At a time when ticket prices are limited only by the extent of a promoter's greed and bookings are stacked together according to profit margins, the second annual Vans Warped Tour (which swings into the Northampton Airport this Tuesday, then moves on to Falmouth next Saturday) is an anomaly. On its inaugural run last summer, the skate-punk music and sports festival actually lost money, and this year the promoters are just hoping to break even. But more important, the festival's organizers captured a slice of rock-and-roll utopia, a place where for a day everyone from musicians to athletes to audience seemed to set aside their attitudes and differences.

Only a handful of the bands playing this year have any wide name recognition; for every Fishbone, Pennywise, Rocket from the Crypt, and NOFX, there's a Blink-182, Red 5, Sexpod, or Sensefield just breaking out. But the Warped Tour transcends the sum of its parts -- everyone who went to last year's show in Northampton came away talking about the intangibles, the stark contrast between Lollapalooza's tense and clunky authoritarian stratification and Warped's laid-back, egalitarian vibe.

And that's no accident. The Warped Tour was created by Kevin Lyman, who worked on the first four Lollapaloozas and promoted a series of West Coast snowboarding and skateboarding AIDS benefits that influenced the Warped Tour's cross-pollination of skateboarding and punk rock. "Basically the idea was to get back to the original idea of Lollapalooza," says Lyman, "which was, to me, a break from the day-to-day grind of the music business, a communal atmosphere where everybody works hard to put on a fun show and a good day for the kids."

To accomplish that goal, Lyman looked to Southern California, where skateboarding and punk rock have long co-mingled in underground culture, and in the Transworld magazines -- Skateboarding, Snowboarding, and Warp -- that document the scene. At the Board-Aid benefit in March 1995, a Warp-sponsored benefit for Lifebeat where punk-rock bands blared on an outdoor stage overlooking a bevy of snowboarders as they attacked Big Bear Mountain, Lyman figured he'd found what he was looking for. "Sitting in the snow looking over the thing, I thought it was time to put one of these shows on the road before someone who's not part of the scene comes in and does it [just] for financial gain."

"Initially they had hoped to call it `The Bomb Tour' in the spring of '94," says Warp managing editor Mark Woodlief. "but then there was that little incident in Oklahoma City. And since Warp magazine had kinda been the inspiration, they decided to call it Warped." By whatever name, it's a good bet that had Lyman not run with the idea, someone else would have. For one thing, skatepunk culture -- from baggy-jeans fashion to the close-knit, tribal brotherhood of the scene -- has been one of the main tributaries drawn on by the "alternative" mainstream as seen everywhere from MTV to Kids. And skateboarding itself, after reaching its peak in the late 1980s and falling in the early 1990s, is again enjoying a resurgence. According to American Sports Data, Inc., a market-research company that monitors participation in various sports, there were some 6.2 million skaters active in 1995.

Around the same time the Warped Tour came together, at least one other skateboard and punk-rock festival was being pitched around -- by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, who headline this year's Warped shows in the Northeast. ("It was an honor to be asked to open [last year's] Lollapalooza," says Bosstones frontman Dickie Barrett, "but the Warped Tour is more our style -- these are the bands we get excited about.") And you can see the tour's influence at events like ESPN's traveling version of the X-Games, which added rock bands this year, or WBCN's River Rave, which added a half-pipe populated with a Warped-inspired mix of skaters who performed while the bands played.

This year's edition of "punk-rock summer camp," as Woodlief calls it, promises to be even better than last year. They've added an amateur skate contest to supplement the BMX, in-line, and skateboard demonstrations by returning pros like Mike Frazier, Neal Hendrix, and Remy Stratton. There will 31 shows on this year's tour as opposed to last year's 25, plus four additional shows in Europe and three in Asia. And even though they're just hoping to break even, Lyman says, "the promoters look at it as a great investment, to put on a cool show for the kids. It's an all-ages thing: I can see people my age re-connecting with it, and 13-year-olds just discovering skating. I hope we can keep it cool. If not, we'll stop doing it."