Alright, it's been a few weeks since I've done a proper #ninetiesfriday post so I'll remedy that right now. Well, now for you as you read but I'm going to stop writing here for a minute to get that Friday morning coffee on, brb :D

OK, the Vans Warped Tour is on the menu today. The Warped Tour stared in 1995 but was not yet sponsored by Vans. 1996 was the year Vans came onboard as the major sponsor of the tour, which I did not know at the time.

The '96 tour began in Phoenix, AZ, on July 4th :D

The Desert Sky Pavilion (as it was called then) is an outdoor amphitheater, with seats in front mostly covered by a roof and general admission grass in the back.

I only mention this because the temperature was 108°F (42°C) that day and that heat factored into my favorite band (the only reason I went to the show) getting really pissed at the lack of dancing during their set.

Before that though, here's the lineup that day:

There were some other bands as well but I guess they are cool enough for that thumbnail on lastfm.

It's ok though, because the only band I went to see that day was Fishbone. I've been a Fishbone fan since about 1991, when The Reality of My Surroundings came out. I still remember seeing their performance of Sunless Saturday on Saturday Night Live before the album came out.

Holy hell, I just watched it again and wow, big time chills these guys were just amazing.

Unfortunately Saturday Night Live is vigilant at taking down things on youtube, so I don't have an embedded video, but here is that performance on dailymotion. Damn, chills!

I want to turn this into a Fishbone post but I'll save that for later. I've seen them live at least 20 times and believe me I have some Fishbone stories. Though that probably only matters to Fishbone fans, of which there are very few :(

Anyhow, back to the show...

Here is an MTV segment on the 1996 tour. It's mostly lame but I'll include it anyway.

Ah, I found the full lineup for the show I was at:

I don't remember much from that day, including any of the bands but Fishbone. I may have left after they performed because I was not a fan of any of these other bands at the time. Looking at that lineup now I recognize a good amount of the band names, mostly because @dfinney still goes to see a lot of these bands xD.

Couple bands on that list that got real big are Blink-182 and Deftones. At the time of this show both only had ONE album out and were relatively unknown.

I became a big Deftones fan in 2000 when, White Pony came out, awesome album. I'm listening to their first album as I type this and it's pretty good as well.

By 1996 Fishbone had five studio albums and three EPs out, so they were the veterans on the tour, along with NOFX I believe, who have been around since the 80s as well.

If you watched Fishbone's SNL performance you can see that the lead singer, Angelo Moore, is extremely animated when he's performing. One of the hallmarks of a Fishbone show use to be Angelo stage diving and crowd surfing while singing.

Well, on this day of 108°F he was every bit as animated as usual, but could not stage dive as there were seats right up to the fence in front of the stage. After the first song he was encouraging the lethargic crowd to get up and dance, by the third song he was berating the crowd for being boring and shitty.

I don't remember how many songs they played but I do remember them getting angrier and angrier at the lack of animation from the crowd and eventually leaving early.

Oh shit, I just found the setlist from that show

Looking at the setlists from subsequent shows on that tour it appears they did cut the set short, as I look through other stops on the '96 tour I see they did 7 or 8 songs most the time.

Thanks for rolling sown #ninetiesfriday lane with me today, until next time...