The Dollies had gained a lot of their momentum through the teen crowd. About a year ago, in an interview for Radio Disney, they were asked to confess to their real ages (between 19 and 21) although the members are nearly a decade older.

We don’t write songs to attract a particular audience, Kelly tells me during our dash across Nevada the day before. When we write a song, that’s just what comes out. We record it and younger types gobble it up. Younger types, she confesses, and the older creepy guys that frequent places like Bender’s.

But you would be surprised how many performers you’ll see tomorrow who are playing to a younger crowd, she says.

Aaron Barret, the only original member to Reel Big Fish, advertises his age at 33. But through my telephoto lens I could make out every bag and wrinkle on his face. His pompadour had the glossy opaqueness of a heavily dyed head of hair. The band is obviously tired, the album they advertise as new is nearly two years old.

Mike McColgan, currently of the band Street Dogs, can’t be younger than thirty even though he acts no older than the pit of seventeen year olds who find their jollies in slugging one another.

Still, when bands release albums called Everything Sucks and Fading American Dream, it’s no wonder they sell so well to the young and the hopeless. I would necessarily say the older performing to the young is a bad thing; it’s just rather surprising to see. It makes you wonder how a 33 year old can still hate life enough to write pop songs about it.

The Dollies are scheduled to play on the Skate Ramp Stage, which they have played before. It is a smaller stage, which is usually right next to the ramp that makes the Warped Tour the VANS Warped Tour. However, due to the unusually cramped size of this venue the Skate Ramp Stage is tucked around a corner next to the set up areas for the main stages and behind an enormous bus advertising Monster Energy Drink. The Dollies are then informed that their start time is now 1:30, instead of the advertised 1:45. A fifteen minute change may not seem like much, except when it is more than half of your set.

Bad goes to worse when Cobra Starship starts their set at  1:25 on the stage overshadowing the Skate Ramp.

There are two girls standing next to the stage when The Rots go on. They are both wearing purposefully torn shirts that read The Dollyrots and neon leggings under their skirts. They can’t be more than 16 years old and they are the only two people who show up for The Rots performance. For the most part, this doesn’t discourage the band. But even with his thick aviators masking half his face, Chris looks extremely unenthused.

As the band grinds through their set a few other curious passer-bys stop and get a feel for the music. The band plays their current single, Because I’m Awesome, and then vacates the stage.

Back at the tent, Luis is trying to convince me to go back to the van and get drunk with him. At this particularly frustrating moment I learn that no one in the band is happy with how the tour was being run. Luis and Kelly vent about  the constantly changing stage times, merchandise that doesn’t move, and the general quality of the tour. Instead of hanging out to sign autographs with the transparent fans, Luis and Chris and myself retreat to the van, Kelly disappears into the air conditioned backstage of the Tour.

I know I have a bit of an ego, Chris vents, but I’m sick of playing to a crowd that small.

We once played to a venue of five thousand people, Luis confesses, and we fucking rocked that place. Appearances on television, commercials and radio should have guaranteed the band more than a dozen spectators at a place like Warped Tour, especially after an 1,100 mile commitment.

The bigger stages are packed with bands that are louder, but not necessarily better, than The Dollies. Performances on the bill range from Hip Hop to Punk with everything in between. Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes dominate the main stages and play to a thousand screaming tweens. Family Force Five, who have an almost embarrassing stage presence, drew a crowd I couldn’t even walk through while on the neighboring stage Colorado’s Single File with the catchy tune of Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors- couldn’t even pull the expired Force Five crowd ten feet to the right.

For an alternative/punk/misfit crowd, the Warped Tour patrons sure know how to pick some awful bands.

Topping this list of awful is the mere presence of neuvo-factory-girl/pop princess Katy Perry. The "I Kissed A Girl but never actually kissed a girl pop princess took one of the mains stages towards the end of the day. Her presence at the Warped Tour was dominant, but there wasn’t a single act here that wasn’t laughing at her behind her back.

Fuzzy, the merch girl who had been with the band for the duration of the tour, hangs a hand-made poster at the Dollies' tent that reads I kiss girls because I’m GAY, not because some straight girl thinks it’s trendy. There are many, many people on the Warped Tour who are more than anxious to meet Perry in a dark alley. Perry’s tour bus is a snap-shot of narcissism a two story pink eyesore that features a dominant photo of her every-girl-I’ve-ever-seen kind of face.

She also touts a promise ring something I thought people had to give up wearing in high school, not when they are 23. But if Katy Perry can consider herself one of the boys, in the mess of masculinity that rages throughout Warped Tour, then so be it. I’m sure the giver of the promise ring, Gym Class Heroes’ Travis McCoy, wouldn't mind the subtle homo-eroticism.

But the mere fact that she is not only on one of the larger stages, but that the stage in front of her is packed with nearly a thousand Warped fans stirs numerous questions within pop-culture which will most likely go forever unanswered.  Do these kids have any idea as to what they are actually listening to?  Do they even understand the process that it takes to get someone like Perry into the spotlight?  Does Katy Perry even understand what Katy Perry stands for?  Looking over this crowd my beliefs of a connection between culture and pop culture are true there is none.

Over centuries of civilization the one thing that humans have rallied around, fought wars and died over is this idea of culture.  To see that it has become so readily interchangeable, so easily moved by glossy magazines and Bruckheimer productions, I doubt it would even be worth it to call it pop-culture. How many people would go to war for Katy Perry when there are even solders refusing to fight a war to save our right to have a saccharine culture that can easily change with the slightest breeze.

I needed a drink.

"Catering is basically a place where self-absorbed assholes serve food to self absorbed assholes who are in bands," I overhear as I follow the Dollyrots down an air conditioned corridor in the Saver's Center.  The corridor opens up into a dock area where several tables have been set up.  This late in the day, the tables are riddled with trash and dropped food has been smashed into the floor by negligent feet. Remnants of finely seasoned chicken and sautéed vegetables are piled high on top of an overstuffed trash can.

Another band from LA called Black President, who was looking plenty peaked from the heat of the day, was seriously contemplating not attending the next Warped Tour stop in San Deigo.

Whoever planned this was a fucking idiot, one of the band mates commented. And he wasn’t far from right either. Today the tour stopped in Fresno, but the very next morning they would have to play in San Diego, 340 miles away. The very next day the tour stopped in Mountain View, a 470 mile trip from San Diego. The route screams of irrationality.

Most bands don’t get paid to do Warped Tour. Instead, they are paid in exposure and merchandise sales. For most bands, what determines whether or not they get to their next show is directly tied to how many shirts and CDs they sell.

It’d almost be cheaper to grab a motel and wait for the tour to come back to us, another band mate, one with heavy eye liner, said.

About half the bands on the tour are traveling in vans and the other half on enormous tour buses. Everyone hauls a trailer. During the day the buses idle in the parking lot, air conditioning running full blast. Simple math shows that the buses get around 2 miles to the gallon and the vans pull off anywhere from 12 to fifteen, depending on the terrain. Assuming gas prices (in California) average at $4.15 a gallon and that there are thirty buses and thirty vans hauling trailers, the cost of moving just the bands from Fresno to San Diego computes to somewhere near 24 thousand dollars in gasoline. And for a band to make it to the venue in time, many of them would have to drive through the night only to show up exhausted for the next performance.

The last verdict I heard was that Black President was not going to show up for the San Diego gig. They fabricate a story about malfunctioning vehicles like any logical band would do.

A reporter from an indie zine requests an interview with The Dollies and the band is more than happy to give it. On the way to the press room, Kelly is accosted by a few teens who ask for a picture and an autograph. She takes it all in stride with smiles while trying not to turn any fans into friends.

The press room is air conditioned, which is a welcome relief. I sit against a wall and read the latest issue of Punk Confidential and the band is interviewed by a very odd reporter who is following his dreams. It is obvious in his questions that he is both trying to be a very unique reporter without coming off as the huge Dollies fan that he most obviously is.

He asks the stock questions about inspirations and where the ideas for songs come from. Questions I should have asked but never got around to. I take a note or two on what is said, he records everything into his tape recorder. I learn that Kelly is a huge admirer of Kathleen Hannah and the band thrives off the dichotomy of appearing innocent but still using fuck on their record. Pure and tarnished, Dolly and Rot.

That night we are on the road again. I help the band drive through the night southbound, towards San Diego. Sometime around midnight I am dropped off near a bus station in Los Angeles and Luis gives me an estimation of where I can probably find the airport. I buy a homeless guy a forty of Mickey’s and ask him the best way to get to LAX. He gives me a series of bus lines and the approximate times they leave. I jot it down on the note pad that has served as the recorder for most of this trip and he stumbles off into the night.

It didn’t help that he was dead wrong. Giving me names of buses and lines that didn’t exist. I eventually resort to paying a cab sixty bucks to get me to the airport (which, by my estimation, was only a thirty minute walk from where I was picked up at.

The next flight to Denver doesn’t leave for at least two hours and costs me four hundred dollars. I am exhausted; living in a van with a band doesn’t give much opportunity for REM cycles. I’m four days behind sleep but even the vinyl covered benches in the concourses aren’t inviting. I walk the corridors of LAX, security officers eye my grungy appearance and canvas rucksack suspiciously. In the men’s room mirror I just looked like a guy who was traveling the country by foot, carrying a few provisions in his pack, looking for his next way home.

Over the P.A. system, between the multi-lingual announcements about abandoned luggage and security threats, a muzak version of Nirvana’s All Apologies plays.

Touching down in Denver, the sun is just coming up over the horizon. I bus it back to the city and drop my gear at my apartment, manage a quick shower and change of clothes before I am due in at my office to perform a job that satiates rent payments but not much else. Re-acclimating to a sedentary lifestyle proved challenging, especially as I was reluctant to settle back down.  All I could think about was how there was an entire world out there that needed thorough observation and analyzation with commercial interlude. 

I open an internet browser, log into Pandora.  Katy Perry plays..

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