Trigger Warning: Old Man Yells At Cloud
Like a fraction of adults in Southern California, I caught enough nostalgia to brave the crowds and heat for the thirtieth celebration of the Vans Warped Tour. I kept wondering how the organizers were going to make something unique based on the mold they had cast years ago. The answer is you don’t; you just fall in line with the other festivals that bastardized your concept.
Usually reserved for the Long Beach Grand Prix Indy Car race, Warped Tour was set up at Shoreline Waterfront in Downtown Long Beach. As charming as the area is, no matter when I go there, event or not, it’s always a mess. This weekend was no different. Finding our prepaid parking spot was a mess. The walk from the parking garage to the grounds was a hike, but this would be the norm wherever this was held.
Surprisingly, the crowds weren’t bad; age and inflated ticket prices have a tendency to do that. It almost felt like a post-high school reunion. I’m reminded of a line from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank spoken by Joan Cusack, describing her high school reunion, in which she says “it was as if everyone had swelled,” which described everything at Warped Tour 2025 pretty accurately. Most of the fans were on the older side; some brought their kids. When you hear things in the crowd like “I had to smuggle Tums inside,” you know, for the most part, things won’t get too out of hand.
However, there was one time each day where things got a little crazy. That was during the unveiling of the inflatable schedule board. Remember that part in Mad Max: Fury Road where the people who live under the rule of Immortan Joe are waiting for him to turn on that faucet of water for like two minutes and the people cheer and run, pushing and shoving their way to get there first? That’s what the unveiling of the inflatable schedule was like. The crowd lining up to be the first to see the schedule was about twenty to thirty people deep, all clamoring to get a picture and idea of how to plan their festival day. The list for the bands was released on the Warped Tour app at 11:00 am, minutes after the schedule board was inflated and was way easier to read. While you would think this would have helped, the lack of phone signal and a Wi-Fi connection that stay disconnected when you got too far away curbed this.
There weren’t too many bands I was interested in for the first couple of hours. This gave me time to check out the grounds. As usual, the bands and labels had booths scattered throughout to sell merch and give away promotional material; hand fans and totes being the most popular. There were many sponsors for the show, including the video game Borderlands 4, whose booth was themed to an outpost right out of the game where you could get tattoos and wait for a chance to break stuff in a rage room. The hidden gem of the tour, however, surrounded the Unplugged Stage. The stage itself ended up being a Trojan horse of special performances throughout the weekend.
While bands always pull out the big guns for their Warped Tour sets, their truncated set times have always irked me. It’s not lost on me why it’s set up that way, but when recounting bands you’ve seen to other people, everyone uses that caveat, “I saw them at Warped Tour.” This was a factor in choosing bands to watch. Some bands like Goldfinger and Dance Hall Crashers, I’ve missed mostly because of various other reasons. Is seeing them for the first time in a bite-sized chunk the ideal way for me to see them? When I was younger and I was discovering music, it made sense to make room for these sets. Now, not so much.
That being said, I think I mostly chose well with the bands I went to see. There were eight stages, and four different sizes between them. The biggest stages were the Left Foot and Right Foot, which were the main stages for the headliners. From there, the sizes get smaller with the Ghost and Beatbox stages, then the Octopus and Shapiro stages, and finally the Rex and Pike stages were the smallest. I had my first hard choice to make of the festival.
Do I watch the Vandals on the Beatbox stage, then go to the Aquabats on the Ghost stage next to it? Doing this meant I’d get a good spot for Ice-T and Body Count, or do I go see Goldfinger at one of the big stages? I chose the Vandals, opting to wait and see Goldfinger in a better venue. The Vandals opened with Fear of a Punk Planet’s “Join Us for Pong,” which led to a very Hitler Bad Vandals Good heavy set. The set was varied in the albums where they culled their set from. However, songs from The Quickening and the last couple of albums were missing. The Vandals always play a good set, but their antics seemed to have slowed down the last few times I’ve seen them.
If you’ve ever seen the Aquabats, then you know how much fun it can be. As usual, the band threw out inflatable sharks and pizzas for the crowd to hit and toss around during Pizza Day and Shark Fight. It’s not an Aquabats set unless villains or allies come out. In this case, it was Dr. Space Mummy and Anaheim Ducks mascot Wild Wing. It seems Wild Wing was making his rounds during the tour. There’s a lot of energy during an Aquabats show, and despite the heat, this was no exception.
One of these things is not like the other. I imagined Ice-T backstage trying to process the Aquabats. Ice-T was given an extended set and played two different types of sets: one rap and the other with his metal band Body Count. It was by far the best set of the day. With help from his son Little Ice, Ice-T opened with “6 in the Morning.” He played a set and did not hold back his thoughts, whether it was due to what he called “the pussification of men” or telling a kid how she was once in his dad’s balls. It turned a good portion of the crowd off, who walked away. It was at this point that you were able to tell who knew Ice-T from Law and Order: SVU and who knew Ice-T, something he actually acknowledged on stage. I don’t know what was funnier, the number of people walking away or the faces they made as they were leaving. Playing a wide variety of songs from his career, including New Jack Hustler, O.G. Original Gangster, and closing with Colors.
It was at this point that Ice-T gave a speech about how rock music does not know color or race and pivoted to his set with Body Count. The crowd couldn’t handle it. The two extremes made even more people leave. Opening with Slayer’s “Reign in Blood,” lead guitarist Ernie C didn’t miss a note. To deny his ability and skill as a guitar shredder is a crime. Body Count’s eight-song set included “There Goes the Neighborhood” and “Talk Shit, Get Shot.” Body Count closed the set with the controversial and raw “Cop Killer.” While Ernie C. has been with Ice-T and Body Count from the beginning writing the music, most of the members have been with the band for about ten to fifteen years. They gelled more than any band and sounded the best given the rushed sound checks due to the nature of the show.
It had been a minute since I had seen Pennywise, and they did not disappoint. Mostly keeping to a set that consisted of nothing past the album *Straight Ahead*. If there’s one band whose pushback to this government is needed right now, it’s theirs. A lot of the bands that played this weekend were Warped Tour veterans, but Pennywise acknowledged a couple of bands that were missing, specifically honoring some of those bands by playing a medley of NOFX songs and “Do What You Want.” Afterwards, they played Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party,” proving that no matter how old you get, you can still be the party band. Even for the bands that are still plugging away and have gone on to be the legends that they’ve become, these sets seemed special.
Despite the Warped Tour being held in Long Beach, Sublime did not headline the show; something the Bat Commander brought up during the Aquabats set. Introduced by Long Beach City Mayor Rex Richardson, this latest reboot of Sublime came out to thunderous cheers. Eric and Bud took the stage with Jakob Nowell in his father’s spot. That being said, their set was better than their Coachella sets earlier this year. It seems like they have Jakob working on his vocals to sound like Brad rather than his guitar playing. Many times in the set, Jakob had given his guitar to someone else and just sang including during self-titled track, “Same In The End.” If you go see this new Sublime, and hope to see them play “Date Rape”, prepare to be disappointed.
I have the same feeling about Sublime reforming as I did when I saw the Germs reform with actor Shane West on vocals many years ago. West had recently played deceased lead singer Darby Crash in the fictionalized biopic about the band, What We Do Is Secret. While I was expecting a shit show, it turned out to be an okay set. It helped that the other three original members were there and probably played better than they did with Darby, but do I really count it as seeing the Germs?
Not to make the Germs, Darby, and the rest, or paint Sublime as Brad and those other guys. It’s hard to separate these bands from their lead vocalists, especially when they were so much a part of the band’s personality. Furthermore, this set was not the first time the band had reformed. Sublime (in)famously regrouped with new lead singer Rome Ramirez to mostly collective groans. Coincidentally, Sublime with Rome is also a veteran Warped Tour band.
While the food options were varied and operated by plenty of restaurants in and out of the area, the prices were steep despite attempts to keep them low. There were complaints that the event was oversold, but it feels like that’s the M.O. for these types of festivals. If you have this amount of space, you can let this number of people in. As long as someone is willing to pay for a ticket, one will be sold. At the end of day one, it was very clear this was Warped Tour in name only.
