Thunder Bay Live Music History: An Archive of Shows, Venues, Tickets and Touring Routes from Crocks to Soo Blaster
Tuesday was the second busiest night in the calendar, and the counts hold more oddities once the shows are laid out by room, price and route.
Fifteen Tuesdays sit in the calendar of Thunder Bay live music history, more than any other weekday except Friday, and that odd fact is where the numbers on this page begin. Crocks kept a club's habits, and the habits show once the dates are laid out by weekday, season, price and room.
Every count below comes from the same archive, and each has limits. A page marks a show or an announcement, and a show without a page leaves no mark. The charts are therefore a floor. The prose that follows reads them as a floor: patterns that survive that caveat get a sentence, patterns that do not get left alone.
Reading the archive before reading the charts
The archive holds just over seventy show pages, plus a few announcement pages that list several dates at once. Seventy-three of the shows carry a full calendar date, which is the base for every weekday and season figure here. Three others give only a month or a year, so they count toward the year totals but never toward a weekday.
Dates are not always clean. The DJ BL3ND night in October 2015 was advertised under one Friday in the headline and another, two weeks later, on the poster and the ticket link. The page went with the 23rd because three of four mentions agreed. Small conflicts like that are why every count here should be read as close, not exact.
Prices are the second limit. A listing gave a face value, sometimes with a service fee, sometimes with a VIP tier, and never with the number of tickets sold. So the figures below describe what was asked at the door or online, not what came in. The same goes for lineups: a bill with no support act named may still have had one.
Shows per year and the gaps in the history
The busiest years are 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018 and 2019, all with a dozen or more pages, and 2019 edges ahead of 2015. Before that block the pages thin out: a couple survive for 2010, a handful for 2012, none for 2011. After 2015 there is one page for 2016 and then nothing at all for 2017.
Read as Thunder Bay concert history, that shape misleads. It looks like a club that grew, stalled and revived, and it may only be a record that was kept more carefully in some years than in others. The lone 2016 page is the Sheepdogs date on 10 February. The next dated show is Sloan on 4 April 2018, more than two years on.
Inside the busy years the coverage has edges of its own. The 2018 pages run from April to November and the 2019 pages from March to the middle of September. No January date exists in any year at all. Winter is the thinnest season here, but a January with nothing booked and a January with nothing kept look identical from this side.
The early pages show the scale. The two from 2010 are a farewell tour stop by Holly Springs Disaster and Architects in August and Tokyo Police Club with Arkells in September. Two dates make no season, yet the room was already taking touring bands as far back as these pages reach.
Data table
| Label | shows |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 2 |
| 2012 | 5 |
| 2013 | 13 |
| 2014 | 13 |
| 2015 | 14 |
| 2016 | 1 |
| 2018 | 13 |
| 2019 | 15 |
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Venues: one club, two addresses and a few away dates
Nearly nine in ten show pages carry the Crocks name, so this is a history of one club with a few side trips. Until 29 September 2018 it stood at 16 Cumberland Street South. The last night there was Dear Rouge on the 29th, and six days later, on 5 October, every event moved to the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road.
Reports at the time called the new room slightly bigger and able to be set up for large or small shows. The first dates under the new address are two nights of the McNasty Brass Band on 12 and 13 October 2018, then Ten Foot Pole on 26 October. The name carried across, and so did the habit of booking heavy bands.
Outside those two addresses the list of venues is short. Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie has three pages, all from 2019, starting with Monster Truck on 28 June. The Coulson in Sudbury has one. Urban Abbey in Thunder Bay has one, a spoken word night with Sabrina Benaim on 18 April 2019.
The odd one out is a 2012 bill, the Retro Rock Revue with Smash Mouth, which played the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino in Minnesota. Two more pages name no room at all: Steel Beaver in April 2019 and DJ Ruckus in February 2014. Only 2019 shows the calendar leaving town in any quantity, so the away dates are a late development, not a constant.
Data table
| Label | shows |
|---|---|
| Crocks | 55 |
| Crocks at NV | 13 |
| Soo Blaster | 3 |
| Not stated | 2 |
| Grand Portage Lodge & Casino | 1 |
| Urban Abbey | 1 |
| The Coulson | 1 |
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Weekdays and seasons across the calendar
Friday leads the weekday count and Tuesday follows, ahead of Saturday, Thursday, Wednesday, Monday and Sunday. Friday and Saturday together hold a little over two in five of the dated shows, so most of the calendar was spread through the week. A room for Thunder Bay live music that filled only weekends would look different. This one took whatever the road offered.
Tuesday is the interesting case. Up to the end of 2017 it took roughly a quarter of the dated shows, among them Amon Amarth, Akon and both visits by Matthew Good. In 2018 and 2019 it fell to roughly one in seven, and Thursday rose to take its place. That is a reading of the dates, not a stated policy.
One likely reason is routing. A band that plays Winnipeg on a Monday and Toronto later in the week has open nights in between, and Thunder Bay is the natural stop. Nobody wrote that down, so it stays a reading. It does fit the weeknights, and it would explain why the weekday count shifts when the tours change.
Sundays are rarer, with only four, and all four fell between March and May of 2014 and 2015: The Glorious Sons, Swollen Members, Arkells and Benighted. None survives after 2015. Mondays, with five, include Ill Bill and Vinnie Paz, Machine Gun Kelly and Sebastian Bach.
Doors were most often at 8 p.m., nearly half of the shows that list a door time. The late slots belong to DJ nights: 10 p.m. for Joel Fletcher, for the Canada Day night in 2015 and for the New Year's Eve party, the only three with doors that late.
By season, autumn leads, with summer and spring close behind and winter well back. September is the busiest single month, and March and November are the thinnest of the months that have any dates. The September pile includes 2013, which opens with a frosh weekend bash on the 13th and an Elliott Brood early show the next day.
Summer has a pileup of its own. In August 2013 three large dates fell inside eight days: The Sword on the 14th, Tech N9ne on the 20th and Airbourne on the 21st. Heavy metal, hip-hop and hard rock in one week is about as wide a spread as the room ever showed.
Ticket prices from five dollars to a three-hundred-dollar package
More than sixty show pages give a price, and the figure used here is the first one listed, the plain entry ticket. Currency is as listed: earlier pages show a dollar sign and the 2018 and 2019 pages add a C.
The median barely moved between the earlier years and 2018 and 2019, about $20 before and roughly $21 after. The average rose from about $20 to between $23 and $24.
The average moved because the bottom of the range thinned out. About a quarter of the priced dates before 2018 asked $10 or less, against a single date in 2018 and 2019, and nothing after 2017 asked under $10. The cheapest tickets were $5, a door price for DJ Ruckus and the Canada Day admission. Bleeker Ridge and The Glorious Sons were each $8 online.
At the other end, the largest plain admission was $45 for Akon in September 2015, with a $5 online fee on top. Monster Truck in Thunder Bay matched it in 2019 with an all-levels ticket of C$45, and Sebastian Bach was $40. Packages run higher: Chris Webby in May 2019 listed a C$100 meet and greet and a C$300 all-access pass.
VIP tiers appear earlier. Airbourne offered a $30 VIP meet and greet limited to 100 places, sold online only, and the Bam Margera band show had a $40 tier. Swollen Members offered a $50 VIP. These sat on top of an ordinary $20 or $25 ticket, so the highest number on a poster often described a package rather than the door.
Repeat acts show the drift best. Monster Truck cost $15 in December 2013, $35 in Sault Ste. Marie in 2019, and C$40 to C$45 in Thunder Bay a day later. Great Lake Swimmers went from $20 to C$25 between 2015 and 2018, and Elliott Brood made the same step. Matthew Good held at $35, with a $5 fee added in 2015.
Genre priced itself too. The bigger hip-hop dates clustered between $25 and $35, with Machine Gun Kelly at $35 in advance. Club metal in 2018 asked $15 for Rivers of Nihil and $20 for The Acacia Strain. Tribute nights were the cheapest later bookings, from C$10 to C$20.
What changed in the bill after 2018
The first noticeable change is heavy music. Between 19 June and 28 July 2018 the pages hold four dates in six weeks: The Faceless, Sebastian Bach, Rivers of Nihil and The Acacia Strain. Before 2018 metal turned up about once a year in the surviving pages. In 2018 and 2019 together, metal and punk make up about a third of them.
Punk arrived with the new address. Ten Foot Pole on 26 October 2018, Stiff Little Fingers on 19 November and Teenage Head on 10 May 2019 are the three punk pages, and none predates the move. Each is a band with a long career, so the punk bookings read as a short run of veterans, not a scene.
Tribute nights are the second new form. Ozbourne played on 13 March 2019, the Steel Beaver hair metal party followed on 18 April, and the Dizzy Mystics Soundgarden and Tool tribute on 26 April. No tribute page exists before 2019, and three landed inside seven weeks of one spring.
Then there is geography. The Sault Ste. Marie dates are a 2019 feature, and so is the single Sudbury date. They suggest a promoter with a wider map than one club, though the pages never say so. The dates also change the arithmetic of a Thunder Bay week, since a band could now be booked into the Soo the night before, or after.
The new address kept some old habits. Half Moon Run on a July Friday and The Motorleague on a Tuesday were the kind of guitar-band dates the club had always run. The change was in the weight of the calendar, and the basic pattern of weeknight touring bands and weekend headliners carried over.
Genres in Thunder Bay live music history, year by year
Rock is the largest group by a wide margin, roughly a third of the show pages, and it needs a warning. It swallows hard rock, classic rock, indie rock, folk rock and power pop. Great Lake Swimmers show why the count is soft: the 2015 page files them as folk rock and the 2018 page as indie folk, so one band lands in two groups.
Hip-hop and dancehall come second, running from Raekwon in 2012 through Beenie Man in 2014 to Chris Webby in 2019. Metal and hardcore come third, electronic and DJ nights fourth, then folk, country and roots. Punk, pop and indie are small groups. A leftover group holds spoken word, burlesque, brass band, funk and tribute acts, which fit nowhere else.
The change by year is larger than the totals suggest. In 2013 and 2015 roughly half of the pages were hip-hop or electronic nights, with Tech N9ne and DJ Qbert among them. By 2018 the electronic column is empty, and 2019 has a single hip-hop show. Metal, punk and tribute bills took the space.
Read literally, that is a change of taste. Read cautiously, it may also be a change in what was listed, since the electronic pages are among the thinnest, with two carrying no price at all. Either way the two halves look different. The earlier calendar leaned on rap tours and dance nights, the later one on guitars.
The leftover group has a consistent side-thread in spoken word. Henry Rollins spoke at Crocks on 9 June 2012 to numbered theatre-style seats, and Sabrina Benaim brought a poetry tour to Urban Abbey on 18 April 2019, the same Thursday as the hair metal party. Seven years and two very different rooms separate them.
Data table
| Label | shows |
|---|---|
| Rock | 25 |
| Hip-hop and dancehall | 12 |
| Metal and hardcore | 11 |
| Electronic and DJ | 9 |
| Other | 8 |
| Folk, country and roots | 6 |
| Punk | 3 |
| Pop and indie | 2 |
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Touring routes from Winnipeg to Sudbury and the Soo
Thunder Bay sits about 700 kilometres by road from both Winnipeg and Sault Ste. Marie, and the pages show a habit: bands reached the city one night after Winnipeg. Holly Springs Disaster played Winnipeg on 11 August 2010, Monster Truck on 11 December 2013, Bam Margera's band on 12 December 2013 and Amon Amarth on 6 October 2014. Arkells did it on 28 February 2015.
After Thunder Bay the routes ran east. Sudbury followed for Holly Springs Disaster, Toronto for Amon Amarth, and Ottawa for Monster Truck in 2013. The club was the natural break on the highway between the prairies and Ontario, and five of these bands used it for exactly that.
The 2018 and 2019 routes run both ways. Ten Foot Pole played Sudbury on 23 October, Sault Ste. Marie on the 25th, Thunder Bay on the 26th and Winnipeg on the 27th, a west-bound run with no rest day for the last three. Cancer Bats reached Thunder Bay on 13 September 2019 and were in Winnipeg the night after.
Two of the three Sault Ste. Marie pages sit next to a Thunder Bay date. Monster Truck played the Soo on Friday 28 June and Thunder Bay the next evening. The Cancer Bats Soo show opened that tour the night before Crocks at NV. Only Bobaflex on 10 September stands alone.
Colter Wall shows a related pattern. He played The Coulson in Sudbury on 9 July 2019 and Crocks at NV on the 11th, two Northern Ontario stops that read as a pair. Together with the Soo dates, that suggests the region was sold as one leg of a tour. A fuller list sits on the shows page.
Acts that came back
Two names appear three times in Thunder Bay concert history. Elliott Brood played Saturday 14 September 2013, Monday 23 February 2015 and Thursday 20 September 2018, a different weekday each time. One listing spells the name Eliott, which is why a plain count reads two. Monster Truck's three pages are the 2013 date and the 2019 Soo and Thunder Bay pair.
Seven acts appear twice. Cancer Bats and Colter Wall played the paired dates described above, and the McNasty Brass Band took two nights in a row in October 2018. Matthew Good came on Tuesday 5 November 2013 and again on a Tuesday in 2015. Tech N9ne, DJ BL3ND and Great Lake Swimmers each have two.
The pairs across years are the clearest sign of a returning audience. DJ BL3ND played consecutive Octobers, 2014 and 2015, both on Fridays. Great Lake Swimmers played 23 May 2015 and then 27 September 2018, two days before the last night on Cumberland Street South.
Support slots repeat too. Dear Rouge opened for Arkells in March 2015 and headlined the final Cumberland Street night in September 2018. Bleeker Ridge supported Airbourne in August 2013 and headlined a Wednesday of its own in February 2014. Fortunate Losers were on both the Bobaflex and Monster Truck bills in Sault Ste. Marie, which suggests a small regional circuit under the touring one.
Tech N9ne is a useful last case. The 2013 page names four support acts and no ticket price, while the 2015 date names two and asks $30 in advance. Which of the two nights drew the bigger room is a question the counts cannot reach, and it is the one most readers of this Thunder Bay live music history will ask first.
Frequently asked questions
What does Thunder Bay live music history look like in this archive?
It is a run of shows at Crocks, mostly at its Cumberland Street South address until September 2018 and at the NV Nightclub building afterwards, with a few dates in Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury and Minnesota. Rock, hip-hop, metal and DJ nights fill most of the calendar.
How many shows does the archive hold?
It holds just over seventy show pages and a handful of announcement pages, spread across 2010 and 2012 to 2019. That is a count of surviving pages, not of concerts. A year with few pages usually means few listings survived, not that the room stood empty.
Why are there no shows for 2011 or 2017?
No show pages survive for those years, and a year with one or two pages, such as 2010 and 2016, is nearly as thin. The gaps are gaps in what was kept. Nobody can conclude that Crocks stopped booking bands in 2011 or 2017.
Which venues appear in the Thunder Bay concert history?
Crocks dominates, first on Cumberland Street South and then at the NV Nightclub building on Red River Road. Smaller entries cover Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie, The Coulson in Sudbury, Urban Abbey in Thunder Bay and the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino in Minnesota.
When did Crocks move to a new address?
Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South until 29 September 2018. From 5 October 2018 its events moved to the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road, a slightly bigger room that could be set up for large or small shows.
Which weekday had the most shows?
Friday leads, followed by Tuesday, then Saturday and Thursday. Friday and Saturday together make up a little over two in five dated shows, so a large share of the calendar sat on weeknights, which suits touring acts moving between Winnipeg and Ontario.
Which season was busiest?
Autumn had the most dated shows, with September the single busiest month, followed by summer and spring. Winter was the thinnest season, and no January date survives in any year. Student weeks and touring schedules are readings, not stated reasons.
How much did concert tickets cost?
Entry prices ran from $5 for a door-only DJ night to $45 for Akon, plus a $5 online fee. Most shows sat around $20 to $25. Packages went higher, with a C$300 all-access pass for one hip-hop show in 2019.
What was the most expensive ticket listed?
The largest figure was a C$300 all-access package for Chris Webby in May 2019, with a C$100 meet and greet beside it. For a plain admission ticket the top prices were $45 for Akon in 2015 and C$45 for the all-levels ticket at Monster Truck in 2019.
What was the cheapest ticket listed?
Five dollars, twice: a door price for DJ Ruckus in February 2014 and the admission for the Canada Day DJ night in 2015. Bleeker Ridge and The Glorious Sons were both listed at $8 online in early 2014.
How did the bill change after Crocks moved in 2018?
Metal and punk packages became a larger share, tribute nights appeared for the first time, and three dates in Sault Ste. Marie were added in 2019. The DJ and hip-hop nights that filled much of 2013 to 2015 nearly disappeared from the surviving pages.
Which acts played Crocks more than once?
Elliott Brood and Monster Truck have three pages each. Cancer Bats, Colter Wall, DJ BL3ND, Great Lake Swimmers, Matthew Good, Tech N9ne and the McNasty Brass Band have two each. Some pairs were consecutive nights in different cities.
Where did touring bands come from before Thunder Bay?
Often Winnipeg, the night before. Holly Springs Disaster, Monster Truck, Bam Margera's band, Amon Amarth and Arkells all reached Thunder Bay one night after a Winnipeg show. Ontario dates came after: Sudbury, Toronto or Ottawa.
Did the promoter book shows outside Thunder Bay?
Yes. The pages include three dates at Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie in 2019, one date at The Coulson in Sudbury, and a 2012 classic rock bill at a casino in Grand Portage, Minnesota. Most were paired with a Thunder Bay date.
Are the counts on the charts the number of concerts held?
No. They count pages that exist, one per show or announcement. A concert without a surviving page is invisible, and a page can cover a night that was never dated exactly. Read every bar as a minimum for that year, not a total.
How did the genre mix in Thunder Bay concert history change over time?
Rock stayed the largest group throughout. Hip-hop and electronic dates made up about half of the 2013 and 2015 pages and nearly vanished by 2018 and 2019, while metal and punk took a bigger share. Folk and country acts recurred in small numbers.