Bootleg Glory
Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Established. Jan 01, 2013 | INDIE | AFM
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When it came to dealing with a temperamental tour van, the members of Bootleg Glory simply fastened their seat belts and braced for the bumpy ride.
The plan was that band members Travis Blodgett, Dylan Burns, Nicholas ‘Red’ Greaves, Matt Meraw, Ryan Thomas and their manager Peter Munro would leave their home base of Toronto and embark on a tour of Western Canada.
In April 2012, the garage rock and roll band released a four-song EP that they recorded in Nashville. Fresh off the release high of their first music video for Tease, a fun, quirky and upbeat song that easily compliments a playlist of party tunes, the group is amped to tour.
Bootleg Glory plays at De’d Dog Jan. 24 at 9 p.m. and there’s no cover. They’ll play three sets, both of originals and covers, said Burns. The show might be “more balls in than balls out” he jokes, due to their lengthy time on stage. There will be a mix between high energy and mellower tunes.
The group looks forward to meeting the Rocky Mountains and being in Jasper for the first time.
“Everyone’s said how beautiful it is, we can’t wait to experience it ourselves.”
As mentioned, the journey to Alberta was packed with tribulations. According to their “bit of a beater” van, as Burns describes, the trip was going to be memorable, for better or worse.
Before leaving, the band brought the newly-purchased van to a mechanic who told them “there’s a whole bunch of work that needs to be done.” If you believe in foreshadowing, or even Murphy’s Law, the following might not be such a surprise.
“We got it back and then within 100 metres of driving out of the mechanic’s shop, it died,” laughs Burns. After a day’s delay for more repairs, the van broke down en route to Sudbury, and was fixed yet again.
It gets better. The van wouldn’t start after being refuelled at a Sudbury gas station. After a boost, Bootleg Glory hit the open road once again, but due to a blinding snow storm, they couldn’t see how open the road was.
Their van, now appropriately and affectionately named Van Wilder, turtled down the Trans Canada Highway at the mach speed of 40 kilometres. Adding insult to injury, the heat stopped working.
“Around 6 a.m., every time I put on the brakes our lights would start dimming; our battery was literally dying in front of us,” said Burns.
After receiving six boosts along the way, Van Wilder finally rolled into Winnipeg. There wasn’t time to wait for a mechanic to inspect it, so the vehicle soldiered on.
“It was a beautiful drive through Saskatchewan and Alberta because it was pretty flat and wasn’t as hard on our vehicle and wasn’t as cold.”
On the drive to Edmonton, however, Van Wilder embraced her final voyage and began to spew smoke. “We run out of this vehicle expecting it to catch on fire and it’s making this awful sound like a jet engine.” Due to Van Wilder’s broken motor, the band is searching for a replacement vehicle.
Bootleg Glory remained light-hearted throughout the ordeal and are happy to now focus more on their music.
Bootleg Glory’s name is a marriage between Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory and Bootleg Saint by Sam Roberts.
Thomas and Burns have known each other since grade school and Blodgett and Meraw have been acquainted just as long. The four formed a band in high school with a different drummer, recruited Greaves later on and have been playing together for five years. - The Fitzhugh
Discography
Bootleg Glory EP - April 27 2012
Photos
Bio
The only people who really understand how friggin' huge Canada is are truckers and travelling artists. Even in an age when music is more accessible than ever, and when artists can build a fanbase without ever leaving their basements, any Canadian band with serious ambitions will sooner or later have to pack up a van and head out on the long and lonely roads that separate our countrys major cities. In January 2013, Bootleg Glory did just that, setting out from their hometown of Bowmanville, Ontario on a tour that took them all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back again. And to prove that they were serious, they did it in the dead of winter.
Bootleg Glory's name was nicked from a pair of songs: Sam Roberts' Bootleg Saints and (What's the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis, a good indicator both of their influences, and their ambitions. The band presents an angular-and-melodic guitar attack from Matt Meraw and Dylan Burns, think Jet by way of The Buzzcocks, grounded in bassist Travis Blodgett and drummer Nicolas Red Greaves solid, party-friendly rhythms. With energetic and charismatic frontman Ryan Thomas' distinctive vocals rounding out the group's sound, Bootleg have assembled all the elements of a breakout band.
The band formed in the first few weeks of 2006. In April of that year, they played their first-ever show, a battle-of-the-bands...which they won. They used the recording time they won as a prize to cut an early demo titled Some Say Its Fake But Its Just Unreal. The band stayed local for the first few years, - honing their craft with a series of gigs in and around Bowmanville and nearby Newmarket - until 2008, when they attracted the attention of local producer and rising country music star Brad Stella, who was looking for talent to sign to a new record label, Volt Music Group. He really liked where our songwriting was going, says Blodgett, so he started workin with us really closely, and eventually signed us as his first act.
When the band was ready to make a stab at well, glory the group booked the 35% Chance of Survival Tour, an ambitious cross-country trek that took them to Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, among a number of smaller towns. The band cut a series of short videos as they went, all of them now available to watch on YouTube. This tour blog archives the absolutely ridiculous stories behind their first tour van, fondly named Van Wilder and the long story-filled road to her timely demise in Red Deer Alberta. The death of Van Wilder yielded the purchase of their newer, less ancient vehicle, Vanna White. At first, the name of the 35% Chance of Survival Tour was more of a joke, but as it progressed, and they reviewed the insane feats theyd managed to accomplish, it became apparent that the estimation wasnt far off. Still, they consider the tour a big success. It was a real learning experience for us, says Blodgett. We had never toured like that before and most of us had never been to the west coast before. It was a lot of fun, and we are excited to do it again.
In spring 2013, Bootleg Glory travelled to Brad Stella's other hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, to record six new songs for what will eventually become their debut album. With major-label interest already forming around the group, a new record in the works, and the experience of a true Canadian tour behind them, Vanna White is hitting the road again this fall with a well-equipped Bootleg Glory.
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