Captain Capa – 2nd ROAD BLOG from the Vans Warped Tour 2014

The German electronic band, Captain Capa, is currently on the Vans Warped Tour 2014. While they are on the tour, they will be writing an exclusive blog for us, to keep us filled in on everything they have going on….

Captain Capa – 2nd ROAD BLOG from the Vans Warped Tour 2014

The German electronic band, Captain Capa, is currently on the Vans Warped Tour 2014. While they are on the tour, they will be writing an exclusive blog for us, to keep us filled in on everything they have going on. You can check out the second entry, after the break.

The second week of Warped is over and the daily routine of touring has it’s cold claws in all of us. After some more exciting shows in California we traveled through the whole country to get to Maryland Heights, St. Louis, some other places I can’t quite recall up to Canada where we are as we write this. We spend our days off hanging around in hotel-pools, getting some really unhealthy but really American food and making a mess out of our beautiful bus. After partying way too hard once or twice, tour manager Grant just had to put some chains on us. The new unwritten rule states: “Turn it down. A little.” We’re fine with that. To celebrate the new rulebook we found some new ways to keep ourselves entertained – apart from being wasted all the time. We cleaned up the back lounge of our bus and built ourselves a little nerd cave in there. From now on, THERE BE DRAGONS! Between the ecstatic shows in the burning heat and throwing tips to the barbecue-bartenders, Magic The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons it is.

The first weeks of Warped are packed with glorious, glorious off days. Days of hanging around in American rural areas, as pretty as they are. The fact that our bus is traveling with the production-part of the crew gives us the privilege of spending our time off in fine hotels, chilling in whirlpools and pleasing our various internet-addictions. On some days, though, Warped has something special planned. One day, a few of us went Skydiving, on another day it was white water rafting. Last but not least we spent an unbelievably beautiful day speedboating in between canyons at the Hellgate in Oregon and having a feast in a wonderful cabin up in the woods. The “THANK YOU, KEVIN!” chants towards Warped founder Kevin Lyman were well deserved.

A few of our shows out here have been surprisingly amazing for us. We finally got a hang on the routine of going from 0 to 100 in a minute, setting everything up just fine and the sound on stage is getting better every day. Of course we have our bad days, our glitchy sets and our bad stage times – but we all do. Sometimes the stage is too far away from the masses of people, sometimes you have to compete with all the headliners at once. But the overall feeling above our heads right now is one of being a community, having fun in a foreign land and enjoying our time as much as possible.

Crossing the Canadian border can’t be described with being fun at all, though. Imagine 80 buses and trucks full of rock n roll bands, DJs and tattooed guys crossing one of the tightest borders. Getting rid of all the alcohol and whatever some of the bands might have in their bags probably wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was showing up in time in Toronto to give the kids the Warped show they deserved. It went down horribly, at first. The catering trucks were held up for hours, some bandwagons were torn apart and searched down to every last crumb and everyone with even an unpaid parking ticket would have to go through a personal interview.

The resulting chaos in Toronto was horrible at first. Bands couldn’t play, breakfast was cancelled but the kids wouldn’t stop floating in. After a while though the gods of Warped had everything sorted out and even we had a great set in front of a big, sweet-hearted crowd. Later that day Maik and I did something every band at Warped should do once in a while: volunteering at catering. Bands around here do it all the time: they help setting up stages, they clean up the parks around the block or they serve meals at the barbecues. Our job was to prepare meals for the main stage roadies and lunch bags for the bus drivers. In Germany nobody ever puts peanut butter and jelly on a sandwich, but here we were, putting tons and tons of peanut butter and jelly on hundreds of sandwiches. It took us quite some time and when we slapped the last spoon full of peanut butter on the last slice of bread we already fantasized about entering the nightly barbecue as kings of volunteering. People would cheer and roll out a red carpet. Well, people indeed did cheer, as it was the 4th of July.

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