Last Friday the Vans Warped Tour came through San Diego, making a stop on the sizzling asphalt of the Coors Amphitheatre parking lot. I had a few thoughts and photos I wanted to share.
First, the thoughts: The venerable tour celebrates its 13th birthday in 2007, making it the longest currently running annual touring festival (and also making it older than half the audience at the show this year).
It's hard to believe, but I went to my first Warped Tour nine years ago. I was living in Vermont then. So I made the trek 45 minutes south down to Northampton, Mass., catching Ozomatli on its first East Coast tour (I helped carry one of the big samba bass drums back to their tour bus). I also had a chance to talk with Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter and saw the crazed Aquabats for the first time.
When I was 26 (like I was for that Northampton show), the Warped Tour experience was entirely invigorating: tons of live aggressive music all day and into the night. Noe the Warped Tour is an annual reminder of my age and general softness.
Journeying to the Van Warped Tour for me now is a little like a stroll through the seven levels of hell for geezers like me, a 35 year old recovering from knee surgery two months ago. Again, for the second time in a eek, I found myself sitting in traffic to get entry to Coors (see my 311 review for more bitching about Coors). While talking a slow tour of the grounds around the amphitheatre en route to the parking lot, I witnessed a 16-year-old kid puking in the bushes. Listen, I'm not saying I never puked in bushes when I was 16. I'm sure I provided sufficient fertilizer for bushes around my small hometown in New Hampshire as kid. Anyway, I felt bad for the kid. And it set the stage for a day of hot sun, loud music, more traffic, dust, stale beer smell and tons of damn kids in my way with their rock 'n' roll music and such. All of which makes me feel old. Next stop: I'll be sitting on my front porch in a rocker with a shotgun full of rock salt chasing kids off my property. People who say "you're only as old as you feel," probably haven't been to the Warped Tour lately.
I think I'll finish this rant tomorrow, but first here's a link to the digital images I took at the festival. I especially dig the As I Lay Dying photos.
