Warped Tour is a unique experience for every individual at each and every date. Whether you’re a fan, band member, crew member, or person who managed to sneak in, your time at Warped is unquestionably different than everyone else who attends any given date. However, after you’ve attended or performed on the tour for a few years you begin to notice patterns, pitfalls, and other oddities. Sometimes those observations make their way to the public, and such is the case with this story.

Thursday frontman Geoff Rickley spent half of last Summer on Van’s Warped Tour performing acoustic. Though it was not his first time on the tour, Rickley was able to see the events through fresh eyes, and now he has turned those experiences into a lengthy (and entertaining) blog entitled The Nine Circles of Vans Warped Tour. You can read excerpt an from the piece below. Click here for the full feature.

This past summer I took a terrifying journey. Though it was a road that I had walked many times before, I was nonetheless unprepared for the horrors that awaited me, the grueling tests of physical endurance and almost unbearable psychological punishment. What follows is a list of the atrocities witnessed during my first time, as an adult human being, descending through the Nine Concentric Circles of the Vans Warped Tour. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

I joined the tour halfway in. My first date was in the Midwest. I don’t remember the city but I remember crossing what must have been called Acheron Street, ferried in a golf cart past what I’d describe as the waiting room for Satan’s Medical Practice.

Teens milled around, aimlessly floating from one car to the next, selling or buying tickets, pestering parents for money, blasting car stereos that played records of bands that were, in most cases, already playing live on stage a few hundred yards away. They flailed like they were being chased by hornets. And I loved watching them: they had real excitement, anticipation and even some innocence left.

As I watched, the driver was clearly trying to decide whether I was a musician or just a pervert with a guitar case. I flashed my credentials before this rock & roll Charon to try to reassure her, but the look on her face said she’d made up her mind: I must be both.

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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