Vans Warped Tour, the original punk rock circus, returns to Long Beach

Los Angeles Times

4 days ago

Sublime's drummer Bud Gaugh says his most memorable moment at the first Warped Tour in 1995 was when he broke his ribs riding a BMX bike on a half-pipe during their stop in Houston, an incident, he says, later led to his arrest in Florida.
'I got arrested because [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman wouldn't let me go see a doctor,' Gaugh jokingly told The Times . 'I was having a hard time breathing, I could not sleep. So, at the Orlando show that we were playing at, I found a girl whose mom was a nurse and she took me home and we raided the medicine cabinet, and I got some Vicodin and some other things to help me sleep. … Unfortunately I was arrested in the parking lot returning with those drugs in zero-tolerant Florida.'
Gaugh was bailed out, and after being on the road for two weeks with broken ribs, Gaugh finally received proper treatment in Massachusetts.
'That was an amazing memory,' he says.
This month, Gaugh returns with Sublime to the Vans Warped Tour for the festival's 30th anniversary, playing with late singer Bradley Nowell's son Jakob on vocals. Sublime was recently revealed to be one of the teased secret bands slated to play the shows in their hometown of Long Beach. Long Beach will be one of the first cities to hear their new song, 'Ensenada,' live.
'Thirty years later — I can't even believe I'm saying that — 30 years later and now we get to do it with Jakob, this is insane … and I just can't wait for Jakob to experience it, we get to live vicariously through his emotions as well as our own, it's incredible, it's such an amazing feeling, I'm such a proud uncle.'
After a six-year hiatus, the Vans festival is being rebooted in partnership with live events production company Insomniac for a three-city tour in Washington, D.C., Long Beach and Orlando. The Long Beach shows take place at the Shoreline Waterfront on July 26 and 27 and includes an eclectic variety of heavyweight acts such as Pennywise, Sublime, 311, Ice-T, Fishbone, All-American Rejects, the Vandals and more. The festival is also featuring its classic extreme sports showcase of skateboarding and BMX stunts, along with art displays, vendors, the 'Gritty Garage' lounge dedicated to uplifting female musicians and an official Vans Warped Tour Museum pop-up celebrating the festival's 30-year legacy.
'Warped Tour is in my heart, I did a lot of brands. I had Mayhem, Taste of Chaos, I had probably like 40 different branded things, those were more business,' Lyman tells The Times. 'If you're going to come back at my age now — I'm 64 and I've been in the music business 45 years, going back to the Goldenvoice days — you're going to do something from the heart.'
Lyman, who is also an associate professor at USC, had been itching to bring back Warped Tour, and the encouragement to revive it largely came from Insomniac founder and CEO Pasquale Rotella. Rotella says that for years, he was 'bugging' Lyman to consider it, and even though Insomniac had previous opportunities to produce other rock events, Pasquale had his sights set on Warped Tour.
'The reason why I went out and asked Kevin is because I knew that there was lots of interest. Everyone wants to be involved with a special event like Warped Tour; it's really in line with what we do,' Rotella says . 'Not only is there a huge crossover with attendees, but I love — we love as a company — community-driven events, and I don't believe that the other brands that are out there, even ones Kevin has been involved with, have as strong a community behind it.'
Insomniac is better known for producing electronic dance music festivals such as Electric Daisy Music Carnival, Hard Summer Music Festival and Beyond Wonderland among others, but Rotella is no stranger to the punk rock world that Warped Tour is rooted in. When Rotella was a teenager, he was a surfer and came up in the skateboard and surf communities in L.A., which he says was full of punk rockers. For him, working on Warped Tour is simply a return to a scene and community that's always been embedded in his background.
'I was part of a lot of different communities — graffiti, skateboarding, surfing … I appreciate so many different kinds of art. I love the culture and community behind these different scenes … it's great to be able to knock those walls down and bring people together, expose people to different things and it's a lot of fun. I think Warped Tour does that well.'
When Lyman started the Warped Tour in 1995, he had already been a promoter and booker in L.A. for years, initially working for the legendary Gary Tovar, founder of Goldenvoice — the company that puts on festivals such as Coachella, Cruel World and Stagecoach. The inspiration for Warped Tour simply came from the diverse shows he was putting on every night in L.A., and the first festival lineup reflected that, featuring bands including No Doubt, Sublime, L7, Deftones, Face to Face, and many other ska, punk, indie and alternative acts.
'It goes back to 1995. I was working in the clubs 320 nights a year, listening to [bands] every night, I was working Roxy, Whisky, Palace, Palladium, a whole bunch of venues that don't exist [anymore], and watching the audiences and going, 'Why are we isolating them into segments? I think there's a lot more here in common,'' Lyman says.
Despite being varied in genre, Warped Tour has always been known as a predominantly punk rock festival. Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge says that when his band first played Warped Tour in 1996, the lineup was mostly punk rock bands and he shared the stage with peers like Rancid, Descendents, Bad Religion and Social Distortion.
'It was like a full-on summer camp for degenerate punk rockers, if you will,' Dragge says. 'We'd done some festivals, we'd done some tours at that time, but nothing like wow, here's all your friends in the same place and eating at the same tables, barbecuing, drinking beers, hanging out, playing dice, playing poker, supporting each other onstage. There was nothing like it. I never went to summer camp, but I imagine this was the craziest summer camp of all time.'
Dragge says that even though Pennywise is playing this year with a slew of younger bands across different genres — an experience he says differs from the old-school days of the Vans festival — Dragge constantly gets 'stoked' about seeing and discovering new bands in the scene, and he's excited to witness the fresh talent at this year's Warped Tour.
'It's inspiring, for me. It makes me feel like there's a future and hope for punk rock in general, it's not going away,' he says.
Warped Tour has significantly evolved since its humble beginnings, becoming one of the longest-running music festivals in the world. Dragge says, 'Warped Tour deserves the ultimate respect of any festival on the planet' because of what it accomplished with its revolutionary idea to take a festival on wheels nationwide, creating a blueprint for other music festivals, which according to Dragge, is now copied by everyone.
'That's all Kevin's doing and he's going to go down in history as the greatest of all great operators for the biggest, craziest punk rock circus of all time that ran around this globe,' Dragge says.