Tech N9ne live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 20 August 2013

Thunder Bay was the fifth date on a fifteen-date route, and the only one between Oshawa and Winnipeg. The Something Else Canadian Tour 2013 opened at the Rockpile in Toronto on 15 August, went to Montreal and Oshawa, came back to the Rockpile on 18 August and then went north and west to Crocks on Tuesday the 20th.

Loffredo & Associates announced the stop on 19 June, two months ahead. The announcement was worded as a Strange Music press item, and it named the record the tour was built around: Something Else.

The route on paper

The dates read as a long diagonal. After Thunder Bay came Winnipeg at Republic Nightclub on 21 August, then Saskatoon at the Odeon Events Centre, Edmonton at Encore in West Edmonton Mall, Calgary, Red Deer, Kamloops, Vancouver at the Commodore Ballroom, Victoria, Nanaimo and, on 31 August, Chilliwack.

Most of the stops were nightclubs, with a ballroom and an events centre among them. A run like this shows how an independent-label artist reached Canada: one room per city, in a mix of sizes, with Thunder Bay slotted between Oshawa and Winnipeg.

Nothing is listed for 19 August, the Monday before Thunder Bay. The Thunder Bay and Winnipeg nights are consecutive, so the tour reached Manitoba a day after leaving Crocks.

Who was on the bill

The tour featured Tech N9ne with Krizz Kaliko, Liqz and Driveby. In Thunder Bay the local support was Beatfarm. Krizz Kaliko is a fellow Strange Music artist and a regular collaborator on Tech N9ne’s records.

No running order or set lengths were published. What the bill does show is three touring names below the headliner and a local act added at the top of the page, so the city’s own scene had a slot on a night it could not otherwise have hosted.

Three weeks after Something Else

Something Else came out on 30 July 2013, three weeks before the Crocks date. It debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with 58,300 copies in its first week, at that time the highest debut of his career. Singles came first: So Dope (They Wanna) on 2 July and Fragile on 17 July.

The guest list is long. B.o.B, Big K.R.I.T., CeeLo Green, The Doors, The Game, Kendrick Lamar, Serj Tankian, T-Pain, Wiz Khalifa and others appear across the record, with production mostly by Seven. It has three sections, called Fire, Water and Earth.

The guest list also shows the rock side of his catalogue. His stage name comes from the TEC-9 pistol, which he reread as technique plus nine, and his fast, chopped delivery has sat beside rock and metal collaborators such as Serj Tankian of System of a Down.

That crossover is worth noting in a week when a metal band and a hard-rock band surrounded his date.

Tech N9ne was born Aaron Yates in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1971 and founded Strange Music there in 1999 with Travis O’Guin. His breakthrough was Everready (The Religion) in 2006, followed by K.O.D. in 2009 and All 6’s and 7’s in 2011, which featured Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne among others.

Something Else was issued through Strange Music, RBC Records and INgrooves, which means an independent label was behind a record that reached the top five of the American album chart. That fact frames the tour: an act with its own label and its own route across the country, from Toronto’s Rockpile to a hall in Chilliwack.

The room that week

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South. The week held two other big nights. The Sword played on Wednesday 14 August with Castle, American Sharks and Uhussie on the bill, and Airbourne followed on Wednesday 21 August, the night after Tech N9ne.

That is three heavy nights in eight days: a metal band, a rapper and an Australian hard-rock band, each drawing on a different corner of the local audience, which is a reading of the genres and not a count. The room’s other dates are on the shows page, and how many people attended on the Tuesday went unrecorded.