Monster Truck live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 12 December 2013

Tickets for Monster Truck at Crocks went on sale on Friday 13 September 2013, a day after the announcement, at $15 in advance. The show itself was Thursday 12 December, thirteen weeks off. That is a long lead for a club date, long enough that the band’s autumn in Europe fell between the on-sale and the night.

Rock 94 and Loffredo & Associates presented the show. Doors opened at 8 p.m., the event was 19+, and photo ID was required. Advance tickets came from Bean Fiend, Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita and Crocks, or from the promoter’s website. No support act was named, so the evening belonged to one band.

Where Thunder Bay sat on the tour

The Canadian run began at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on 4 December. It went through two nights at The Starlite in Edmonton, then Calgary and Saskatoon, and reached the Pyramid Cabaret in Winnipeg on 11 December. Thunder Bay came next, on the twelfth. Ottawa followed on the fourteenth.

That made Crocks the seventh date of thirteen. The tour finished in southern Ontario: Sound Academy in Toronto on 20 December, then Peterborough, then Hamilton Place Theatre on 22 December. Hamilton is where the band formed, so the run ended at home.

The drive from Thunder Bay to Ottawa, with no date on the thirteenth, is a very long one by any route.

A young band with a busy year

Monster Truck formed in Hamilton in 2009 and reached radio with a 2011 EP. Furiosity, the debut album, came out on Dine Alone Records in Canada in June 2013.

Jon Harvey sang and played bass, Jeremy Widerman played guitar, Brandon Bliss played keyboards and Steve Kiely played drums. A keyboard in a hard-rock four-piece is part of what set the sound apart.

The announcement listed the year’s marks: a Juno Award for Breakthrough Group of the Year, a spell at the top of Canadian rock radio with “Sweet Mountain River”, and summer dates opening for Alice in Chains.

The Junos that year were held in Regina, Saskatchewan, in April, eight months before this show. The same copy said Furiosity had entered the Canadian SoundScan Top 200 at number 13. It added that the second single, “The Lion”, was climbing the radio charts. Those were the band’s own figures at the time.

It also carried praise from two guitarists. Slash called Monster Truck hard, soulful and heavy, and Mike Inez of Alice in Chains wrote a longer, saltier endorsement. Both quotes sat in the announcement between the ticket details and the tour dates.

Europe first, then home

Before the Canadian dates the band went abroad. The announcement listed the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg on 27 September, then Turku, Jyvaskyla, Helsinki, Stockholm and Gothenburg between 18 and 23 October, supporting Vista Chino, which it described as formerly Kyuss.

The last of those Swedish dates was six weeks before Vancouver. The band therefore reached Thunder Bay with two long trips behind it in one autumn, the second of them across Canada in the depth of winter.

What $15 bought

The promoter’s other priced shows that year ran from $10 to $40, across nine dates, so fifteen dollars sat at the cheap end. The band was, on the announcement’s own account, coming off its biggest year to date, and the price stayed low all the same.

The rest of the run shows the band’s scale. Most of the named rooms are clubs and ballrooms, with Hamilton Place Theatre the one seated hall, so Crocks was typical of the tour, not a detour from it.

The same promoter, six years later

Monster Truck came back in 2019. On 28 June a show was sold for Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie at C$35 as listed, and on 29 June for Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay at C$45.

Two more albums lie between the visits: Sittin’ Heavy in 2016 and True Rockers in 2018. Fifteen dollars became forty-five, though the later prices are listings for a different room and a different ticket system, so the comparison is only rough. More nights from the same winter are on the shows page.