![]() ![]() For a little while, we’re all our angsty teen selves again. The lyrics don’t exactly fit the setting - no one here is alone and everyone seems to be having fun - but the feeling’s still there. ”Oh, my god, I am 12 years old again,” says the sunburnt guy in checkerboard Vans beside me as the crowd whines along with singer Pierre Bouvier: “Nobody cares, ’cause I’m alone and the world is having more fun than me tonight.” High school may be a distant memory, but at least now I’ve finally made it to Warped Tour. ![]() ![]() This is how, on a Saturday in late June, I find myself on a crowded Jersey beach sandwiched between Caesars Casino and the Atlantic Ocean, belting out Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid” with nearly 30,000 other people - many of whom, like me, were in fact kids when the song came out in 2002. The crowd at Warped Tour’s 25th anniversary show in Atlantic City this year. While not strictly a nostalgia play - there are up-and-coming bands booked alongside veterans, and plenty of fans are first-time Warped attendees - this year, the average age of concertgoers appears to be more than a decade older than it was at the tour’s height (15 or 16, as of 2006), and plenty of the once-wayward youth now have kids of their own in tow, keeping them a safe distance from the mosh pit. The result is a three-city affair: a single-day event in Cleveland celebrating the opening of a retrospective exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and weekend shows in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Mountain View, California. Plus, according to founder and producer Kevin Lyman, he was just getting tired.īut in the era of reboots and remakes, it’s not surprising that organizers would want to honor the tour’s silver anniversary just one year after it shut down. The audience was getting older, production costs were rising, and bands weren’t sticking around year after year like they used to. Attendance the prior year, in 2017, had been down significantly, particularly among the 14- to 17-year-old demographic that had historically been Warped’s lifeblood. Last year was the tour’s final cross-country run - it featured hundreds of bands over the course of 38 stops for which nearly 550,000 tickets were sold, but this impressive turnout was buoyed by the announcement that it was the event’s last hurrah. This summer, Warped Tour celebrates its 25th birthday, making it far older than the teenagers it has courted for two and a half decades. Unfortunately, I never got to attend, on account of being at actual summer camp. To us, Warped Tour - the traveling “misfit summer camp” that merged punk, ska, rock, and emo with extreme sports and a healthy array of corporate sponsors - was the pinnacle of cool. With that as our gateway, my friends and I began our foray into skate-punk lite, memorizing Taking Back Sunday lyrics, trying (poorly) to land an ollie, and developing extremely unrequited crushes on any boy who bore a passing resemblance to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge. In Canada, where I grew up, this meant listening to a steady stream of Sum 41, Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, and Billy Talent - all homegrown acts that got regular radio play thanks in part to Canadian content laws. It was the summer of 2004, and pop-punk was ascendant. And I really, really wanted to go to Warped Tour. ![]() I wanted to seem like a grown-up (or at least like a 16-year-old). Most of what I remember about being 14 involves wanting stuff: I wanted straighter hair. ![]()
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