When Howie Abrams heard the premise for the first ever Warped Tour in 1995 – a traveling festival rooted in punk music and extreme sports – he had mixed feelings. “I thought it was an incredible idea,” said Abrams, who was an A&R representative for Roadrunner Records at the time.
“You had this combination of semi-known bands with this component of pro skateboarders and BMX riders. It was something that was really interesting, but when I first witnessed it, I had to say: ‘How can this possibly last? How can you do a festival on this level with this kind of music every year and have kids come?’”
But they did come, and have continued for the next 20 years. Despite Howie’s skepticism, the Warped Tour became an institution of American youth culture. It’s an anomaly that somehow took the pitch-black aura of punk, shined, sparkled and teased it up to then present it in parking lots and festival grounds across the United States and beyond, with enough charm to make it attractive to both mainstream America and a bevy of corporate sponsors.
Two decades after its inception, Abrams has written Misfit Summer Camp: Twenty Years on the Road with The Vans Warped Tour, a book covering the history of the festival’s endurance, complete with images from longtime Warped Tour photographer, Lisa Johnson.
At the beginning of the book, Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman admits the event was hemorrhaging money in its first year. That was until longstanding skateboard company Vans decided to tie both their name and money to the festival. Since then, Warped Tour has seen sponsorships by everyone from Apple to Trojan condoms – much to the chagrin to some of the more stringent elements of the punk community who find the corporate entanglement against the moral precepts of the punk ethos.
In a 2004, Pitchfork senior editor and then Chicago Reader writer Jessica Hopper wasn’t impressed by what it had become in the first decade: “Punk in its primal form is of course a deeply anti-commercial genre, but Warped has turned money into the medium of cultural affiliation here, as it already was everywhere else.”
But Abrams is used to the sellout accusation, one he rebuts with a dose of realism: “I love these people who think a band can show up at a gas station and the attendant is just going to say ‘Oh, you’re in a punk band? Well, here’s some free gas then!’ It doesn’t happen.
“Someone needs to pay for all this. A human being alive for 20 years is a massive accomplishment these days, so for a tour with as many moving parts as Warped Tour being around for two decades is an incredible accomplishment. The sponsorships are a flat-out necessity and there’s no way around that.”
Despite the scrutiny by some in the punk world on the Warped Tour’s intentions, one can’t deny the looks of elation on some of the young punks’ faces in Johnson’s photos scattered throughout the book. The images illustrate the basic principles of punk – communication and community – are in full effect at these events and no amount of corporate sponsorship or commercial codification is going to kill that feeling.
“I have a seven-year-old daughter,” said Abrams. “If somewhere down the road she wanted to go to Warped Tour, I’d be way happier she chose that over Meghan Trainor.
“Just as long as she gets there and feels that sense of community I felt at my first punk shows, then I’m fine if Warped Tour is her way there.”
Misfit Summer Camp: 20 Years on the Road with Vans Warped Tour is out on 22 June. Vans Warped Tour 2015 runs to 8 August.
