Canadian rockers, The Trews, toured with Kid Rock earlier this year and have been on the road ever since. Here, guitarist John-Angus MacDonald, blogs about the band’s DIY ethic in booking their own shows in the States.

The U.S. of A. A place where anything can and does happen, a wild and reckless beast with a whole lotta heart. We’ve never had too much luck connecting with the folks down here in the past.  A series of false starts with a host of record companies/ agents and business people has left us scratching our heads on more then one occasion. We haven’t yet been able to get much more then a pinky toe in the door so far (Buffalo, Detroit, NYC, Rochester and Cleveland - you are the exception and we love you for it).

So we decided to take matters into our own hands and book some shows. Some residency shows. Throw a dart at the map of the American southeast and see what we get. What we got was Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta and Louisville – with one off shows in Montgomery and Knoxville for good measure, all great and fabled music cities.

The idea is we hit the same venues, 12th and Porter, the Nick, the Atlanta Room and Uncle Slayton’s ( taken from a name in the James McMurty song “Choctaw Bingo,” if you don’t know this songwriter you should, he’s written the unofficial anthem to the occupy movement with his song “Can’t Make It Here”), respectively, three weeks in a row. It was meant to be four weeks but the American Thanksgiving threw a little wrench in our plans.

The idea is to start out small, playing for the people who happen to be in the clubs and those who have heard of us through any number of grapevines or from a previous visit. Most of these cities we haven’t played in in over five years. And then, like the classic shampoo commercial goes, they tell two friends, and they tell two friends and so on and so forth.

I’m writing this on our way to week three in Birmingham and I’m not sure what awaits but from week one to week two we managed to double our crowd so hopefully that trend continues. These are small clubs and career baby steps but we gotta do something and start somewhere, this is the country that gave us rock’n’roll and we don’t wanna be left out of the story. We feel we have something to offer this great continuum of music.

More and more I’m realizing that we’ll probably have to do it this way. Slow and steady, they say it wins the race but at least we’re in the race.