It is the 15 year anniversary of Warped Tour this year and PCM we were sweating it out with a line-up that included many Warped Tour veterens such as Less Than Jake, NOFX, Flogging Molly, Bad Religion, and Senses Fail. Other bands on this years trek included 3OH!3, Underoath, Scary Kids Scaring Kids, A Day To Remember, Tat, Ionia, Meg & Dia, Jefree Star and many many more! This years lineup was great, maybe a couple hundred kids were patiently waiting to get in.  There was some street marketing, signs roaming the street with bands and their set times, and the occasional new bands with their mp3 players and headphones trying to sell their CD’s and spread their music.  What we later found out as we started to listen to the artist inside was that that artist outside spreading their music via a sound system and guitars ran on generators was actually better than the artist inside.  I could have spent the entire day in the parking lot and had a good time for free.  I will give credit to some artist inside such as “The Maine” who were playing oldies such as “Poor Some Sugar Me” which is on their deluxe edition of “Don’t Stop Won’t Stop” that was released earlier this month, also to CHIODOS who had a big turn out earlier in the day seemed to have the crowd eating out of their palms.   Another interesting note was that of the amount of people participating in the “Truth” tent/karaoke van.   The area was constantly filled with dancing and lip syncing, which was also more entertaining than let’s say brokeNCYDE or The Millionaires.  Needless to say the tour didn’t pack the punch it usually does, with only 1 main stage and not that many artist backing it other than punk legends NOFX and Bad Religion, these artist  only get the credit as they were the few that has actually earned it.   The tour didn’t really pop as previous years, there were not as nearly the amount of merch tents as usual and the interaction definitely wasn’t there.  It seems that this year’s tour targeted a different audience, an audience that definitely doesn’t belong.  If the tour plans on keeping artist that make a mockery of our music scene, perhaps they should consider going on the road with the circus.  Now the tour lineup on the vans website looks impressive, and it could be just that the date I attended didn’t have the star power the rest of the tour had, but yet again the bad seems to outweigh the good and I will just stop here on trying to make the best out of an awful day at the 2009 Vans WAPRED tour.

Posted by Greg Thimmes