When the Warped Tour rolls into town Monday, the Charlotte band Hopesfall will be playing on the Smartpunk stage, a slot the group holds for the entire road trip this summer.
“It is by far one of the most fun tours I’ve been on, if only because every night you’ve got 50 buses in the parking lot and everyone is partying and having fun. There are a lot of interesting people to meet and it’s a good time,” says Hopesfall guitarist Josh Brigham, standing outside the group’s bus.
I catch up with Brigham in St. Louis after the show there, the third of my four dates following the 2005 Vans Warped Tour. The bands’ buses hold down a small corner of the parking lot, and the atmosphere around them is like Mardi Gras. The people from Vans — the sneaker company that has sponsored the tour for 10 of its 11 years — are hosting a party with dollar liquor drinks, shots or beer, dispensed from a crowded table-top that’s become the center of the night’s entertainment.
Members of All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy and Strung Out stroll by with drinks in hand, kibitzing and talking to the merchants running booths on Warped’s concourses. Seated in lawn chairs outside their buses, some band members can be seen passing pipes and bongs amongst each other. Josh and I remain next to the Hopesfall bus, nursing our drinks, watching the party froth, and chatting about Hopesfall’s rise from local clubs to Warped regulars.
The group began in Charlotte in 1998 while Brigham was still in high school. Hopesfall started as a Christian-rock act, and even played the Christian alt-rock Cornerstone Festival in Illinois in 1999. Brigham dismisses the earlier incarnation of Hopesfall as a phase the band has outgrown. The members don’t begrudge the Christian fans who follow them, Brigham explains, it’s just that Hopesfall now considers itself a secular act.
The group took another turn on its most recent album A Types, which came out in November. Earlier albums pegged Hopesfall as a melodic hardcore act in the vein of Glassjaw, combining the pummeling pulse and screaming vocals of hardcore with flashes of melodicism and singing. But despite — or perhaps because of — the newfound popularity of similar acts such as Atreyu or Story of the Year, Hopesfall has taken on a new tack, soft-pedaling the aggression in favor of more moody, mid-tempo guitar numbers.
“We’ve been playing melodic hardcore since 1998 and we were always trying to stay one step ahead of the game. It just seemed like that’s kind of the thing that’s taken over, so we wanted to take our music in another direction and go with more of an atmospheric-rock sound with heavy guitars,” Brigham says.
New music and new bands provide the main course on this year’s Warped Tour, and the lineup is much leaner on big names than in past years. The main stage still features veteran acts such as 1990s platinum-sellers the Offspring, Boston Irish-punk vets Dropkick Murphys and the Transplants, featuring Rancid’s Tim Armstrong and Blink-182’s Travis Barker. But even the main stage is dominated by acts that formed this millennium — Atreyu, My Chemical Romance, Something Corporate and the Starting Line — and have no more than a couple of albums under their belts.
This hasn’t impacted attendance, which is as good (if not better) than on the stops I hit during the 2004 tour. Last year, a total of 650,000 people saw Warped on its 48 dates. According to tour founder Kevin Lyman, this year should top that number.
A quick look around reveals even more differences. While punk rock and the Warped Tour have traditionally been sweaty boys’ clubs, the mainstream success of acts such as pop-punk merchants Fall Out Boy and the mopey, raccoon-eyed sensitive rebels of My Chemical Romance has brought young girls out in force.
At the St. Louis and Kansas City stop, herds of pre-teens move in groups of three or more, wearing sleeveless T’s, halter tops and band shirts. (I empathize with the My Chemical Romance fans — so pale, so all-in-black — on the series of cloudless, 90-plus-degree days.) The young ones clutch at each others’ shoulders and giggle spontaneously as they move through the venues, and from the mass of bodies in front of the stages, they scream and cry for their favorite bands.
The girls even crowd-surf, and in greater numbers than the guys. As I take pictures in front of the stages, teenage girls, many in bikinis, pass through the crowds and bubble over the barricades likes pieces of popcorn. Absent is the grabbing, clothes-tearing and Neanderthal male behavior that accompanied such activity at the notorious Woodstock 99.
Some of the younger kids come with their parents. In Columbus, Ohio, I talk to Jen Comford, a veteran punk rocker who’s here with her husband and their 12-year-old son. Leaning against a fence near the stage while the Offspring is performing, Comford catches a break from the crush of the crowd and turns to me: “I’ve always loved this music, and now our son loves it too.”
The next night I’m talking with MxPx bassist and singer Mike Herrera when Greg DeFortuna, the merchandising guy for Hopesfall, interrupts and excitedly introduces himself. DeFortuna wants to run MxPx’s merch and is trying to convince Herrera to give him a shot. Herrera suggests they settle the matter with a drink-off between DeFortuna and MxPx’s merch guy.
“Okay,” DeFortuna says, “but not tonight. I’m already going pretty good on other stuff.”
It’s a scene that plays itself out time and again during the tour. With so many acts on the road together, the making of important contacts is one of the big bonuses of the Warped tour. Chapel Hill’s Valient Thorr already has hooked up with the Cali-punk band Strung Out, and the two plan to tour Canada together after Warped.
Exhausted by all the networking and kibitzing, I step onto the Hopesfall bus and retire to the back with the band’s tall, charismatic singer, Jay Forrest, for some relaxation therapy courtesy of Mother Nature.
“We’re having the time of our life,” Forrest confides, exhaling sweet smoke. “Making new fans and friends; meeting musicians you’ve admired for years — this is what it’s all about.”
The Vans Warped Tour will begin at noon on Monday, Aug. 8, in the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre parking lot. Tickets are $26.25 and available at www.ticketmaster.com or by calling 704-522-6500.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.
