(Read AFI Part One) - Sweden's the Sounds — one of the few female-fronted acts — brought a bit of class to the proceedings thanks to singer Maja Ivarsson's black heels and clingy cocktail dress. The formal wear was just a front for an unhinged stage persona that paid serious homage to late punk priestess Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, right down to the partly shorn blond hairdo and a few unladylike glimpses of her panties during some deep knee bends. As a bonus, the Sounds were one of the few bands at Warped to bust out the cowbell, which they did proudly during the catchy "Song With a Mission."
Though they had the day's most iridescent hairdos, there was nothing elegant about hardcore punk survivors the Casualties. The New York kings of the Day-Glo Mohawk tore through a set that included the tough-as-nails punk ballad "Punk Rock Love" and their tribute to the three deceased members of the Ramones, "Made in NYC." Their set also inspired the day's biggest circle pit, a 50-foot-wide swirl of bodies that tore around the sound booth. The crowd was less juiced up by the Pink Spiders, who, between their pink spandex pants and fingerless gloves, seemed to confuse some of the kids with their Ramones-meets-Loverboy sound and look.
Though she didn't draw a huge crowd, old-schooler Joan Jett was the sentimental favorite of the day and the unofficial cell-phone champ, as half of her crowd held their cellies aloft during her set. Lyman says he invited her along as a lesson to the rest of the bands on the tour about the history of punk rock. Jett and her Blackhearts delivered a tight, half-hour set of classics, including "I Love Rock N' Roll," "Crimson and Clover," "Do You Wanna Touch Me" and her latest hit cover, Sweet's "ACDC".
Jett, who started out as a member of the jailbait all-girl punk group the Runaways as a teenager in 1976, has never forgotten the first rule of punk: The chorus needs to be easily chantable (think "whoa-whoa-whoa" or "yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah") and the guitars need to rip like buzz saws.
Doug Pyle, 21, drove up from Knoxville, Tennessee, to attend his third Warped Tour show, and he admitted to not really being into all the emo bands on the bill. The heavily pierced, Mohawk-sporting Pyle, clad in a Rancid T-shirt, was on the same page as Dayton, Ohio's John Fritz, 24, who lamented the emo overload and tagged Jett and the Casualties as his favorites of the day. "Man, she's still really hot!" Fritz said of the lean, ripped Jett.
Theatrical California goths AFI rambled from punk to goth and electronica without losing a step. After a day of blazing temperatures, nature seemed to feel the heaviness of singer Davey Havok's inner vampire, as gray clouds rolled in to block the sun during the band's set. Havok, a bilevel-haircut-sporting dude in distress, waved his tattooed arms and threw off panicky jazz-hand gestures while screaming and thrashing around during the Depeche Mode-like gothtronica tunes "Love Like Winter" and "Silver and Cold."
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