Tomorrow is the Toronto leg of the Warped Tour, which is celebrating it twentieth anniversary. I’m not going this year, owing in part to changes in my taste in music that has made Warped Tour less relevant to me, and in part to my bosses’ expectation that I’m going to be at work at 8:30 tomorrow. Even though I haven’t been in years, I always get excited when I think about Warped Tour. I went in 2008, a few weeks before I turned sixteen. Even though I had been to several concerts before this one, this was the first one I was allowed to go to without parental supervision. My parents let me go because I was going with our family friend, Emily, and my parents knew I would be fine with her.
I was so excited the morning of. I got dressed in what I thought everyone else was going to be wearing: black and Converse. (Even if it had occurred to me to wear Vans to the Vans Warped Tour, I didn’t own any.) I felt pretty cool as I laced up my brown and pink Converse, but secretly, I was afraid I was going to get beaten up by someone with a mohawk for not looking like I belonged. When we arrived at the Mississauga parking lot where the show was being held, it was already crowded. Emily’s friend, Quinn, suggested that we cut into the middle of the line so we wouldn’t have to wait as long. “No!” I exclaimed. “Then we’ll get beaten up by a big guy with a mohawk!” We cut into the line anyway, without so much as a sideways glance from the people in the spiked jackets. When we finally got into the venue, I was amazed to see that everyone there was around my age. I wasn’t like the Barenaked Ladies concert I went to as a child with my parents, where the range of ages of the people in attendance spanned about eighty years. This was an entire festival for people my age. I knew very few of the bands, as I mainly came to Warped Tour as Emily and Quinn’s tagalong, but I loved what I heard. Some of the highlights from the day were The Academy Is…, Cobra Starship, Mayday Parade, Norma Jean and Every Time I Die. It started pouring rain midway through Every Time I Die’s set, and the combination of the music mixed with the sound of the rain made for an experience that is still up there with my all time greatest concert moments.
The bands I saw that day made music that spoke to me at that age, as a high school student waiting for what was coming next. Mayday Parade sang about dreams of leaving home, and The Academy Is… sang about wanting to be in love. Even then I knew that a lot of this music wouldn’t stay with me for the long term. What mattered was that the music meant something to me at that moment. Even though the music doesn’t resonate with me today in the same way that it did then, it continues to bring me back to the time when I first started to experience the freedom of getting older. I’m not going to Warped Tour this years, but I’m excited for everyone who is going, especially everyone who is sixteen and dreaming about leaving home for the first time.
Song of the Day: Jamie All Over by Mayday Parade
OR The Rock Show by Blink-182, because that’s where the title of this post comes from.
This is my first post on my new domain, courtneyheff.com. It’s been a long process getting this blog set up, but I’m excited about how it’s turned out. If you have any comments or suggestions, please make them! I’m still in the process of fine tuning. I would like to thank Matt for his tech support and Becca for being the first to try the new domain name. Thanks for helping me to get this off the ground. Lastly, thank you to everyone who has been reading my blog for a while. I’m now at the one year anniversary of I’m on a Journey. I have greatly appreciated everyone’s enthusiasm over the last year. I hope you stick around to see what comes next.
