All posts tagged with: Bad Religion
Warped Tour
August 6, 2007 | Filed Under Main, Music | No Comments
This may be only my fifth time to the Warped Tour, but they are in their 13th season as the pre-eminent traveling punk rock summer show. This year was one of the best for me because… I think I was finally able to enjoy myself. Trust me – there is a big difference between chaperoning 12 year olds and being the driver for seventeen year olds. No hyperventilating this year and we hit no traffic either coming or going (a major miracle!). Just a pleasant, music filled ten hours on blacktop in the hot sun.
Ska was big on the menu this year. We started off the morning with Bigger Thomas, a fun local band. Then the Toasters, though I had trouble finding their stage. (Signage, people. Is that so hard?) Then the Fabulous Rudies from San Diego, who were great onstage with a cool guitar player – however the CD doesn’t even sound like them. Later, there were some alterna-ska bands like Pepper and Big D & the Kids Table. Good music and more interesting to me then the usual diet of shrieking-white-twenty-something-males who dominate the stages.
However, my main band was Bad Religion. Since I started going to these shows, it has been painfully obvious that 99% of the attendees were AT LEAST 20 years younger than me. Bad Religion has been around since the 80s – still talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk – and are as old as I am! Their new record “New Maps Of Hell” continue their tried and true brand hard rocking social commentary. So – I wanted to be in the middle of this audience. As close to the stage as I could get. Ergo – I was in the mosh pit. Let me pass on what I have learned over the years about moshing, slam-dancing and crowd surfing. There is etiquette involved. Surfing is a bit problematic because you don’t know which direction the surfer is coming from until they land on the back of your neck. But everyone understands this and you move them along until the reach the front of the stage and are lifted off the crowd by very large security men. If a surfer falls – you pick them back up. (Oddly, most surfers – at least at this show – were girls). As for the dancing – a mosh circle is organic. It forms where ever it forms. A song begins, some people push back to create the circle and there you are. With the “slam dancing” (for lack of a better term) that happens in the circle, you just push the “dancers” back into the circle. They run into you – you push them back. If anyone falls, they are immediately helped up. Someone will pick up your cell phone or glasses to keep them from being crushed. Dancers are all sizes, shapes and genders. One guy next to me had two withered arms and was right in there with it. You might get hurt, but no one is hostile or violent. In fact, the highlight of the set (and the band was perfect!) was when the crowd surfed a guy and his wheelchair.
Let me say that again – they surfed a guy WITH HIS WHEELCHAIR! He held it in front of him as the crowd gently carried him to the front. The band stopped dead in the middle of the song to acknowledge this move, we all cheered and the show continued.
And, really, how bad can humanity be if something like that can happen?