If you relied on the mainstream entertainment press to keep up with rock & roll in 1991, you were probably of the opinion that punk rock was dead and gone. That's why so many folks seemed surprised when, late in that year, Nirvana exploded onto radio, MTV, and the Billboard charts with the release of Nevermind, awakening the mass audience to the fact that punk and its myriad offshoots had been alive and well and lurking under the radar for the past decade, nurtured by a network of independent labels, fanzines, and small clubs. Within a few years, the commercial success of Green Day, the Offspring, and Rancid confirmed that punk was not only still out there, but millions of kids finally decided they liked it after all, and the music industry concluded it was high time they figured out how to market the stuff.
One guy who had a handle on selling punk rock to a new and larger audience was Kevin Lyman, who, after several years of promoting extreme-sports events and helping with the annual Lollapalooza Tour, partnered with skateboarder-shoe company Vans to create the Vans Warped Tour. Launched in 1994, the tour sent a busload of punk bands on the road, playing large outdoor venues with as many as 50 acts on multiple stages over the course of a single day. While most of the bands received only token payment for their shows, it provided them with a golden opportunity to perform for large audiences and sell T-shirts and other merchandise to eager audiences; the tour also allowed companies hoping to appeal to the lucrative youth demographic (like Vans) to add some hip cache to their wares. The Vans Warped Tour has become something of an institution on the summer-touring circuit, with the show playing dozens of major markets around the country and hundreds of bands vying for the opportunity to join in, especially since it helped launch the careers of acts such as blink-182, No Doubt, Paramore, and Kid Rock.
There's certainly a story to be told here, and that led filmmaker Parris Patton to tag along and make a documentary about the 2010 tour, but what he ended up with is No Room for Rockstars, a rather odd portrait of a semi-significant cultural event. Rather than present a history of the Warped Tour or a sampler of the music one might encounter on a given tour stop, No Room for Rockstars focuses on three of the nearly 50 acts that were on the roster for the 2010 edition, none of which conform to the sound or style for which the tour is best known. Suicide Silence are an extreme metal band from California; their front man, Mitch Lucker, is a howling demon on stage, but off-stage he's a sweet, well-mannered guy who tours relentlessly because it's the best way he knows to support his wife and child. Never Shout Never is an acoustic-based pop band led by Christofer Drew, who looks too young to be out on the road without his parents and sings sweet, naïve, heartfelt songs about love. And Mike Posner is an R&B-influenced pop singer who seems entirely out of place on the Warped stage, except for the fact that he's a powerfully driven professional willing to take any gig that will broaden his audience. Another band is featured in the movie, though they aren't officially on the bill -- Forever Came Calling are a trio from a tiny Southern California town who follow the tour from city to city, selling CDs of their self-published album to folks waiting in line and asking people to sign a petition requesting they be added to next year's tour, which they're convinced could be their big break.
Patton has made a film about the hard work of touring and the nomadic life of musicians, but curiously, No Room for Rockstars doesn't have much to do with music. None of the bands that appear in the movie ever play a complete song onscreen, and Patton spends more time talking to bus drivers, stage technicians, and road managers than he does with the acts who headline the show, or even the fans who show up to hear the music. The sheer effort of setting up and tearing down a show this big night after night is impressive and Patton gets that much across, but while many of the people interviewed talk about the sense of freedom and the familial camaraderie of the touring party, one doesn't get much of a sense of that watching No Room for Rockstars.
The movie has reached the two-thirds mark when Christofer Drew suddenly becomes aware of the aggressive marketing that's part and parcel of the tour (his sense of disappointment resembles that of a child who has dropped his ice-cream cone on the sidewalk), and while the documentary occasionally offers a glimpse of the downsides of touring, Patton clearly admires Kevin Lyman and his enterprise far too much to ever become especially critical. Ultimately, it's Forever Came Calling who end up being the most compelling story in No Room for Rockstars -- as they wander across the country in a beat-up van while subsisting on coffee and doughnuts, they seem more punk rock than anyone else here, willing to take the hard road if it gets them heard. While Mike Posner was the commercial-success story of the 2010 Warped Tour, you get the feeling that Forever Came Calling are the ones who will still be playing ten years down the road, too determined to make good on their dream to ever give up. They're a rock & roll story worth hearing; the rest of the film is more about sleeplessness and bad weather than the music that's supposed to be the reason for putting this show on the road.