Monday, July 16

Whooped at the Warped Tour

BMX Online

I woke up on Friday thinking it was going to be a good day. In the morning, I was going to stay at my apartment and work on tabulating the Ride BMX surveys. This meant that I wouldn't have to fight commuter traffic, which always makes my day much more pleasant. Later that afternoon I was going to head to the Vans Warped Tour with my girlfriend to check out some bands. I hadn't been to a show in a long time, so I was looking forward to it. Around noon, I threw on some sunscreen, filled up my tank, and headed out to the Los Angeles Convention Center. This is when my day went sour.

When I checked out the Warped Tour Web site, I misread the location of the Los Angeles stop on the tour. I thought that it had said LA Convention Center, when it really said LA Coliseum. I drove around like an idiot for about 20 minutes before I called work and had someone give me directions to the realsite of the Warped Tour. We weren't too far away, so it only took about 15 minutes for us to arrive at the LA Coliseum.

Traffic was a mess as we approached the Coliseum; there wasn't anywhere near enough parking for all the people that had shown up. In fact, some places were charging $30 for parking. I refused to pay that much to park, so I drove around looking for something a little cheaper. I found a lot that was only charging $10, so I got in line and waited to pull in. After waiting for ten minutes there were only five cars in front of us, and that's when they pulled the gates closed because the lot was full. Ten minutes down the drain, and now I had to go find another lot. If you know me at all, you know that I was beginning to be a little more than just frustrated at this point.

Luckily, we found another lot that was only charging $10, which was good because that was all the cash we had. We paid the attendant and started to drive down the road that wraps around the stadium. We drove all the way to the end of the road and never saw another parking attendant, so there was absolutely no one to show us where to park. I threw the car in reverse and backed up for about 50 yards before I found a parking attendant that had been sleeping on the job. The attendant told us to drive over a curb and across the lawn in front of the Natural Museum of Art. This kind of pissed me off because I know they spend too much money keeping that lawn maintained to have a bunch of kids drive over it for a concert. We found a place to park and started walking towards the Warped Tour.

This is just one of the hundreds of rows of cars at the Warped Tour. Photo: Scot It seemed that everyone was just following the herd without really knowing where they were going, so I asked someone wearing an "Event Staff" shirt if there was a quicker route to the ticket line. He told us that we were heading in the right direction, so we kept walking. While we were walking, we could hear a few of the bands. One of the bands really had the crowd going. Kids were screaming the lyrics back at the band and, from what I could see through the fence, the crowd was really into it. As we came around another corner we could hear a different band playing. A girl in front of us said it was The Ataris, and this was confirmed when they announced that they would be playing their song "Teenage Riot" next.

After making a complete circle around the venue, we arrived at the ticket gate. The line moved fairly quickly, so it wasn't long before I was listening to someone tell me that they couldn't take the tickets that we had (we had comp tickets from Vans), and that we would have to go to another line. We got the same story in the second line, so we headed over to the box office to see what the deal was. We were then told that the booth we needed to go to had closed an hour ago and no one knew how to get in touch with them. This was about all I could take, so I said f#*k it and we headed back to my car. It only took us about two minutes to get back to the car, unlike the 15 it had taken to get from the car to the venue. At this point, I was just glad that we wouldn't be wasting our time in traffic.

While we were walking back to my car I took a photo of people walking to the Warped Tour. This is that photo. A minute later some old men tried to start something with me. Photo: Scot Of course, right when we got to my car, some middle-aged farts tried to start shit with my girlfriend and I. What the hell are 40-year-olds doing going to the Warped Tour anyway? Normally I'm pretty hot-headed and I would have been right up in their faces, no matter how dumb that would be. But at this point I was just over it. All I wanted to do was get as far away from anything associated with the Warped Tour as I could. I drove along a sidewalk for about 50 yards, hopped over a curb, and headed home.

What's the moral of this story? If you go to the Warped Tour, take a lot of cash and fill your car up with as many people as you can so parking doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. Be prepared to deal with the most unorganized event you've ever been to (in Los Angeles anyway). And finally, if you have a free ticket, don't count on getting in with it unless you arrive really early.