Sebastian Bach live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 25 June 2018

Skid Row’s second album had been out for twenty-seven years when its singer reached Crocks. Sebastian Bach played the Monday of 25 June 2018 as one stop on a tour he called Home Away From Home, and the name suits a singer who was raised in Peterborough, Ontario.

Bach was born Sebastian Bierk in Freeport, in the Bahamas, in 1968, and grew up in Peterborough. He sang with Skid Row from 1987 to 1996. The band’s self-titled debut arrived in 1989 and Slave to the Grind in 1991, and the crowd at a show like this one came mostly for those years.

A run across the country

The tour opened in Highland, California, on 8 June and closed in Woodhaven, Michigan, on 14 July. In between came fourteen Canadian cities: Vancouver, Kelowna, Red Deer, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Ottawa, Barrie, Kingston, Montreal, Halifax and Moncton. Thunder Bay is the one stop on that list well north of the Highway 401 corridor.

The Standstills, a rock duo from Canada, were announced as the opener across the dates. Nothing more about the Thunder Bay bill was published, and no start time reached the record. Its Monday date is the only one in the record for that week at the room.

The most expensive night

Tickets cost $40. Across twelve 2018 shows with a price in this record, admission ran from $13 to $40, so the Bach date sat at the top. It cost twice what The Faceless charged six days earlier and well over twice the $15 asked for Rivers of Nihil twelve days later.

The gap says something about name recognition. A singer known from a chart-era band commands a higher price than a touring metal act still building its audience, and the same small downtown room held both.

The songs people came for

The early Skid Row records supply most of what a Bach show is built from. “Youth Gone Wild” and “18 and Life” both come from the 1989 debut, and “Monkey Business” from Slave to the Grind. Which of them were played in Thunder Bay is not on record, and the songs are named here only as the band’s best-known work.

They are also the reason for the price. The voice on those 1989 and 1991 records is what a $40 ticket bought, and nobody else on the summer calendar had one to sell.

Between records

Bach’s solo albums came in 2007, 2011 and 2014, under the titles Angel Down, Kicking & Screaming and Give ‘Em Hell. When the tour was announced in April 2018 he was writing and demoing a new record, with songs offered by the guitarists John 5 and Steve Stevens.

No release date came with that news. The Thunder Bay crowd heard a singer between records, working from a catalogue that stopped four years earlier.

He had filled the years between albums with plenty else. Bach appeared on Broadway, took acting parts on Gilmore Girls and on Trailer Park Boys, and published a memoir, 18 and Life on Skid Row, in 2016. The Trailer Park Boys credit is a small joke for a Canadian tour.

Where it sat in the week

The Faceless had played the previous Tuesday, and the next Crocks night in the record after Bach is the Rivers of Nihil show on Saturday 7 July. A hard rock singer on a Monday between two metal bills is a reminder that the room booked across genres instead of down one.

On the tour list Thunder Bay sits between Winnipeg and Ottawa, the only date in the run between the prairies and the capital. For a Canadian singer on a Canadian tour, that is a fair description of the route from west to east.

Crocks would stay on Cumberland Street South for a few more months. From 5 October 2018 the name moved to a different building, and the other nights of that year are on the shows page. Bach’s own dates on the tour ended with a Michigan show nineteen days after this one.