I often think of myself as a young, vibrant, vivacious guy. Well….Yesterday, I learned different. I have actually made the cross over to just an old man. I don’t mean this literally of course, but figuratively. It dawned on me yesterday as I was excitedly headed to the Van’s Warped Tour in Atlanta that as a 28 year old I would probably be on the older side of the crowd at the festival. For those of you who don’t know what the warped tour is…it is a music festival with 50-70 bands that you have never heard of, but that your kids would love!. The reason you have never heard of them? YOU ARE TOO OLD! The bands are loud, pop, and heavy for the most part. There was the occasional splattering of a Hip-Hop group here and there but it was mostly Metal, Punk, and Power-pop stuff most of which is not on your radio. Most of the bands however are in my opinion very talented and me being a music lover I just had to go.
I have been to this very same tour in years past and never thought twice about being viewed as the old guy. To my defense there were still several people out of thousands that were significantly older than I but, nonetheless I was in the minority as was my good friend Derek Amos who went with me. Derek and I both found ourselves judging what the kids were wearing, their language, and how loud they listen to their music. Is that not precisely what old people do? Don’t get me wrong about the loud part because I listen to my music louder than most people would consider tolerable, but it was so loud and so hard hitting that my eyes were literally vibrating in their sockets. This was AWESOME for the first two bands, BUT I STIL HAD LIKE 10 MORE I WANTED TO SEE AND HEAR! This is an all day event. At this point I was thinking to my self “man I wish I had some ear plugs, but I am a cheapo and they wanted $2 for a pair of earplugs so I suffered like the rest of the youngsters chose to do.
My overall impression of the event even though I was the old guy in the crowd? I give it a 10 out of 10! The organizers know how to put together a great experience with great sound engineers and workers. They put mostly great bands with a pretty good diversity amongst sub-genres of rock music. My Highlights, some of which are bands that I have liked for a really long time and some that were brand new to me were as follows: Underoath (amazing live show and I have been a huge fan of theirs for a while), 3oh!3 (new to me, dirty language but an amazing concert experience), The Maine (loved these guys, I think they going to be all over the place soon), Cash Cash (Dance/POP/Rock and they were very entertaining), Sing It Loud (POP/Rock/Dance very entertaining stuff and new to me.) If you want to check any of these bands out they all have myspace pages or you can just google them. The other highlight of my day was thanks to my new good friend Chuck that works for the warped tour as a sound engineer, Derek and I got to go to the Front of House mix position to watch The Maine and got to mess with the equipment a little and learn a lot! As an added bonus it was inside a tent and out of the sun!
