Barnacle Bands: Following the bands that follow Warped Tour

Every year, a slew of up-and-comers follow the Vans Warped Tour in hopes of expanding their fan base and taking themselves to the next level (and hopefully snagging a spot on the tour in the future!). This is their story: the barnacle bands.

“Hey, you guys like pop punk? You want to check out my band?”

It’s morning in a dusty parking lot. It’s hot. Probably real hot. The long line of people, a mix of everything from black Converse and beanies (It’s so hot, why are they wearing beanies?) to band shirts and Puffy painted homemade tank tops loops around the gravel.

“Yeah, sure.” Acknowledgement and a lack of cursing. Success.

This is the barnacle bands' office for the day. Armed with iPods and headphones, they go to work. These are the bands that follow the Vans Warped Tour across the country with hopes of gaining new fans, meeting new contacts in the scene and making just enough money to fill up the gas tank to get to the next stop. These are the guys that just want you to check out their band. No worries if you don’t like them–hey, thanks anyway.

Jonnie Baker, lead singer for the pop-punk four-piece the Groundbreaking Ceremony, is one of those guys in one of those bands. He and his bandmates have just completed their third summer following the tour, and they’ve done their fair share of pounding the punk-rock pavement to promote their band.

“The best you can do is just be a friendly face,” he says. “We didn’t go out there like, ‘Hey, listen to my fucking band.’ You just kind of spark a conversation. They’re not customers. They’re not a number. They’re not $5 in your pocket.”

Peddling CDs to Warped attendees is a big part of following the tour and, with exceptions and some blurred lines, there are three ways bands follow Warped Tour: One, hit the parking lot lines, and only the parking lot lines. Two, hit the parking lot lines, then head inside the gates if possible or three, hit the parking lot lines, then work (unpaid) the rest of the day for the tour (i.e., Kevin Lyman, Warped Tour founder, says it’s okay that you’re there.) The Groundbreaking Ceremony—which got their start after winning a spot on the Ernie Ball Stage on the 2010 Scranton, Pa., stop through a battle of the bands—have done both the second and third. That first summer, the band, from State College, Pennsylvania, kept on their wristbands for two weeks for access into the tour each day. Not bad, but not exactly authorized.

For the next summer, they wanted more. After doing “a little research on our own, we found a way into the tour,” Baker said. “A friend of a friend referred us to the tour’s catering company.” They followed the 2011 and 2012 tour for their entirety, earning their official right to be there by boxing meals for tour crew and helping out with the stage production staff. With all-access laminate passes at their disposal, their own merch tent inside the gates and the opportunity to play occasional sets, the band sold a few thousand copies of their first album. Using what he calls their “no-pressure-sales environment,” Baker said people respond well to friendliness and a conversational approach. “For every person who shoots you down, there’s usually always another person who’s willing to give you a chance,” he says.

For Jade Estrella, guitarist of Richmond, Virginia-based pop-punkers Broadside, the same low-key method works best. But there are still people who reject the headphones. Estrella recounted a particular encounter with a guy who declined to take a listen.

“I was like, ‘All right, no problem, there’s nothing wrong with saying no, but why not?’ and he was like, ‘I only listen to good music,’” Estrella says, laughing at the memory from the summer when his band followed Warped Tour, two weeks in 2011 and the whole ride this year. “I was like, ‘But you’ve never heard it.’ And he was like, 'Well, that’s why; if I haven’t heard it, it’s not good music.’ So you just get those random jerks who are super close-minded.”

“I don’t want to stereotype anyone,” he adds, “but those guys who are really protective and have their girlfriends in front of them, they’re usually the first ones to be like, ‘No, no, go away.’ And it’s cool, we just say, ‘Thank you very much, I hope you have fun, stay hydrated and don’t die today.’”

“The worst response isn’t really a response, it’s just being ignored, like someone just walks by, and doesn’t even acknowledge that you exist,” offers Joseph Candelaria, who handles lead vocals and guitar for Forever Came Calling. The band, hailing from Twentynine Palms, California, followed the tour during the summer of 2010. His band's travels are well-documented in the Warped Tour documentary, No Room For Rockstars.

The golden time to work the line is from about 9 to 11 a.m. Bands like The Groundbreaking Ceremony often set a goal of how many CDs they want to sell (or in most cases need to sell in order to sustain their Warped Tour existence) in a day. “Once the doors start to open, the kids get really restless and they start moving and jumping around and getting excited, so they’re less able to listen to your band and pick up a CD,” said Baker. “We got up every morning and set quotas for ourselves every day,” Baker said. “You can be lucky some mornings and sell your entire quota, right there in the morning, or you might only sell five or six.”

For the Portsmouth, U.K., metalcore outfit Prolong The Agony, it was need-based.

“There was no option of phoning home and saying we need some more money,” says drummer Darren Draper, talking about the band’s 2011 summer-long stint, during which they worked for the tour in the same fashion as the Groundbreaking Ceremony. “We had to make it ourselves, so some days it was a case of, ‘We need to make so many dollars or we literally cannot get to the next venue.’ So as long as we had that amount, we would all be happy.’”

Finding happiness on the road for the barnacle bands is more often the result of spending times with friends and traveling across the country. “You’re there with two of your best friends. It was like, ‘Holy shit, we just passed the Mississippi River,’ Forever Came Calling's Candelaria said. “It was things like that [that decided if] it was a good day or bad day. Every day was kind of like a good day.”

Endless driving, even when crossing the Mississippi River, does take a toll, though. With drive times topping 10 hours that have to be completed overnight after a day of schlepping CDs or merch in the heat, the open road can be brutal. “The hardest part for us was definitely the driving,” Draper says. “When you’re at home, when you’re doing a job, you finish the day and you can relax, but there was nothing. As soon as the day was over, we had to drive.”

“The heat makes it a totally different ballgame,” Baker says. “When you go to places where it’s, like, 107, 112 degrees, you’re not a part of the tour and you don’t get free water.”

The driving and the heat are bad enough on their own, but Broadside, who are signed to Ice Grill$ Records, found the combination of the two was even worse. “We were in Arizona … and we were just kind of over it at that moment because we had no A/C in the van,” says Broadside drummer Andrew Dunton. “It was just brutal.”

The Warped Tour community was dealt a blow when While We’re Up, an Arizona-based band who were also following the tour, were involved in a car accident on the way to Minnesota in July. Vocalist/guitarist Zach Booher was killed. “Everyone was kind of taken aback by it,” says Dunton. “Everybody on the tour, and even the bands following, became a lot closer after that just because it’s such a real thing. You wouldn’t expect that to happen until it actually did.”

Even Warped Founder Lyman, who is known to be strict about not wanting bands to follow the tour, helped out in the aftermath by allowing a band that’s close with While We’re Up to sell merch inside the gates. The band donated all their sales to a funeral fund, and Lyman matched the donations, Baker says. “He would really rather that [bands not follow Warped Tour], because initially what they’re doing is taking money from what those kids are going to spend on the bands that are inside,” Baker said. “He could be really mean about it, but he was pretty compassionate and a really good guy.”

Estrella and Dunton, who became good friends with almost every band following the tour, said the sense of community is what makes Warped Tour great. “This tour especially was very successful in the fact that we were able to meet so many new people,” Dunton says, “and they’re not just random people to us; every person is a friend now.”

For Baker, who has been able to form bonds over the past three years with bands such as Less Than Jake, Taking Back Sunday, All Time Low and New Found Glory, the opportunity for connections at Warped Tour is invaluable. As they worked in catering, Baker and his bandmates were able to “hook them up with a little extra food here and there, and we would just talk to them.

“The bands that we helped out ended up reaching out to us and trying to offer us help however they could. They were like, ‘Oh, you guys are an unsigned band, you’re on this by yourself, we remember what that was like, you should try to do this, you should try to do that.’ They just offer you advice from their perspective.”

Candelaria says he and the other members of Forever Came Calling (now signed to Pure Noise Records), who did not have the same kind of authorized access as the Groundbreaking Ceremony, preferred to stay to themselves. “We really didn’t want to be, like, a burden or, like, schmoozers,” he says. “We were just there to do our thing, show people our music and get out of the way.”

For bands that are trying to make it in the scene, is being a barnacle on the underbelly of U.S.S. Warped Tour really the best way to spend a summer?

“Without a doubt in our mind, this was a successful summer for us,” Dunton says. “It’s such a great way to get your music out to everybody. I do not regret it one bit. Not to mention I got a sweet tan out of it.”

Building a solid fanbase via personal interaction was a drawing point for Draper and the rest of Prolong The Agony, as well. “You can talk to [fans] face to face and get them to listen to it,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any better way to do that than on Warped Tour.”

Though he says Warped Tour is awesome, Candelaria says it’s not the way to get the most out of your time. “Nothing negative toward Warped Tour, but the thing that I learned is just touring on your own does more because then you’re playing your songs for people,” he says. “Warped Tour was awesome, but we didn’t start seeing something noticeable until we started touring full time. Those [headlining] bands got there from touring, and that is where time is much more well spent,” he said.

Baker and the rest of the Groundbreaking Ceremony, who have spent two full summers of their lives living in the name of Warped Tour, are still not signed. But he said they couldn’t think of doing anything else.

“If you’re doing this for the love of the music, then you’ll do it regardless. You’ll do it no matter how broke you are, no matter how tired it makes you, no matter how exhausting it is,” he says. “You just do it because you don’t know anything else.”