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Misfit Summer Camp: How We Almost Saw the "Calvin Klein Warped Tour"

Nothing comes between me and my Quicksand tape.

Photos by Lisa Johnson

In part one of this here series celebrating the new book exploring the wacky world of the Vans Warped Tour, we schooled you as to how the whole damn thing came to be in the first place. Well, after its first run in 1995, with semi-known acts the likes of Quicksand, L7, Sublime, Orange 9mm and a little Orange County ska outfit named No Doubt in tow, the Warped Tour was already choking away on life-support. While the bands received some much needed and appreciated exposure, everyone involved was taking a financial bath. The tour underperformed, and to quote tour founder Kevin Lyman, "We probably should have played 2 - 3 dates and gone home.” Enter skateboard shoe purveyor Vans, which not only performed successful CPR on the monetarily challenged tour, but assisted in bringing the original idea of a traveling, SoCal style backyard, punk shred-a-thon to fruition. Now called the 'Vans Warped Tour,' shit definitely began to get real.

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Steve Van Doren | VP Events and Promotions, Vans

Surfers and skateboarders started wearing our shoes in the mid-‘70s. Tony Alva during the DogTown days, Stacy Peralta… All the skateboarders back in those days would come into our store, and our shoes were only say, five or six dollars, so they could afford the pairs and then if they wore one shoe out, because of the way they were skating, they could just come in and we would sell them the left shoe for three dollars. We were a manufacturer and we could just make the other shoe and get it back to a pair and stuff. So, they adopted us in the mid-70s, and then in the late 70s and early 80s, when Sean Penn and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High;” with the checkerboard shoe became a fad, and we started getting notoriety around the country and around the world. So we started opening up wholesale business, and that’s how that began. That helped us launch our brand in the early 80s

Kevin Lyman | Tour Founder

After that first year I was broke. I had to go right back to work in the clubs, and people were talking about the tour, which was very cool. People associated with the skate brands, and the world that I was in thought it was very cool. I started thinking, wow; maybe some other bands would want to play on this. Pennywise and NOFX kind of put the stamp on it…the credibility factor. We started to get these bands interested, but we didn’t have any money, and the promoters were saying, ‘Come play, but we are not going to pay you anything.’

Darryl Eaton | Agent, CAA

Many of the promoters were losing money, but the feedback we got from the agents of all the bands that had put their necks out there with us (for the first year of the tour), and all of the artists, and everybody that was involved with the tour closely, was tremendous. This is the most fun they’d had touring… This is a great experience. Let’s see what you guys can do next year.

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Kevin Lyman | Tour Founder

My partner - my ex-partner now - convinced me that he had a friend at Calvin Klein, and that Calvin Klein would be a great sponsor for the Warped Tour. You’re thinking, Calvin Klein… Warped Tour? And then you think, NOFX and Pennywise are going to play this thing? I got a call from a guy who was trying to help me raise some money for the tour, and he said, ‘Vans wants to meet you, Kevin.’ And I said, ‘Absolutely. They want to talk about the Warped Tour. This is going to be fantastic.’ I went to Vans and met with them at their warehouse. I was put in this room and Walter Schoenfeld, one of the original CEOs of Vans; one of the original owners, comes in the room and, within about 2 minutes, I think I realized that he was trying to hire me. He was interviewing people to help him with his amateur skate program.

Steve Van Doren | VP Events and Promotions, Vans

We were already well known in Southern California. Kevin had a music festival that he had just done the very first year, but he had no money. Our president at the time, Walter Schoenfeld, got with Kevin and myself, and in a very short meeting, came to an agreement. Kevin will have this tour; we’ll help supply money to it if we can have skateboarding and get penetration to all these other states that we aren’t known in. Since that day it’s just been a great merge with Kevin. We consider ourselves a brand of what we call ‘creative expressers.’ Our customers like being different from the norm. Even our athletes. I mean, look at [pro skateboarder] Steve Caballero. He loves to play music. He was in the punk band The Faction. You find out more and more how all of this stuff crosses over, but not everybody understands that.

Kevin Lyman | Tour Founder

I told the Vans people about my successful music festival and convinced them that no one will watch amateur skating unless you have the music component. That brings kids who don’t know how to skate, and they are going to get turned-on to skating. Within 15 minutes we had a verbal commitment from Walter to become the sponsor of the Warped Tour. It became the ‘Vans Warped Tour.’

Darryl Eaton | CAA

Kevin had a one-on-one with the Vans guys and they agreed to come on board. The fact that they were gonna help us a bit with sponsorship; that was a big burden lifted because it erases that negative margin that we had experienced that first year. I think that, coupled with the tremendous feedback we’d gotten from the other agents that were involved with the tour, helped tremendously. All of a sudden you’ve got a group of people who said, ‘Okay, we trusted you with our kind-of smaller bands here and they had a great time, so I’m going to let you take a run with THESE guys.' Suddenly, we’ve got a much bigger line-up of artists willing to come aboard. It signals to the rest of the community that we’re not blowing it.

Jay Bentley | Bad Religion

Early on the sponsors wanted to help the scene along because they were a part of it, and Vans is a perfect example. It’s a perfect example! There’s Steve Van Doren: very supportive of what we are doing; he’s friends with everybody, and he’s been making shoes for everybody I know since forever. This is just all a part of we want to be a part of this from the ground floor. Fine. But, by the time you start getting these giant multi-nationals in there, what they are basically saying is: ‘You’ve got thousands of captive kids, and we want to advertise our shit to them.’

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Illustration by Bella Kozyreva

Steve Van Doren | VP Events and Promotions, Vans

I know if I say: ‘Hey, this is the Vans Warped Tour and you gotta wear my shoes,’ that’d be lame. So, the thing that I always do is; every time we have rehearsal day, I’m gonna bring out a truck. I’m gonna bring out 3,000 pairs of shoes. I’m gonna have clean socks and clean shirts for the entire tour so if anybody needs something, they can go over and get it. But that’s because it’s their choice. They gotta find out that we care about their music.

Jay Bentley | Bad Religion

Eventually, I turned to our agent and said, ‘Now I want to do it.’ It seems that they’ve had some time to iron out whatever serious kinks there were, and we can go on this tour and it’s not going to be Mad Max: Beyond the Thunder Dome, which it was very close to being. But we went out and, by the time we had gotten there, it really was something that had some sort of shape…had an idea to it.

Misfit Summer Camp: 20 Years on the Road with the Vans Warped Tour will be published on June 19th, and is available for pre-order NOW at vanswarpedtour.com/book