Taste of Chaos founder Kevin Lyman

I don’t want anything. They heard I liked fishing so I got kids coming by my house and dropping fishing poles off. I get a lot of bottles of wine. I must have a reputation out there or something. But it’s not my thing.

I know. Yeah like leopards or something crazy like that. It’s tough especially with the Warped Tour because so many bands want to be on it, which is great. I love that because one day people might not want to do the tour. Then it’s going to get hard. But we’re limited. We had 2000 bands submit to be on that tour this summer.

I worked on the first few of those. I worked with Jane’s Addiction back in the day. Everyone talks about wanting to put on these festivals or events or lifestyle shows but it’s so hard. What happened was that Perry [Farrell] was very involved the first few years of Lollapalooza then they went in a different direction. An accountant even became in charge of Lollapalooza at one point. He’s a very good accountant but accounting and creativity don’t go hand in hand unless you work for Enron.

He started making a lot of the decisions and accountants are always going to make decisions based on financial reasons. A lot of stuff I do isn’t based on the finances of the tour. I make a nice living. I can’t complain about that. But I do a lot of things just because I feel it’s right for the show. We don’t really need to have the extra stages on Warped Tour to make it successful. But I believe you still have to have the local element and keep the kids involved in the show.

Absolutely. With Warped I’m still there every single day. I’m involved in all the booking of the talent with Darryl [Eaton], my partner. Right now we’re going through the last couple of shows to see if we have any spaces available. I design a lot of the show. I work with the sponsors. With Warped, there are so many people involved. We want to keep those people happy but also keep the integrity of the show so a kid doesn’t feel like he’s constantly being pumped. Yes these people openly have a goal of selling their cell phones to kids, but we make sure they give something to the show.

It depends. I make a nice living at it. I don’t think it’s huge amounts. I don’t have a house in Malibu or a house in the Hollywood Hills. I raise my family. It’s definitely hard to make vast amounts of money when you’re trying to keep the ticket price at $25 and deliver an all day festival. But it’s going on 12 years now and last year was our strongest. We sold 700,000 tickets. I bet we could’ve charged more for the tickets but we wouldn’t be talking about the Warped Tour in the present tense now.

No. I’ve got great partners with CAA and Vans. They understand. My wife pressures me to make more money [laughs].

Well I’ve taken a lot of side jobs besides Warped Tour like the Sprite Liquid Mix Tour that was kind of a hip hop tour. I worked on The Cure’s tour a couple summers ago. Last year I was really getting frustrated because I’m terminally unemployable because I won’t just shut up for the money. I was having a lot of trouble with a couple projects because I believed these people weren’t doing them for the right reasons.

I was talking to John Reese who manages The Used who I’ve been close with since they were on the Warped Tour. He said [The Used vocalist] Bert [McCracken] has always had an open mind and he was looking to do something different. We took the harder edge of Warped Tour and put them in Taste of Chaos. Bert from The Used, became almost like a partner on the first year of the tour. They even took less money than they normally would so we could go get a lot of great bands. We were able to put together a package with My Chemical Romance and Killswitch Engage and lots of other great bands. It was great timing because it was when the hockey strike was on last year. So the venues were very open-minded about bringing events into their facility. They gave us really cut rate rental deals. We went out and did 37 shows and sold out 31 of them which surprised a lot of people.

No, they’re taking time off. But their management company is involved. We made them a partner and they ended up doing really well, even better than if they had gone out on their own tour.

Yeah, it was. Anytime you have a little bit of a proven track record helps. But last year was an anomaly in some ways. A lot of the shows were selling out very far ahead of time. This year some cities aren’t doing quite so well. We’re doing 44 shows so we might’ve taken too much on. The Midwest is a little tough right now.

Last year we had My Chemical Romance right before they captured everyone’s imagination. We have a lot of bands whose records are going to come out later. They were supposed to come out at the beginning of the tour. Now they’re coming out at the end of the tour. So we have to facilitate a lot of the marketing. The bands have been very cooperative with promotions and interviews. We’re at about 100,000 tickets sold, which is a nice number. I think we’ll end up doing about 210,000 kids on this tour, which isn’t bad.

It’s a mix. The second stage has The Receiving End of Sirens, Pelican, Adair. It’s a mix. I also think kids aren’t getting their tickets in advance since all the shows are general admission.

Yea, I used to think the military was a good option because kids could go get an education. But now that they’re trying to use videogames to persuade kids to be in the military, which is a bit of a deception.

They kids go in and play a videogame then they tell them “Well this is what the Army’s almost like.”

I used to believe the military was cool just like I thought the Hare Krishnas weren’t a bad organization because at least they took street kids in and gave them a home.

Hare Krishnas are fine. I have no problem with them as long as they’re honest with what they’re doing.

They need to be a bit harder than the Warped Tour, have a great live show and a history of touring.

I deal with everyone, all the agents and the managers. MySpace did a contest to find a local band from each city to play on the second stage. It keeps the local element because so many local bands don’t have a chance to play at big shows.

We try to keep that local element.

I would. We’ve had some talks with Sirius Radio about getting back into it. I just think it would be hard.

Yeah, just this morning I was trying to book my kids to come visit me at Disney World while I’m out on Warped Tour.

They’re six and ten.

My ten year old daughter loves Yellowcard, Fall Out Boy and her favorite band is Bowling for Soup. My six year old daughter likes the oldies stations. She loves Temptations and Aretha Franklin.

It’s fun when my ten year old comes out on Warped Tour because she brings all her cousins and they get to spend the day hanging out. The bands all have to be nice or they’re going to be playing at 11 o’clock the next morning.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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