Nick’s Warped Tour Report: Part 1

August 18th, 2006

Welcome to Part 1 of 2 of my story of Warped Tour: Barrie Ontario, 2006!

Come back to see the rest… :)
First of all, even though I doubled travel time to the venue to two hours and arrived three hours after the event began, I still managed to enjoy Warped Tour to the fullest. When I arrived I was serenaded in the parking lot field by people with their car stereos blasting everything from ska to death metal. At the time I quite enjoyed listening to a bit of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones on a Ford Explorer’s radio. Before walking into the venue we sat back leaning on my car, had a couple bites of our leftover Tim Horton’s and talked about who we couldn’t wait to see.

It was about 3pm when we decided to actually walk on in to Park Place, an amazing venue of planes, plateaus, trees and fields. The first thing we saw was all walks of the rock generation, and every one of them looked excited to see their favourite band.

So we’re in! The time was 3:10 and we were serenaded with some great ska. I couldn’t recognize the band cause it was a bit too early and I didn’t get close enough to the stage. The beverage tent that (located in the baseball field) called to me and my friends - we had to sit back and generate a plan/schedule to make sure we saw all the performances we wante to.

Okay, 4pm and we have to see Protest The Hero. So we head over to watch one of the tightest, tweeter blowing bands to emerge from Canada since Glass Tiger.

“I’m not down with walking AGAINST the punk crowd, I feel like I’m going to get gang beat.” Those were words that especially stuck out in my mind as we headed back into the crowd near the main stage after grabbing an overpriced burger from the food stand. It was a flimsy, dirty, rotten looking burger with hardly any condiments, but my god it was tasty!

Though the fear for life wasn’t literal, it passed when we got to the stage. Jared Leto and his band, 30 Seconds to Mars’ hard riffs were pumping the crowd pretty hard. We stood about 80 feet back from the stage in a medium heavy crowd to watch them. They were pretty tight. I found my head bumping for the songs I recognized, and laughing when he told the entire crowd to clear a 20 foot semi-circle in front of the stage and slam it closed when the drums started the next song. I was a little disappointed however when he asked the crowd to sing the best parts of his most popular songs, and the crowd fell short. The band was dressed completely in white and sadly I couldn’t make out the black, backwards text on Jared’s shirt, but I’m sure it was humorous.

NEXT TIME: Alexisonfire and the crazy naked guy!

Posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 2:48 pm by Nick and is filed under Blog.

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