Essay of Music - the Vans Warped Tour

Arielle Botta

The Warped Tour

The Vans Warped Tour is a traveling music and extreme sport event that goes on through the months of July and early August. Kevin Lyman who got the idea working skateboarding shows, which included music and extreme sports, created the Warped Tour in 1994. While the name "Warped Tour" comes from a short-lived magazine called Warp Magazine, which entailed surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and different types of music. The Warped Tour is usually held in the northern hemisphere of the United States and has also been to New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. This tour not only brings music but also a great place for new bands, clothing brands, non-profit organizations and extreme sports organizations to network and get their names out there. Being as there are many tour buses, and tons of electricity that is used during these events the Warped Tour introduced in 2006 their Warped Eco Initiative. Where they have biodiesel fuel for the buses, and solar panels for the stages where it can host up to ten bands on just solar power.

This past summer I attended the Warped Tour as I have done every year since 2005. The concert starts at eleven in the morning, and the location is about a half hour away from where I live so a friend and I typically leave about eight in the morning to go to the venue early to get parking. Arriving to the concert is like one huge rush of people just anticipating the day and what is going to happen. There are usually bands walking around the parking lot giving out flyers of when and where their band is going to play. Sometimes they even give out free demo CD's and are really down to earth and nice people. I have made friends that I still stay in contact with that I have met at Warped Tour where they are just trying to network their band. Once eleven o'clock rolls around everyone starts to get excited and rushing to the front gates to get their ticket scanned and be allowed into the large open parking lot of Raceway Park where the event is taking place. One of the first bands that I saw that day was a band called Eyes Set to Kill, it includes a female lead singer, a bass player, lead guitarist, and drummer. The lead singers voice is like no other woman's voice I have ever heard. She sings with such ease and passion, you can see in her face that every word that she sings is true and really does mean something. It is nice to see that bands today write their own music and it really shows through their live performance, and that they are not just doing this for the fame and money. One of my favorite bands We the Kings was playing later in the day, and while waiting for them to come out on stage I decided to try to get to the front of the stage so I could get good pictures and enjoy the show more. While moving towards the stage, a mosh pit started and I was instantly