RC: I did that for my nephew many years ago. The year Morgan Heritage was on the tour. Now do any amazing Warped Tour anecdotes pop into your head from over the years?
KL: For me, it's always you seem to remember the weather. Usually the heat, or the storms. We were in Cleveland yesterday where we had a massive storm last year, and of course we've played Cleveland every year of the Warped Tour, and everyone just remembers last year. Is it going to be like last year? No, and it wasn't like that the 12 other years.
In Detroit - playing in Pontiac, the Warped Tour playing on the roof of that parking lot [The Phoenix Plaza Amphitheatre - ed.], to think that we had to bring everything up in elevators. It kind of showed how little we brought with us in the beginning. It's take us three days to get it all up elevators now.
RC: How many more years are you going to do this?
KL: I never thought about it. Definitely next year, with it being the 15th. There will be change, some of it's going to be predicated by the economy; we're probably going to have go back to one or two less stages, or maybe do them on a local level, with more local involvement, which won't hurt.
How many more years? It's going to be weird the summer I don't have Warped Tour, to be honest. It's like that job - the year I die is the year I don't do Warped Tour. The only thing I'll ever retire from is the Warped Tour, since I never really had a job.
It will be predicated by when the kids stop coming, but I think it's a very important part of our music scene, and that's why the scene is pretty strong. It's a great place to pull everything together, more than ever. We got a lot of broke-ass bands out here this summer, and everyone is trying to figure out how to get down the road. It's very much like 1995, when I started this. Luckily for me, my company was sound financially and I can say, "OK, we're going to make a lot less money this year," but it's funny to it here trying to figure out how a band can stay. Some bands are saying "I don't know if I can make it," and figuring out how to team up or the best avenue for a band to stay on the road right now, and get them through the summer.
It's kind of exciting in a way, because I think we're all going to tour smarter. Bands will be sharing vehicles - we're already seeing that.
I'm getting really excited about the 15th year of Warped. The first weekend of Warped I didn't know if there would be a 15th. Tickets sales were tough, expenses were crazy, but the tour caught life like it normally does. The kids were coming, and we'll get to 15.
So actually I'm sitting here, going "Maybe I should pull out the calendar and start routing the 15th." We've got some big plans for that we're trying to do. So, we'll have at least another year.
