Whenever I sit down to write a story about a hard working Canadian band, the road comes up. Not the book, the actually strip of pavement. Arguments, break downs, animal collisions, vomit rainbows, UFO’s …    all these things seem to get involved. So, it’s a nice change of pace to talk to someone about their work as well. And for British Columbian metal band 3 Inches of Blood … holy shit do they ever work.

“The longest run of shows that we have done is 32 in a row,” guitarist Shane Clark says. “We don’t get many days off. When we do, we usually spend them driving. It’s nice to recharge every once in a while but, hey, we are road warriors.”

 So, as I talked to him, it was not surprising that he was in a van bearing down on their next gig. The only thing different this time is that the van has a couple of Canucks flags pouring off of the sides. Should they be worried about showing support for a specific team in a hockey mad country? Don’t they know how some people feel about Canucks fans?

“I never heard that some people hate Canucks fans,” Clark says. “I heard they dislike the team but I never heard that about the fans. At the same time, I was raised to hate the Habs, but that was just my father teaching me. It is Canadiana. I would think that since the Habs are out that people would just rally around the last Canadian team. Neat, that is news to me.”

With that said, it doesn’t surprise me that Clark isn’t aware of how some people may feel about his team, or even his band for that matter. Playing as many shows as he has, you learn to stop reading reviews and focus on what you can control.

 “We have our hotspots,” explains Clark. “San Francisco, Chicago, The Twin Cities and a handful of other places. Denver, we do really well in Denver, it’s more like Canada and we get great support at the shows all throughout Canada. But Florida is hard to get going as well as some other places in the South. The musical climate is different there; they don’t really get what we are doing. I like to look at the positive. Music defies language and besides, it’s heavy metal. People are coming out to rage.”

And speaking of rage, did you know that there are Heavy Metal gossip sites? Yep. You just read that.

“The weirdest thing for me is people who are misinformed,” Clark says. “So many writers and critics get their stuff from Wikipedia and we know how reliable that is. For example, it is said that our old singer Jamie quit the band because we don’t like people who drink. That’s just ridiculous. I don’t follow the online gossip sites. It’s a bunch of 40- or 13-year-old dudes who don’t have anything better to do than write this stuff. I don’t have time. I got too much shit to do. I’m busy with my life.”

I guess when you get around that much, people think they know you. And if they don’t, they’ll just
make stuff up. Like, vomit rainbows for example.