Raekwon live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 28 February 2012

The announcement for 28 February 2012 gave nearly as many lines to the guests as to the headliner. Under “the legendary Raekwon the Chef of Wu-Tang Clan” came JD Era, Conscience, Stack Steady, Webster Death and Grimmace the Butler, Sleep Clinic, Def Kontrol, 101 Records, and Leo B Dope and Bronze, all billed as special guests.

Loffredo & Associates presented the night at Crocks, and the announcement went up on 20 February as a promo video. Eight days of notice is short for a name of this size.

The same day a longer list of dates appeared, which puts Raekwon the evening after a Philthy Fam night and five days after a hardcore band, as set out in the February 2012 events post.

A Tuesday, and seven places to buy

Advance tickets cost $25 apiece. Seven outlets sold them: Ozone on Memorial, Extreme Pita, Valente’s Music, The Urban Boutique, Rainbow on Bay, Crocks itself and the promoter’s website.

Six of those are named businesses around town and one is a web page. A hip-hop night in 2012 reached buyers through ordinary errands, not through a ticket agency. The club’s own front counter was one of the stops, and the record shows no other route.

No door price was printed. The age line was: 19+ event, photo ID required. In Ontario 19 is the legal drinking age, so this was the licensing rule of a bar-format room and not a matter of taste.

Among the prices attached to shows at the room in 2012, $25 was the highest, matched only by Henry Rollins that June. Nashville Pussy’s advance tickets in April cost $10, and Raekwon’s were two and a half times that. A Tuesday usually asks for a lower price. The number says something about how the promoter rated the name.

What the name carried in 2012

Raekwon joined Wu-Tang Clan in 1992 and rapped as Raekwon the Chef. The group’s first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), came out in November 1993. His own first solo record, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, followed on 1 August 1995 and debuted at number four on the Billboard 200.

A sequel, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II, arrived in September 2009 and was received as a return to form. Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang followed in March 2011, so by February 2012 he had an album less than a year old to tour behind.

In 2012 he also started his own label, Ice H2O Records, so the Thunder Bay date fell in the year he began running an imprint of his own.

He was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Park Hill area of Staten Island. That geography is part of the Wu-Tang story, and Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, is a long way from it.

The guests

The order of the eight guests was never published, so the sequence on the night is unknown. The list is a mixed one. Some names are individuals, some are pairs, and 101 Records reads like a crew or a label more than a single performer.

A bill written like this was common in the period: the headliner is fixed and the openers are a roll call of acts that each bring their own friends through the door.

For a Tuesday that mattered. Weeknights in a small northern city depend on local pull more than on touring names, and eight guest acts is a lot of people with a reason to buy a ticket. That is a reading of the arithmetic, not a stated plan.

The promo video

The post was titled as a promo video, and it carried the Tuesday date, the guest list, the $25 price and the shops that sold tickets.

Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South in Thunder Bay, close to the waterfront. Other hip-hop and DJ nights at the room are collected on the shows page, and the ten dates announced around Raekwon’s are laid out in the events post linked above. Whether the room filled on the night went unrecorded.