The Glorious Sons Announce a 14-Date Canadian Headlining Tour

Fourteen dates, five provinces, and the road runs west to Vancouver and then turns around. Peterborough opened it on Friday 14 March 2014, and Oshawa closed it on Tuesday 1 April. In between, the band crossed the country in a bus, and Thunder Bay sat late in the return leg, on Sunday 30 March at Crocks.

The announcement went out on 12 February 2014. It named the act as a Kingston band and called the run its first headlining tour. The group would be crossing Canada by bus for the second time. Earlier cross-country runs had put it on bills with The Headstones, The Trews, Three Days Grace and Head of the Herd.

What the band had by then

The Glorious Sons formed in Kingston, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Ontario, in 2011 as a five-piece, and the tour headline called them a Kingston band before it said anything else.

Their first EP, Shapeless Art, came out in November 2013, and after they signed to Black Box Music it was re-released with a new single. The band’s team said it had debuted at number four on the iTunes rock chart, a claim from its own side.

Two singles carried it. “Mama” came first and went to number six on Canadian rock radio, according to later accounts. “White Noise” followed, and the announcement put it at number eight on the Canadian rock chart at that point. It went on to peak at number two, so the tour was announced while the song was still climbing.

The route

Read as a map, the list is tidy. From Peterborough and Barrie the band went to Winnipeg on 17 March, then Regina, Red Deer, Lethbridge and Calgary, and on to Kelowna, Vancouver and Kamloops. Edmonton and Saskatoon came on the way back, on 27 and 28 March.

Winnipeg, at Pyramid on Monday 17 March, was the first date after the two Ontario openers, and Regina followed two days later at The Exchange. Kelowna on the 23rd and Vancouver on the 25th had the 24th between them, a day the list leaves empty.

That put Saskatoon on a Friday and Thunder Bay on the Sunday after it, with one last Ontario show two days later. Four of the fourteen stops were in Ontario, four in Alberta and three in British Columbia. Thunder Bay was the only northwestern Ontario date on the whole run.

The rooms were clubs and pubs, among them The Red Dog in Peterborough, Republik in Calgary and The Pawn Shop in Edmonton. The Vancouver show was listed at The Roxy with CFOX in brackets.

In Thunder Bay the room was Crocks at 16 Cumberland Street South, the address the club had taken over four years before.

Around the night

The shows page collects the other nights Crocks put on that spring. This one was a rock band on a first headlining run, with its second single still gaining ground on radio. The room’s 2014 calendar also held hip-hop, such as the Swollen Members night on 4 May, so a Sunday could go either way.

Two lines of press sat below the tour copy. The Kingston Whig praised the band’s everyman sound, and AlanCross.ca wrote of lyrics about love and liquor delivered with a sense of humour. It named the Rolling Stones and Kings of Leon as influences. Those are the band’s own selected quotes, and they read that way.

What came next

The Thunder Bay date fell about six months before the band’s first full-length record. The Union was released on 14 September 2014, recorded at Catherine North Studio in Hamilton with producer John-Angus MacDonald. The band then toured Canada with Airbourne and with The Trews, and The Union earned a Juno Award nomination for Best Rock Album.

Few details of the night itself made it out: no door time, no ticket price, no support act. What remains is a place in a sequence. A Thunder Bay club hosted the band while its single was still on the radio charts and a few months before the album that made the name widely known, which is a small claim but a true one.