REAPING REWARDS
Kingston’s Glorious Sons put in the miles and sweat to earn the stage at Scotiabank Arena on Thursday Kingston rock band Glorious Sons has developed a fan base without help from tastemakers.
Kingston’s Glorious Sons have made the leap to playing big arenas,
Without a lot of fuss, the Glorious Sons have quietly positioned themselves as perhaps the biggest thing to come out of Kingston since a certain other Canadian rock ’n’ roll quintet of some repute.
No, they’re not quite the Tragically Hip yet. But on this fall’s cross-Canada “S.O.S.” tour with hard-workin’ Toronto gals the Beaches, the Sons have made the leap to playing arenas in numerous markets — including a stop at the Scotiabank Arena on Thursday — and they’ve done it in much the same fashion as their “Little Prison City” predecessors: mainly by getting out there and hitting the road relentlessly and so consistently delivering the goods onstage that word can’t help but get around.
Canadian rock radio has been kind to the Glorious Sons, true, giving a lot of airtime to gritty singles like “Heavy,” “The Contender” and the smashing “S.O.S. (Sawed Off Shotgun)” over the past five years. But the live shows keep drawing larger and larger crowds for a reason. And the Sons, who sold out two nights at the 1,350-capacity Phoenix here in Toronto last fall, were confident enough in their powers to upsize their ambitions for this latest round of touring in support of last year’s sophomore album Young Beauties & Fools.
“I think that it was a situation where we outgrew the rooms that were safe and comfortable and we wanted to, y’know, get our feet wet and see how well we were gonna do booking these large venues and arenas and whatnot,” says thoughtful frontman Brett Emmons, conceding that this Thursday’s Scotiabank Arena gig — while perhaps not quite as momentous as the band’s homecoming arena gig at Kingston’s K-Rock Centre immortalized on the
Little Prison City live album last February — will be the biggest of the band’s career to date, and mildly nerve-wracking because of it.
“I just didn’t want to show up and play to a half-empty arena, but the ticket sales are good and I’m excited to see how it goes … Growing up in Kingston, there was always kind of a buzz downtown on the day of a big show. Like, if Santana was coming to town or something everybody would be out in the bars and on the patios and there’d be this excitement in the air all day, and it was really cool to be the band creating that buzz when we played the K-Rock Centre. So I’m curious just to see kind of what the vibe is down there when we get to Toronto.”
Emmons and the rest of the Glorious Sons — big brother and guitarist Jay Emmons, guitarist Chris Koster, bassist Chris Huot and drummer Adam Paquette — have thus far had little trouble adjusting to larger rooms, he says.
The expanded size of the venues and the stages haven’t been a problem, anyway. What has been a little weird is showing up to some western dates to find a seated crowd on the arena floor.
“That, to me, kind of goes against the very culture of what we’re about so that was a little tough to get over,” says Emmons. “I mean, people stand and it wasn’t a big thing, but it was just a little bit of a hiccup that you have to kind of digest and try to play to. Because when people are sitting down in chairs like that, it’s no problem getting them to stand up, the problem is the barrier created by the actual chairs, where you want them to move up and you want them to be close and sweaty and you want to be able to feel them. And on a Tuesday night in, let’s say, Grande Prairie you’re going to have trouble getting people to become ambitious enough to push those chairs out of the way.
“It was just something to get over. It was a unique position I’d never been in before and it’s not a big deal at all. We still had a great time, but I definitely know now when talking to a promoter or management or agents or people like that to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
There will be no seats on the floor at the Scotiabank Arena, for the record, which is indeed a bit more fitting for the Glorious Sons’ earthy, honest breed of blues-tinged barroom rock than a recital-hall vibe.
That earthiness and honesty — combined with Emmons’s literate, but relatably messedup lyrics — is key to the Sons’ growing mainstream success. It was never a calculated thing on the band’s part, as they’re simply fans of more “classic” rock ’n’ roll, but they’ve casually slipped into a purist niche that not a lot of younger bands are filling these days. Indeed, demand for the Sons, who’ve already been on the road for a full year behind Young Beauties & Fools, is such that they’re going to have to postpone plans to start recording a new album
in January take on another headlining tour in the U.S. through February and March.
This popularity with the “plebes,” of course, means the Glorious Sons have never been embraced by the Canadian music press as particularly “cool.” But Emmons takes great delight in the remark that he and his bandmates have come as far as they have without ever having any kind of hype behind them.
“Thank you. That’s really kind of you to say because we’ve felt that our entire damn career,” he laughs. “We feel like we’ve been fighting the whole ‘cool’ issue our entire career, for some reason. No matter what, there’s always been a band releasing an album at the same time as us that has more hype or has more of that ‘underground energy’ around them. And our thing is just to prove people wrong. If we’re going on tour sometimes we’ll see negative comments about the band and this and that or whatever, but no one who’s leaving our show is leaving unhappy, usually.
“I’ve never not gone on stage and sweated my ass off for people and people love that. I think people forget how fun music is and how all these opinions and stuff don’t really matter if somebody is writing good songs and having a good time and, y’know, trying. So I’m glad you said that. I shouldn’t have gone into that monologue, but it’s been an issue with our career that we’ve kind of felt for a long time.
“It’s actually kind of a good position to be in, when you’re underestimated.”