A conversation with Kevin Lyman of Warped Tour

If it’s difficult for you to wrap your head around the fact that the VANS WARPED TOUR is now 15 years-old, making it the longest running festival tour in America, just imagine being its daddy. KEVIN LYMAN, the wizard of Warped, is just as astounded-if not more so–than you. In the years since 1995, Lyman has also branched out into other tours–like Rockstar Taste Of Chaos (and Taste Of Chaos International) and the Rockstar Mayhem Festival–and he’s still looking for new projects, like his upcoming country music tour and a top-secret tour of Japan that will reportedly feature Less Than Jake among others. Back on September 6, Lyman and his crew celebrated the 15th anniversary of their flagship tour with a massive concert in L.A. featuring the likes of Bad Religion, Rise Against, the All-American Rejects, Katy Perry, Pete Wentz and the members of Panic! At The Disco. Did you miss it? No worries: The show has been turned into a feature film that will be screening for one night on September 17. We caught up with Lyman to get his thoughts on the movie, nearly two decades of Warped Tour and, well, if he ever felt bad for Brokencyde and Millionaires on this past summer’s Warped.

INTERVIEW: Tim Karan
PHOTO: Lisa Johnson

How does it feel to have Warped Tour 2009 in the books?
I really think it went very, very well. I think the adjustments we made like going to the single main stage worked. I think the questions that were out there about the tour, I think we dispelled that. It was an eclectic show and the kids responded very well. Sometimes in this business you have to gauge success on ticket sales, and it’s funny because we did 563 more people than last year. [Laughs.] All summer I was telling people, “It’s coming down to a hundred here and a hundred there.” Some shows were up and some were down. We were really getting on a roll there, though: Portland was a record show. Then we hit that first week of school and kind of dropped below, then we had a strong last weekend. I’m proud of the way the tour went. The bands were great. Everyone got along so well together and were cooperating and helpful to each other. This is the year that everything got pushed aside and people were realizing that they’re all musicians and that they need to support other musicians. A few people talked trash a little bit out there, but the older bands–like NOFX–were supporting the younger bands. [NOFX frontman] Fat Mike really embraced 3OH!3 and Jeffree Star and some of the other young acts out there. It was good. I really enjoyed it. I really feel like we could’ve all probably taken three days off and gone and done it again, and everyone would’ve been very happy doing that.

How do you feel when bands like Gallows or Senses Fail would outright call out other bands on the tour?
They should let their music speak. They’re both really good bands, but they’re young and they have that brashness with them. But I always think it takes something away if you’re talking about someone else’s music. Worry about your own music. Let it talk for you. That’s also a sign of being young. Buddy [Neilsen, Senses Fail] isn’t as young as he once was and his band played really solid shows out there, so I don’t know why he’d have to worry enough to have to talk about other bands. It just seems like self-doubt in some ways. I think I saw Senses Fail play some of the best shows they’ve played in the past five years during this tour. And Gallows are an amazing band, too. I don’t know why [Frank Carter, vocals] even has one second in that whole show to talk about anything else. They don’t need to. They’re blowing people away.

Does that kind of stuff hurt a band’s chances for being invited back?
No, not at all.

How have things changed for the tour over the past 15 years?
I think this year was even more reflective of 1995 than many other years, just going back to people cooperating, sharing bus spots and buses pulling over when another broke down. There were a couple years there where if another bus would break down, other bands would just hit the gas and go. But this year, everyone was like, “What do you need? We have a little room in our trailer if you need space.” That’s the kind of stuff I saw, and that’s the way 1995 was like. I also thought the fans and the lineup were very reflective of that. I loved when Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band joined the tour and you’d watch the crowds walking by, then hear the music, turn and then get pulled in. It was really fun to go to Warped Tour.

Do you consider this a punk tour anymore?
I always question if it was punk in the first place? In 1995, we had Sublime, L7, No Use For A Name, Quicksand, Orange 9mm and Seaweed. How many of those bands were actually punk? In 1996, we had NOFX and Pennywise and it became more known for that. But I always believed it was more than a punk tour. I think it fits the punk attitude, and I think everyone has a punk attitude out there.

Could you have imagined back then that we’d still be talking about the tour in 2009?
No, not if we were talking about the present. If you were doing a history of punk in the ’90s and you needed the guy who started Warped Tour, then maybe. And we’re still going strong, too. Despite anything anyone likes to say, Warped Tour is stronger than ever and a stronger place for bands to be. Nowadays, everyone is touring all the time. It used to be that around Warped Tour, people wouldn’t play shows for a few days on each side of it. But now people are trying to book shows right on top of it the same day we’re in town. For Warped Tour to do the business it did and with none of the ticketing discounts that some of these other tours had to give this year to get people out, that just means the fans came out. Many of them said, “If I have to make a choice of what I’m going to this summer, I’m going to Warped Tour.” I think we’re in a great position. If it’s any indication, people are already asking me when they’re getting their Warped Tour offers for next summer. [Laughs.] And I have to say, “Well, the tour ended a few weeks ago.” And this is a pretty big band we’re talking about! [Laughs.] It used to be that people wouldn’t even bring up Warped Tour until mid-October, now we get eight days after the tour and people are already trying to book the following year. So at least the perception within the industry is that Warped Tour is the place people want to be.

How did the anniversary concert come about?
Originally, I had a grandiose plan to turn our anniversary into this whole big weekend tied in with Nascar and have Hayley [Williams, Paramore] sing the national anthem and it turned out to be a little bit too big of a project for the economics of today. But we started looking at this a one-off show in L.A. that’s a MusiCares benefit. From that, it spun out into, “How do we connect it with the kids across the country?” Kids tend to complain that a lot of things that go on with Warped Tour happen in L.A., but then I have to explain that L.A. is where a lot of us live, and that’s why things happen there. But then we got the opportunity to film the show and put it into movie theaters. Then it all just became this major project. A lot of people didn’t see me on the tour a lot of the summer because I was on the bus working on this. I think we got a pretty cool lineup together, and it’ll be in movie theaters across the country-and actually around the world. We just licensed it to Australia and New Zealand, they’ll be showing it in Canada and it looks like Europe’s gonna pick it up. It’ll be a two-hour movie based on the four-hour show we did in L.A. with some historical footage cut in.

Why just one night?
That’s just sort of the deal. Technically, if we do well enough and sell enough tickets, we’ll get an encore performance for one night. But I think theaters are trying to do these-it’s a very focused night. And, really, that’s what they gave us. We’re out on a limb on that one. And it’s a big thing to turn a movie around in 10 days. We’ll get the movie turned around, but the amount of paperwork and licensing and publishing deals have to be done ahead of time. It’s a pretty busy time.

You’ve got the connection with Endless Bummer and Punk Rock Holocaust, but have you received a lot of offers to do a movie like this in the past?
Getting in the movie business hasn’t been easy, and it’s probably not what I wanna do. [Laughs.] I should probably stick to doing music festivals that do well. But we have a great group working with us on this film, and there will also be some afterlife for this product too-like DVDs or CD box sets.

Where are you on the tour of Japan?
That’s something else that needs a lot of paperwork done soon. [Laughs.] Working with Japan is great, but challenging. I’m also going back and forth to get some artists confirmed. I used to manage Less Than Jake and I know Vinnie [Fiorello, drums] is tied into that culture with his toys and everything, so I thought Less Than Jake could use another avenue to tour over there. I think people need to keep creating unique reasons for people to come out to shows because there are so many of them now. We have access to Oreskaband and bands like that and we were looking for something for them to tour on, too. So if we can put this together, it gives us an avenue to help bands we love tour in a different way.

And you’ve also got the country tour in the works, right?
Yeah, as it is now, I’m either completely done with the lineup today or I could be back to square one with the headliners. [Laughs.] The side stages are confirmed already. It’s the stuff I love to do. I love to work on those side stages. I do it on Warped, I’ve done it on Mayhem and I think we were able to get a pretty good show for Mayhem this past year–bands like White Chapel and Trivium. That made that show special.

How involved are you with getting the bands on these tours? Totally. I really focus on the side stages. But I book the whole Warped Tour except for some of the bands that play on the Ernie Ball stage for a show. But Mayhem and the country tour, I’m very involved in the side stages.

What do you look for when you’re putting together these bills?
I used to always be able to see bands play live when I worked in clubs, but I can’t go out as much as I used to. There were a couple bands last year who were out on Warped Tour who weren’t quite ready to be out there, and that happened because I sort of went more off of what people were telling me. But this year, I want to be sure that all the bands are very good at playing live. You want people to be really excited to come see these bands play. Never Shout Never played a really short run on this past Warped, but there’s a real excitement about that band. It was fun for me because I was able to see them in person and they’re a band I would definitely want to play for the whole tour next summer.

Do you take it personally when people are down on the bands you choose like, say, Brokencyde or Millionaires?
I don’t. I think people want me to take it personally. But, hey, Brokencyde had their audience out there. There was plenty else going on every day at the same time that people could go watch. I feel like Millionaires were one of those bands I referred to earlier. If you’re going to be out there, you need to be very rehearsed. I guess they really didn’t have the show together that they wanted to present at the very beginning. And being that they were a band that kids were already taking target practice with before the tour, they really needed to come out and dispel that. Many bands have done that in the past just by putting on a great live show.

If you were to throw together a tour just for you, who would be on it?
The Specials, Rancid, Bad Religion and that older-school kind of Warped Tour. I’d like to get the Dropkick Murphys to come back, too.

Do you foresee any sort of “Old-School” tour in the future?
Not really. Old-school tours tend not to work. I love that Warped bridges the gap where the youth get to see those bands, too. We do the Old School Stage in California, and I love to watch those bands. You watch Channel 3 and the Adicts during that time, and they take it as their own little Warped Tour. They’re setting up their tents and cooperating and working together, and it was their first time on the tour. I loved walking around and seeing their tents that weren’t quite as clean and slick as, say, that of Sing It Loud, but those were bands who were raised on Warped Tour. This was a new experience for the older bands. They had to put together, “We need to get out there in the morning, stake our ground for the tent, put up posters everywhere.” The Adicts did a signing during the last couple days that lasted two hours. I was impressed with that. They took it as serious as the band made up of 17-year-old kids. They knew they needed to make everything they could of their opportunity on the tour. And it was fun. But those are the bands that 10 years ago would never have played Warped Tour. The old-school punk bands were the ones who started referring to me as the biggest sell-out. But they’ve eventually come around to say, “This is a great bridge for us to play to these kids who might not ever get to see us in a club.” It’s very cool that everyone-well not everyone–but most people eventually come around. alt