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ALAN SCULLEY - SPECIAL TO The Daily Herald
If you think applying for a regular job is tough and competitive, just be glad you're not in a band that wants to play on the Vans Warped Tour.

This year more than 3,000 acts applied for a slot on the tour, and according to Kevin Lyman, founder and organizer for the tour, that's only counting the ones whose applications came through record labels, management or other authentic avenues of professional representation.

Lyman doesn't like to say no, but it's becoming one part of running this modern rock music and lifestyle tour that gets more common year after year.

"We will still probably accommodate 300 or 400 bands this summer at some point on the tour in some fashion," he said in a recent phone interview. "So you're really only able to give someone a positive response 10 percent (of the time). It's still more than any other tour in the business. But (it's tough) to have to say no so often, and no to some very good bands and no to some people I've known now for the better part of my life."

The Warped Tour -- appearing Saturday at the Utah State Fairpark in Salt Lake City -- is a plum gig for bands for many reasons, including the exposure to large audiences, the opportunities it opens up for other touring and just the sheer fun of it.

This year, one can find bands that have eagerly hopped onto the Warped Tour for any or all of those reasons.

For Joan Jett, one of the high-profile names on this year's tour, Warped represented a chance to reach a whole new audience. Jett has a new CD, "Sinner," coming out, and it's her first studio release in a decade. The tour gives her a chance to get in front of a lot of kids who may know little if anything about her long career as a solo artist or her stint with the groundbreaking all-female rock band the Runaways.

"I think certainly a lot of kids know (my music), but there are a lot that don't," Jett said. "And maybe they know the name and they may have heard 'I Love Rock 'N' Roll' or something, and this will give them a chance to put the face with the name and all of that stuff. Plus, I'm pretty confident in our live performance. We're a live band, really, by trade, moreso than a recording band. We're a live band that records so we can tour. So I'm looking forward to getting out and playing for everybody because I think once they see us and hear the music, we'll pick up some fans."

Every Time I Die, a band that has twice been on the heavy metal festival tour Ozzfest and also done a short stint on Warped, is playing the entire run of 60-plus Warped dates this summer.

For Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams, the Warped Tour draws a younger and more open-minded crowd than Ozzfest, where he said it seemed like many of the fans wanted to hear straight-forward classic metal -- something quite different from his band's more frenetic and raw brand of music.

"I think this is the crowd that has been waiting to see us for the eight years we've been around," he said. "This is like such an opportunity, and we're totally going to take advantage of it."

Underoath is one of the bands on this year's bill that can be considered a Warped Tour veteran. The band returns for a third straight year -- this time as a mainstage attraction.

That prime slot makes sense considering the group's previous CD, "They're Only Chasing Safety," sold some 350,000 copies and the June 20 release of the group's a highly anticipated new CD, "Define The Great Line," was timed to the Warped Tour.

Guitarist Tim McTague said the Warped Tour and Lyman's other major tour, Taste of Chaos, have played a key role in Underoath's surging popularity.

"The Warped Tour played a huge part," he said. "Kevin Lyman really got behind us, and three of the most major tours we did on the 'They're Only Chasing Safety' record cycle were Taste of Chaos and then Warped Tour of 2004 and Warped Tour 2005. So, I mean, those were huge tours for us. All the other tours we got were spin-offs of his tour. The Coheed & Cambria tour, they heard of us through the Warped Tour. They were on Warped Tour with us that year, and it's just kind of the way things happened, and it was really cool."

Every Time I Die and Underoath represent a heavy rock sound that has become a more prominent part of the Warped Tour's musical mix in recent years. But Lyman said this year he actually backed off on booking some hardcore and modern metal bands.

Instead, he tried to give fans a bigger sampling of acts that represent the roots of alternative rock. Jett, who as part of the Runaways from 1975 to 1979 actually preceded the emergence of punk rock in the United States, is one of this year's first-wave acts.

"With a lot of the other tours out there, Ozzfest and Sounds of the Underground, all these packages going around the country, they seem to have a very metal edge to them," Lyman said. "We still have some of those influences on this tour. But all of a sudden I went, 'Wow, maybe this is the year we can go into some of the roots of the music, the roots of what punk is.' I think punk's going to have a big resurgence. It never goes away. And to me, I'll fight for it forever. That's the world I came from. But I think right now, kids are trying to grab onto that."

What the 2006 tour lacks, though, is the kind of established hitmakers (Green Day, the Offsping) and breakthrough bands (like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy last summer) that have been big drawing cards on other Warped Tours.

Lyman admitted he was unsure whether this would cause a downturn in ticket sales -- even though he has always felt Warped was more about showcasing emerging talent than popular established acts. But so far, it appears ticket sales will be in line with the 700,000 total from last year's 11th and most successful outing.

"This year we kind of worked on the lineup, and I think top to bottom, musically it's a very interesting lineup," Lyman said.

That's good news -- even for the bands, many of which say one of the great aspects of Warped is getting to see and hear other bands they might not encounter as they stay busy with their own careers.

It was one reason that Jett got excited about doing the tour.

"I've not heard of a lot of these bands. Some of them I've heard of, some of them I haven't," she said. "So I'm just going to be looking forward to immersing myself in the whole experience. I'm expecting a sort of punk rock circus, and I'm going to enjoy the whole thing."