Tech N9ne live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 8 October 2015

Two days without a show sit in the middle of the Special Effects Canadian Tour, and Thunder Bay sits right after them. Tech N9ne played Oshawa on 5 October 2015. His next date was Crocks on Thursday 8 October. The night after, he was booked into Winnipeg, so this was the last stop before the prairies.

The tour ran 17 dates, from Windsor on 29 September to the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on 17 October. Seven shows in Ontario and Quebec came first, Thunder Bay was number eight, and nine dates in the west followed. Rooms on the route ranged from the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto to a club in Castlegar, British Columbia.

What he was promoting

Special Effects, his fifteenth studio album, came out on 4 May 2015 on Strange Music and debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with 60,000 copies sold in its first week. The record is organised by days of the week and runs 77 minutes. Guests include Eminem, Lil Wayne, Corey Taylor, B.o.B, 2 Chainz and E-40.

Singles followed through the year: “Hood Go Crazy” in February, “Aw Yeah?” in March, “On the Bible” in May, and “No K” on 23 September, the week the tour began. Its predecessor, Something Else, had opened at number four too in July 2013, on 58,300 copies, the highest first week of his career to that point.

Two years later he beat it.

Where he came from

Tech N9ne is Aaron Yates, born on 8 November 1971 in Kansas City, Missouri. He built his career on his own label rather than a major, and by September 2008 he had passed a million album sales. His records are Anghellic in 2001, Everready (The Religion) in 2006 and K.O.D. in 2009, with All 6’s and 7’s following in 2011.

He is best known for fast, chopped delivery, and one of his songs is called “Worldwide Choppers.” In 2009 he won the Left Field Woodie Award at the mtvU Music Awards. Crocks was not new to him by October 2015, since he had played the room two years earlier.

The labelmate and the local name

Krizz Kaliko is a rapper and singer from Kansas City, Missouri. He signed to Strange Music in 2006 and appears on Special Effects six times, so his slot on the bill was a continuation of the record. The label was founded in 1999 in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, by Tech N9ne and Travis O’Guin.

The third name, Doug Crawford, is a Canadian rapper. His slot put a home-country act on every date of a tour that otherwise came from one Missouri label. No set times were given for the Thunder Bay stop.

Tickets and the door

Advance tickets cost $30. They were sold at Rainbow on Bay, Waking Giant Coffee Co., Joya Espresso and Crocks, and through the promoter’s online store. VIP packages went on offer separately, through the label’s own shop. The event was 19+, with doors at 9 p.m. and valid photo ID required.

Loffredo & Associates presented the night with H.I.T Management. The date was announced on 16 June, almost four months out. At $30 it sat below the $35 asked for Machine Gun Kelly the previous December.

Not the first visit

He had been to the room before. On 20 August 2013, a Tuesday, he played Crocks on the Something Else tour, three weeks after that album reached shops.

The two visits differed in season, weekday and cast. The 2013 run had been a summer trip of fifteen dates between 15 and 31 August, Thunder Bay among the first. This one fell in the autumn, on a Thursday, and Krizz Kaliko was joined by Doug Crawford, where in 2013 he had shared the bill with Liqz and Driveby and a local act, Beatfarm.

The following night the room went from a rap tour to a single DJ. DJ BL3ND, billed as coming from Los Angeles, was announced for the Friday at $20 pre-sale, ten dollars less than this show’s advance ticket.

More dates from that autumn are on the shows page.