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Photos: VANS Warped Tour Is 20, Older Than Many Attendees

Gothamist Staff

Published Jul 14, 2014

Modified Jul 14, 2014

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Photograph by Jim Kiernan on Flickr

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Gothamist Staff

Published Jul 14, 2014

Modified Jul 14, 2014

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Photographer Jim Kiernan checked out the VANS Warped Tour at Jones Beach for us—here's his account:

This year is the 20th Anniversary of the Warped Tour, which is older than many of the kids attending.

The weather was pretty much perfect: bright and sunny, hot but not too hot. This year they moved the tour to Jones Beach and, similar to years past at Nassau Coliseum, they set up the stages in the parking lot and fenced off the grounds. Building the venue this way allows them to have 8 major stages with alternating set times so there are constantly bands starting to play within minutes of other bands finishing up, all within a few minutes walking distance at most. The actual Jones Beach theater stage was off limits to the general public and was instead used as catering for the bands and support personnel.

Yesterday's tour stop at Jones Beach featured over 80 bands playing from 11:00 a.m. until after 8:00 p.m. The crowd was huge, relatively young and in general very well behaved. As always, I discovered many new bands that I'd never heard of and others that I know of but wasn't that familiar with. This is one of the great things about the Warped Tour—you're pretty much guaranteed to come across a large cross-section of bands and music that you otherwise might never come across.

Hands down, the best band I saw yesterday was a band from Lodi, California called A Skylit Drive. They are a Rock/Hardcore/Post-Hardcore band... which I don't really know what that means. Having said that they had incredible musicianship, huge hooks, amazing energy and stage moves and alternated between loud, heavy aggressive vocals and highly melodic lines. Definitely a great find and the crowd was clearly into them.

Other cool bands included a band called PROTOMEN who consider their genre "Rock Opera". They had a robotic/space alien vibe going, very visual, but again incredible musicianship, lots of fun and weirdness. They played an awesome cover version of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" which really got the crowd going and injected humor and theatricality into their set.

Bowling For Soup, a more classic (read: older) Rock/Punk band were practiced veterans who know exactly how to work the crowd and get the energy going and keep it there. They were also very funny. I always thought they were more of a comedy band, but seeing them live yesterday made me realize that they are a super-tight, heavy unit who use humor in addition to their music, but not at the expense of great songs and a high-energy show.

SECRETS were one of the bigger bands with a huge following of kids. They came straight out hard and fast and didn't let up throughout their entire set. The audience was whipped into a frenzy with a circle pit and a non-stop wave of kids crowd surfing from the the minute they hit the stage, continually pouring over the top and keeping security on their toes.

There was a smaller experimental Hip Hop stage as well, a bit away from most other stages, inside near the food concessions, where I was able to meet and speak with Young Dirty Bastard—Ol' Dirty Bastard's oldest son who fills in his spot with Wu Tang Clan from time to time— and Cappadonna, who also records and performs with Wu Tang.

As always, there was a wide variety of fashions and body art on display. All in all it was a great day for fans of live music.

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Gothamist Staff

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