Irvine just came up with a new city motto, but here’s one I’d keep on the back burner: Altamont South.

The City Council on Tuesday night bared its collective anxiety over the Vans Warped Tour, which rolls into the Great Park for an all-day concert next Thursday. About 15,000 teens and young adults, and about 80 bands. There’s a couple of acoustic acts, but the council is concerned about the crowd that will come for the tender musical stylings of such self-identified genres as “death metal,” “hard core,” “metal core,” “death core” and “post hard core metal.”

Councilman Jeff Lalloway led the charge, wondering whether a city routinely named America’s safest had just opened itself up to a day of mayhem. Should a “family-friendly” park, he wondered, be hosting a band called Anti-Flag whose chorus to its song, “F*** Police Brutality,” goes:F*** police/F*** police/F*** police brutality/ (repeat four times, rinse mouth).

OK. The Warped Tour is in its 18th year. Kathleen could find no record of it ever having devolved into Altamont, the 1969 concert at which one person was murdered, another drowned and two were killed in a car wreck.

But Warped is not without incident. Last summer, police arrested 47 people, most for under-age drinking, at the tour stop in upstate New York. In 2008, in Missouri, the lead singer in one band was arrested for allegedly walloping a concert-goer in the head with a microphone after the concert-goer yelled an insult. A guy was stabbed in a mosh-pit fight in Florida in 2000. Conversely, a sheriff’s deputy happily tweeted that the Warped concert in Glendale in 2010 resulted in no arrests.

Some newsroom colleagues point out that the crowd Jimmy Buffett draws every year at the Verizon Amphitheater is not exactly sober, and wonder why the Irvine council isn’t up in arms about him or other Verizon acts. Here’s why: Verizon may be in the Irvine city limits, but unlike the Great Park, Verizon is not a city-run facility and neither is there an ungodly amount of political capital invested in its success. (Furthermore, your average Buffett fan is old and happily wasted away – and probably would go days before even realizing he’d been shivved.)

The three-member council majority rarely agrees with Lalloway on anything that has even a remote possibility of giving him some political props, but there was remarkable unity this Tuesday.

Councilwoman Beth Krom, whom I’d mistakenly pegged as a post hard core metalhead, seemed mainly worried that the kiddies had enough sunscreen, but she too seemed puzzled as to how Warped landed in straight-arrow Irvine. Even Larry Agran, whom I’d have sworn was a neo-metal post-core freak if there ever was one, was parroting Lalloway. The Great Park, he said, is “the safest public space in the safest city in America. Everything about this suggests really risking that reputation.”

I suddenly realized why this famously factious council wasn’t blaming each other. There was someone else members could blame: staff. A rule of working life – never let your boss be surprised – had been violated. The council only found out the Warped Tour was coming to the Great Park when it read it in the Times. Oy.

Some fine butt-covering ensued, with staff Tuesday explaining how the tour had been thoroughly vetted by the private company that oversees renting out the park. The Pomona Fairplex, which hosted the tour last summer, reportedly gave it a “rave” review. The private company, AMCI Marketing, recommended approval to park managers, who OK’d it. But didn’t tell the council.

The rental fee to the Great Park is $36,000, which Lalloway seemed to think a pretty measly sum given the risk. It sounded like the council would have canceled the concert were it not next week and had contracts not been signed. “Let’s make the best of it,” Councilman Steven Choi said. Agran told Police Chief David Maggard, “I want to see a very strong police presence. … I want to see azero-tolerance presence,” which he said included no smoking ofany kind. Keep Agran out of the GP loop, and there’ll be hell to pay.

But, hey, I’m ready, even if I can’t bring cigars. Hijack the balloon. Turn the demonstration farm into a mosh pit. Flip the carousel on its side and roll it up Sand Canyon Avenue. Let’s rock.

Kathleen Luppi contributed. Contact Mickadeit: fmickadeit@ocregister.com