Monster Truck live at Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie, 28 June 2019

Monster Truck went on sale in Sault Ste. Marie for $35 plus a service fee, and the address on the ticket was 345 Queen Street East. The date was Friday, 28 June 2019, with doors at 7:30 p.m. Fortunate Losers were named as special guests. H.I.T Management and Loffredo & Associates presented the night.

A room on Queen Street

Soo Blaster is one address with more than one use. Current listings describe a sit-down restaurant, a sports bar with an area set aside for bands, and a games centre with pool tables, darts and arcade machines. A concert there means a bar-format room with a stage corner, rather than a hall built only for shows.

The city sits on the St. Marys River, facing its American namesake across the water. In 2019 Canada Day fell on the Monday after this show, so the Friday opened a long weekend. That is a reading of the calendar, not a stated reason. The Saturday in Thunder Bay has a page of its own, and the two nights ran back to back.

Where the band stood in 2019

Monster Truck formed in Hamilton in 2009. Its first album, Furiosity, came out in 2013 on Dine Alone Records, and that year the band won the Juno Award for breakthrough group of the year. Sittin’ Heavy followed in 2016 on Mascot Records, a Dutch label, so the band’s records had a Toronto home for the first album and a European one for the second.

True Rockers arrived in 2018, with Dee Snider of Twisted Sister singing on the title track. Snider fronted his band on its biggest hit in 1984, so the guest spot tied a Canadian rock band of the 2010s to the hard rock of the 1980s.

By June 2019 the album was nine months old, and the band had already toured it in the United Kingdom in April. A bar-format room in the Soo was a long way from that tour, and a plain reminder that the same album could be played in both kinds of place.

Four people, a few songs

The four-piece that formed in 2009 was intact in 2019: Jon Harvey on bass and vocals, Jeremy Widerman on guitar, Brandon Bliss on keyboards and Steve Kiely on drums. Their catalogue by then held “Sweet Mountain River” and “The Lion” from Furiosity, both of which did well on Canadian rock radio in 2013, and “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” from Sittin’ Heavy.

Another song, “The Enforcer”, became the Toronto Maple Leafs’ goal song, so a Hamilton rock band’s riff is heard in a hockey arena every time the home side scores.

An opener from Sudbury

Fortunate Losers are a rock quartet from Sudbury. Their billing here is a plain “special guests”, and the bill gives no start time or running order. A Sudbury band opening in Sault Ste. Marie kept the evening regional, and the Thunder Bay date followed within a day.

The bill as announced was two bands and one ticket price, $35, with the $35 exclusive of the service fee.

The last visit and this one

An earlier Monster Truck date is in this record: Thursday, 12 December 2013, at Crocks in Thunder Bay. Doors were at 8 p.m., the show was 19+, and advance tickets were $15. That tour was built on Furiosity, and the Thunder Bay date sat between Winnipeg on 11 December and Ottawa on 14 December.

Six years later the base price had more than doubled, and the band had two more albums to draw on. The $35 here was the cheaper of the two 2019 nights. Thunder Bay’s tiers, at $40 and $45, were higher, and nothing in the announcements says why.

The summer that followed

Eleven days later the same promoter’s calendar moved to Sudbury, the opener’s home city. Colter Wall played The Coulson there on 9 July. Two days after that he was at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, and Half Moon Run followed on 12 July.

Country and indie in July, after rock in June, came in three different rooms across two cities.