Ten Foot Pole live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 26 October 2018

The Crocks name was three weeks into a new address when Ten Foot Pole arrived. Until 29 September 2018 the club had been at 16 Cumberland Street South, where the final night featured Dear Rouge, The Treble and Modern Space. From 5 October it worked out of the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road.

Reports at the time said the new room was slightly bigger and could be set up for large shows or smaller ones. The bookings carried on under the same name. The McNasty Brass Band had played two nights under it earlier that month, so this Friday was not the room’s first test.

The band and its name

Ten Foot Pole comes from Simi Valley, California. The band began in 1983 as Scared Straight, made an album under that name in 1988, and became Ten Foot Pole in the early 1990s. Founder Scott Radinsky was also a professional baseball pitcher. The other members wanted a full-time touring band, so in 1995 he left to pitch and Dennis Jagard took over the singing.

Swill appeared in 1993. Rev, released by Epitaph Records in September 1994, was the last record Radinsky sang on, and Insider followed in 1999.

After a three-year hiatus the band began playing again in 2009, and a 2017 album kept it in circulation. Its booking agency describes the group as skate punk, a fair label for a band that took shape in the 1980s and never quite stopped.

A long Canadian tour

The autumn run was announced as a 39-show North American tour with 25 dates in Canada. It opened on 4 October at a bar in Fullerton, California, the day before the Crocks name moved rooms. The Canadian dates began on 14 October in Windsor, Ontario, and Thunder Bay was the tenth of them.

The route through Ontario and Quebec ran Toronto, London, Guelph, Montreal and Ottawa, then Sudbury at The Asylum on the 23rd and Sault Ste. Marie at The Harp on the 25th, before Thunder Bay on the 26th. Winnipeg’s Windsor Hotel followed on the 27th, and Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Calgary came after that.

Sault Ste. Marie is about 700 kilometres east of Thunder Bay by road, so the drive on the 25th and 26th was a long one, and the schedule allowed no rest day between the two shows.

Coverage of the announcement said the producer Ryan Greene was working on a new album, halfway finished, and that the band was trying Patreon as a way of paying for the recording. Before the full-band tour, Jagard and Chris Del Rio had played 23 acoustic shows in Quebec and Ontario, and reported that the new songs went over well.

Where the price sat

Tickets were listed at $22.50. Across twelve 2018 shows with a price in this record, admission ran from $13 to $40, so a Ten Foot Pole ticket cost more than the summer’s cheapest heavy night and well under the $40 charged for Sebastian Bach in June. It sat two dollars and a half above the $20 charged for The Acacia Strain and The Faceless.

The nearest nights in the record are the two McNasty Brass Band shows, on 12 October and 13 October, both within two weeks. A brass band one weekend and a punk band from the 1990s the next is a fair picture of what the new room was trying. Nobody could call the programme narrow.

What came after

The record that Greene was producing may be the one that followed. The band’s discography lists Escalating Quickly in 2019, a year after this tour, though nothing in the tour coverage names it. That is a reading of dates, not a stated link.

Whether the new songs were played in Thunder Bay is not recorded, and neither is the rest of the bill. The rest of the autumn is on the shows page, where the new room’s first weeks are gathered, and Winnipeg’s Windsor Hotel had the band the night after.