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11:59 PM - 10th annual Warped Tour Holy shit! What a day. Chas & I arrived at the Smirnoff Music Centre in Dallas just as the gates opened at 11am, but this did not mean we got to just waltz right in. Oh no…we had to first walk to the end of the line which was at least ½ mile in length. I shit you not. The line moved quickly enough, though, thanks to the UPC bar coding system developed jointly by Logicon and Satan and deployed nationwide during the year of my birth. Throughout our time in the queue, I danced about impatiently on account of a full bladder and an unsubstantiated belief that my favorite punk band would be playing around noon. Once we got inside, it started raining – hard. At first this made me unhappy, but soon I recalled my Buddhist training and realized that the real problem was not with the rain but with my desire to stay dry. Once I gave up any hope of this I made my peace with the rain, removed some unnecessary clothing, and spent the remainder of the day soaking wet and laughing inwardly at the poor blighters cowering under tents and other fixtures trying to keep out of the weather. Many of these folks were trying to keep their hair dry, having spent the better part of the morning prepping it for the event with spikes and temporary hair colour and whatnot. By the end of the day, the poor posers were wearing their hair colour all over their faces and sporting severely wilted mohawks. It is hard to tell in retrospect whether they were more pathetically comical, or comically pathetic. What with not being even part poser, Chas did not have to concern himself with hairstyle, and what with not having any hair to speak of, I was equally unconcerned. We did not revel in the rain so much as to lie down in the gutters and feign swimming or lie down in the mud and create mud angels, but it did feel pretty damn good to simply stand in the midst of a torrential downpour defying the gods of rain to do their very worst. Soon after we parted with our traditional notions of dryness, we realized that band for which we had come would not be playing until every other band had done their bit (this makes perfect sense in retrospect since they are the biggest name on the tour) so we set to wandering about aimlessly for the next six hours or so. We idled around alternately visiting the two main stages (each of which was split into left and right halves so that each band could start playing immediately after the previous one had finished) and two or three smallish trailer-based stages scattered throughout the park. Probably, the highlight of this nomadic period was coming upon the Guttermouth set, during which the band incessantly harassed, belittled, and insulted their fans and the entire audience. Not since Bad Religion has a band ever so thoroughly lived up to their name. The God Awfuls, by contrast, completely failed to live up to their name, putting in a downright decent performance; however, I was curiously unmotivated to hop into the throng. I suppose my reluctance was primarily due to my ignorance of the most of the band’s repertoire, but the fact that the audience was tightly pressed into a rather smallish space between the seats and the stage did not help either. Evidently the Smirnoff Music Center amphitheater was not designed with mosh pits in mind. Go figure. Flogging Molly’s set was unlike anything I’d ever heard, but if you can wrap your mind around the phrase "traditional Irish punk rock," then you’ll have an idea of what they sound like. I hope to pirate their music soon enough. A full half-hour before Bad Religion was scheduled to start playing their bit, the crowd starting jockeying for position close to the stage. Once they reached a sort of positional stasis, people grew bored, and rather than striking up friendly conversations with new and interesting folks, a few particularly uncreative and juvenile folks took to throwing shit around. At first, it was merely balloons and empty water bottles, fairly harmless stuff. Eventually, though, it escalated to half-full water bottles, shoes, and other assorted refuse. By the time the band prepared to play, I’d taken a bottle to the head, another to the lip, and a nasty-ass mud-soaked discarded t-shirt to the face, and I was getting ready to pounce on a mentally-challenged little Mexican punk who was largely responsible for causing the ruckus. (Un)fortunately, though, the band geared up right about then and Dallas was spared yet another instance of Hispanic-on-Hispanic violence. When the band lead off with "Sinister Rouge" it became clear that it would be a damn good set. It was every bit as intense as one would expect, and the crowd ate it up, surging forward in a mass rush toward the stage. For the first couple minutes it was all one could do just to keep from getting crushed in the press of bodies, or (worse yet) accidentally impregnating one or more of the scantily clad punker chicks who seemed to utterly lack fear, modesty, and a proper sense of sexual ethics. Eventually, though, the body press subsided a bit and the crowd got down to the business of moshing it up, tossing themselves and one another hither and thither and generally having a bang-up time of it all. I do not remember too clearly much of what happened after this point, but I have a few otherwise inexplicable bruises and friction burns to show for it. I do recall that the band seemed as passionate as the crowd, which is a feat since they have been at it for nearly ¼ century now. I also recall having a damn good time, which is a feat in and of itself since I am over thirty. (
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