As Warped Tour wraps up for good this weekend, alum G-Eazy recalls, "It was like boot camp…you had to earn it"

ABC/Paula LoboWarped Tour, the longest-running touring music festival in North America, wraps up the final full cross-country trek of its long history on Sunday. Over the years, the famously grueling tour, which started back in 1995, has featured performers ranging from Katy Perry, Bebe Rexha and The Black Eyed Peas to Eminem, Mike Posner and Green Day. G-Eazy played Warped Tour in 2012, and he says it’s sad to see it go.

“It’s its own culture,” the rapper says of Warped Tour. “I was, I guess, grateful I got in before it ended. I’m sad for that but I’m happy that I got to experience that.”

“It was like boot camp and it was like a pretty rough summer, but you had to earn it,” he tells ABC Radio of the tour, which found bands playing in blazing hot parking lots at the height of summer. “And I was getting out there in front of fans that weren’t hip hop fans or anything…small crowds, making barely enough money to get to the next city at all.”

Recalling that he was earning just $300 per week during the tour, G says, “We were all like scraping to get by, doing what we could — my little brother was selling my merch.” But he says it taught him a valuable lesson.

“That’s the kind of summer where, if you make it out of [t]here, you know you love it and you know you want it for the right reasons,” he notes. “And if you can survive that, then you can survive anything!”

These days, G-Eazy is touring under considerably better circumstances. His Endless Summer tour plays Phoeniz, Arizona tonight and will wrap up September 9 in West Palm Beach, Florida.