Pop go the punkies Less Than Jake and Mest get ready for Warped BY SEAN RICHARDSON

The Warped Tour started rolling in 1995, a year after the release of Green Day’s Dookie (Reprise), which has since become the best-selling punk album of all time. Green Day’s success may at first have seemed a fluke, but eight years later, punk is still all over MTV, and the Warped Tour is still going strong. This year’s model, which hits the Brockton Fairgrounds next Thursday, features long-time favorites Rancid and Pennywise topping a bill that includes chartbusting upstarts the All-American Rejects and Simple Plan — plus about 50 other punk bands of both the DIY and the corporate variety playing on the tour’s half a dozen stages, and gangs of pro skaters and BMXers who’ll be doing their thing throughout the day.

Count Gainesville’s Less Than Jake among the Warped Tour’s old guard: they first played the festival in 1997, and this year they’re one of its biggest draws. Thinking back to their first year on the tour, Less Than Jake drummer Vinnie recalls, "We were unprepared, it was hot, and our bus was crappy. But the Descendents were playing, and it was remarkable to watch them play." Over the phone from sweltering Phoenix, he stops to think about how things have changed. "Now, I like to ride our tour manager piggyback from show to show," he jokes. "The more it goes along, you learn from your mistakes. You learn to refine the things that you’ve been doing right and wrong."

The new Less Than Jake album, Anthem, is their first for Sire and fifth overall. Having emerged in the early 1990s as a Mighty Mighty Bosstones–style ska-punk band, they released two moderately successful discs on Capitol at the end of the decade. When a management change at the label left them out to dry, NOFX frontman Fat Mike bought out their contract in exchange for an album, 2000’s Borders & Boundaries, on his label, Fat Wreck Chords. The group recently returned to the big leagues when some of their old Capitol friends resurfaced at Sire and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

To Vinnie, who has a label of his own called Fueled by Ramen, the industry run-around could have been a lot worse. "We’re not guys who are going to fall over and die just because some asshole thinks pop and rap is where he’s going to make the most money. We’re not afraid to work, so who gives a fuck if we’re on a major label or not? We’re still going to go on tour. We’re bigger now than we were when we were on Capitol, you know?"

Indeed, Anthem is selling respectably, and the first single, "She’s Gonna Break Soon," has been getting some love from MTV. "She’ll be spending her whole weekend/Faking laughs and faking smiles with her fake friends," sneers guitarist Chris over the tune’s sugary punk racket. Bassist Roger coos along in harmony on the chorus, where the band’s two-man horn section step in with a hook of their own. Vinnie, who writes all of the group’s lyrics, contributes the poignant, teen-friendly narrative, but he bristles when I use the word "hit" to refer to the song. "It’s just a warm-up song. It’s a song that’s saying, ‘We haven’t been around for five years to radio and MTV, so here’s a middle-of-the-road song that sort of represents the record.’ "

Hit or not, "She’s Gonna Break Soon" sets the stage for an album that may not be as party-oriented as Less Than Jake’s previous work but still delivers in terms of both energy and melody. On "The Science of Selling Yourself Short," the band revisit their mostly abandoned ska roots and come up with the sunniest groove on the disc. "Just sing along: ‘I’m the king of catastrophes,’ " they implore while Green Day producer Rob Cavallo polishes the tunes hooks to an irresistible sheen. They get sensitive on "The Brightest Bulb Has Burned Out," a simple, vocals-and-guitar lament that Vinnie wrote about a friend who committed suicide. That song bleeds into "Screws Fall Out," which ends the album with an explosive reminder to let go of the past. Throw in the recurring themes of alcoholism and domestic unrest and you have a disc that’s as cathartic as it is catchy.

"The lyrics on the record are very autobiographical," Vinnie stresses. "Lots of our fan mail comes from dudes in the military, and when buildings are getting blown up, it’s not a joky time. When the national psyche is a bit dark, how are you going to do a whole record of songs like [the Less Than Jake standard] ‘Johnny Quest Thinks We’re Sellouts’? We wanted something that was dark and anthemic at the same time."

Around the same time Borders & Boundaries came out, Less Than Jake stunned the rock world by opening a top-grossing arena tour for Bon Jovi, who at the time were in the midst of a big commercial comeback. According to Vinnie, the trek remains a career highlight. "The most punk thing we ever did was go on tour with Bon Jovi. Just a few days ago, we had [Warped Tour rapper] Talib Kweli come on and do a freestyle over ‘The Science of Selling Yourself Short.’ We have to do things that are out of the box to keep things interesting for us and for people who like our band. The Bon Jovi fans were polite — it started out silent, and then it ended up with applause by the end of the set. They just wanted to know what our headspace was about before they let us into their metal circle."

As survivors of the 1990s ska-punk craze go, Less Than Jake have done all right for themselves. Farther down the list of their contemporaries are Goldfinger, whose "Here in Your Bedroom" was one of that era’s most irrepressible hits. Last year, the band released their fiery fourth album, Open Your Eyes (Jive), to lackluster sales, but the real story behind Goldfinger these days is that frontman John Feldmann is establishing himself as the business-savvy older brother to a new generation of corporate-punk superstars. So far, the biggest achievement in Feldmann’s burgeoning second career is his production credit on the homonymous Reprise breakthrough by current Warped Tour heartthrobs the Used. He’s also in the midst of putting together his own label with Joel and Benji from Good Charlotte.

Before Good Charlotte and the Used started conquering the airwaves, Feldmann was working with Mest, an exuberant pop-punk band from Chicago. Still a teenager when the band’s 2000 major-label debut, Wasting Time, was released, Mest singer/guitarist Tony Lovato sang a silly love song called "What’s the Dillio?" and wore an "I Love Britney" shirt on the album cover. A year later, the band collaborated with Young MC on "Cadillac," from the tougher Destination Unknown, but they still couldn’t manage to join the like-minded New Found Glory at the top of radio playlists.

These days, Lovato is a punk veteran at 22, and Mest have a homonymous new release (all three of their albums are on Maverick) and a spot on the Warped Tour. On the first single, "Jaded (These Years)," the boys get a little help from Good Charlotte’s Benji, who’s been a friend since meeting them through Feldmann right after Wasting Time came out. "There’s a time and place for everything/There’s a reason why certain people meet," croons Lovato at the outset of the song, a teary power ballad with enough Top 40 ear candy to make the All-American Rejects blush. Feldmann commissions a string section, and Benji gets a chorus to himself after the bridge — yeah, it’s pop overkill at its finest, and the punk guitars in the middle make its bid for loser prom theme complete.

Like Good Charlotte, Mest seem to be begging for ridicule from the more dogmatic factions of the punk community. And like their DC brethren, they aren’t afraid to show nay-sayers their trump card. Both bands have the vocal support of Rancid, for which there’s actually a plausible explanation — and it’s not just that Rancid are rumored to be accepting major-label backing after all these years. Mest might sound like a boy band with guitars, but their street-urchin cred is for real. They’re problem children who hail from Blue Island, the working-class outgrowth of Chicago’s South Side that’s pictured on the back cover of the new album, and they’ve named themselves after cheap beer (Milwaukee’s Best). So it’s no surprise that one of the disc’s highlights is a bittersweet ode to their old stomping grounds called "Paradise (122nd and Highland)." "I knew that we’d move on someday/But I didn’t think it would be this way," Lovato sings as the track’s upbeat Green Day harmonies betray the road-weary disillusionment of his delivery. Nostalgia sounds sweeter on the bouncy new-wave move "Rooftops": "Up on the rooftop/Listening to punk rock/Nobody believed us/This could be our one shot/That was all we had."

Singer/guitarist Jeremiah Rangel brings a neurotic edge to the band with his handful of songwriting turns, and Lovato takes a convincing stab at emo punk on "2000 Miles." He pulls out all the stops on "Chance of a Lifetime," another string-driven ballad that sounds as if it had been plucked from the pages of a high-school yearbook. "The end of the world’s in front of me/Hard to believe all I’ve seen," he sings, borrowing his long vowels from Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. The rest of the lyrics are even less coherent than those of "Wonderwall," but the melodies never fail to connect. When it comes to turning hard times into commercial-punk gold, Mest aren’t quite on Good Charlotte’s level. But they’re getting there.

Less Than Jake and Mest are two of the dozens of bands slated to perform at the 2003 Vans Warped Tour on Thursday, July 31, at the Brockton Fairgrounds; call (508) 586-8000.