Dizzy Mystics live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 26 April 2019

Wanderlost, the first album by Dizzy Mystics, came out on 3 May 2019. A week earlier, on Friday 26 April, the band was in Thunder Bay playing songs that were not on it. The billing was an Ultimate Soundgarden and Tool Tribute Experience, and a ticket cost C$10, the cheapest price listed for any 2019 show in this record.

The room was Crocks, by then inside the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road, where the club’s concerts had moved on 5 October 2018. Eight days earlier Thunder Bay had a very different bill, when Steel Beaver and Ozbourne shared an 80s hair metal party.

Three sets from one band

The band is from Winnipeg. Kyle Halldorson sang, Alexandre Joyal played guitar, Aaron Bacon played bass and Jeff Laird played drums. Their own material is psychedelic and progressive rock, and they are based in Manitoba’s capital, a long way west of Thunder Bay.

Wanderlost is a self-released record of ten tracks, and press for the album set them beside Primus, Frank Zappa and Steely Dan as well as Tool. That night the evening ran in three parts: a Tool set, a Soundgarden set, and a stretch of their own songs.

That structure is unusual for a tribute night. Most tribute acts stay inside one catalogue. Splitting the show put the band’s own work between two sets of songs the room already knew, a sensible way to introduce a record that was days from release. It also handed the singer two very different jobs in one evening.

The two catalogues

Soundgarden formed in Seattle in 1984. Their album Superunknown reached the public in 1994 and carried “Black Hole Sun” and “Spoonman”, both released as singles that year.

At the 1995 Grammys the two songs won awards for best hard rock performance and best metal performance respectively. Chris Cornell, who sang for them, died in May 2017, so a Soundgarden tribute in 2019 was also a way to hear the songs live when the band itself no longer could.

Tool are from Los Angeles, and the singer Maynard James Keenan also fronts A Perfect Circle and Puscifer. Their albums Ænima and Lateralus date from 1996 and 2001.

The song “Schism”, from the second of those albums, won a Grammy for best metal performance in 2002. In April 2019 the band had not released an album since 10,000 Days in 2006. The next, Fear Inoculum, appeared that August, four months after this night.

Two weeks at the same address

This was one of three Crocks at NV dates within about two weeks. Rapper Chris Webby followed on 8 May, at C$20, and on 10 May Hamilton’s Teenage Head arrived at C$25. The three nights share almost nothing in sound, and their prices climbed across them.

The Chris Webby show belonged to hip-hop, Teenage Head to first-wave Canadian punk, and this one to two alternative rock bands of the 1990s, one of which is properly a prog band. A club calendar that runs that wide in a fortnight looks like a room booked to fill weekends, not to serve one taste.

The price

The billing lists Dizzy Mystics alone, with no support act and no door time. C$10 is the whole of the ticket information. It is less than a quarter of the C$45 that Monster Truck’s all-levels tier reached in June.

A ten-dollar ticket in a year that ran to forty-five is a plain marker of where the night sat, at the floor of the calendar. The album was a week away, and by that measure the Friday was a preview: songs from other people’s records, with the band’s own in the middle.

The date also marks an odd overlap. The two acts being honoured were on opposite sides of a long wait. Soundgarden’s singer was gone, and Tool’s audience had been waiting more than twelve years for a record. Both were absent from the stage, in different ways, and a club show was the nearest substitute.