Road warrior The Warped Tour soldiers on in Brockton BY MATT ASHARE

When it first got rolling, in the early ’90s, the Warped Tour looked an awful lot like Lollapalooza’s snotty young skatepunk cousin — a close relative of the kind of package tour that Perry Farrell had dreamed up to serve the all-ages crowd who’d been gravitating toward mosh pits across the country for years. But it quickly became apparent that the Warped Tour — an event that got its name from Warp, the music-oriented magazine published by Transworld, a company best known for its skateboarding and snowboarding periodicals — was a whole different animal. For starters, rather than attempting to bite into a broad slice of the demographic pie by bringing together a diverse roster of artists from some hard-to-define "alternative" sector of the music business, Warped was happy to narrowcast, loading up on as many so-called punk bands as it could fit onto half a dozen stages over the course of an afternoon, and topping it all off with a big halfpipe for skateboarding demonstrations. So whereas Lollapalooza searched in vain for some way to define itself as a festival — as something that was culturally more than the sum of its musical parts — Warped already had a built-in connection to the same lucrative fusion of rock and sport that was fueling the growth of the X Games. Lollapalooza quickly lost its relevance as "alternative" came to mean less and less; meanwhile, Warped has continued to thrive, drawing its energy and its identity from a skatepunk lifestyle that remains as attractive as ever, if not more so, to teenagers across the country.

To a music-oriented person like myself, the big halfpipe full of skaters and BMX bikers that was set up next to a pair of stages at this year’s Warped, which landed at the Brockton Fairgrounds last Thursday, might have seemed nothing more than an amusing distraction. But the intersection of skate and punk that that halfpipe represented was a tangible reminder of the cultural phenomenon that has made the tour a thriving enterprise. This Warped wasn’t all that different from last year’s, or the one that came through the year before that. During its first few years of existence, the tour went through a few growing pains as its organizers fine-tuned the mix of music, sport, and vendors. Here in New England, it took a couple of years before Warped settled into what seemed the perfect location — Suffolk Downs racetrack, which is where it’s been held the past few years, and where it would have been this year if its schedule hadn’t conflicted with the track’s racing dates. In its first couple of years, the closest Warped came to Boston was Northampton, which had an airport that wasn’t afraid of an invasion of thousands of teenage skate punks. Warped also found a temporary home on the Cape for a few years, though I never made it out to one of those. By the time the tour discovered Suffolk Downs, the organizers had worked out a framework that gave the kids what they wanted.

And at the Brockton Fairgrounds this year, that framework remained intact. In keeping with punk’s traditional suspicion of anything that looks too much like a rock star, Warped, as distinct from Lollapalooza, has only a nominal headliner, instead relying on a group of main-stage acts to sell tickets. They along with the rest of the bands — the ones who come for part or all of the tour to play the smaller stages and the earlier slots — switch around in the line-up from day to day. And Warped places less value on record sales and airplay then it does on staying power and respect. Over the past five or six years, the tour has drawn its main-stage acts from among the same general group of bands: West Coast pop-punkers Pennywise (who played the final set in Brockton) and NOFX have been taking turns for a few years now, with Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, a punk-rock cover band fronted by NOFX singer Fat Mike, joining Pennywise as a main-stage act on those years that NOFX are off. Rancid, who were the second-to-last main-stage act in Brockton, also seem to have adopted an every-other-year approach to Warped. And as was the case in 2001, they have a new album that won’t be coming out until a month or two after the tour is over — it’s as if they were thumbing their noses at the huge boost in record sales that would come from touring behind the CD. But nothing could be more in keeping with punk-rock values.

Thanks to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Dropkick Murphys, who have also alternated doing the tour over the past few years, Warped has maintained a solid Boston connection. This year it was the Dropkicks’ turn. And the rest of the packed Brockton Fairgrounds seemed to empty out as fans flowed south toward the main stage for their 5 p.m. set. With the sun-beaten crowd whipped into a dusty frenzy, it was almost impossible to catch more than a tiny glimpse of the Dropkicks — even from backstage — when they appeared along with a couple of kilt-wearing bagpipers from some local electricians’ union.

All of the tour’s six stages are arranged in adjacent pairs, so that as one band finished their set the next could be ready to go. Following pop-punk upstarts Mest — the last major group of the day with any major-label association to play the main stage — the Dropkicks signaled the beginning of the climax of this year’s show with their special brand of Irish working-class punk rock. And just as they got going, you could make out the revving of dirtbike engines as the most recent addition to the Warped line-up — stunt motorcycle riders — prepared to do their thing on a course that had been set up right next to the two main stages. The result was near sensory overload as the Dropkicks handed the ball off to the Hawaiian-shirt-clad jokers in Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, who in turn blended right into the classic mohawk punk of Rancid. Meanwhile, at one of the smaller stages closer to the gate, one of Geffen’s latest signings — a band called S.T.U.N. — were doing their best to win over a small crowd of tired kids who’d given up on trying to fight their way up to the main stage. That as much as anything seemed to capture what Warped is all about.