Get Out the Vans
Pop-Punk trio ditches Warped Tour for retrospective shows
Jen Zoratti

If you’re considered an all-American power-punk band, it’s practically required that you play the Vans Warped Tour.

But playing a quick and dirty 20-minute set to throngs of sweaty, dehydrated teens gets old quickly. So this year, Chicago punksters Alkaline Trio turned down the festival to do something a bit more punk rock — their own thing.

“We’ve done it (Warped) in the past —did it for two years — and it was starting to get on our nerves,” says drummer Derek Grant. “Honestly, being stuck out in the middle of a field all day, playing to people who’ve also been stuck out in the middle of a field all day, that gets a little trying.”

The trio, rounded out by frontman/guitarist Matt Skiba and bassist Daniel Andriano, is taking its tunes indoors this year, and the band is currently on tour, making its way across Canada before heading back down to the U.S. — despite being added to the Warped lineup anyway.

“People tend to assume that because you’ve done the tour before, you’ll do it again,” Grant says. “We made it clear that it just wasn’t something we were interested in. We politely turned them down, but the people behind the Warped Tour went ahead and put us on the posters anyway.”

Perhaps they were just surprised. Alkaline Trio’s last album, the critically heralded Crimson, came out a year ago, and the summer is usually a good time for a band to hit the festival circuit and move some units. This band decided summer would be a good time to head out on a retrospective tour and play stuff from the past 10 years — stuff they wouldn’t have time to play at, say, a summer festival.

“When Crimson came out, we had an amazing time supporting it,” Grant says. “And normally at this time we’d be taking a break. But we thought we’d get out and play songs we haven’t played.”

The result is a tour titled The Occult Roots of Alkaline Trio, featuring a set comprising mostly old material and requests.

“People can request songs online, and every day we tally it up so we can see what people in Winnipeg, for example, want to hear. That usually makes up 45 minutes of our set,” Grant says.

Alkaline Trio has the catalogue to draw from, and the fan base. The trio formed a few years after pop-punk pioneers Green Day and The Offspring exploded on the scene, and 10 years later the band is still relevant.

The group has seen its fair share of lineup changes, and its sound has evolved, but Grant says that sometimes it takes a look back to be able to see the future.

“It’s not like we want to recreate our first album. We don’t. We’ve grown a lot since then,” the drummer says. “But I think it’s a good idea for an artist to stop and look at the whole of your work. It’s really enabled us to go out in different directions without losing our identity.”