In 1995, former Goldenvoice exec Kevin Lyman changed the modern tour landscape by infusing Southern California punk rock with skateboarding and X Games culture to create the Warped Tour. The fest became one of the longest-running summer tours in history (it wrapped in 2019) and provided the stage for bands like Sublime, No Doubt, Blink-182, My Chemical Romance, Something Corporate, Fall Out Boy, Paramore and many more to break into the mainstream. On any given day, the festival’s lineup shuffled, and fans had to arrive early to ensure they saw their favorite artist.
Though Lyman stepped away from that scene in recent years (he‘s currently an associate professor at USC‘s Thornton School of Music), he felt the time was right to bring a new version of what worked so well back — with a twist. Lyman along with Eric Tobin of Hopeless Records and Mike Kaminsky of KMGMT (who also teaches at USC) are pushing the spirit of Warped forward. Tobin and Kaminsky have been involved with the Warped Tour in various capacities over the years and understood the festival’s ethos.
They’ve also worked together as Hopeless signed KMGMT’s artists over the years. When the pair first conceived the idea of Summer School, they wanted to bring an experience outside of the commercialized festivals that dominate the current landscape. “The conversation that started between Mike and me was how do we create something like Warped with it being gone?” Tobin says.
“The conversation was that m.