Smash Mouth at Grand Portage Lodge & Casino, 29 June 2012

The Friday bill for 29 June 2012 began in the late afternoon with a Thunder Bay band, The Hoolies, who played classic rock from 5 p.m. until 8:30. They were the home team at an event held in another country, in a tent on the Minnesota shore of Lake Superior.

Grand Portage Lodge & Casino stands less than an hour south of Thunder Bay, and the event was its second annual weekend of the kind.

The occasion was the Retro Rock Revue, two days of 1970s, 1980s and 1990s rock. Loffredo & Associates took part in arranging the entertainment, in its own words facilitating it.

The Friday night

After The Hoolies came Kiss Army at 9 p.m., billed as a Kiss tribute phenomenon. The billing promised identical make-up, outrageous outfits and classic instruments.

A tribute act is a specific kind of booking. It sells a repertoire rather than a name. Two of the four support acts across the weekend were tributes, Kiss Army on Friday and the Zep Show on Saturday, and the other two were a local classic-rock band and a disco outfit.

Saturday’s three names

Saturday opened at 2 p.m. with Boogie Wonderland, described as Minnesota’s top 1970s disco dance band. From 6 p.m. the Zep Show took over, a Led Zeppelin tribute. At 9 p.m. Smash Mouth came on as headliners, with what the announcement called a 1960s-influenced garage-band pop sound.

That is three different decades in one day: disco, arena rock and late-1990s radio. The order was sensible, since it built from dance floor to guitars to the hits, and it kept the best-known songs for the closing slot.

Smash Mouth in 2012

Smash Mouth formed in San Jose, California, in 1994. Their breakthrough was “Walkin’ on the Sun” in 1997, from the album Fush Yu Mama. In 1999 “All Star”, from Astro Lounge, reached number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their 2001 cover of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” put them on the soundtrack to Shrek.

By June 2012 the hits were between eleven and fifteen years old, which makes a retro festival an honest fit. The rest of the weekend reached back to the 1970s.

The day also ran long before the headliner. Saturday started at 2 p.m., so seven hours passed before Smash Mouth walked out at nine. Friday’s opener had filled the three and a half hours from 5 p.m. to 8:30. Both days were built as afternoon-into-night events, and the top billing came last each time.

Where the ticket money went

When the event was first announced on 16 May it was an ordinary festival. Ten days later it was not. Rain on 26 and 27 May put Thunder Bay under a state of emergency, and a line was added to the announcement. It said 100 per cent of ticket sales would go to the Thunder Bay flood fund.

The Friday came about a month after the storm, which dropped 108 millimetres on the city over 36 hours. So the tent went up while the clean-up was still under way.

By September that fund had passed $1,046,908, raised through concerts, a golf tournament and donations. The announcement gave no ticket price, so no dollar figure for this event can be stated. What it did say is that every ticket paid into the fund.

Getting there

The lodge advertised free shuttle service from Thunder Bay, booked by phone, and Famous Dave’s barbecue was on offer all weekend. The announcement says nothing further about the site or the crowd.

The nearest Crocks date before it on the calendar was Henry Rollins, twenty days earlier, a seated evening with no band at all. Smash Mouth’s Saturday slot, by contrast, came with a barbecue menu and a free shuttle from Thunder Bay.

The drive south crosses the international border at the Pigeon River, and the shuttle spared anyone at the wheel that crossing after a long night. That is a practical reading of the offer, not a line from the announcement.