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How Warped Tour led the consumerist music festival revolution

The iconic festival was as much about brands as it was about bands.

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Most of what I remember about being 14 involves wanting stuff: I wanted straighter hair. I wanted to seem like a grown-up (or at least like a 16-year-old). And I really, really wanted to go to Warped Tour.

It was the summer of 2004, and pop-punk was ascendant. In Canada, where I grew up, this meant listening to a steady stream of Sum 41, Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, and Billy Talent — all homegrown acts that got regular radio play thanks in part to Canadian content laws . With that as our gateway, my friends and I began our foray into skate-punk lite, memorizing Taking Back Sunday lyrics, trying (poorly) to land an ollie , and developing extremely unrequited crushes on any boy who bore a passing resemblance to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge.

To us, Warped Tour — the traveling “misfit summer camp” that merged punk, ska, rock, and emo with extreme sports and a healthy array of corporate sponsors — was the pinnacle of cool. Unfortunately, I never got to attend, on account of being at actual summer camp.

This summer, Warped Tour celebrates its 25th birthday, making it far older than the teenagers it has courted for two and a half decades. Last year was the tour’s final cross-country run — it featured hundreds of bands over the course of 38 stops for which nearly 550,000 tickets were sold, but this impressive turnout was buoyed by the announcement that it was the event’s last hurrah. Attendance the prior year, in 2017, had been down significantly, particularly among the 14- to 17-year-old demographic that had historically been Warped’s lifeblood. The audience was getting older, production costs were rising, and bands weren’t sticking around year after year like they used to. Plus, according to founder and producer Kevin Lyman, he was just getting tired.

But in the era of reboots and remakes , it’s not surprising that organizers would want to honor the tour’s silver anniversary just one year after it shut down. The result is a three-city affair: a single-day event in Cleveland celebrating the opening of a retrospective exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and weekend shows in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Mountain View, California. While not strictly a nostalgia play — there are up-and-coming bands booked alongside veterans, and plenty of fans are first-time Warped attendees — this year, the average age of concertgoers appears to be more than a decade older than it was at the tour’s height (15 or 16, as of 2006 ), and plenty of the once-wayward youth now have kids of their own in tow, keeping them a safe distance from the mosh pit.

This is how, on a Saturday in late June, I find myself on a crowded Jersey beach sandwiched between Caesars Casino and the Atlantic Ocean, belting out Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid” with nearly 30,000 other people — many of whom, like me, were in fact kids when the song came out in 2002. High school may be a distant memory, but at least now I’ve finally made it to Warped Tour.

”Oh, my god, I am 12 years old again,” says the sunburnt guy in checkerboard Vans beside me as the crowd whines along with singer Pierre Bouvier: “Nobody cares, ’cause I’m alone and the world is having more fun than me tonight.”

The lyrics don’t exactly fit the setting — no one here is alone and everyone seems to be having fun — but the feeling’s still there. For a little while, we’re all our angsty teen selves again. Likewise, there’s a twinge of irony when Good Charlotte tear into their breakout single “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” a middle finger to celebrity culture written long before Joel and Benji Madden (the band’s lead singer and guitarist) married Hollywood it-girls (Nicole Richie and Cameron Diaz, respectively).

Warped Tour itself is a contradiction — it’s a punk rock festival that’s also a prodigious marketing machine, sponsored from top to bottom by brands hoping to win over fans in between shows. This isn’t a knock on the tour, really: if it weren’t able to bridge that gap, it probably wouldn’t exist.

The idea for Warped began germinating while Kevin Lyman was working as a stage manager for the alt-rock-focused Lollapalooza in the early ’90s — back when that, too, was a touring festival. He had been immersed in SoCal’s hardcore and ska scenes growing up and wanted to bring some of his favorite bands to audiences around the country with a back-to-basics tour that did away with the music industry’s hierarchies and out-of-control egos: no headliners, no arenas — just a few thousand fans in a parking lot and an average ticket price of less than $30.

Even for the biggest acts, that DIY spirit shone through. “You feel more like a carnie on Warped Tour than you do on any other tour or at any other festival,” says Adam Lazzara, the lead singer of Taking Back Sunday, who are currently in the midst of a 20th-anniversary tour , “just because you’re literally there setting up and breaking down into the next town.” Lyman also tapped a handful of pro skateboarders and BMX bikers to come along, recognizing the crossover between extreme sports fans and punk rock’s moshing masses, as well as the fact that both subcultures were becoming increasingly mainstream.

In 1995, the same year Warped made its debut run in the summer, ESPN aired the inaugural X Games (then called “Extreme Games”), with athletes competing in action sports such as barefoot water skiing, street luge, and skateboarding. The year prior, the Offspring and Green Day — both bands with roots in California’s underground punk scene — released best-selling albums that catapulted them into popular culture.

The time was ripe for something like Warped to exist, though in order to get it off the ground, Lyman needed to buck one of the central tenets of punk and get a few executives to break out their checkbooks. “I grew up with that whole ‘eff corporate America’ mentality,” he says. “And then, for me, I just started looking at corporate America, and no matter how punk rock we were or whatever, we were still supporting it in some way. We were buying their brands; we were using their products.” He looked at the Rolling Stones pulling in millions through sponsorships with Jovan fragrance and Budweiser, and thought: Maybe we can get some money too.

It didn’t go seamlessly at first. After the 1995 run — which featured an eclectic lineup that included the ska-reggae band Sublime, a Tragic Kingdom -era No Doubt, and the grunge pioneers L7 — the tour was in dire straits financially, as the small sponsorships Lyman had landed from brands like Converse and Spin weren’t enough to cover the significant production costs. To keep it going, he was desperate enough to consider brokering a deal with the decidedly not-punk Calvin Klein to become the title sponsor. “I don’t really think that would have worked,” he now says, matter-of-factly.

Fortuitously, the meeting with the fashion brand was delayed by the devastating East Coast blizzard of 1996, and before they could go any further with the arrangements, Lyman got a call from Vans CEO Walter Schoenfeld.

Founded in 1966 as the Van Doren Rubber Company, Vans had engendered strong ties to the skateboarding community, which was loyal to the brand’s sneakers thanks to their grippy soles. The $300,000 check the company wrote turned the Warped Tour into the Vans Warped Tour, giving Lyman some financial runway while securing the festival’s ties to corporate America. (At the time, Vans was owned by the venture banking firm McCown De Leeuw & Co., thanks to a $71 million 1988 leveraged buyout .)

The Warped partnership was led by Steven Van Doren, the company’s vice president of events and promotions and the son of Vans founder Paul Van Doren, who saw an opportunity to give the brand national exposure beyond the Sun Belt states that at the time accounted for most of its sales. He also introduced amateur skateboarding competitions to the tour, giving contestants the chance to win pro contracts with Vans. “Having Steve involved really solidified our partnership,” says Lyman, noting that he turned down bigger subsequent sponsorship offers from the shoe brand Airwalk because he felt Vans was in it for the long haul.

He was right: By 1999, Spin reported at the time, Vans owned a 15 percent stake in Warped and was paying $1 million per year “to strengthen [its] presence with ‘Generation Y’” (or, as we’d call them today, “millennials”). Two years later, it stepped up its investment, paying $5.2 million for a 70 percent controlling stake, according to Forbes .

Today, Vans is a $3 billion brand — current parent company VF Corp bought it for $396 million in 2004 — and a household name for most Americans, including those who have never set foot on a skateboard. Even as it has grown well beyond its fringier roots, though, the brand’s relationship with Warped has endured, and at the 25th-anniversary show, seemingly every other fan is wearing Vans sneakers: Sk8-Hi’s , Old Skools , the ubiquitous checkerboard slip-ons .

(Airwalk fizzled by the early 2000s and was reborn as a Payless brand; its current owners — the same company that recently acquired Sports Illustrated — are trying to stage a ’90s-nostalgia-fueled comeback .)

Even with the Vans investment, Lyman had to hustle to keep the tour afloat in the early years. “We had to raise nearly $4 million in sponsorships to make the ticket price what it was, to give you the show you wanted, to bring all those side stages that developed young artists,” he says.

In 1999, he signed a partnership with the brand new surf label Hurley and got up-and-comers Blink-182 — then still a year out from the explosively popular Enema of the State — to wear the brand’s clothes onstage in exchange for free seats on one of the Warped Tour’s buses, since the band couldn’t yet afford their own transportation. It was a turning point for both band and brand: Blink had just replaced its former drummer with Travis Barker, who’s still with the group today, and Hurley’s founder Bob Hurley had left a successful career with Billabong to start his namesake clothing line earlier that year. Four years later, Blink was selling out arenas and topping Billboard charts, and Hurley had grown into a $70 million business, which Nike acquired in 2002 .

It wasn’t just hormone-addled fans going through an adolescence of sorts at Warped. “I always said Warped was a developmental spot, not only for bands but for crew people to learn how to tour and learn how to be good citizens in the music community, as well as brands,” says Lyman. “A lot of brands got their starts in those parking lots.”

One of those was Monster Energy, which has been a tour sponsor since it launched in 2003, back when it was made by a California soda company called Hansen’s Natural Co. The company set up a portable rock wall, became “the official energy drink of the Vans Warped Tour,” and embarked on a wildly successful rebrand that has seen its stock soar more than 72,000 percent since its public debut that same year. According to Lyman, Monster also came up with the idea of “Tour Water” — specially designed cans of water that make it look like bands and crew members are chugging energy drinks all day onstage without the risk of cardiac arrest; the concept is now an industry standard, and cans from early tours go for more than $75 on eBay .

Another was Jeffree Star Cosmetics. Before Star was a beauty mogul, he was a MySpace-famous scene kid who performed on the tour as a solo artist in 2008 and 2009. In the following years, he came back to host meet-and-greets with his YouTube fans and, when he launched his makeup empire in 2014, set up shop among the merch tents.

The Warped Tour also forced more corporate brands to loosen up a little: After the PlayStation team showed up in uniform polo shirts their first year on the tour, Lyman told them they’d have to change, citing a life motto of his: “Never trust a person in a golf shirt unless you’re at a golf course.” (They’re either a douchebag or they don’t know what they’re talking about, he says.)

When the tour created a “reverse day care” for parents on-site in 2001 — complete with air conditioning and noise-canceling headphones — Lyman convinced Target to put its bull’s-eye logo on top, sans brand name, citing the symbol’s history with ’70s mod bands like the Who and the Jam. He even dug out the Ramones’ tour rider to persuade the makers of Yoo-hoo that the chocolate drink was, in fact, kinda punk rock, and by the 1998 tour, fans were climbing a rock wall shaped like a giant Yoo-hoo bottle and competing for branded skateboard decks .

Walking around the grounds in Atlantic City, there’s a near-endless array of stuff to buy at Warped this year: limited-edition Vans, commemorative 25th anniversary bracelets, T-shirts reading “Mall Goth Trash” and “SadBoy Crew,” henna tattoos, water bottles, skate decks, and beer koozies (plus $14 Pacifico). There are also plenty of freebies: branded coupon wristbands from the teen retailer Journeys, which has been the tour’s presenting sponsor since 2014; T-shirts from Truth, the anti-smoking organization; stickers from PETA.

Among the panoply of shoppable teenage rebellion are booths with a cause, like Hope for the Day , a suicide prevention organization, and A Voice for the Innocent , a nonprofit that offers resources to survivors of rape and sexual abuse, which was brought on board in the wake of a series of sexual assault and harassment allegations involving artists who had performed on the tour.

”The Warped Tour is really interesting because it jumped early on the idea that crowds could be commodified,” says Gina Arnold, a former rock journalist and the author of Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella . “They were able to widen out the notion of the festival as a marketplace — not so much of ideas, but a marketplace of actual things.”

Today, the concept of festival-as-shopping-mall is well established — so much so that this year’s Coachella attendees could have Amazon orders delivered same-day to lockers on site — but in the ’90s, it was still a novel idea. Before then, it was all “bad food and band T-shirts,” as Arnold put it. (The exception: the parking lot of any Grateful Dead concert, long a thriving marketplace of tie-dye tees , beaded jewelry, DIY taco stands, and any drug you might fancy, collectively known as Shakedown Street .)

Band T-shirts still make up the bulk of the merch at Warped, just as they do at most concerts these days. As album sales have dropped off a cliff and services like Spotify have taken their place, paying a fraction of a penny per stream, merchandise has become an increasingly essential part of artists’ income. A superstar like Taylor Swift or Kanye West can gross $300,000 to $400,000 in merch during a single show, according to a Billboard interview with licensing exec Dell Furano. Warped artists aren’t coming close to that, but especially at the tour’s peak, they were pulling in a good amount of cash.

Taking Back Sunday made a reported $20,000 to $30,000 per show on merch on the 2004 tour; My Chemical Romance set the record the next year, selling $60,000 worth of black T-shirts, sinister-looking posters, and fingerless gloves at a single stop. 2005 was also the only year Warped made money on ticket sales, according to Lyman. Headliners Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were regulars on MTV’s TRL thanks to crossover hits “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Helena.” Teens who hadn’t heard of most of the “authentic” punk bands the tour had booked in prior years were turning out in droves. By the end of the 48 dates, 700,000 fans had bought tickets, and the tour grossed an all-time high of $25 million .

”That was a pretty wild year, with all the bands exploding,” says Lisa Johnson, who’s been photographing Warped Tour since its first run. “I’m not gonna lie, it was a little frustrating in the photo pit because it was so jam-packed. And a little dangerous, because there were so many kids coming over the barricade constantly. But at the same time, how fantastic is that?”

Of course, not everyone agreed. From its inception, Warped provoked criticism from punk purists who argued — not without reason — that the corporate-sponsored festival was antithetical to the values of the genre. It also ruffled feathers with the bands it booked, particularly as the rise of “mall punk” and emo put bands like Good Charlotte, Blink-182, and My Chemical Romance alongside punk mainstays like Rancid, Pennywise, and Bad Religion.

”You go to the Warped Tour and walk around and you’ll hear 100 bands that try to sound like Green Day or NOFX. It’s just disgusting,” said Mike Avilez, a vocalist for the California punk band Oppressed Logic, in the book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day . “They’re missing the angst. To me, punk rock is supposed to be angry and pissed off.”

The tour has also caught flak from within over the years. In a 2004 Chicago Reader piece , “Punk Is Dead! Long Live Punk!” the music critic Jessica Hopper chronicled a clash between Lyman and a band called the Mean Reds: “It was only the sixth day of the tour, and they were already on ‘probation’ for running their mouths onstage about what a sold-out capitalist-pig enterprise Warped is, how it isn’t really punk, et cetera.”

Even Adweek, hardly a voice of the counterculture, said in 2005 that the influx of corporate cash “does somewhat undermine the legitimacy of the event, even as it introduces groups of men in tight pants to new audiences.”

Among those who’ve been along for the ride since Warped’s early days, though, ambivalence about the scene’s brushes with the mainstream is tempered by ideas both idealistic — that the tour provided a platform to bands that otherwise might not have made it, and a community for kids who didn’t always fit in elsewhere — and practical.

”There’s always going to be critics,” says Shira Yevin, who’s performed at Warped as Shiragirl since 2004, and for a decade produced a stage at the tour dedicated to promoting women-fronted bands. “But they’re the same ones bitching because they only got paid $100 for the gig and they don’t have enough money to get to the next state, you know?”

In 2019, the idea of “selling out” seems like a product of an earlier generation — one without climate change or student loans or school gun violence to worry about. And anyway, the purists may be getting their way for now, since even pop punk isn’t popular these days. Instead, the top 40 charts are ruled by Lil Nas X’s boundary-pushing country trap, genre-fluid acts like Billie Eilish , and mumble rappers like Post Malone. The loud, fast, guitar-driven sound that Warped is known for? “In top 40, it’s very rare,” says Nate Sloan, a musicologist and the co-host of Vox’s Switched on Pop podcast . “Even the bands that sort of assert that look and that style and may throw a guitar around their shoulder, the actual sound doesn’t necessarily have that.”

On the second day of the Atlantic City shows, in one of the festival’s seemingly endless meet-and-greet lines, I meet 20-year-old Sam and 14-year-old Tori, friends from Philadelphia who made the trip down for their first Warped Tour. Sam has rainbow hair and rainbow gauges in her ears; Tori’s wearing a Set It Off band tee. They met at the Hot Topic where Sam works, a store that itself has transformed from mall-goth central into a haven for geek fashion .

”I basically live there,” says Tori.

”We vibed about the music we listen to,” says Sam.

”I don’t really have any other friends that listen to this kind of stuff,” explains Tori. “I almost kind of get made fun of, because it’s like, ‘Oh, emo music, what do you do, cry all day?’”

At Sam’s high school, most guys listened to trap or rap, while “angsty music” was mostly the domain of girls or “the guys who had a bad upbringing.”

”It was just divided,” she adds. “Like the way the country is right now.”

While genres may separate fans into factions in high school, Sloan says they’re not necessarily as diametrically opposed as they seem. “A lot of the sensibility of rock ’n’ roll has gone into the sound of SoundCloud rap and mumble rap,” he says. “This genre is sort of the spiritual heir to a lot of the acts that first kicked off the original Warped Tour. Sonically, it feels like a world apart in a lot of ways, but in terms of the intense emotional affect, it’s very clearly picking up the mantle.”

Part of the transformation may be technological. “Maybe 20, 30 years ago, if you were an angsty teenager, the easiest way to express yourself would have been by installing yourself and your friends in the garage with a couple of crappy guitars and a battered drum set,” says Sloan. “Today, the easiest way to express your angst would be through a pirated copy of [the music software] FruityLoops and a USB microphone.” This evolution may also help explain why punk’s communal, anti-commercial spirit seems to have fallen out of favor while themes like alienation and disaffection (which Gen Z artists like Eilish mine extensively) have endured.

Shifting musical tastes are just one factor contributing to Warped’s decline. Most people I talked to had similar theories about what’s behind the drop-off in teen attendance: It’s not just that today’s rock bands can’t compete with the colossal forces of hip-hop and pop; they’re also up against YouTube, Netflix, TikTok , esports, and social media, all of which are pouring billions into the race for young people’s attention. Plus, parents are warier about sending their kids to live shows because of tragedies like the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas and the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England .

Lamenting the changing habits of teenagers has always been an adults’ game, though. For the current generation of fans and artists, the end of the tour is, inevitably, the beginning of whatever comes next. Not Ur Girlfrenz was the youngest touring act at Warped last year, and now at ages 13 (bassist Gigi Haynes) and 14 (lead singer and guitarist Liv Haynes and drummer Maren Alford), the trio is on the cusp of what was once the festival’s prime demographic. They also just released their first EP, the title track of which, “New Kids in America,” riffs off the Kim Wilde hit with bouncy pop-punk energy and lyrics like, “When did the trend of no one ever having fun / Spread throughout the land infecting everyone?”

Still, they’re more optimistic about the future of the kind of music they play. “Kids our age these days just aren’t really exposed to it anymore. It’s not exactly like they just don’t like it. They’re just not exposed to it,” says Maren. She’ll introduce her friends to a new band or tell them to stay and watch whoever Not Ur Girlfrenz has opened for, “And they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is my new favorite band!’”

Plus, with early-aughts nostalgia already trending heavily among Gen Z (so much so that this year’s VidCon — a conference for online video creators and their mostly teenage fans — featured a meeting room decked out in Lizzie McGuire posters and blow-up furniture), a musical comeback seems timely. “You hear the 1975 bringing back the ’80s sounds, so I think now’s the time to bring back the 2000s,” reasons Liv.

At their Sunday set, it’s easy to see why they’re hoping for another Warped Tour next year — even if Lyman insists that, for real this time, this is the last. Fans are yelling their names and singing their lyrics back at them from the crowd.

”I did the whole thing where, you know, someone points at you and you look behind you and then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s me!’” Liv says with a laugh.

At a signing at their merch tent after the set, the screaming starts again. “We were like, ‘Is somebody famous here? Oh, my god, is it Blink-182?’” recalls Gigi.

”Yeah, we saw this huge group of people,” says Maren, “and we were like, ‘Ooh, someone important is giving a signing. I wonder who it is.’”

”Nah, it was just us. Psh ,” Gigi sighs.

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Blink-182, Offspring, All-American Rejects to Play Warped Tour 25th Anniversary Shows

By Jon Blistein

Jon Blistein

Blink-182 , the Offspring and the All-American Rejects are among the numerous Warped Tour veterans set to perform at the festival’s upcoming 25th anniversary shows this summer.

While the roving emo and pop-punk festival embarked on its final trek in 2018 , it will return this year for three special shows. The first will take place June 8th at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio to mark the opening of a new Warped Tour exhibit. Next, Warped Tour will hit the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey June 29th and 30th, then the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, July 20th and 21st.

Each show will boast a different line-up, though there will be some overlap. Among the artists set to perform in both Atlantic City and Mountain View are the Offspring, Andrew W.K., Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, Gym Class Heroes, Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, Less Than Jake, the Starting Line, Set Your Goals and Chali 2NA and Cut Chemist.

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Bands just playing Atlantic City include Blink-182, 311, Atmosphere, Bowling for Soup, Taking Back Sunday, CKY, the Menzingers, Reel Big Fish, the Skatalites and Thrice. The Mountain View show will boast All-American Rejects, Sum 41, Jawbreaker, Lagwagon, NOFX, Man Overboard and OFF! The Cleveland gig, meanwhile, will feature just a handful of artists: Simple Plan, Hawthorne Heights, Emery, We the Kings and Chali 2NA and Cut Chemist.

Tickets for the Warped Tour 25th anniversary shows are on sale now via the fest’s website , where complete lineups are also available.

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Blink-182: A Timeline of the Band’s History

From lineup changes to No. 1 records, here's a look back at the group over the years.

By Hannah Dailey

Hannah Dailey

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Blink-182 has been through a lot. Since forming in 1992, the rock band — a staple of the late ’90s, early 2000s punk takeover — has experienced several fallings-out, lineup changes, hiatuses and reunions that have kept fans on their toes for two decades and counting. For those keeping track, Travis Barker, Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, Scott Raynor and Matt Skiba have all been part of the group throughout its various iterations, but never more than three of them at a time.

But while many things have changed for the band over the years, one thing is for certain as far as fans are concerned: Whenever they are together, the guys of Blink-182 make some good music. They have the commercial success to prove it, too. According to Luminate, the group’s eight-album catalog has raked in a combined 15.3 million copies sold and nearly five billion on-demand official U.S. streams.

Not to mention its chart successes, which solidify the band’s status as pop-punk artists who have paved the way for several acts following in its footsteps. Blink-182 has topped both the Billboard 200 and the Album Sales charts twice, scored four No. 1s on the Alternative Airplay chart and notched eight songs in the Billboard Hot 100 .

That’s why it was so exciting for fans when the band announced in October 2022 that after seven years away, DeLonge would be returning to Blink-182, restoring its classic lineup with Barker and Hoppus. The trio revealed plans to go on a reunion tour in 2023, dropped a new single in celebration of DeLonge’s homecoming titled “Edging” and went on to become impromptu headliners for Coachella 2023’s second weekend lineup after Frank Ocean dropped out. And then there’s the new album that Hoppus has promised is “one of the best albums we’ve ever made.”

Keep reading to take a look through the tumultuous history of Blink-182.

1992: Blinking Into Existence

The very first lineup of Blink-182 — back before that was even their name — included Scott Raynor, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus. The story goes that San Diego natives Raynor and DeLonge first met after the latter was expelled from Poway High  for being drunk at a basketball game and transferred to the former’s school, Rancho Bernardo High. They met Hoppus through a friend’s sister, who was dating the bassist at the time.

After experimenting with a handful of different titles, the band operated for years simply as “Blink,” releasing its demo album Buddha in 1992, and its official debut album Cheshire Cat in 1995 under that moniker.

1995: Blink Becomes Blink-182

Though the band has given many fanciful stories over the years when asked where the specific number in “Blink-182” came from — the number of times Al Pacino drops the F-bomb in Scarface , for example — Hoppus has stated that the guys picked it out completely at random.

Their label at the time, Cargo Records, had asked them to change their name because another group had the same moniker, Hoppus said during a chat with Amy Schumer . He, DeLonge and Raynor delayed the decision for so long, someone from the label spoke with them on the phone and said that if they didn’t pick something new before the call ended, Cargo would choose a name for them.

“We just made up the 182,” Hoppus told the comedian. “Ever since then, we’ve made up different stories all the time about what 182 means.”

By then, the trio had gained a sizeable following in Southern California and would begin embarking on tours of America and Australia, opening for the band Pennywise. They were also booked for the 1996 Warped Tour around this time.

1997: ‘Dude,’ It's a Major Label Debut

Blink-182 recorded its sophomore LP, Dude Ranch , while still with Cargo, but signed to major label MCA as demand for the band boomed. The album earned Hoppus, DeLonge and Raynor their first entry onto the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 67 and spending 48 weeks on the chart.

1998: Enter Travis Barker

Things got tense between Raynor and the rest of the band as Blink-182’s success continued mounting, and he was fired in 1998 . Travis Barker, drummer for fellow Warped Tour band the Aquabats at the time, replaced him, forming what would become the group’s classic lineup.

1999: Mainstream Breakthrough With ‘Enema of the State’

Blink-182 became a household name with the massive success of Enema of the State , which became the group’s first Billboard 200 top 10 album in 1999. It spawned radio hits “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things,” which peaked at No. 58 and No. 6, respectively.

2001: ‘Take Off Your Pants and Jacket’ Debuts at No. 1

One blockbuster album was followed by another when Blink-182 released Take Off Your Pants and Jacket two years after Enema of the State . It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

2002: Tom DeLonge & Travis Barker Form Box Car Racer

Tom DeLonge conceived of a side project called Box Car Racer in 2002, wanting to expand his musical style beyond that of Blink-182. But after he had Travis Barker play drums on BCR’s self-titled debut album, tensions brewed between them and Mark Hoppus, who felt betrayed by his exclusion from the project.

“It was really hard for Mark,” DeLonge said in an archived interview with MTV . “He thought it was really lame Travis and I went and did that, but it was a totally benign thing on my part, because I only asked Travis to play drums because I didn’t want to pay for a studio drummer. It wasn’t meant to be a real band.”

Blink then regrouped to release their fifth LP in 2003, and the resulting self-titled record incorporated darker, more mature sounds reminiscent of BCR and Barker’s side work with the band Transplants.

2005: Hiatus

Disagreements over scheduling, recording plans and personal issues eventually led the band to take an indefinite hiatus in 2005 . In a statement, the band said it was taking a break to “to spend some time enjoying the fruits of their labors with loved ones.”

DeLonge largely disappeared from public eye, while Barker and Hoppus formed a side project of their own called +44. They released just one album together, 2006’s When Your Heart Stops Beating.

2008: Travis Barker Survives Plane Crash

Barker was the victim of a horrific plane crash in 2008 that killed four people. The drummer and his friend and collaborator DJ AM — the only other survivor of the accident, though he died from an overdose one year later — was taking off from South Carolina when the tragic incident happened.

As a result, Barker developed post-traumatic stress disorder — it would take him 13 years to board another plane — and spent many weeks in the hospital recovering from severe burns and injuries. While he was there, though, DeLonge reached out after years of strained communications between him and his bandmates, and a Blink-182 reunion was put into motion.

“Up until that point, I had zero hope for Blink,” Barker said of the crash’s aftermath in a 2011 interview with Daily Beast . “It was something that I had really put behind me. My accident definitely made everyone think about things a little more clearly, especially me.”

“It’s horrible that it took something like that for everyone to wake up, but we realized, ‘Man, life’s short!'” he added. “We were fighting about some bulls–t and not talking, and it wasn’t anything to be fighting over.”

2009: Reunion

With Barker’s arm still in a sling after the plane crash, the guys of Blink-182 formally announced their reunion at the 2009 Grammy Awards. “We used to play music together, and we decided we’re going to play music together again,” the drummer told the audience, with the band also confirming a new album and reunion tour were in the works.

They would go on to release Neighborhoods in 2011, Blink’s first album in eight years, followed by a 2012 EP titled Dogs Eating Dogs .

2015: Enter Matt Skiba, Exit Tom DeLonge

Four years after Neighborhoods , DeLonge exited the band once more in a public, messy war of words. In January 2015, Barker and Hoppus announced the guitarist’s apparent resignation from the band and claimed that he “didn’t want to participate in any Blink-182 projects indefinitely, but would rather work on his other non-musical endeavors.”

Immediately afterward, DeLonge shared a statement saying he actually had not exited the group. “To all the fans, I never quit the band,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “I actually was on a phone call about a blink 182 event for New York City at the time all these weird press releases started coming in… Apparently those releases were ‘sanctioned’ from the band. Are we dysfunctional- yes.”

Barker and Hoppus then clapped back in a tell-all interview with Rolling Stone , claiming that DeLonge had expressed disinterest in recording music with them and only communicated with them over emails through his manager.

“When we did get back together after my plane crash, we only got back together, I don’t know, maybe because I almost died,” Barker said at the time. “But [DeLonge] didn’t even listen to mixes or masterings from that record. He didn’t even care about it. Why Blink even got back together in the first place is questionable.”

Regardless, DeLonge was out of the group — but Blink was still booked for a performance at Musink Festival in just a few weeks. To the rescue came Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio, who subbed in for DeLonge at the concert and stayed with the band in his place for many years afterward.

2016: ‘California’ Debuts at No. 1

With Skiba in the mix, Blink-182 scored its second No. 1 album with California . The project was nominated for best rock album at the 2017 Grammys (though it lost to Cage the Elephant’s Tell Me I’m Pretty ) and its lead single, “Bored to Death,” reached No. 85 on the Hot 100.

2021: Cancer Battle

Hoppus revealed in June 2021 that he has cancer and had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for three months. “It sucks and I’m scared, and at the same time I’m blessed with incredible doctors and family and friends to get me through this,” he shared on Twitter. “I still have months of treatment ahead of me but I’m trying to remain hopeful and positive.”

Soon after, DeLonge shared his support for his friend. “To add to his own words that he used today, I would also like to say that he is strong, and a super-human who is pushing through this difficult obstacle with a wide-open heart,” he tweeted. “#WeHaveHisBack.”

A month later, the singer-bassist shared that he was battling the same cancer that his mother had beaten — diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. “My blood’s trying to kill me,” the rocker shared in a Q&A .

But good news was to come. Hoppus shared at the end of September that his oncologist has declared him “ cancer free .” He told fans on Twitter: “Still have to get scanned every six months and it’ll take me until the end of the year to get back to normal but today is an amazing day and I feel so blessed.”

2022: DeLonge Returns, Band Releases ‘Edging’

The classic Blink threesome was restored at last in 2022, when the band announced that DeLonge would be taking his place back from Skiba and returning to the lineup. The guitarist addressed a public letter to Skiba in light of the announcement, writing, “I wanted to take take a minute and say thank you for all that you have done to keep the band alive and thriving in my absence.”

“Emotions between the three of us in Blink have always been complicated, but Mark’s cancer really put things in perspective,” he continued. “But to be honest, the band would not even be here today if it were not for your ability to jump in and save the day.”

The trio also dropped “ Edging ” — its first single and music video together in years — revealed plans to release a new album and joined forces with Green Day to headline the 2023 When We Were Young Festival.

2022: Teasing New Music

Ahead of the holidays, DeLonge teased on his Instagram account that a new album would be “ coming in a few months .” But that wasn’t all. Hoppus joined in on the merriness by declaring on his own account that the “new album is [fire emoji].”

Shortly after the new year, DeLonge once again shared his excitement for the upcoming Blink album . “This is the best album we’ve ever made,” he wrote on Instagram. “Buckle up.”

2023: Live in the Desert

This was no small thing! After delaying their reunion tour due to Barker’s finger injuries, the band was announced as a last-minute addition to the Coachella 2023 lineup .

During its April 14 set , the band rocked hits such as “What’s My Age Again,” “All the Small Things” and “Feelin’ This,” as well as its latest single, “Edging.”

It was Blink to the rescue the following weekend, when Frank Ocean dropped out days before his second headlining set. The band took over his main-stage spot on April 23.

September 2023: 'One More Time...'

The band announced on Sept. 18 that the long-teased new music from the original lineup was finally coming in the form of a brand new album titled One More Time . The release date for the 17-track release? Oct. 20, with Hopper promising it’s “one of the best albums we’ve ever made” in the announcement video. (Watch it above.)

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Blink-182, The Offspring + More to Play 25th Anniversary Warped Tour Shows

Travis Barker of Blink-182 – Story by Anne Erickson, photo by Ken Settle

The lineups for the 25th anniversary Warped Tour celebrations feature Blink-182, the Offspring, 311, A Day to Remember and more

The Warped Tour might be over, but fans of the annual punk rock music festival can rest easy that the Warped Tour’s 25th anniversary celebrations are taking place this summer.

The anniversary events will happen June 8 at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; June 29 through 30 at Atlantic City Beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey; and July 20 through 21 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.

As for the lineup, it includes some of the biggest names in alternative and punk, including Blink-182, The Offspring, A Day to Remember, 311, The All-American Rejects, Good Charlotte, Andy Black, Thrice, Atreyu, Bad Religion, Dirty Heads, Simple Plan, Sum 41, Sleeping with Sirens and Taking Back Sunday.

“FOREVER WARPED: we hope you will join us one-last time to celebrate 25 years of the Vans Warped Tour!” the festival tweeted to break the news.

Each band is booked for different events, so the lineup changes per night. For each event’s individual lineups and more information, head to VansWarpedTour.com .

The Vans Warped Tour holds the title for North America’s longest-running touring music festival. The tour was created in 1995 and made its final cross-country North American run in the summer of 2018.

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Kevin Lyman on why Blink-182 won't play Warped

Everyone always says, 'Bring Blink!' Just as a sheer economics project, think about what Blink-182 would cost and what you'd pay for a Blink-182 ticket compared to a Warped Tour ticket. It doesn't work economically for Blink. They're always welcome to come back. The door is never shut for anyone, but they've just gotta figure out how to come be part of it and still make it work for that $40 ticket at the door.

Find the full interview here .

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Blink-182, The Offspring + More: 2019 Warped Tour Atlantic City Photos

What a weekend it was! The Atlantic City stop of the 25th Anniversary of the Vans Warped Tour provided fans with lots of great music, plenty of feels and a reminder at just how many great bands helped accelerate their career with the help of traveling festival.

The Atlantic City beachfront was rocking Sunday and Vans Warped wasn’t the only anniversary to celebrate. Blink-182 rocked the Warped crowd, refreshing their memories about their peak presence celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Enema of the State album. The 21-song set also included such non- Enema favorites as “Bored to Death,” “Feeling This,” “I Miss You” and the new song “Generational Divide” before wrapping up with “Dammit.”

Another ‘90s holdover, The Offspring , played a rocking set that included “Come Out and Play,” “Gone Away” and set closer “Self Esteem,” but also gave fans a surprise cover of AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie.”

The Rockstar Disrupt Festival also provided plenty of Sunday’s entertainment, with Andy Black, The Used, Thrice, Circa Survive, The Story So Far and Sleeping With Sirens all getting stage time while paying homage to their Warped roots. The day also gave spotlights to such acts as Set It Off, Neck Deep and plenty more.

Though Vans Warped Tour has shuttered as a traveling festival, there’s still one more celebration coming for the 25th anniversary. Get ticketing details on the Mountain View, California stop here . Check out our photo gallery from the second day of the Warped Tour’s Atlantic City stop below and revisit the Day 1 photos at this location .

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Vans Warped Tour Blink 182 returns to rock festival; band is loud scream of today's punk-rock youth

By deseret news , dainon moody staff writer.

Headlining the Vans Warped Tour for the first time and landing in Salt Lake City tomorrow is alt-rock band Blink-182. The band members are really excited, too, though one wouldn't be able to tell by the seeming lack of enthusiasm in the drummer's voice.

When asked why Blink-182 was chosen as the headliner over the more than 20 bands playing on the tour this summer, drummer Travis Barker simply said, "Well, we haven't done the Warped Tour for two years now, so they asked us if we wanted to be the headliners and we said, 'Yeah.' "Joining Blink-182 at this year's Warped Tour, and performing on two separate stages are Pennywise, Sevendust, Eminem, Black Eyed Peas, Less Than Jake, Grinspoon, Lit, The Living End, Suicidal Tendencies, Ice T, Molotov, The Vandals, Bouncing Souls, Amazing Crowns, Dropkick Murphys, Gob, Deviates, Buck-O-Nine, Zebrahead, Avail and FenixTX. Eminem replaced Cypress Hill, which left the tour to work on a new album.

The Vans Warped Tour will perform at the Utah State Fairpark Saturday. Gates open at noon and the festivities begin at 1 p.m. Tickets are available at all Smith'sTix outlets or by calling 467-TIXX or 1-800-888-TIXX.

Blink-182 is not exactly gushing about being Warped's headliners, but it seems appropriate, coming from the trio that wrote songs such as "Dammit (Growing Up)" and posed in their boxer shorts for the back cover of their "Enema of the State" album, the follow-up to 1997's 800,000-selling "Dude Ranch."

The group of twentysomethings -- composed of San Diego residents Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus as well as Barker -- has become the collected scream, er, voice of today's youth. Blink-182 sings with the fervency of a younger, more vivacious Violent Femmes, mocks just as well as the older-aged Offspring and offers peeks of vocal blending that recall the harmony-heavy Beach Boys.

Yes, those Beach Boys.

As the Blink-182 band members reach toward their 30s (Hoppus is now 27), their songs focus on remaining forever in their 20s. Barker figures they may as well, considering that much of their audience is composed of 20-year-olds. Blink-182's current single, "What's My Age Again?" with lyrics about a lack of respect for a 23-year-old in today's society, is earning itself heavy rotation at KXRK/FM 96.1. The band members seem like self-made Peter Pans of the '90s, forever young in a Never Never Land of their own creation, one filled with multi-colored tattoos and spiked hair.

The new album "Enema of the State," however, hints toward a maturity threatening to peek over the horizon. Cuts like the piano-laden "Adam's Song" deal with the suicidal state of the world. Barker assures the interviewer that while the band's music may be achieving new "mature" heights, they are not.

"We've written some better songs, not as repetitive," Barker said during a telephone interview from Riverside, Calif. "There's always an experimental song on any album, like 'Adam's Song.' Some of the other songs, like 'Going Away to College' and 'All the Small Things,' are more mature as well. I wouldn't even say mature, but better. We wrote the album in two-and-a-half weeks and we're happy with what we came up with."

Barker doesn't see the band changing all that much in the near future. The band members seem to treat their thriving musical career as a job, maintaining an attitude not unlike a handful of typical blue-collar factory workers -- punch in at 8, punch out at 5. After touring this summer, the band will work on putting out another album. In five years? More touring, still recording music. "(We'll be) doing everything we're doing now," Barker said.

Blink-182 is making its big-screen debut this month, when it appears in "American Pie," a movie that promises to make "There's Something About Mary" look as wholesome as "The Sound of Music." The band-mates appear as themselves in the movie (big stretch), also lending their musical stylings to the movie's soundtrack with the song "Mutt."

How does Blink-182 compare to the punk rock of yesteryear, when acts like Sid Vicious and the Circle Jerks ruled the stage? Is the band simply copying those that went before? Is it offering a more toned-down form of punk rock to better suit the mainstream, like Green Day?

As far as Barker's concerned, today's punk scene doesn't hold a match to what it once was. "None of the bands were on the radio. The music now is definitely edgy, but I think we're part of a different scene. I think pop punk is going to stay around as long as good bands are playing good music. I'd be happy to stick around for awhile, but you never know."

Though Blink-182 has been around for about seven years, Barker has been with the band for a year. He played with the Aquabats before replacing Scott Raynor as drummer.

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blink‐182 Setlist at The Stone Pony Landing, Asbury Park, NJ, USA

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• Aug 02 1996 Warped Tour 1996 Vernon, NJ, USA Add time Add time
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