Cancer Bats live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 13 September 2019

The date on the ticket was Friday the 13th, and Cancer Bats arrived at Crocks at NV on the second night of a tour that had begun the evening before at Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie. The show was on sale in July, well ahead of the date. Winnipeg came next, with a festival slot on the Saturday.

Tickets were $20 in advance plus a service fee. Doors were set for 8:30 p.m., and the show was 19+, with photo ID demanded of everyone who came in. H.I.T Management and Loffredo & Associates were the presenters.

A tribute band inside the band

Cancer Bats have a second identity. Bat Sabbath began with a 2011 set at the Sonisphere Festival, where the group played Black Sabbath songs, and it became a running side project with an EP in 2013. The two acts share their members, which makes the heavy-metal side of the band’s taste easy to hear.

Only Cancer Bats were billed for Thunder Bay, so Bat Sabbath was not part of the night. The point is where the group had grown from: hardcore and punk records, metal reference points, and a live show that borrows from all of it. A Friday in a rock room suited that mix.

The record in the merch bag

Two days earlier, on 11 September, the band and Single Mothers had put out New Damage Switcheroo Vol. 1, a covers split on New Damage Records that came as a download and a limited seven-inch. Cancer Bats folded two Single Mothers songs into one, and Single Mothers played the Cancer Bats song “Road Sick”. A tour and a fresh record arriving together make easy promotion.

That also explains the bill. Single Mothers were half of the release, so on this run the two bands played their own swap in the same place on the same night, with Sharptooth from Baltimore, whose album Clever Girl dated from 2017, completing the package.

Carver, the local guest

Both Ontario dates had a local guest. In Sault Ste. Marie it was Redundant, and in Thunder Bay it was Carver. Nothing further is recorded about either band, but the arrangement is a familiar one: a touring package with a fixed core, and one place on the card kept for a group from the host town.

Single Mothers had formed in London, Ontario, in 2008, so the Thunder Bay stop put a London band and a Toronto band on one stage a long way from home. Carver’s slot was the only part of the card that changed between the two nights.

Red River Road on a Friday

By September the room had spent eleven months in its new home. Crocks had moved into the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road on 5 October 2018, leaving Cumberland Street South after about nine years. Its shows were timed to end early enough for the club to run its own late nights afterwards.

A 19+ hardcore show at 8:30 on a Friday fitted that arrangement, with the loud evening first and the club’s programme after. That is a reading of how the building worked, not an account of what happened on this particular night.

Prices against the summer

At $20 the ticket sat between the July shows in the same room. The Motorleague’s Tuesday date cost $12, Colter Wall’s Thursday $25 and Half Moon Run’s Friday C$32. Across fourteen priced shows in 2019 on this site, prices ran from $10 to $45.

Sault Ste. Marie had the same price and nearly the same bill, in a very different building: a restaurant and arcade complex the night before, a nightclub here. Anyone who caught both nights paid $40 before fees. The same $20 had bought a Bobaflex ticket three days earlier, so it looks like the going price for a touring rock bill that week.

The tour’s fifteen dates included only two in Ontario, and this was the second. Winnipeg followed on the 14th at the Park Theatre, as part of the SOS Festival, with the Prairies and the west coast after that.