Every day on Warped Tour is completely different but the same as the last. There’s so much structure built in to the controlled chaos. Different city, same workflow. Warped is very much a community and when things go wrong there’s usually someone around that’s willing to help. Literally everyone is accessible so it’s easy to make friends and find your place if it’s your first year doing the tour.
7:30 a.m.
Wake up to the sounds of my busmates getting ready. Procrastinate crawling out of my little rock & roll coffin until our tour manager gives me the 15 minute warning to when we need to be setting up our tent.
8:00 a.m. - 9:15 am
Find the tour truck that holds our tent and merch. Usually many of the boxes have been unloaded onto the day’s parking lot and you have to search through everyone else’s stuff to find your own. Set up the tent, build tables, and sort product with my MusicSkins tourmates Jesse & Evan. Scavenge ice for our cooler, fill it up, and give the rest to our friends at Keep A Breast. Visit Jasmine at the Klean Kanteen tent and get free water for the day. Find Kate or Allison in production to get our daily set of vendor passes for street teamers.
9:15 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Run to catering with Jesse & Evan to grab some breakfast. Say hi to Shelley who runs TaDa!, the company that feeds the entire Warped Tour staff. Mornings are a lot of running around to say hello to people and getting things that you need for your day to run smoothly. Breakfast is usually held from 7-9 in the morning so we grab some of what’s left. This might be some fruit, a muffin, juice, or a combination of the three depending on how many people have grabbed food before you. I’m not a breakfast person so I usually just grab a granola bar and head to see Bethany at the publicity tent to grab press passes for Jesse & myself. Bethany is a professional band wrangler and works to make sure every press outlet in attendance scores as many interviews as possible (see: “So ladies, what’s your next kill?”). Coincidentally we were on the same flight to Dallas last week, which succeeded in getting me even more stoked for this year’s tour. At press you sign in, pick bands to interview throughout the day, and you’re done. Time to go visit Selena in the production tent to grab a schedule for the day then it’s back to the bus for a few zen moments to get focused.
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Meet our street teamers by guestlist to give them their tickets and working (vendor) passes. This is my first tour so I’m meeting many of our teamers for the first time. We’re only couple days into the tour but all of our MusicSkins StreetElite in Texas were amazing - shouts to Abril, Vanessa, Ronnie, & David for braving the heat and keeping morale high. After passes have been distributed we’re back to the tent to grab our signature MusicSkins shirts, fliers, and door hangers for our Jakprints contest. Door hangers go up on fences and fliers are hustled out to kids in the lines before gates have opened at 11. For this tour we have 10 posters each for August Burns Red, D.R.U.G.S., There For Tomorrow, The Wonder Years, & We Came As Romans that need to be hung up around the bands’ respective stages. This is usually the most stressful part of the day because once you’re out of the venue gates there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to get back in as easily if gates open early and are swarmed with thousands of kids.
11:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
This is the most unpredictable part of the day because there’s just so much that needs to happen. I’ll usually start off by selling some skins and coordinating with my street teamers on what they have to do. After selling a bit I’ll head to press to interview a few bands. The last few days we’ve covered August Burns Red, Automatic Loveletter, Black Veil Brides, It Boys!, Relient K, & There For Tomorrow. Interviews can be scheduled but sometimes they just end up happening on the fly in the back lounge of someone’s bus.
Lunch is from 12 - 2 so sometimes I’ll go grab catering for Jesse & Evan at the tent and send the street teamers off for lunch. You meet a lot of rad people in the catering line - in Houston Juliet Simms of Automatic Loveletter helped me saran wrap all our food so it didn’t get dusty on the way back. Teamwork! After bringing food back to the tent I’ll sell some more skins while the guys eat. They’re the major breadwinners as far as sales go and hardly ever leave the table so I eat after they have. Throughout the day I’ll take video and shoot photos of certain bands’ sets for our daily vlog - A Day To Remember & 3OH!3 have been recent favorites.
Back to the tent to check in, refill the cooler, and help out. If things aren’t particularly busy I’ll go visit friends on the tour for spontaneous footage, try to catch an acoustic set, and get some atmospheric shots to show where we are on any given day.
6:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Tear down the tent, box up all our merch, and load it into a truck which will bring it to the next city. Done with work, time for fun.
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
A Day To Remember usually headlines Teggart mainstage so I try to catch them every other day. One of my busmates jokingly called me out earlier for using the word “headline” in relation to Warped Tour. Once ADTR plays half the kids in the mainstage crowd clear out for the rest of the day so at that point you kind of have to have a band like them or 3OH!3 close.
Back to the bus for hangouts. We’re 18 people strong on bus 16 and it’s great to just chill in the front lounge with everyone after work and just get to know people. Other than the MusicSkins crew I hang out with pretty much everyone from Kia, Nintendo, & Tilly’s. So far I’m closest with Steve from Kia. Overall we just lucked out in getting bus spots with a friendly and easy going crowd.
10:00 p.m. - ???
On nights where we have late bus call there will be a tour wide BBQ where everyone can let loose and meet other people on the tour. Steve convinced me to go to the San Antonio BBQ and it was so worth it. This is his fifth year on Warped and he’s always trying to get me to seek out things that will give me a good tour experience. Burgers and drinks, learned to play cornhole, meandered around just meeting new people, watched Larry & His Flask rock it in the middle of the crowd. It was a good change to stop taking everything so seriously and to share in experiences with other first year kids as well as veterans of the tour.
BBQs only happen if we don’t have to leave mad early for the next city. Leaving Las Cruces last night we had to be on the bus no later than 10 p.m. No BBQ, no problem. If you’ve got a tolerant driver, some party people, and an iPod you can turn the front lounge into a makeshift club and rage as the bus zooms 75 MPH towards it’s next destination. Productive partying.
