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Not everyone can play the Warped Tour 16 summers straight. Here we look back on some of the ghosts of Warped Tour’s past and reveal what they are up to today.

Photo by Lisa Johnson

Band: Midtown

Who were they?: Before New Jersey became a hotbed for mainstream emo acts, Midtown were a group of suburban teenagers attending Rutgers University, alongside the members of Thursday. However instead of focusing on the political and personal rage that powered their one-time scenemates, Midtown pioneered a brand of pop-inspired emo rock far before that genre was particularly profitable.

After putting out a handful of small, independent releases the band signed to Drive-Thru Records in the early ’00s and released now beloved albums like 2002’s Living Well Is The Best Revenge. They followed that with their major-label debut, Forget What You Know, which contained one of the most un-emo sentiments ever on it.

During the song “Is It Me, Is It True?” lanky frontman Gabe Saporta (pictured above with members of New Found Glory) opined, “Sex is old and boring.” Which, presumably, was not true if you weren’t getting any. The band played the Warped Tour multiples times, starting with their initial run in 2000.

Memorable moments: “On our first Warped Tour we were all really young,” recounts the band’s former drummer Rob Hitt. “We didn’t know anybody and I was freaking out because when you’re growing up people like The Bouncing Souls aren’t your peers. They’re your idols.

“Then all of the sudden, right before we’re about to play our first show across this field, we hear, ‘Everybody, I want you to go over to that stage right now and watch a band called Midtown’—and it was the guys from Anti-Flag! We were these little emo pop-punk kids and the coolest band on the Warped Tour were yelling to go watch us and we couldn’t believe it.”

How did it end?: Shortly after the band released Forget What You Know, Midtown quietly broke up in 2005. Well, sort of. “It’s really weird because I guess we never officially broke up,” Hitt says. “I guess we just kind of faded away. The best way to explain it is if you looked at a graph of our career it peaked at one point and then held steady. But if you’re five years in, and that graph is still holding steady or slipping a little bit, you have to make some hard decisions.

“I think we were unsure of what our label was going to do with us and we were getting older and things didn’t seem to be progressing. So we just took some time off from each other and never came back together again.”

So where are they now?: Midtown bassist/vocalist Gabe Saporta went on to form a little band you might now called Cobra Starship. He lives in Manhattan and can probably be heard on your local pop station at some point in the next five minutes. He’s also still really tall.

After Midtown broke up drummer Rob Hitt started his own label, I Surrender Records, whose roster includes Valenica and Take Notice. He has also entered the world of artist management and currently represents The Cab, Craig Owens and Four Year Strong.

Midtown guitarist Heath Saraceno joined Senses Fail in 2005 and played on the albums Still Searching and LIfe Is Not A Waiting Room, before leaving the band in 2009. He is currently studying to be an electrician. He also has a pretty rad food blog.

Midtown guitarist Tyler Rann fronts the David Bowie-inspired rock act Band Of Thieves and is a sales rep for Marc Jacobs. Don’t worry Tyler, we won’t tell your employer about the video below.