certain times, but, it doesn’t matter how happy a kid is. They are still dealing with the same shit. Their parents are probably fucked up, their school sucks, their hearts are broken by their first love, they got into a fist fight… Whatever it might be. What the Warped Tour does by bringing all of those people together is so important, and shows why it has lasted so long.

Kaves (Lordz of Brooklyn): It might sound cliché and corny, but I keep going back to the fact that Kevin was a misfit as a kid himself. He was somebody that was looking for a voice, right? And from him looking for a voice, he’s built something that’s meant to give everybody else a voice. The voice is the music, and whatever else kids need to convey, to say… whatever it was, Kevin was there to put the microphone, or amplifier, up to whatever they were feeling. That’s why all these different styles of music came out of that tour. All of this creating: graffiti art, these clothing companies, these charity organizations… all of this stuff comes through Kevin. You know how many kids run away to join this tour? How many kids built their lives around it? It’s amazing. The guy is still holding that amplifier, that microphone for people, Giving them THEIR voice.

Misfit Summer Camp: 20 Years on the Road with the Vans Warped Tour is out now, available in physical and eBook format right here. The 2015 Vans Warped Tour is underway too.