Teenage Head live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 10 May 2019

In June 1980, a Teenage Head show at Ontario Place ended in a riot, and the fallout led the Toronto lakeside venue to bar rock concerts for several years. The band that caused it was from Hamilton and already had a debut album behind it. Thirty-nine years later it played a club on Red River Road in Thunder Bay.

The date was Friday, 10 May 2019. Tickets were C$25, the room was Crocks at NV, and the show came two nights after the rapper Chris Webby had played the same stage at C$20.

A band with a long start

Teenage Head formed in Hamilton in 1975, in the first years of punk anywhere, and it counts among the earliest Canadian bands to play the style. The sound was rooted as much in 1950s rockabilly and British Invasion beat music as in punk, and the name came from a 1971 album by the Flamin’ Groovies. The self-titled debut appeared in 1979.

Frantic City followed in 1980 and gave the band two of its best-known songs, “Let’s Shake” and “Somethin’ on My Mind”. Some Kinda Fun came in 1982. The 1980s also brought a Tornado EP and the album Trouble in the Jungle in 1986, so by 2019 the catalogue was four decades deep.

The room in its first spring

Crocks as a name was older than the address. The club had its roots in downtown Port Arthur for more than thirty years, so the name goes back to the late 1980s or earlier. By May 2019 the concerts had spent seven months in the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road.

They had moved on 5 October 2018 from 16 Cumberland Street South, where the club had stood for its last nine years.

A 1975 punk band and a club name from the late 1980s were both long-serving fixtures by 2019, and the Friday put them in one building. No announcement drew that link; it is only a reading of the dates.

Who was on stage

The original singer, Frankie Venom, died on 15 October 2008. Six months earlier, in April 2008, the band had released an album of its songs made with Marky Ramone, the Ramones drummer. It carried on without Venom, with other vocalists, and one of its founders, the guitarist Gord Lewis, was still in the line-up in 2019. Gene Champagne played drums.

Lewis died on 7 August 2022. This Friday in Thunder Bay fell three years before that, which makes it one of the last visits with him on the guitar.

The bill named Teenage Head and nobody else. No support act, door time or age rule was given.

Two nights in one week

The two-day gap from Chris Webby shows how mixed the room’s calendar was. A rapper on the Wednesday and a punk band from the 1970s on the Friday, at C$20 and C$25, had almost nothing in common. Before both, on 26 April, came a C$10 night of Dizzy Mystics, playing Soundgarden and Tool.

Of the three, Teenage Head was the priciest. Across 2019 the prices in this record run from C$10 to C$45, so C$25 sat in the middle of the range.

Another Hamilton band

Hamilton sits at the western tip of Lake Ontario, and Thunder Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior. A Hamilton band made that long trip north in May, and a second one followed in late June: Monster Truck, formed in Hamilton in 2009, at Crocks at NV on 29 June.

The two bands began thirty-four years apart, yet both come from the same steel-town city and both built a name on straight-ahead guitar rock. Monster Truck won the 2013 Juno Award for breakthrough group of the year, while Teenage Head’s best records date from the turn of the 1980s.

Teenage Head were sometimes called Canada’s Ramones, a label that also explains the Marky Ramone record. Which of the two Hamilton bands the Thunder Bay crowd knew first is a matter of age, and no ticket records that.