A Warped Plan for Ushering In 2000?

The Y2K doomsayers are warning people not to fly next New Year’s Eve, lest airline computer controls fail due to the millennium bug.

But a concert promoter is hoping to coax an international roster of pop stars into chartered 747s over the South Pacific.

The idea: Hold a celebratory festival in New Zealand, which will be one of the first places on Earth to greet the year 2000, and then head for Hawaii in time to do it all over again. The plan is to have two linked events in each locale--a concert featuring major pop acts and native New Zealand and Hawaiian artists, and a special edition of the Warped tour, the annual youth-skewed trek featuring punk and ska bands with an extreme sports theme.

The former is being organized by Michael Chugg, head of Australian booking agency Frontier, to be held on a plot of sacred land owned by the Maori tribe overlooking Auckland Harbor.

“The idea is to have one big act on at midnight, and another on at 5:20 a.m., which will be first light, coinciding with a flotilla of ships coming through the harbor,” says Chugg. “And then we’d throw everyone on a plane and go to Hawaii and do it again.”

Chugg says he’s in negotiation with several artists, but he won’t say who. One focus of speculation, though, has been Sting--an artist with global appeal and an interest in the tribal culture and spiritual elements meant to be underscored in this event.

Sting’s publicist, Kathy Schenker, says that the singer, currently working on a new album, has expressed an interest in staying home with his family at New Year. Schenker says she has no knowledge of an offer for the Pacific events.

Warped organizer Kevin Lyman has been approached by Chugg and is considering the prospect. The tour usually heads down under that time of year anyway.

“Everyone’s trying to talk me out of it, worried about the airlines,” says Lyman. “But I was very high on the idea. It was a very grueling tour this year, though, and adding something like that might be too much. So I’m not sure what I’ll do at this time.”

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REALLY WARPED: Lyman, who has been putting the Warped shows together for four years now, is adding to this year’s event a measure of refinement. He’s not scaling back the skate-punk element--Blink-182 and Pennywise are already on board for this summer’s U.S. stint, set to start June 26 in Austin and conclude July 31 in Miami. He’s even talking to some hip-hop acts about joining this year.

But he’s also bringing dance instructors. Lyman, having had a little swing revival representation in the past, has put together an orchestra of college musicians that is working out mambo and swing arrangements of punk and rock classics. The ensemble will be featured in a tent separate from the main stages, with dance lessons offered.

He’s also added a rock en espan~ol band, Molotov, to the tour. The day after the tour ends, Molotov will be joined by other Spanish-language acts for a rock en espan~ol Warped that will head from Florida across Texas and the Southwest and finish up in California.

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ROQ THE HOUSE: With recordings of artists ranging from the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Oasis and Hole to Depeche Mode, David Bowie and KISS performing at the Almost Acoustic Christmas and Weenie Roast concerts, the folks at KROQ-FM (106.7) could put together a pretty great series of CD releases, couldn’t they? That’s exactly what station management is thinking, and work’s been started on selecting material and securing artist and record company permission for just such an endeavor.

KROQ and its parent company, CBS/Infinity Broadcasting, have teamed with Jim Guerinot, who owns the BMG-distributed label Time Bomb and manages No Doubt and the Offspring, among others, to move ahead on the project, with a first collection on Time Bomb possible as early as May. Given the intense demand for tickets for those shows, as well as for the annual Christmas album put out by morning men Kevin & Bean (40,000 this year in a couple of days, sold only in Southern California), not to mention the station’s own promotional power, this would seem pretty much a sure thing.

Gene Sandbloom, KROQ’s assistant program director, says he’s spent most of his time in recent weeks listening to tapes from those shows and assessing the quality of the performances and recordings.

“If the music is there, we’ll do it,” he says. “But we’ve realized that the potential for something terrific is there.”