Matthew Good live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 24 November 2015

Anyone who bought a ticket for Matthew Good in September 2015 was given a chore along with the receipt: print the PayPal confirmation, and carry it to the door with photo ID. Two months separated the sale from the show, so a lot of paper spent the autumn in kitchen drawers. Tickets were $35 in advance, plus a $5.00 online service fee.

The concert was set for Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at Crocks, 16 Cumberland Street South, in the downtown core of Thunder Bay. The radio station Rock 94, Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presented it. It was billed as one stop on the Chaotic Neutral Tour, with Scott Helman as special guest, and no other act was named.

Chaotic Neutral, three days old

Chaotic Neutral came out on 25 September 2015, three days before this show was announced. It was Good’s seventh solo album, produced by Warne Livesey, and it was nominated for Rock Album of the Year at the 2016 Junos. The tour that carried it began in Victoria on 6 November and was already eighteen days old when it reached Thunder Bay.

Two days after Crocks, the same tour played Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. That is a big step up in room size, and it makes the Thunder Bay date look like what it was, one club night in the middle of a national run. Good’s name was large enough to fill both kinds of room.

A young opener

Scott Helman was twenty when the tour began. He grew up in Toronto and had released his first EP, Augusta, in October 2014. Supporting Good across Canada in 2015 was one of the touring jobs that filled his year. For a singer barely a year into his catalogue, the slot meant weeks of playing to rooms that had come for someone else.

His breakout song, “PDA”, was still two years off. On a Tuesday in Thunder Bay, most of the room would have met him as a name on a poster. Later results make the pairing look sharper than it could have felt at the time.

Two years after the first night

Good had been to Crocks before. On 5 November 2013 he played the same room, six weeks after Arrows of Desire was released, with Gentlemen Husbands as special guests. That night, covered on the earlier show page, sold general admission at $35 and a limited block of reserved seats at $40. Doors were at 8 p.m.

The base price did not move in two years. It only gained the $5.00 fee, which the 2013 notice never mentions. Set against the other Crocks nights of 2015, whose listed prices ran from $5 to $95, $35 sat in the upper half without reaching the extremes.

What Good had built by then

Matthew Good was born in Burnaby, British Columbia, and grew up in Coquitlam. The Matthew Good Band’s Underdogs appeared in 1997, and Beautiful Midnight in 1999 became the record most people name first. He went solo with Avalanche in 2003. His album Vancouver, from 2009, won the Juno for Rock Album of the Year in 2011.

By 2015 he had twelve years as a solo artist behind him and was still releasing records steadily. No set list came with the promotion for this night, so none is given here. Listeners who came for the songs of 1999 and listeners who came for the new album could stand in the same room.

A cold Tuesday

Late November in Thunder Bay is a cold month on the lake, and a Tuesday is an ordinary working night. Booking a touring rock act on such a date fits a national tour that has to be somewhere every evening. That is a reading of the calendar, not a reason anybody gave.

The other nights of that season are gathered on the shows page. Good’s two visits to Crocks, in 2013 and 2015, fell almost exactly two years apart, both in the first weeks of November.