Small Label Has Own Stage at Festival

Now that two of the Southland’s biggest radio festival concerts--the KROQ Weenie Roast and KIIS-FM’s Wango Tango--are in the books, pop fans can turn their attention to one of the summer’s major touring fests, the Vans Warped Tour, which opens Friday in Nampa, Idaho, and hits L.A. with shows July 10-11 at the Coliseum, then moves to Seaside Park in Ventura on July 12.

This year’s tour is special for siblings Richard and Stefanie Reines, who started attending the Warped Tour as fans in 1995. Six years ago they launched a small label, Drive-Thru Records, from a bedroom of their Sherman Oaks home, and they have usually succeeded in placing at least one of their acts on some portion of the Warped Tour.

But this year the label, now based in Woodland Hills, will feature several of its punk, pop and emo bands on a stage of its own; it’s the first time the Warped Tour has included a stage dedicated to an individual record label. Acts including Home Grown, Allister, the Movielife, Rx Bandits, Finch and the Starting Line will perform on the Drive-Thru stage, while a couple of higher-profile Drive-Thru bands--pop-rockers Something Corporate and pop-punkers New Found Glory--will be on Warped’s main stage, along with such headliners as Bad Religion, Flogging Molly, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and NOFX.

“This year we wanted to get as many bands as possible on the tour because we have so many releases coming out this summer,” Richard Reines says. “We thought, ‘Let’s call Kevin and see if he’ll give us our own stage.’ We never in a million years thought he’d say yes.”

Says Warped founder Kevin Lyman, “This came about last October, which is when we meet with all the labels to see which acts they’re pushing and how they feel about their roster. Richard and Stefanie basically said, ‘We want our whole roster on the tour.’ I said that was very unlikely, then they asked, ‘What if we bring our own stage?’

“It’s a new thing. It’s going to be interesting, but it has caused some confusion in the industry.”

Specifically, Lyman said, it’s been suggested a label can buy its way into a featured spot on the tour, which this year has 48 dates running through Aug. 18. Reines says that the Drive-Thru stage will cost his company nearly $500,000 but that he believes it will be worth it for the exposure his acts will get.

“I don’t consider it a buy-on if they’re bringing an entire stage,” Lyman says. “That’s a very expensive thing to do, and they’re footing the bill, which gave me even more respect for them. Instead of doing tour support for all their bands on different tours, they’re just putting them all on one tour. It brings a whole separate new attraction to the Warped Tour without cutting anyone else out.”