Subject: Warped Tour

• Rain and the Parade, But Not Necessarily Both at the Same Time

  June 25, 2007

• Drenched in Blog: Say Ya Want a Resolution?

  January 2, 2008

• Last Night: NOFX at Warehouse Live

  February 27, 2008

• Weekend Music: No Money, No Problem

  April 11, 2008

• Rock and Roll Dream Team

  Forget the office-football draft, dude. Here's a far cooler way to waste your time and your employer's money.

  August 26, 2004

• Top Ten Hip-Hop Albums Of 2008

  A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience--these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled "Ten More Albums You've Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear," plenty. Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we've found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Thin

  December 18, 2008

• Local Rotation: Something Fierce's There Are No Answers

  Something Fierce There Are No Answers www.somethingfiercemusic.com Open letter to the Warped Tour: If you don't include Something Fierce on your 2009 80-something band docket, you deserve to have Andy Macdonald or Kyle Loza do one of their extreme-sports stunts right into your figurative nuts. Or whatever. Not every band in its early (early) twenties can find the Buddy Holly heart inside an MC5/Sex Pistols riff machine like "Modern Girl," after all.

  January 7, 2009

• This Week in SXSW: Katy Perry Kisses the "Lake of Fire"

  There's now less than a month to go until we here at Rocks Off throw sobriety and sane living to the wind at this year's SXSW festival. This past week we learned of a boatload of new stuff about the weeklong liver-damaging voyage in March, so here goes... The list of bands keeps growing and growing, but we have noticed that some of the events are not as extravagant as years past. Many festivals, including the Vans Warped Tour, have scaled down their theatrics for the sake of saving cash. Th

  February 11, 2009

• Flannel File: The Descendents

  One hot morning in August of 1997, my little brother and I hopped on MARTA (Mom wouldn't let me use the car) and moseyed on down to the Lakewood Fairgrounds in Atlanta for the third-ever Warped Tour. Should the writer of a column about experimental music be ashamed of having gone to the Warped Tour as a kid? Yes, clearly he should have burst from the womb reading Henry Miller and listening to Mission of Burma (oh wait, that was my brother). But in my defense, sample the lineups from some of thes

  June 4, 2009

• Pennywisdom

  June 24, 1999

• Album of the Week: Shooter Jennings & the .357s' Bad Magick

  Shooter Jennings & the .357s Bad Magick www.shooterjennings.com "I don't wanna be a legend/ I just wanna be a man," Shooter Jennings sings on "Living Proof," a Hank Williams Jr. cover and one of two previously unreleased songs on Bad Magick, which otherwise rounds up the best of Jennings' three studio albums starting with 2005's Put the "O" Back In Country. The song is an obvious fit for Shooter: alongside Bocephus, he inherited one of Nashville's most formidable legacies when father

  April 2, 2009

• The Last Place You Look

  January 22, 2009

• Something Fierce: There Are No Answers

  January 15, 2009

• Alkaline Trio, with Pretty Girls Make Graves and Pitch Black

  Tuesday, June 3

  May 29, 2003

• Ludo

  August 28, 2008

• MC Chris

  August 21, 2008

• The Meridian

  Pit etiquette and Black Flag tats at the Meridian

  October 11, 2007

• A Strange Land

  August 10, 2006

• One Piece at a Time

  Psychobilly at the gates

  July 19, 2007

• American Idols Live

  Which megatour is really more punk rock?

  July 12, 2007

• Various Artists

  Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly

  August 31, 2006

• Punk-o-Rama

  Our intrepid reporters set out to experience the Vans Warped Tour -- so you don't have to

  June 29, 2006

• Scared Straight

  Alkaline Trio gets clean on its pristine new LP

  September 22, 2005

• Singing from the Gut

  You never know what'll be spewed at a Heist at Hand show

  September 8, 2005

• Can't Touch the MMMBop

  A new boxed set excavates the '90s

  August 4, 2005

• Strhess Tour, with Darkest Hour, Bleeding Through, Misery Signals, Zao and Fight Paris

  Sunday, July 31, at the Meridian, 1503 Chartres, 713-225-1717.

  July 28, 2005

• Warped Minds

  A day at punk rock's biggest summer tour takes more than just stamina

  June 23, 2005

• Various Artists

  Bonnaroo 2004

  June 16, 2005

• Method Rocking

  Minnie Driver and Juliette Lewis have started bands. Come on, you know you're curious.

  January 13, 2005

• Playbill

  December 2, 2004

• Rock and Roll High School

  Vans Warped, Class of '04

  June 24, 2004

• Playbill

  June 17, 2004

• Boys Night Out, Moneen and Senses Fail, with the Beautiful Mistake and For the Time Being

  Friday, February 6

  February 5, 2004

• Everything Old Is New Again

  What do punks the Dropkick Murphys have in common with soulful Norah Jones? More than you think.

  July 31, 2003

• Free-Falling

  H-town skydiving options

  July 17, 2003

• Reggae Rugrats

  Morgan Heritage keeps roots reggae rolling into a new century

  May 8, 2003

• Pitfall Punks

  Swinging over the crocodile ponds with the Ataris

  November 28, 2002

• Vans Warped Tour

  Saturday, June 29

  June 27, 2002

• Flogging Molly

  Friday, March 29

  March 28, 2002

• Racket

  Pinpointing when Texas music jumped the shark

  August 16, 2001

• Bored? Tired?...

  L7 delivers a message of defiance to all those prepackaged rockers

  November 11, 1999

• Summer Sounds

  May 21, 2009

• Flannel File: Quicksand

  Speaking of the early days of the Warped Tour, let's talk about Quicksand. Along with Helmet, Quicksand developed and popularized a particular type of post-hardcore that took the metal-influenced hardcore punk of 1980s New York, cut the tempo in half and filled up the resulting space with melody and atmosphere. Quicksand frontman Walter Schreifels had previously been the creative force behind Gorilla Biscuits, one of the most important bands of the NYC youth crew scene (he also played bass for a

  June 10, 2009

• Houston's Rememberances of Warped Tours Past

  For the past 15 years, the Vans Warped Tour has been barreling through city after city across the globe creating punk rockers out of boy scouts and riot grrls out of band geeks. The traveling punk, hardcore and emo road show has been coming to Houston since 1995. The first taste local punks got of founder Kevin Lyman's tour was at the AstroArena, starring such future luminaries as No Doubt, Sublime and the Deftones, along with members of the old guard like Sick Of It All and L7. Everyone who is

  July 2, 2009

• Flipping Out: Aiden At The Vans Warped Tour

  We are currently nursing one hell of a sun hangover, but we have a video from yesterday's Vans Warped Tour to hold you over until Monday morning. Have a safe and happy Independence Day from all of us at Rocks Off. Warning: This contains sweat, cursing, dust, and a whole lotta teenage vitriol.

  July 4, 2009

• Aftermath: Vans Warped Tour at Sam Houston Race Park

  Photos by Craig Hlavaty Aiden stirred up the moshers on a sizzling afternoon. For anyone out there thinking that kids don't care about music anymore, or that all they want out of it is illegal downloads and faux guitars connected to gaming consoles, Rocks Off would like to kindly direct you to the 15th installment of the Vans Warped Tour. Nearing a decade over the age of the average attendant, Rocks Off can tell you it's not easy covering a show of this magnitude. Somewhere walking into t

  July 6, 2009

• The Distillery: Rancid's Let the Dominoes Fall

  What it do, Rancid? What's crackin', formerly crusty-punk rude boys? Been a long time since we last hang, bros. When Dan Zeller lent me Let's Go during senior year of high school, I knew y'all were onto something special: three-billy-goats-gruff sung scrabbling punk anthems and routs with just a hint of ska. ...And Out Come The Wolves was what really sold me, though, as you found a slightly more commercial sound that brought MTV rotation (for "Time Bomb"), plus a platinum plaque. Our interest be

  July 17, 2009

• Inquiring Minds: Pop Princess Katy Perry

  Mike Ruiz​They say man can't exist on indie-rock and metal alone, or something like that. Rocks Off firmly agrees, so when we hear good mainstream pop we ride that horse for all it's worth. That's why a little over a year ago, when Katy Perry hit with her single "Ur So Gay," we were enamored with the raven-haired California native. It wasn't quite bubblegum, and it wasn't quite rock and roll, but it was catchy as hell. Plus it was delivered in such a non-plussed pinup/rocker-girl motif, that m

  July 31, 2009

• MUTEMATH

  October 29, 2009

• Aftermath: Puppet Shows, Neo-Rastas, Freddie Gonorrhea, Black Congress and an Impromptu Nap Saturday at Westheimer Block Party

  Marc Brubaker​ Saturday's Westheimer Block Party began on a wobbly note, as most music festivals do with fans and staff still trying to find their bearings, aided by alcohol or otherwise. The scene on the ground seemed chaotic just an hour into the first day of the event. Organizer and Free Press Houston editor Omar Afra walked from venue making sure everything was going off without a proverbial hitch. The first thing we saw on Saturday was renaissance rapper Nosaprise on the Helios outdoor st

  November 16, 2009