80s Hair Metal Party With Steel Beaver and Ozbourne, 18 April 2019

Steel Beaver describes itself as a four-piece Canadian band that pays respect to 1980s hair metal and plays without recorded vocal tracks. Whatever the singer manages is what the room hears. On Thursday, 18 April 2019 the band was billed in Thunder Bay at an 80s Hair Metal Party, with the tribute act Ozbourne as the second name on the ticket.

A ticket was C$20. The event is placed in Thunder Bay, and the room is not named. The date fell on the Thursday before Good Friday, which in 2019 opened the Easter long weekend, and Easter Sunday came on 21 April.

The genre on the poster

Hair metal was the polished, hook-heavy end of 1980s hard rock. It grew up in the clubs of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, around rooms such as the Whisky a Go Go and the Troubadour. Mötley Crüe released Shout at the Devil in 1983. Ratt’s Out of the Cellar followed in 1984, and Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In arrived in 1986.

The same year brought Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, and Def Leppard’s Hysteria came in 1987. MTV had begun broadcasting in 1981, and the genre’s look, all teased hair and tight trousers, was made for the small screen. Those records supplied the choruses that a band like Steel Beaver plays back.

The word “party” in the title matters. It promises a mood more than a lineup, and it suggests the songs, not the musicians’ names, were the draw. What the evening actually contained is beyond what the ticket says.

Ozbourne, five weeks on

Ozbourne had been in the same city on 13 March, at a Wednesday night of its own. That earlier show was a single-name tribute to Ozzy Osbourne at Crocks at NV, priced at C$18. This one cost two dollars more and gave the act half the billing.

Osbourne belongs on the bill more than the label suggests. His own 1980s run included Bark at the Moon in 1983, The Ultimate Sin in 1986 and No Rest for the Wicked in 1988, the last with the young guitarist Zakk Wylde. He was a contemporary of the Sunset Strip bands even if he came from somewhere heavier.

The difference in format is the interesting part. In March the whole night was one man’s songbook. In April the same band was one ingredient in a party where eighties metal in general was the subject, and Ozzy Osbourne’s music was one piece of it, not the frame around it.

The same night across town

Thursday 18 April had a second event with the same price. The poet Sabrina Benaim brought her Slumber Party Tour to Urban Abbey on Red River Road, also at C$20. It is hard to think of two audiences further apart, one in blankets and pillows for poems about anxiety, the other in denim and hairspray.

Twenty dollars sits in the lower half of the year. Ticket prices in this record for 2019 run from C$10, for the Winnipeg band Dizzy Mystics, to C$45, for the most expensive tier of a Monster Truck night in June. Chris Webby, who played Crocks at NV on 8 May, was priced at C$20 as well.

What came next

The next date in this record from that month is Friday, 26 April, when a Winnipeg band played the music of Soundgarden and Tool. Soundgarden came from Seattle, and its album Badmotorfinger came out in October 1991, two weeks after Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Seattle’s records of that autumn are the ones usually blamed for making the Sunset Strip sound dated. Dizzy Mystics took the stage eight days after this party, so the same city heard one decade’s stage sound and then, a week later, the sound that followed it.

Whether anyone went to both nights is not something a ticket price can show. The two bills sat in one season of a small-city calendar, ten dollars apart: C$20 for the party and C$10 for the Winnipeg band.