Arkells live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 1 March 2015

The night before Thunder Bay, Arkells were in Winnipeg at the Garrick Centre. The night before that they were in Saskatoon, and the night before that in Edmonton. Winnipeg is about 700 kilometres west of Thunder Bay by road, so Sunday 1 March 2015 began with a long drive east.

Doors were at eight. The show was 19+ with photo ID, and advance tickets were $30. H.I.T Management and Loffredo & Associates presented it.

A record seven months old

High Noon was the band’s third album. Jackson Square came out in 2008 and Michigan Left in 2011, and the band won Group of the Year at the Junos in 2012, a year after Michigan Left. Anthony Carone had joined on keyboards and guitar in 2011.

Arkells are from Hamilton, Ontario, formed in 2006, and took their name from Arkell Street in the Westdale neighbourhood near McMaster University, where they lived. Max Kerman sings, and Mike DeAngelis plays guitar. The album on the road that winter was High Noon, released on 5 August 2014 through Dine Alone Records and Universal Music Canada.

The album debuted at number 3 on the Canadian albums chart, the band’s highest position there, and by September 2015 it had gone gold. It was recorded in Los Angeles in 2013, with Tony Hoffer mixing and engineering, and it made the longlist for the 2015 Polaris Music Prize. “Come to Light” was one of its songs.

Two weeks before the Junos

The timing is the most striking thing about the date. The Juno Awards were held in Hamilton on 14 and 15 March 2015, which was the band’s own hometown. Arkells won Group of the Year, and High Noon won Rock Album of the Year. They also played on the broadcast, with an orchestra.

Nothing on the Crocks poster hinted at any of it, and the room could not have known the result. Anyone who came on 1 March saw a band that had been nominated and had not yet won, which is a reading of the calendar. They had already won Group of the Year once, in 2012.

By 12 March, three days before the broadcast, the band was in the news in Hamilton for presenting a surprise award to a local children’s group at the TD Music Green Room, still described as Juno nominees. Only eleven days separated that event from the Sunday at Crocks.

The opener

Dear Rouge is a Vancouver duo, formed in 2012 by the married couple Drew and Danielle McTaggart. Their debut album, Black to Gold, came out on 30 March 2015 through Universal Music Canada, four weeks after this show. They announced the tour with Arkells on 2 February, four days before Crocks announced its date.

So the Sunday bill caught them a few weeks before that record came out.

Their single “I Heard I Had” won the 2015 SOCAN Songwriting Prize, and the title track of the album reached number 2 on the Canadian alternative rock chart by May. A year later, in April 2016, they won the Juno for Breakthrough Group of the Year, and that is how many people know the name today.

Thirty dollars in context

Thirty dollars in advance was the highest ticket among the three shows announced together on 6 February. The highest price on the club’s 2015 list was $95, for a meet-and-greet tier at the Akon show in September. At the other end, Canada Day admission was $5 after the fireworks.

Set that way, the Arkells ticket was a mid-priced Sunday for a band with a national award two weeks away. Tickets were sold at Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita, Waking Giant Coffee Co. and the club itself, and online. Sunday was also the night Crocks gave to Benighted the following week and to Swollen Members the previous spring.

The week before, and the week after

Elliott Brood had played the room six days earlier at $20 in advance, and Benighted at Crocks followed a week after at $10 on the door.

All three were announced together on 6 February, and the full list of nights is on the shows page.