It’s another scorching day in the South, where Justin Sane from Anti-Flag is a week into the band’s monthlong stint on the Vans Warped Tour.
“What better place [to talk],” he says, “than a dirty parking lot in Atlanta with a bunch of generators running around me?”
“Is that where you are, Atlanta?” I ask him. “I thought you were in Charlotte.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right! See, I don’t even know where I am.”
And with that, Sane epitomizes the life of bands on the Warped Tour, moving from city to city every day to offer their best, most furious 25 minutes.
The tour arrives at the KeyBank Pavilion Friday morning with a lineup that also includes The Adolescents, The Alarm, The Ataris, Save Ferris, Barb Wire Dolls, Blessthefall, GWAR, Silverstein, Hatebreed and Hawthorne Heights.
“The shows have been smaller,” Sane says. “I think sometimes on Warped Tour, there’s that super big headliner that appears. We were on Warped Tour the year Papa Roach broke [2000] and the year that 3OH!3 got big [2010] and Katy Perry was on it one year [2008]. I don’t know if it’s sort of missing that artist that has the big summer song. But it’s still good. It’s still been really cool. For me, it’s been a blast. You get to see a lot of bands that you might not normally get to watch.”
This is the 11th Warped Tour for Anti-Flag, the Pittsburgh-based political punks now one of the bigger, more veteran bands on the bill. They’re happy to connect with Warped fans — who Sane says might only go to this one punk show a year — and offer a counter-perspective to some of the other bands and merchants on the tour.
“I think a lot of people write off Warped Tour, that it doesn’t matter and it’s not important, but I think reaching those people matters. We’ve connected with those people through the years: just after 9/11, after the Iraq Invasion, through George Bush and Obama coming in, and kind of the apathy [during the] Obama [years], and now there’s a new politicization of people with Trump. If this is how they connect with an alternative point of view, going to Warped Tour, then I think that makes it worthwhile for us to be here. For us, the message is of inclusion and tolerance and empathy.”
So far, the biggest headline to emerge from Warped was the opposite. It arose when Leonard Grave Phillips, frontman of veteran punk band The Dickies, launched a misogynistic rant from the stage in Denver against a woman from the advocacy group Safer Scenes, who was protesting their set by holding a sign that said, “Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men! Punk shouldn’t be predatory!” The woman was a friend of the feminist band War on Women.
“We weren’t here at the time, we didn’t witness it, I know that it involved War on Women, who we are friends with,” Sane says. “They felt like during the Dickies show, there were things being said that they didn’t feel comfortable with and they fought back. If you have a point of view that you think is important, if you’re not here, you’re not offering it up. War on Women do not need us to fight their battle. I do happen to share their point of view. My point of view is that sexualizing women and calling them the c-word is not something that should be tolerated.”
For him, misogyny is not the only blemish at Warped through the years.
“For example,” he says, “we started an organization called Military Free Zone many years ago to combat predatory military recruitment. Well, on a lot of these dates, the Marines are here trying to recruit people. I think we’re the counterpoint to those people, saying, ‘We believe the Marines are an organization used by the wealthy to keep their power in check. We believe the military in general is set up to help further gains of multinational corporations, not to keep our country safe.’ It’s a conversation we can have with them.
“And just to clarify,” he adds, “I have family in the military. I’m not against the people in the military, but I think what the military is sold as, the sales pitch, is a very different thing than what the military actually becomes. We had soldiers sign up after 9/11 because they thought they were going to be fighting the people that committed the 9/11 atrocities and they ended up in Iraq, and they didn’t think they should be in Iraq.”
Once again, Anti-Flag, the band that gave us “Die for the Government,” is ready to commit these principles to record. They spent June in LA recording their 10th album and the follow-up to 2015’s “American Spring,” working for the first time with producer Benji Madden, also the singer-guitarist for pop-punk band Good Charlotte.
Anti-Flag wrote nearly 40 songs for the yet-untitled project and reduced it to 11.
It will be the band’s first new material since Donald Trump became president.
“Obviously, with Donald Trump coming into office, there were a lot of ideas we wanted to express,” Sane says. “The message isn’t 100 percent focused on Donald Trump, but Anti-Flag has always been influenced by what’s going on in our society. We’re making a record to comment on our society and our world, so we’re looking at the idea that a lot of people seem to think it’s normal to be racist or to be sexist or bigoted, and to me that seems like a step backward.”
The first single is likely to be “American Attraction,” a song that he says “highlights the fact that the things that are glorified the most are the worst elements, like violence, weapons and war [over] empathy and unity.”
The album, which will be out in the fall, never mentions Trump by name.
“Some songs can actually speak to certain times even if they were written a long time ago,” he says. “I really feel like when you insert a particular name in there, you kind of date it.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576.
First Published: July 13, 2017, 4:00 a.m.