Katy Perry on Warped 2008: Mosh Pits, Injuries and Andrew WK

The 2008 edition of the Warped Tour wrapped up last weekend, and for Katy Perry, the conclusion of the tour means she'll finally be able to nurse some wounds. "I have bruises all over my legs. That's from wearing leggings. I'm like jumping off of the monitors and doing scissor kicks, or trying to keep up with these boys. It's funny," Perry told Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard. "I'm onstage on the right, and then there's another stage going on right before I go on, and usually it's like a hardcore screamo band with a mosh pit spanning the size of an arena, and I've got all pink gear and a soft-pink bubblegum guitar. I definitely am keeping up with them, but I am causing injury at the same time."

As for Perry's favorite Warped moment, that came courtesy of the man who laid stake to the claim I Get Wet. "We were onstage with Andrew WK the other day. We went to his show, and it was the best thing of my life I've ever been to. There was only room for maybe twenty-five people onstage, but there was a hundred and twenty-five people onstage," Perry brags. "People were lifting their shirts, showing their belly, stagediving. It was like Sodom and Gommorah. It was actually like that scene in Pinocchio where he turns into a donkey and he goes to that circus. That's an Andrew WK show."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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