Celebrating 10 years of hard and fast southern rock with a Canadian kick, Monster Truck rolls into Iceberg Alley for their long awaited Newfoundland debut
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It’s taken a decade, but Hamilton hard rockers Monster Truck are finally making their Newfoundland debut, and they’ll be doing so at the biggest music event of 2019. The 2013 Juno winners for Breakthrough Group of the Year have toured the world alongside some of the biggest names in the business, but The Rock has always seemed to allude one of the hardest hitting bands in the great white north.
NL debut
That all changes on September 11th, as the band heads to the Iceberg Alley Performance tent alongside returning favourites The Glorious Sons and locals The Novaks.
“We’re excited. We haven’t been and we’ve always wanted to come,” says frontman and bassist Jon Harvey. “I mean who doesn’t want to go right? It’s such an interesting place.”
Leaping onto the scene with their acclaimed debut album Furiosity, Monster Truck combines classic elements of southern rock with smoky blues riffs and hard and fast rock ‘n’ roll for a chugging, driving brand of balls to the wall rock rarely seen across our nation.
“We were listening to Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers at the time when we started the band, Deep Purple and things like that. But the blues, my dad got me into the blues,” Harvey said of the group’s influences.
“I’ve always loved the blues and I’ll probably always play the blues. It’s just part of it for me. As far as music I think it’s probably the purest form of expression that I can do.”
2019 serves as the 10 year anniversary for a band who have paid their dues playing venues big and small across the globe, putting in the necessary work and mileage to earn the status as one of the premiere rock outfits working today.
Winning the lottery
“I’m grateful for everything I experienced and grateful for every country I’ve got to visit, every city,” Harvey shares. “It’s pretty wild when you think about it. It feels like it’s been like three weeks to be honest with you. I feel like I’ve finally got my bearings with this whole thing, after 10 years. It’s kind of a trip. We feel really blessed that we got to do everything we got to do. It’s like winning the lottery.”
Many of those opportunities have grown out of the group’s reputation as righteous dudes on and off the stage, earning the respect and admiration of peers in the industry across the globe.
“I think bands want to take us out because they realize that we know what we’re doing. We’re good guys,” Harvey shares. “We’re not weird backstage, we don’t go crazy. So I think our reputation spread that we’re just a good band that you can take on tour and not really have any problems with. So we’ve got a lot opportunities out of that.”
One such collaborator is Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who has sung the praises of the group for years on social media, leading to a collaboration on Monster Truck’s record True Rockers.
“He was in Toronto doing a musical like two years ago. He heard us in a juice bar and he went crazy about it on Twitter and started messaging. So I started talking to him and then I went and met him and we hung out. He texts me sometimes and sometimes he calls me at weird hours in the morning,” Harvey laughs.
Clean living rock star
“We just ended up having like a friendship. I just asked him when we wrote the song, I said do you want to be on a record? I didn’t tell him what he was doing and he said yes. It’s pretty flattering to have a guy that influential in music to be such a big fan of ours and be such a supporter. He’s an awesome man. He’s a good father and he’s a clean living rock star. He remembers everything. So that’s the kind of guy I want to talk to.”
The band has already laid the groundwork for a followup release to True Rockers, aiming for a much more relaxed and loose production this time out.
“I think with True Rockers we got a little bit too serious. It sounds like such a dopey thing and a lot of the songs on the record have the goofiest lyrics but we were really serious about it. It kind of came out sounding a little bit more rigid than we wanted, but we’re writing another record right now and we’re trying to get back to just having fun and relaxing, doing things that are the right things to do rather than trying to break a mold or reinvent the wheel.”
As for Iceberg Alley, fans are in for a rare treat in the form of one of the hardest working, and hitting, rock bands today under the big top.
“We’re gonna be loud and we’re gonna be obnoxious, for the most part,” Harvey laughs. “We’re gonna make sure you have a good time. We don’t rest until everybody looks satisfied. So it’s going to be a really rocking time.”
For more on Monster Truck and their performance at Iceberg Alley on Setepmber 11th visit ilovemonstertruck.com and icebergalleyconcerts.com
*Edit: Monster Truck performed at the pre-festival bash at Club One in St. John’s on August 24th.