The Black Dahlia Murder live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 22 May 2012

Five days after this show, heavy rain hit Thunder Bay, and by the 27th the city was flooded. The Black Dahlia Murder had played Crocks on Tuesday, 22 May 2012, and gone on down the tour route before any of that happened. The bill was theirs, with two other extreme-metal bands beneath them and an all-ages door.

The date was announced on 23 March, nearly two months ahead. Advance tickets cost $18. An all-ages line is uncommon for a metal night in a bar-format room, and it suggests who the promoter expected to want a ticket.

A tour built around a record

The Black Dahlia Murder come from Waterford, Michigan, and formed in 2001. Their fifth album, Ritual, came out on Metal Blade Records on 21 June 2011 and reached number 31 on the Billboard 200. The name of this run echoes it. The Canadian Ritual Tour finished in Detroit, at St. Andrews Hall on 2 June, close to the band’s home ground.

The North American leg began on 11 May in Madison, Wisconsin, and crossed Canada from the west. The Rickshaw Theatre in Vancouver hosted the date on 16 May. Thunder Bay, on the 22nd, was the twelfth day of the run. The band’s next album, Everblack, followed on 11 June 2013 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 32.

The two support bands

Exhumed formed in San Jose, California, in 1990, went on hiatus in 2005 and reformed in 2010. Their comeback album, All Guts, No Glory, appeared in 2011, and Necrocracy came out through Relapse Records on 2 August 2013, a little over a year after this date. Their genre is deathgrind, a blend of death metal and grindcore.

Fuck the Facts are Canadian, from Gatineau, Quebec. They began in 1998 as a solo project of the guitarist Topon Das and later grew into a band with Melanie Mongeon on vocals. Die Miserable, released in 2011, came out on Relapse Records. The poster called them Canada’s own, and they were the only homegrown name on the poster.

A large year for the headliners

The tour press text noted that the headliners had already toured Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, and had played dates in New Zealand and at the Soundwave festival in Australia. An American headlining tour with Nile, Skeletonwitch and Hour of Penance was next on the list. A trip to Crocks was a small stop in a busy year.

The comparison with the rest of the spring is direct. Across five 2012 shows with a listed price, tickets ran from $10 to $25, and $18 sat in the upper half. Henry Rollins charged $25 for a seated spoken-word evening 18 days later. The metal night cost seven dollars less.

Who presented it

The poster credited Loffredo & Associates together with H.I.T Management as presenters, a credit line that also appears on the Rollins date and on several other Crocks shows that year. A touring band’s route is a chain of fixed nights across two countries, and Thunder Bay was one link in it, the twelfth of a run that ended on 2 June.

Buying a ticket

Tickets were sold at The Urban Boutique, Rainbow on Bay, Solbada beside Ozone on Memorial, Extreme Pita and Bean Fiend. The promoter’s own website was a sixth route. Questions went to a promo e-mail address and a Thunder Bay phone number, both printed on the poster.

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South, downtown. The show was five days over by the time the water came. The remaining dates on the tour still ran on into the first days of June, ending in Detroit on the 2nd.

The storm of 26 and 27 May dropped 91 millimetres of rain on Thunder Bay in 18 hours, overwhelmed the sewage treatment plant and led to a state of emergency. By September a disaster relief fund had raised $1,046,908 through concerts, a golf tournament and donations.

One concert that gave all its ticket sales to that cause, held across the border in Minnesota with Smash Mouth headlining, is on the Retro Rock Revue page.