Crocks Concert Listings Posted in November 2011

The whole announcement was one sentence long. It told readers to visit the club on Facebook for the most up-to-date concert listings. The concerts themselves were left to Facebook. A page called Crocks Up-Coming Concerts went up on 18 November 2011 and pointed away from itself, which says a good deal about where a Thunder Bay club’s audience was looking that autumn.

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South, in the older, Port Arthur half of the city, near the Lake Superior waterfront. It was a room the local promoter Loffredo & Associates used for rock, indie, hip-hop and dance bookings, and by 2011 the club had been on the touring map for a long time.

Where the schedule lived

Facebook in late 2011 was where a club’s calendar became an event page, with a name, a date, a photo and a button to say you were going. A static web page could not compete with that. Sending readers to Facebook meant one calendar to keep current instead of two, which is a reading of the practice and not a reason the notice gave.

A notice that sends readers to Facebook is at least plain about which tool did the work. The website held the headline. The detail lived elsewhere.

The room behind the notice

A Northern Ontario tourism profile describes the original building as dark, with low ceilings and cherry-red vinyl booths. Two brothers who ran the club bought it in what was then downtown Port Arthur, the older half of the city that merged into Thunder Bay. Touring musicians were fed homemade spaghetti and meatballs.

The same profile lists the acts that came through: Sarah McLachlan, The Tragically Hip, Sloan, Blue Rodeo and Rancid, who reportedly insisted they would only play Thunder Bay at Crocks.

It also links the club to two films by Bruce McDonald, Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo. That is a long reach for a room with booths. The profile’s own title calls the club Thunder Bay’s rock ‘n’ roll mecca, which is a fair summary of the reputation the 2011 notice took for granted.

Shops for tickets, Facebook for news

Facebook told people what was on, but tickets were a separate matter. The February 2012 list names six Thunder Bay outlets that sold them, from The Urban Boutique and Rainbow on Bay to Valente’s Music. A reader in 2011 could learn about a show on a screen and then walk into a shop to buy the ticket.

By April 2012 the promoter’s own online shop also sold advance tickets, at $10 against $15 at the shops.

The next list

The next general listing here is the announcement of ten dates from 23 February to 20 April 2012, which arrived three months later. Each line of that list ended with a prompt to RSVP on Facebook, so the habit the November notice describes was still in place.

The pattern held into the new year. The individual show pages that follow, such as Nashville Pussy in April 2012, were where ticket prices and start times were set down.

Thirty years and one address

When the club moved in 2018, its own announcement said Crocks had kept its roots in downtown Port Arthur for more than thirty years.

So the 2011 notice belongs to the Cumberland Street years, when the calendar lived on a social network and the door was on a downtown street. The February list shows what that calendar held within three months: Every Time I Die on 23 February and Raekwon on 28 February, then Nashville Pussy in April.

A room that moved

The last night on Cumberland Street South was Saturday 29 September 2018, with Dear Rouge, The Treble and Modern Space. The first at 228 Red River Road came on 5 October, in the NV Nightclub building, and the club worked there as Crocks at NV. A local news headline from that year called it a long-running venue finding a new home.

The shows from the years in between are on the shows page. A visitor in November 2011 who followed the notice to Facebook got the week ahead. The pages here hold what stayed fixed once a night was over: a date, a room and a price.