“I remember playing one of my first Warped Tour dates. We drove eight hours and we slept under the van until we were allowed to load in for the next day of Warped Tour. It is one of my favorite memories.”

– Josh Balz, ex-Motionless in White

“My favorite memory of Warped Tour is being 14 and learning about what a ‘wall of death’ was. I was watching The Devil Wears Prada and, after they finished, Chiodos came on and called for a wall of death. 14-year-old Eric had no clue what was happening. Experiencing that for the first time has been branded into my memory forever.”

– Eric Novroski of So Much Hope, Buried

“My favorite Warped memory is running into a few people from school that I hadn’t known were into alternative music. It felt pretty isolating being into the music and scene that I was in, so it was always such a cool thing to see familiar faces in an unexpected place. It made things feel a little less lonely the next day in class!”

– Shug Smith of Pucker Up!

“My favorite Warped Tour memory was my first in 2012. It was a perfect storm of everything I wanted to do – being in my first real pit for New Found Glory, discovering new bands like Patent Pending, and crowd surfing for the first time to Taking Back Sunday, all with my best friends.”

– Ed Allison of Lyndhurst

“[One of my] favorite [memories] was crowd surfing and getting dropped while I was watching Katy Perry! I met some friends that picked me up off the ground that I still talk to! I was only a young kid, but my mom was a trooper and allowed me to go to all the festivals since I was young. She played on a side stage and the very small crowd was not into my energy.”

– Jonathon Kamor of Tori V & The Karma

“This was a while ago so I’m kind of fuzzy on the details, but Warped Tour was the first time I ever really got to experience heavy shows. I saw Whitechapel play at probably like 10 in the morning at Montage. There was a moment, I think, during Bring Me the Horizon’s set where a shoe was flying through the air and I caught it just before it hit a girl in the face. It’s also the first place I’ve ever experienced other people stage diving. The singer of I, the Breather jumped into the crowd and his face landed in my hands. I remember it was really sweaty.”

– Travis Antoniello of Toothless

“By 2016, I had been going to Warped Tour every year since 2003. I have a ton of amazing memories from prior years. Most of the bands playing would just be walking around, so I got to watch sets and hang with a lot of the people I looked up to at that time. There were a lot of sunburns, a lot of dehydration, the standard Warped stuff, but 2016 stands out.

“I had just joined Clever Clever a few months prior. Gabe, Rebel, and myself had bonded over a mutual love of Every Time I Die. Since they were playing that year, the three of us went up together. I was the youngest by a few years and was therefore the ‘baby’ of the group. During the ETID set, we were standing in the back like old people do, arms crossed and slowly bobbing our heads. I had asked Gabe if they were going to get into the pit and he quickly responded, ‘No way. We’re too old for that.’ Understandable, but I wasn’t too old, so I waited for my moment. By the start of the third song, I suddenly felt various items being shoved into my hands and thrown at my feet and looked up just in time to see the back of Gabe and Rebel’s heads as they ran away from me and towards the pit. I looked down to see they had, without a word, thrown the entire contents of their pockets at me. So much for them being too old and so much for me being able to get into the pit myself! They came back two songs later, smiles wide on their faces, shirts stretched, hair disheveled.

“Warped Tour had that effect. It was a vibe, an experience. It was a young person’s game, but not by age. Even if you were getting ‘too old,’ the atmosphere de-aged you a decade and, for 25 minutes at a time, you could be 16 again.”

– Anthony Magraner of Old Daggers

“Some of my favorite experiences included seeing and meeting Yungblud before he blew up, seeing and meeting Doll Skin, my first-ever crowd surf experience during Falling in Reverse, and all of the free merch that would float around!”

– Demi Belzer of Pucker Up!

“Some of our favorite memories include hanging out in the Monster tent and chugging energy drinks at 11 a.m. in 90 degree weather, the iconic mudslide at The Pavilion at Montage Mountain in 2012, and getting to see so many incredible bands in just one day. It truly was like a one-day vacation every single year that we all looked forward to, with nothing but music, friends, and lots of sunscreen! Coppermine is so happy to be a part of this semi-resurgence.”

– Phil Luongo of Coppermine

“So many different genres of music brought us all together in one place. It was the one time of the year that I looked forward to the most.”

– George Yurchak of Eibes

“One of my favorite memories was Warped 2012. It was my first time going. I would attend the Mayhem Fest events prior. I got to see Motionless in White, Chelsea Grin, Miss May I, and The Ghost Inside for the first time live in the Warped Tour setting. The Monster Energy truck was a really awesome part, and the earlier pace of the day was just an incredible experience!”

– Eric Abyss of Traverse the Abyss

“The Warped Tour was huge for me. It’s how I got into the music industry when I was 20 years old or so. My band Split Fifty won the Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands and I got to play on it for the first time, and then the following year, we won it again and I got to play it once again. Then we signed to a small record label and they got us on something called the Space Station Stage, which was run by a band called The Phenomenauts. It was just this cool little stage they did that was on the ground in front of their tour vehicle. They had a weird bus that was covered in space station-looking stuff. It was a lot of fun, and when that year was over, we played in Hershey. I think it was 2004. We called them and asked if we could do it again next year and they told us that they weren’t doing it anymore, so we asked them for [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman’s phone number. They gave it to us, and me and the singer of my band at the time Zach just called Kevin Lyman up and we said, ‘Hey, since the Space Station Stage isn’t happening next year, can we do it?’ He said, ‘Sure,’ and he just let us run a stage on the Warped Tour, two guys he didn’t really know that well.

“In 2005, we got to run our own stage, and we did it for the next eight years or so. We set up the stage, we booked the bands, we paid for all the staging. We got the PA. We got all the stage banners. We got the sponsors. It was really cool. What was really awesome about it was we got to hook all of our friends up to play Warped Tour and we got to help a bunch of bands get their start – bands like Motionless in White, All Time Low, Four Year Strong, Forever the Sickest Kids.

“We have a lot of awesome memories of the band barbeques backstage each night. Lots of fun. Lots of debauchery. Lots of fireworks in the parking lot and getting yelled at by Kevin for doing that. But he was always so supportive of us and our band. It taught me so much about the music industry, so much about booking tours, so much about booking events, running things. That really is the whole reason why I’m in the music industry. I started Don’t Panic in 2009 as a side project and one of our very first shows was playing on the Warped Tour.”

– Ted Felicetti of Don’t Panic

“I attended every Warped Tour from 2004-2018 in some fashion, first as a kid who discovered an awesome world where a few days a year I felt like I was surrounded by people who understood me. When I was in college, the company I worked for put on the Warped Tour Battle of the Bands that gave local bands up and down the East Coast a chance to play Warped Tour. I worked a summer helping build stages and doing other things for a company that owned a stage on Warped Tour and, while I owned Eleanor Rigby’s [in Jermyn], we hosted the afterparty for the Warped Tour movie. The tour is ingrained in my soul forever. I made lifelong friends and connections and learned what real hard work was by working for that festival. Josh is a true Warped Tour success story as well – it’s only fitting that he’s the one behind this four-day resurgence that brings it back to Scranton.”

– Joe Caviston of Screaming Infidelities

“I’ve always wanted to be a musician. I’ve been writing songs as long as I’ve even been able to read and write. I found lots of different inspirations growing up, but going to my first Warped Tour in 2015 was monumental. Not only was it my first-ever concert, but it was a culmination of all the music I loved in one place! Warped Tour was accessible to me in ways other concerts wouldn’t be for a 12-year-old, especially considering it was so local and affordable. I’m so grateful I was able to attend as many years as I did, seeing bands I deeply cared about and being a part of countercultures that helped me deal with the adverse situations I was growing up in, complex/continuous trauma, my poor mental health, undiagnosed health problems, but most of all, I was just profusely inspired.

“I was passionate. I would watch those bands with stars in my eyes and, after every concert I went to, Warped Tour included, what I wanted to obtain just seemed more and more of a reality to my very ambitious and creative self. Jeez, that was going to be me up there one day! I was going to be up on that stage, singing my songs – songs I wrote to get me through the day in ways nothing else could ever match. I wanted to save people’s lives with my emotional music just like everybody else I was seeing at Warped Tour. Even with my own band, that band is currently saving my life and keeping me afloat and I can only hope people find that solace within our music. And I definitely wanted to give a hell of a show too! I wanted to be the best performer I could be. To this day, the music I listened to at Warped Tour means the world to me. It proved to me that what I wanted, what I needed, was a reality while introducing to me the crucial idea of finding family in your community. I wasn’t alone and maybe, just maybe, things would work out for me.”

– Allie Katz of Acid Rat

“I never got the chance to experience Warped Tour during its original run. Honestly, I’ve never even been to a real concert, unless you count local shows. This year changes that. Not only will I finally get to see national acts perform, but I also get to open Day 1 of Road to Warped right here in Scranton, alongside a bunch of my music peers. It’s my first real taste of Warped, and I couldn’t be more hyped.”

– Gus the Savage of Broken Alibi