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On the morning of Friday, January 28, 1977, author Erno Rossi stood at his window and looked at a flock of geese feeding on the corn he’d spread on the froze surface of Lake Erie. Then something strange happened.
“Suddenly the geese all collapsed on their breasts onto the ice facing into the breeze,” he wrote in his book White Death: Blizzard of ’77. “They then pulled their feet up into their breast feathers. Twisting their necks backwards, they then tucked their bills and heads into their back feathers.
“I looked out onto the frozen lake," he continued. "I saw a wall of white as high as a mountain flowing across the ice toward the geese and my home. That wall of snow hit my house with hurricane force and almost shattered the bay windows. The blizzard of the century had arrived.”
This is not hyperbole. Fresh snowfall was not the cause of this environmental disaster. It was snow which had already fallen earlier on frozen Lake Erie in January, which was redistributed with hurricane-strength winds across much of New York State and southern Ontario.
Snow drifts the height of double-decker buses swallowed up homes, blocked highways and isolated communities, causing millions of dollars of damage. An estimated 29 people died during the blizzard, with many more needing medical treatment due to the extreme cold.
"It happened in our hometown and our parents lived through it," Alexisonfire guitarist and vocalist Dallas Green told FaceCulture. "It shut down the whole city and it was a national crisis. The President of the United States got involved in it."
In early 2006, the Ontario quintet would begin recording their follow-up to 2004's Watch Out! in Mississauga's Metalworks studio and Silo Recording in Hamilton.
“The songs are definitely darker,” vocalist George Pettit revealed during an interview with Now magazine that year. “We don’t have any songs about go-karting or Linda Blair.”
Indeed. While there was no mention of The Exorcist star this time round in songs like That Girl Possessed, 2006 Alexisonfire – now with new drummer Jordan Hastings – bristled and brooded on the 11-song Crisis. Boiled Frogs is about getting stuck in a monotonous work routine, while This Could Be Anywhere In The World is a universal anthem for those trapped in rotting towns and cities.
But it would be the terrible events of 1977, declared a major disaster by President Jimmy Carter, that would inspire the title track and provide source material for the cover art of Crisis.
The song itself settles into a fast-pace and feels unsettling, with each verse painting individual stories of despair: stranded motorists, children trapped in snowdrifts, drug addicts unable to get their fix and desperate prayers for safety falling on deaf ears.
“This town is going under, the temperature's through the floor, your fingers are turning black, there’s a crisis knocking at your door,” sings Pettit during the first verse.
"This season's growing cold, I fear that this could be the end," counters Green during the song's climax. It's unremittingly bleak and the most intense three and a half minutes on the album.
"My aunts and uncles would tell me stories about a spot in Fort Erie where they had to dig to find the telephone poles," Pettit told Matt Mills in an interview for Ticketmaster. "It was something that happened close to us, so these images of kids standing on top of a school bus and snow coming through a window into your living room, it all felt very ominous and kind of brutal."
It was something that happened close to us... it all felt very ominous and kind of brutal.
George Pettit
On the album’s 20th anniversary, Alexisonfire will revisit their second album and perform it in full this summer at select arena shows in London, Toronto, Montreal and Buffalo, "a city has been in the DNA of this record since day one."
“It feels like you blink and all of a sudden your album is almost old enough to drink in the United States,” says frontman George Pettit. “So many incredible memories of making this record. It felt like we were really coming into our own as a band. We discovered another level of potential that we didn’t have at the start.”
"It was an album built for the stage,” he adds. “We knew the things that resonated with a crowd from playing the songs off of the first two records and we concocted a record full of crowd friendly choruses and straight up bangers. Conceptually, it was the most concise record to date. Debuting at number 1 on the Canadian charts, it was probably the height of our commercial success. It also came with an exhaustive 10 months of touring that nearly broke the band in half.”
