The Academy Is... on Warped 2008: "It's a Revolution Like 1991 in Seattle"

The 2008 edition of the Warped Tour wrapped up this past weekend, and it saw the rise of Katy Perry, the arrest of Travis McCoy and a whole lot of sunburned kids screaming along to Against Me! songs. For Adam Siska, the bassist of Chicago's the Academy Is... (whose excellent new album Fast Times at Barrington High is out this week), it's been a historic summer. "It's a good time in music right now," he told Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard. "There's Gym Class Heroes, Against Me!, us, Everytime I Die — there's a lot of good bands on this tour. There's a revolution happening. It could be like 1969, or 1991 in Seattle. It feels like something's happening again. I don't know what it is, but something's happening."

Beckett also wasn't bothered by the whispers that ticket sales were down this summer. "Ticket sales don't mean anything as long as our fans are coming. There's not just pop punk. There's a lot of things happening here. Festivals are meant to be diverse, and if tickets sales are down then it's the fans' problem for not coming out."

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• Gym Class Heroes Frontman Arrested at Warped Tour Stop

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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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