In a word--hot. Just as our driver Darrell was explaining that our bus' generator wouldn't function properly in the intense Phoenix heat--the very same component in the bus parked behind us caught fire. The temperature peaked at around 115 degrees when we went onstage at 2:15 p.m.

DAY TWO--7/3

In a word--Gold Bond. The temperature in San Diego was a solid 40 degrees cooler than in Phoenix, but some discomforts are impervious to weather. In the production office I saw a fellow musician (name witheld) who was trying to find a runner to get his band some Gold Bond medicated powder. I must admit I've never used the stuff, but it apparently alleviates a condition our tour manager Chris Wrightsman calls "gig butt." I can see it will be a hot item on this tour; guys will be peddling it like some illicit drug in hushed backstage deals. Tour organizers may want to consider a Vans/Gold Bond co-sponsorship for Warped '99.

At a payphone I ran into Monique of Save Ferris. We could smell food, which I explained was not the tour catering but the vittles of local vendors. She joked, "So what we're smelling isn't prison food?" Her words hit home later in the catering tent where I found myself gazing into a plate of hot beef on white bread smeared with what looked like cheese sauce, or some sort of caulking.

DAY 3--7/4

A pleasant, if dusty, day at Irvine Meadows, where a couple of weeks earlier we played the KROQ Weenie Roast.

DAY 4--7/5

A day off. The incredible Ozomotli jammed under the stars in a Squaw Valley, CA parking lot where several band and Warped crew buses sat huddled together like space-age covered wagons.

DAY 5--7/6

Boreal Ridge, Lake Tahoe. On this day I learned that the mysterious man spotted sitting in with Punk Rock Karaoke and wandering around at the shows with a bass guitar on his back looking like a rabbi in a beard and black suit is one Mike Watt.

Moments before we had to go on, a Warped musician knocked on our bus door and asked if we wouldn't mind letting a security guard use our bathroom. Assuming this seasoned touring drummer would have told the fellow about the sacred No-Crapping Rule of bus toilets, we let him in, and I left for the stage. Later I heard the story: when the bathroom door had been closed a minute too long, those left on the bus began to smell the truth. After our set, when the guy's dump had festered for a solid (or rather, not-so-solid) half hour, the bus smelled like a diaper and Wrightsman had to go in like on of the Chernobyl firemen and clean the john with ammonia, bottled water and paper towels.

DAY 6--7/7

The image chiseled into my gray matter from this perfect-weather day on a San Francisco pier is of motorcycles and their riders hovering airborne between ramps while we played "Brown Derby Jump," shouting "Jump! Jump! Jump!"

DAY 7--7/8

A day off, which we spent at NBC studios performing for a taping of Howie Mandel's talk show.

DAY 8--7/9

Seattle. Steve Perry told me about a conversation he had with a Warped musician who has a thick English accent. His transcription of the guitarist's comment on the tour catering: "Bet' na' faht or al **** misef agin."

A member of Bad Religion gave us a videocassette of infamous punk band The Mentors. It includes gems like their semi-pornographic [*Expletive Deleted*] Movie, their provocative appearance on the right-wing Wally Show, and reaches an apex of hilarity with audio of a conservative senator in a PMRC hearing reciting the lyrics of "Golden Shower." In exchange we may have to turn Bad Religion onto a little something we call Master Mario...

DAY 9--7/10

In a moment resembling a scene from Brazil, I was awakened at 3 a.m. so I could stumble into the Canadian Customs building and stand in a long line of sleepy musicians waiting to have a non-descript man glance at my passport and check my name off a list. Luckily our return to the U.S. after the Vancouver show was made easier by an officer named Dawn who, it turns out, is a fan.

DAY 10--7/11

The tour's "Portland" stop turned out to be in the rural community of Estacada, some 40 miles outside of Oregon's largest metropolis in a woodsy setting that could only reaffirm the image I'm sure many Warped musicians have of Oregon as one big location from Deliverance.

DAY 11--7/12

Oh Boise! Actually, we were in Nampa, Idaho. After I told a waitress at the restaurant where I ate dinner the name of our band, she had a "joke" for me: She punctured a maraschino cherry with a cocktail straw and called it "an anti-virgin kit with a plastic applicator." Yuk, yuk.

DAY 12--7/13

Our tenor player, Sean, bought some beer at a Salt Lake City supermarket, but I refused to drink any of it in protest against what I consider a sinister Orwellian plot. Grocery stores in the state of Utah can't sell a full grown adult real beer, only urinary-bladder-fodder with an alcohol percentage reduced to 3.2 by virtue of a perverse brewing process. To get what those of us in the free world call beer, you have to go to a bar or liquor store or restaurant with a liquor license, a condition which egregiously offends my sensibilities as a U.S. citizen. What if you found yourself in a state where coffee shops could only sell decaf? Not in my America, pal.

DAY 13--7/14

An early set, for us, at the UC Boulder campus, followed by a plane ride to New York to do the David Letterman show on...

DAY 14--7/15

Of all the television experiences we've had, this one went by the most quickly. While Jay Leno has you show up early in the morning and makes an effort to go around and meet all his guests, Letterman didn't require us to be at Ed Sullivan Theatre until 4:00 p.m. and remained completely invisible until around 6:20 when, having just gotten up on my little riser, I realized that cameras were rolling and that the voice I was hearing belonged to The Host. I looked over to see Him holding aloft our CD and introducing us...it all happened in a blur and I'm just glad I got through it knowing that Jimmie Vaughan, sitting in with the CBS orchestra, was watching the whole time. Hours later we arrived at the hotel in Tulsa and found a few Warped friends in the bar who had just watched the show on the big screen TV there. After a few cocktails, I caught the West Coast feed on our bus. It looked and sounded all right, but then again maybe it was the Scotch.

DAY 16 (I think it's 16 - I may have lost track) to 19

This period marks the inevitable point in every summer tour where the gigs begin to run together into one long, steamy day: Tulsa in the morning, St. Louis for lunch, Chicago in the afternoon, and Milwaukee at night.

DAY 20

On this day the Warped and Ozzfest tours converged into one summer supershow. Kurt Loder was there with MTV, covering what might have been a clash of musical subcultures, but ended up as one more or less seamless blanket of aggressive guitar rock. Warped had Rancid and the Deftones, Ozzy had Motorhead and Tool. But the only Ozzfest act I caught was The Great One himself, and I have to admit to feeling a little sunbeam of rock'n'roll religion when I heard the opening strains of "War Pigs" coming across the way. "My God," I found myself thinking. "That's...that's...Ozzy." I hurried over to the Ozz stage and found what looked like 40,000+ people bearing witness to the lyricist and singer who gave the music of Black Sabbath its heart (which disappeared after he was fired), slugged on through the eighties and still remains the living embodiment of the crazed but somehow endearing eccentricity of rock godhood (check out the July issue of Guitar World in which Ozzy describes the crumbling of his first marriage: "The last straw," he says,"came when I shot all our cats."). I only wish I could have seen the whole show.

DAY 21

Lawrence, Kansas city of my birth. So hot and humid it felt like being back in the womb.

DAY 22

A day off in Terra Haute, Indiana, which we now know as the Town with Two Taxicabs.

DAY 23

Quotes for the day: At the end of a muggy day in Pittsburgh a very hard-working member of our crew, having fallen victim to a syndrome that occasionally haunts all men out on The Road, began muttering things like, "I should be getting in a cab to go hump somebody" and "all I want is a purple-haired space whore."

We're now three short days from the end of the tour. Here's a recap of some highs and lows from the past couple of weeks:

7/24 to 7/27

Memorable moments from this respite in the country of two languages and no guns include drinking at a waterfront bar in Toronto with members of Australian band Frenzal Rhomb, a visit to an upscale Montreal strip club, a meal at a Quebec City McDonald's where all the menus were in French, and an outdoor gig (unrelated to the Warped tour) in downtown Toronto after which John of Marcy Playground, on a break from the H.O.R.D.E. tour, stopped by the backstage tent to say hello.

7/30

According to our trumpet player, Dana, while we were playing in Philadelphia an audience member shouted out something like the following: "Go back to MTV with your corporate swing." I guess this means the cover's blown on our plot to ripen the world of music for a complete and final takeover by The Man.

8/1

A show at Randall's Island in New York City, by the end of which I could write my name in the dust on my guitars.

8/2

This was our second visit to the deserted boardwalk of Asbury Park, NJ. The neighborhood typically has a kind of post-apocalyptic gloom that thousands of Warped fans managed to quell for a day.

8/3

On the advice of our friend in Philadelphia, we took our corporate music back home to MTV, spending our day off in NYC filming a 15 second promo in which we play our rendition of the old MTV theme in a swing club.

8/4

In Jacksonville two of the Warped motorcyclists were injured when they overshot the landing ramp and came straight down onto pavement from a height of some three stories. We hope they're both okay.

8/5

We had to cancel out of the Miami show due to our bass player Dan's worsening flu. Our apologies to South Florida fans.

8/6

Having canceled our Orlando show so Dan could recover, we spent the day at a Days Inn in Pompano Beach.

In the afternoon Steve got off the phone and told me that MTV wants us to edit shots out of the "Brown Derby Jump" video showing a woman throwing flaming derbies. Apparently the music channel is sensitive about the issue of fire, thanks to an incident I vaguely recall in which a child arson was blamed on the influence of Beavis and Butthead. I guess this will mean shelving video ideas for our hit singles "Light That Match" and "Burn Mommy's Bad Boyfriend."

~~Jason Moss