The Long and Winding Road

The dudes in Madcap made a deal with themselves to give up working for a living and took on the punk lifestyle full-time to tour non-stop from now until they can't do it anymore. Having spent only about a month at their respective homesteads in Los Angeles, the four-piece have stayed true to their calling, touring on the Vans Warped Tour over the summer and now as an opener for friends, The Bouncing Souls.
"The Warped Tour was great, the best tour ever," says Madcap's frontman /guitarist Alfredo. "They were long, hot days but we made so many friends. It was awesome…hanging out with H20 and the Bouncing Souls, everyone was really cool." Playing to huge crowds every day with punk heroes from Rancid to Pennywise sounds like everyone's idea of a good time, but with those powerhouse acts its hard to hang with the after hours gambling action backstage. People like Me First and the Gimme Gimme's Fat Mike were reportedly throwing around the kind of the cash that most punk rock journalists don't make in a year. From his hotel room in Chicago on a much-needed day off from touring the Madcap singer explains why he stayed to the leaner games.
"Fat Mike's a high roller. He used to play dice and stuff but he wanted a game that had better odds so he switched to poker and they were playing hands with like $9,000 on the table at a time." It seems Fat Mike and Fletcher of Pennywise had some action that went well beyond what some would consider sane, but we won't get into that.
"I'm scared of that guy," Alfredo says about Fletcher. "Maybe you shouldn't print that."
But touring, beside all the craziness and drama that comes with it, is the one thing Madcap wants to continue doing, at all costs. "It doesn't matter how much money I make on the road, even if it's like I have to live on dirt, I'd rather do that then go back to work," states the determined punker. Although it's not as glamorous and easy as it might seem to the casual observer. It ain't just free booze every night and women throwing themselves at the band. "It's not really the dream most people think it is," continues Alfredo. "It's the hardest job I've ever had. I thought it would be a lot different, the dream you know? But right now it's like, 'I got three bucks, do I want to eat or do I want to get a six pack of some cheap beer?'"
Lucky for the guys in Madcap, they can eat with the money on this tour because the booze has been flowing for free, one of the perks of coming up in this business.
So what else does Madcap have to offer? Well, they got a wacky drummer. Turns out he's a huge roller coaster enthusiast. "He's a really weird guy. You ask him about any roller coaster ever built in any part of the world and he'll tell you everything about it: who built it, how long it is, what material it's made of, what company made it. He knows it all."
Sounds like some Rain Man shit, doesn't it?
"Yeah exactly," Alfredo agrees. "He's an idiot savant or something."

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