I got my face stepped on at the Warped Tour

Let's hold off on the story of the crowd surfer using my face as a launching pad, and skip right to the important thing: the beer. The Warped Tour - America's largest and most popular punk music festival - serves beer, but every year it gets tougher and tougher to locate. They used to have a few beer stands among the food and drink places, but this year there was only one beer stand, and it was hidden.

The one thing most people want at a festival, when the sun is beating down on them and the moshing and slam dancing makes them sweaty, is a beer. Wanting easy access to cold beers is nothing to be ashamed of. It's pretty much a basic human right at music festivals. However, it took my brother and I damn near an hour to find the beer stand.

Anyone who walked the festival grounds actually holding a beer was immediately bombarded with the same question from 10 different people: "Where the hell's the beer stand?"

The festival took place in the parking lot of the Metrodome in Minneapolis. The area was modest but complicated, and the beer stand was on top of a long ramp normally used as an access point to the stadium. There were no signs advertising the beer, only a few red Budweiser umbrellas mixed in with a bunch of red Coca-Cola ones. The Budweiser umbrellas were impossible to spot from down below, and once you finally found the stand, you were forced to walk up the long ramp every time you wanted another beer.

They might as well have just hung up a big sign that said, "Are we pissing you off? Good. We hate you."

To make matters worse, the beer stand was the stand fathest from the stages, and you were only allowed to buy one beer at a time. So by the time you walked down to watch a band, your beer was pretty much gone. Talk about a buzzkill.

As if that bit of poor organization didn't lose enough money for the festival, the ATM was even harder to find than the beer. This is mind boggling, since the whole idea of such festivals is to make money. You can't make money if 3/4 of the people can't find the ATM. Signs noted the ATM was "by gate B", when in fact it was inside the Metrodome, closer to gate C.

On the plus side, the ATM was right next to the medical area (another place you probably don't want to make difficult to find), and i got to see this girl who had a bone from her wrist practically breaking through the skin on the palm of her hand. Her hand looked mutated. It was awesome.

Well, maybe not for her, but I found it amusing. Another thing I found amusing were the fat girls who were sitting in the medical area crying. There was nothing physically wrong with them, they were just lame teenie-boppers who didn't realize a mosh pit means getting thrown around. Sissies. Next year, the organizers of the festival should hire a guy to walk around the medical area playing a tiny violin and saying, "Ooooh, poor sissy. You get a boo-boo?"

The mosh pit brings us around to the original topic, which was people stepping on my face. The last band to play was Flogging Molly, one of my favorites. The last time I saw them, nobody knew who they were, so there was only about 30 people there. This time, there were around a thousand people there, with about 300 of them packed in tight. It was so crowded you couldn't even start a mosh pit.

With no mosh pit, there was only one thing left to do. Crowd surf. Normally, crowd surfing is fine. It's usually done by girls and younger guys who don't weigh much. The Flogging Molly performance started out with good crowd surfing, but as the songs went on, everyone and their mother started doing it. There were 250-pound guys up there, and in at least a few instances, two of them would be pushed at me at the same time, crushing me.

It was ridiculous. I couldn't even watch the concert, because I was too busy looking behind me to make sure fat guys weren't being lobbed on my head. At one point, I felt a shoe rest against my cheek. Before I could react, the shoe pressed harder, and used my face as a launching pad. It hurt like a son of a bitch. I was also kicked in the face about 10 times, crushed by multiple crowd surfers three times, had my neck landed on from behind twice, and was nearly smothered to death by a girl's ass.

I'm not picky when it comes to methods of dying, but if I'm going to die by suffocation, damn it, I want to be smothered by breasts.

Here's some other notes from the Warped Tour:

-Note to people trying to register concert-goers to vote: I dig what you're doing, but it's extremely rude and unethical when you ask people who they're planning to vote for.

-Note to the middle-aged lady who gave me a sour look: Yes, I was laughing at you because you're old and out of place at the Warped Tour, but don't feel bad. If your kid had been with you at the moment, I would have laughed at him or her even more.

-Note to the person who placed a large margarita glass on the floor of the portable toilet, and filled it up entirely with pee: Seeing that glass on the floor was the funniest part of my day. Kudos.

-Note to the losers who actually paid $15 to park in a downtown lot: It was Sunday. Meter parking was free. You're dumb.

-Note to the girl walking past me with the french fries: When I pretended that I was going to steal a french fry from you as I walked past, it was a joke. Lighten up, you french fry hoarding bastard.

-Note to the band "Simple Plan": You suck. Please go away. Only 14-year-old girls like you, and they were all standing in the crowd with their mothers.

-Note to all the people wearing the exact same Ramones or Taking Back Sunday shirts:I'll bet you thought you were pretty original and cool when you left the house, didn't you? Ha ha.

What the hell is that?  Find out! More from last week: "You've been kicked in the nuts!" Man shoots himself in groin Dodge's logo looks like a vagina Much, much more Join now

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Reader Comments

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haddon@trendwrecker.com                      Josh      Mar 22, 2005 • 9:21pm   You are fucking loser man and ar eno owrse than the fat chikc scrying. You are a pussy, suck it up and stop pretending you are better than everyone. c1nt4x3rr0r      Jul 26, 2004 • 9:31pm   Now that's funny. Katers      Jul 26, 2004 • 6:56pm   Haha, Paul got stepped on. Freakin' sweet.

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