GLADIATORS ENTER COLISEUM FOR WARPED TOUR.

Byline: Theo Douglas Staff Writer

AN EVER-CHANGING BEAST, the rock festival tour has altered its form again - exchanging its spandex, long hair and some of its eyeliner for a skateboard and a need for speed.

This summer's annual two-day edition of the Vans Warped Tour 2002, which began Wednesday at the Los Angeles Coliseum Thursday, is the antithesis of your dad's festival tour. A sprawling 48-hour display - featuring a handful of headliners, including MXPX, NOFX, Bad Religion, Reel Big Fish, Flogging Molly and No Use for a Name - it also will offer demos by nearly a dozen professional skateboarders, soaring ever higher.

Call it an alternative lifestyle expo for the under-25 crowd, despite the fact that members of Bad Religion likely have kids that age. Or call it ground zero for the region's legions of tattooed skater punks. Either way, it's bound to be organized mayhem set to music.

``All ages are out there. There's teens mostly, but some grown-ups. Mostly, it's the punk kids,'' says ska-metal band Reel Big Fish's guitarist Aaron Barrett.

In the words of acid-tongued Glassjaw guitarist Justin Beck, ``The Warped Tour, it's a mall for pop-punks.'' Yet most of the 44 bands that will appear both days offer more than recycled Green Day or regurgitated Blink-182.

Iceland's Quarashi, for example, is from the same scene that spawned '80s college radio darlings the Sugarcubes. And while they haven't won the same adulation yet, the rap-punk four-piece has a similarly eclectic sound, drawing on everything from rap classics to punk rock to the Irish sounds of tour mates Flogging Molly.

``If you would ever come to Iceland, you would find out we've got nine months of darkness,'' says 27-year-old Solvi, the band's producer and drummer, over a scratchy cell phone from the middle of Kansas. ``That pretty much manufactures (screwed-up) people who are punk and full of energy.''

Musically, Quarashi bounces around like a pinball.

``What we try to do is absorb as much influences as we can put into a big melting pot,'' says Solvi, who uses only his first name professionally. ``This last record (``Jinx'') is basically an attempt to combine a lot of different mixtures of styles.''

Quarashi members may dress like skateboarders, but they're not just posing; the band's rapper, Stoney Fjelsted, is a former Icelandic skating champ who met Solvi at a skate park. And while others on this year's tour - like Warped veterans Bad Religion, who range in age from 41 to 24 - may eschew actual skating, they're quick to acknowledge its influence.

``When you're 26 to 27, you get a job and settle down,'' says Bad Religion founding member Jay Bentley, 38, describing the process by which many fans leave the Warped way of life. ``Unless you're like me, and crazy. But every year under the Christmas tree there's a new skateboard. Somewhere out there, somebody's going, 'Hey, this punk stuff is cool.' '' And though he'd never use the words, that means job security for Bentley and his band mates.

Formed in the late-'70s in Woodland Hills, the band is one of those punk survivors - like Los Angeles' X, or Orange County's Social Distortion - which morphed but never really went away. Also featuring Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz (who has left the band twice to run his label), Bad Religion found a hit single in 1993's ``Infected,'' which coincided roughly with punk's second wave. Since that time, their melodic hard-core has never really languished on the sidelines. The band last played the Warped Tour in 1998.

Another Warped Tour veteran is Long Beach/Orange County rock-ska band Reel Big Fish, which first graced the Warped stage in 1997, following its debut release ``Turn the Radio Off.'' That Mojo Records disc was certified gold (500,000 copies sold), and the band is hoping for similar results from its June 25 Jive/Mojo release, ``Cheer Up.''

``We are a ska band. A lot of people come to our shows and say we're the first ska band they ever heard,'' says the band's guitarist and songwriter Aaron Barrett of Seal Beach. His sentiments may seem surprising to some, for the band's sound has careened back and forth between ska and rock.

Says Barrett: ``We're proud of the ska scene. We don't mind being associated with that scene. We'd love to have another gold record, but as long as people keep coming to the shows, that's all we care about.''

Fans will have a large window of opportunity to do just that; after the Warped Tour, which will reach 47 U.S. cities by its end Aug. 18 in Detroit, the band heads to Europe, to play until the holidays.

VANS WARPED TOUR 2002

Where: Los Angeles Coliseum, 3939 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles.

When: Noon to 8:30 p.m. today.

Tickets: $25. Call [phone] or www.warpedtour.com

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Iceland's Quarashi - Solvi Blondal, left, ``Stoney'' Fjelsted, Hossi Olafsson and Omar Swarez - perform today at the L.A. Coliseum.