Warped Tour and the summer time

3Aug/090

Warped Tour and the summer time

About a week ago, my good friend Tori IMed me and asked me what I was doing this past Friday. Now, this requires a bit of explanation: I had made plans with 10-12 people to go up north to Tawas City, Michigan, to a cabin my cousin owned in what would be the third year in a row of what I've come to call "Rapinstock" but after some botched planning, mistaken date understanding and bad luck, all of that backfired straight into my face. When all was said and done, I ended up having a free weekend. After a bit of talking, Tori "convinced" me to go to the Warped Tour with her in Detroit.

So, Friday came and BAM! We (ie. Tori, her boyfriend Dave, a guy named Nic and myself) were on the road at 8am and heading towards Detroit. We ended up arriving at the show at 11:45am and man oh man were there tons of people. We headed straight to find a schedule and managed to make it on time to see Big D and the Kids Table, followed immediately by a band I have loved for about 7 years now: Anti-Flag. They played a few songs and we headed over to try to see Bayside. After some major misunderstanding on my part, we found out we were at the wrong stage and had missed the whole Bayside set. It sucked, but we headed straight to see Less Than Jake. Holy crap, they put on a fantastic set. We followed that by We are the Union, which was pretty damn good, then hit up Bouncing Souls. Mind you between those three bands we traversed the entire damn concert area, but it was all good.

We split back, half way across the Comerica Park parking lot (where this all took place), and sat and saw Senses Fail--who were pretty damn good--and then saw Streetlight Manifesto immediately after (the two stages were right next to each other). Man Streetlight was damn good. We took a break for an hour--because all sorts of shitty hipster-fuck-bull-music was playing--and got some pizza inside of the ballpark.

We proceeded to see Bad Religion on the main stage and I was fucking impressed. 45+ years old and still kicking ass. It was truly a sight to see. Finally we headed to the other end of the damn concert to see the most packed fucking show of the night: A Day To Remember. I got elbowed, sweated on and generally sick given the amount of sweat and weed that was around. It was the worst show of the day for sure.

All in all though, the entire concert was one of the coolest experiences I've had in a long while. But I'm pretty sure this upcoming weekend's Wizard World Chicago will be pretty top notch seeing that 1. It's 3 and a half days long and 2. it's all comics. I'm pretty damn pumped.

Nevertheless, I'm damn sure I got my years worth Vitamin D from all of the sun I took in. I'm glad I went to Warped and I'd do it again--that is, if the bands are just as good as they were this year. I had a hell of a time.

Anti-Flag playing "Turncoat" Live