The man behind the Warped Tour
His name is Kevin Lyman and he has been in the music industry for the last 27 years.
Although it has been a rocky 14 years-- full of successes and failures-- from launching hundreds of music careers, giving millions of fans around the world a summer festival to wait for to struggling with last summer's sky rocketing fuel costs and economic blunders, Kevin Lyman has managed to keep music lovers around the world interested in the product he is handing out. Did I mention he is down to earth and extremely humble? Unlike most successful leaders in the music industry, Lyman has been able to keep his feet planted firmly on the ground, which can probably be accredited to how his career all started out.
“I worked 12 years in the clubs, took all the hard jobs loading vans, sweeping floors, cleaning up; throwing people off stages...All the stuff that people don't realize I used to do. It wasn't an overnight success. That's allowed me now to have Mayhem tour and Taste of Chaos and control my own destiny,” Lyman said.
While Lyman has the seniority to take the proverbial wheel down whatever musical road he wants, there were some challenges this past summer that were completely out of his hands namely, fuel costs in the United States. Lyman said it was a hard decision to continue.
“A lot of people were telling me to charge an extra dollar at the door... Those kids were suffering trying to get to the shows, how could I charge an extra dollar? And also, I learned that the business has changed,” Lyman said.
Suddenly, bands would agree to release albums at the beginning of June so that they could join the tour and the record never came out. This is something Lyman was able to learn from.
“I realized that I have to book it more on my gut feeling and intuition, than by what other people say,” Lyman explained.
On Warped Tour's official web site, Lyman wrote that the 14th annual tour was one of the most difficult. It was the highest gas prices in history in June, which scared a lot of people and consequently attendance was down substantially at the beginning of the summer, but Lyman assured that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
“As the tour gained momentum and the bands became more popular and word of mouth on the Warped Tour was that it was a great show, our attendance was at what it was the year before,” Lyman revealed.
Over the last 14 years, the scene has changed dramatically. Kids are now more open to all a wide range of music and the accessibility is at their fingertips. Think about it! It costs close to nothing to go on the Internet and check out any band from any genre in the whole world. For some of the more seasoned Warped Tour attendees, this could prove to be a downer because the music festival that was all about punk with Bad Religion, Pennywise, Rancid, and NOFX suddenly turned into an odd mixture of screamo, ska, reggae, pop punk and Christian bands. For Lyman, seeing all of these bands come together behind the scenes is pretty gratifying.
“It's nice to be able to see bands accept other bands that are not from the same scene, like Everytime I Die, all of a sudden comes over and plays the Warped Tour,” Lyman explained. “They're hanging out with punk bands... [It's about] Uniting different scenes and getting people to hang out.”
Gone are the days of scene-against-scene rivals, these days the conflicts, if there are any at all, are usually the clashes of attitudes between the seasoned guys and the new guys.
The 15th anniversary of Warped Tour is this summer and there will be a ton of great surprises.
“I think you're going to see a lot of good bands and a lot of bands that played the tour in the past will be coming back to make special guest appearances. I'm just happy we're going to be there for another summer” Lyman said.
