Never Back Down - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the metalcore band, Never Back Down, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

Last spring we were touring Germany together with Our Mirage and the Hirsch Effekt. Our second run started in Dresden and the next day we played in Hamburg which is like a 500 kilometer drive. It may not sound that much for an American but as an European it’s already quite a long drive, especially when you are not in a nightliner and have to drive everything by yourself. For the whole tour we got a little rental van which was already way to small for all of our stuff and six people to carry. Unfortunately we’ve got an even smaller one for that run, even though the rental company had promised something else.

So we were on the run, in a full packed van with exactly no space left for anything. We even had to put some of our suitcases on top of us to fit everything. We started at around 6 am to be in time for our soundcheck. After the first two hours, where we had travelled just 100 kilometers because of really bad traffic, we decided to have a little breakfast. To save as much time as possible we just drove by a supermarket right near the highway. We found a nice parkingspot, put in the reverse gear and BOOOOM.

At first we didn’t know where the sound came from and thought it might be an accident nearby. But when we looked out through the rear window we realized there wasn’t one anymore. We stepped out of the car and saw that we hit an advertisement sign that was hanging above the ground so the PDC didn’t recognize it. The whole windows was smashed into thousands of pieces across the parking spot. But unfortunately not only across that but also across all of our merch items which we used to store right behind the tailgate.

Because time was already running fast we had to act quickly. So we unloaded the whole van, checked every single merch item for shards, cleaned the van and bought some trash bags to secure the window at least in some way. But after that we only had about 2 ½ hours left to cross half of Germany.

As you might know, Germany mostly has no speed limits on highways. And that is what might have saved our silly asses that day. At more than 200 km/h (almost 125 mp/h) we’ve managed to be at the location just in time for our soundcheck. Luckily we didn’t had any further delay on the run. The show was great, no one was hurt but we were really exhausted after that adventure. But since we were in Hamburg of coure we had to party at least at little bit on the world famous Reeperbahn! But that is another story for another time...

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