Maia Vidal, lead singer for the all-girl group Kiev, belts out a song at the Vans Warped Tour at Darien Lake. They were the only all-girl group performing and are from Ithaca.
ANNETTE LEIN
Democrat & Chronicle
Vans Warped Tour draws 18,000
Punks flood Darien Lake in a day of controlled chaos
Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic
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Maia Vidal, lead singer for the all-girl group Kiev, belts out a song at the Vans Warped Tour at Darien Lake. They were the only all-girl group performing and are from Ithaca. ANNETTE LEIN |
(August 19, 2004) — The program — you can't know the 94 bands without one — promises "No Britney, Christina or American Idols."
The Vans Warped Tour is pure punk. Now the longest-running festival tour, the day of spiked hair, snarled vocals and crowd surfing shows no sign of abating after 10 years. There seems to be an endless supply of bands named Rise Against and the 15-year-olds who follow them. Wednesday's noon-to-11-p.m. show drew more than 18,000 fans to Darien Lake Performing Arts Center.
The order of the day was chaos. "A lot of different bands," says 14-year-old Shauna Tortorelli, who attends Pittsford Sutherland High School. "We don't know the names of them." To help sort out the confusion, a shirtless kid had scrawled the names, stages and times of the bands he wanted to see in red ink along his forearm.
The lineup for the four main stages (there were four others, plus scattered small performance areas) was posted on a huge inflatable monolith. Two of the main stages were set up in what is generally a parking lot. One of the first bands to get a mosh pit going in the gravel was a big act on the tour, the prog-punk Coheed & Cambria, taking the stage at 12:30 p.m. Later, in the night, were slated New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday and Good Charlotte.
What were the big names doing here, rather than beneath the roofed pavilion? "So they don't have to mosh on chairs?" muses Margaret Storms of Rochester, a 15-year-old student at School of the Arts.
Indeed, this was where the action was: Under the hot sun, with sneaker-clad feet flopping over the crowd, fists pumping in the air and gravel dust drifting overhead.
Thirty-four-year-old Christine O'Connor was throwing sticks of gum to the crowd and offering broiled kids entry to an air-conditioned truck sponsored by a chewing gum company. "A lot of parents bring their kids expecting trouble and chaos," she says. "But it's not that way."