Channeling The Gypsy Spirit: an introduction to Fuse's unscripted series, 'Warped Roadies'
There are a few things in life that we instinctively associate with summer, like barbeques and the smell of fresh-cut grass. In the past 18 years, one summer staple has become the shining beacon alternative-music lovers look forward to year ‘round: the Vans Warped Tour.
Creator Kevin Lyman brought this outdoor, all-day music experience to life in 1994, and although the fundamentals have stayed the same, the tour’s done a lot of growing throughout the years. Now, Warped Tour is about to take another big step into uncharted territory. No, Miley Cyrus is not headlining next years’ bill, and no, Lyman hasn’t announced dates on Mars (yet). Instead, starting Friday, December 7, Lyman, Fuse TV and Magilla Entertainment are bringing the Vans Warped Tour into your home with the new unscripted series Warped Roadies.
The new 10-episode series shows viewers a side of Warped most of them have never seen, giving them a behind-the-scenes view at what and who brings this giant beast to life every summer in 41 cities in less than seven weeks. The series focuses on a handful of the 1,000 crew members that pile into 100 buses and dedicate their entire summer to the tour. “To be a roadie,” says Lyman in the series’ first episode, “you need to have some gypsy in you.”
The concept of Warped Roadies began to develop when Fuse made the decision to invest in more long-form, music-focused programming. Fuse’s senior vice president of programming and operations, Brad Schwartz, says, “Fuse is in this really great place. It’s a channel that’s in over 70 million homes. We’re the only channel completely dedicated to music, and we have this really great foundation.
About a year-and -a-half ago, we decided to put a little more investment in Fuse and grow [the network], and, in order to do that, we had to think not just about music videos, but about great stories from the world of music.”
The network began working with production company Magilla Entertainment and came up with the concept of a show focusing on roadies whose jobs are any tour’s backbone. “If you look and see what types of shows are working on television today, whether it’s Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers or Swamp People,” says Schwartz. “All of those reality shows find a subculture and bring it to television. We feel like Warped Roadies is a musical, youthful version of that type of content that explores this world people would love to see.”
The Vans Warped Tour and Fuse have a long-standing relationship, so when the network partnered with Magilla and made the decision to go ahead with this roadie concept for an unscripted series, the Warped Tour roadies were the obvious choice.
“I waited on doing a TV show for a long time, and it took a long time for people to convince me to do it,” Lyman says. “But sitting down with those guys and seeing the history of Magilla and the type of shows they’ve done, I felt that maybe it was time to do it.”
When previous offers for a television show came to Lyman, he had to think about Warped Tour’s brand and the potential effect a reality show could have on it. “The Warped Tour has enough drama without creating any.” Lyman explains. “A lot of the reality-show guys at that point were trying to create more drama than we already had in our lives. When I sat down with [Fuse and Magilla,] I explained that Warped Tour really stands for something; it’s a brand that kids hold in high regard. The people who work with us hold it in high regard, and you’ll get some great stuff naturally. You don’t have to force the issue with it. I think these guys were very respectful of the brand I’ve worked on for 19 years, and we saw that throughout the whole recording of the show.”
In addition to the inevitable trials and tribulations in a roadie’s line of work, long days, blistering heat and tight quarters are bound to lead to some dramatic quarrels, and love affairs and drunken partying are sure to ensue anywhere there’s a gigantic group of young people. However, the bottom line is, it’s all real, not concocted or arranged, and “certainly not built around the premise of five people in a hot tub,” says Schwartz.
Executive producer at Magilla Entertainment, Matthew Ostrom, says the first real character casting for the show was Lyman himself. “[Kevin] is obviously a fantastic character… He is the modern day P.T. Barnum. He puts on these amazing shows every night in a different city. We spoke to [him] and he was just a really captivating, interesting person who had a lot of interesting stories about what it was like to put on this tour. As Kevin told stories about the tour, he would mention some of these amazing people that were involved, so we started making phone calls and tracking down these people because when they’re not on the Warped Tour, they’re living in various corners of the United States or some of them are on other tours. We worked really hard to track them down, and, as we sat with them, we asked them to tell us their stories. What stood out is hard to describe, but it’s just personality: people who are articulate and fun to watch, people who are comfortable in their own skin and not self-conscious about what they say, people that are willing to just put their own personal human experience out there and not be embarrassed by it.”
Through this process, Magilla found and decided to focus on a slew of diverse and captivating characters including hunk Danny Bateman and the rest of the equally handsome set-up-crew boys in Bus Four, along with eccentric, ex-convict main-stage manager, Kenny “Thor” Leath and cute, soft-spoken pit reporter Amy Willard, just to name a few.
Lyman, who has only missed a couple shows since the tour’s inception, says he knows these characters just from being out there on the road with them. “Warped Tour has been the tour of underdogs,” he says. “It’s been the tour of underdog bands. It’s been the tour of underdog companies, underdog promoters and even underdog people that get to work on it. It shows you that you can mess up in life, but if someone gives you a second chance, you can move forward with it. And I think Kenny’s story is a great example of that.”
Aric Leferriere, Magilla Entertainment producer and show runner, who was at every date, overseeing the taping of the series, said he really got the chance to get to know the characters and, in a way, he and his crew became Warped roadies themselves. “Our tour bus was literally part of the tour, so it wasn’t like we were in a bus where we could be like, ‘Oh, we’ll go over here and hang out for a while,’ or ‘We’ll go to a different city and go swimming.’ [Our] bus had to leave with all the other buses in the tour,” says Leferriere.
The Magilla crew ate when the roadies ate, loaded out when the roadies loaded out, showered when the roadies showered (once every two or three days) and loaded in when the roadies loaded in, all while shooting roughly 1,300 hours of footage. “It’s an adjustment, but it’s a fun world,” says Leferriere. “I see how these guys get caught up in it. We were right there with them, and we got to see the fun side of it and embraced the whole world. It’s a hell of a nice group of people, and they welcomed us right away. I think they were a little nervous at first like, ‘What’s this TV show coming in?’ But once they saw what we were about and what we were aiming to capture, they opened right up and made us feel like part of the crew [even taking them onto their buses when the Magilla crew’s bus broke down for a few days] and with that, we got to kind of endure the same experience as they did. In the end, it feels like you went through something together.”
Lyman says he hopes the show will not only give kids the behind-the-scenes look they crave, but will also inspire those who want to get involved in the music industry, but don’t know where to start. “I think a lot of people always wonder what it’s like to be out on tour,” says Lyman. “One of the biggest questions we get is not just from bands saying, ‘Hey, I want to be on the Warped Tour,’ but from people who want to go on tour in life. There is that sense of a gypsy spirit. There is hard work that goes behind it. It’s not all fun and games. These people really work hard to bring the show to you. It shows that Warped Tour is this festival for people and that there is no set path for how to get involved in the music industry. Everyone has a different story of how they’ve been involved and how their journeys have taken them to be out on the Warped Tour… If it inspires someone, If kids look at it and think, ‘I can do it. I can make something happen in my life,’ then,” Lyman says, “the show’s a success.”
Tune into Fuse for the on-air premiere of Warped Roadies Friday, December 7 at 11 p.m. EST., and stream the first episode below:
