Vans Warped Tour is going away. And depending on who you talk to, this can be seen as both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, the touring punk festival played a key roll in launching the careers of bands like Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy, and provided a rite of passage for many suburban kids to attend their first festival. On the other hand, recent years have seen more controversy, including incidents involving the bands Slaves and Front Porch Step.
In an interview with Billboard, Vans Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman gave a sprawling interview about the history of the festival, but when the conversation steered toward the controversies of the festival, he seemed to think that the event had done a great job at policing itself and didn’t need the help of outsiders, writing off sexual harassment as simply “part of the culture.”
Lyman gave the following response when asked about what it was like dealing with sexual harassment on the tour:
Well, that sexual harassment didn’t happen on Warped Tour. If you go through every one of those stories, it didn’t happen on Warped Tour. The Jonny Craig thing did happen on Warped Tour, and I addressed it the same way. We sent him away. And then all of a sudden, I’ve gotta have town hall meetings with it. But if you really go through all that stuff, things happen prior to the tour or things… it’s part of the culture.
Warped Tour, the thing is, it’s funny because the way we used to deal with any problem was if we found out an artist was disrespecting a woman, they were usually brought back behind a tour bus by some people on the tour, and given a few options in life. Your life was not being threatened, but you were educated out there.
There’s artists that come to me and go, ‘You know what? I was young. I didn’t know I was offending the women… I didn’t know that until one of the bands that I respected growing up pulled me aside and told me this is unacceptable.’ The Front Porch Step thing, to be honest — he wasn’t on the tour, but then we brought him to that one show. I was still going under the premise of asking professionals, thinking it was the right thing to do. I still looked to professionals, because I’m not a trained therapist or psychologist. So the way we addressed it was, I supplemented the organization A Voice For the Innocent to come out and be a part of my tour. They’ve grown into a large organization that’s helping all these kids year ‘round now.”
It’s easy to see the problem in this, as dealing with sexual harassment behind closed doors and without tangible repercussions neither protects women from possible harm nor allows professional consequences for the artist’s actions. It can be said that social media at least allows for fans to make up their own minds when they see accusations being flung at someone. But Lyman bemoaned the use of social media to log complaints, instead asserting that he should be the one that people are coming to with accusations:
It was a few years ago when I would read something an artist posted online while they were on tour with us without coming and discussing it with me first. I thought I at least should have the respect at this point of an artist — the times had changed — where an artist would come and talk to me about something they didn’t like or something I was doing that they didn’t agree with, not read about it when I wake up on the bus in the morning on their Twitter account.
When Billboard responded that it might be hard to get in touch with him, Lyman scoffed at the assertion, noting that he makes it very clear how to get ahold of him, calling Warped Tour “my school.” “Look, you’re not going to be on my tour unless you can at least discuss situations with me before I read about it in public,” Lyman said. “If you still then don’t agree, or if we don’t come to a resolution, then that’s what it is. But you at least owe me that respect, because I am paying you, right, to be out here? I am feeding you to be out here. At least have the respect to have that discussion with me.”
The whole premise that Lyman raises seems to promote secrecy, and judging by how some of the problems of the past were handled, particularly with Front Porch Step being allowed to continue on the tour despite sexual assault allegations, it is a flawed system. Later in the interview, Lyman even hints at how he views the present environment of men being held accountable for past actions as not a reckoning, but as a possible hazard. “And as my wife said this weekend,” he said, “we watched what happened with Brand New and these kinds of things. And she goes, ‘Oh, I see a storm gathering. You’ll get sucked into this somehow.’
It all presents a warped (no pun intended) view of the culture surrounding sexual harassment and sexual assault, where the biggest concern isn’t protecting women, but optics. With all that’s been said, maybe Warped Tour’s conclusion is a good thing after all.
