MAKJ live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 18 October 2013

Hungry guests were told where to go: a barbecue on the patio, offered in the same breath as the ticket price and the age rule. It is a small line at the bottom of a poster, and it says something about how a Friday at Crocks was meant to run. Eat outside first, then go in for the dance floor on Cumberland Street South.

The night was MAKJ live at Crocks, on Friday 18 October 2013, the weekend after Canadian Thanksgiving. Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presented it, and tickets were $10 through the promoter’s website. The event was 19+ with photo ID.

Two clocks ran on the same poster. Music continued until 3 a.m. for guests with a valid wristband, and the wristband had to be collected by 1:30 a.m. Both conditions were printed in capitals.

A producer from the central California coast

The name looks European, and the remix list is heavy with Dutch and Swedish names. MAKJ is neither.

Mackenzie Alexander Johnson was born in San Luis Obispo, California, on 25 June 1990. As a teenager he lived in China and was working toward a career as a racing driver until, at fifteen, he bought a pair of Technics turntables. He had lessons with DJ AM, who taught him to scratch.

His first releases came in 2012, with tracks called “Crunch” and “Croche.” By the autumn of 2013 he was 23 and had a run of tracks on Hysteria, Juicy Music and Doorn Records behind him.

The names on the poster

No opening act was named. The poster listed instead the people who had backed his edits, bootlegs and remixes: Hardwell, Tiësto, Steve Aoki, Afrojack, Fedde Le Grand, R3hab, Chuckie, Avicii, Laidback Luke, Adrian Lux, Swanky Tunes, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso. It pointed to the festival main stages and left the reader to fill in the rest.

That is a common trick with a young producer. It worked here for a plain reason, because most of those names had played rooms far larger than a downtown club in northwestern Ontario, and a reader could see the distance.

Eleven days after Countdown

The date was announced in July. The record that changed the season came out in between. “Countdown,” made with Hardwell and issued on Revealed Recordings on 7 October 2013, reached number one on Beatport within three days. Hardwell had first played it in his set at Ultra Music Festival earlier that year, and a ticking countdown announced the release ten days ahead.

Crocks opened its doors eleven days after the single came out.

The announcement predates the release, so the timing was a coincidence of the calendar. The result was a $10 club night for a producer who had just topped a major dance chart. He also had “Encore” with Henry Fong out that year, and toward the end of 2013 he set out on his first large American tour with Bingo Players and Bassjackers.

Ultra Music Festival in Miami followed in March 2014, where Billboard named him one of ten acts to watch. Set the Crocks date inside that run and it reads as an early stop on a climb, and a cheap one to attend.

Miami in March is one of the biggest dates in the American dance calendar, and a downtown Thunder Bay club in October sits at the other end of that scale.

The other nights around it

Three weeks earlier the same room had held the New York production duo Mysto and Pizzi, also at $10. A dance night, a three-week gap and another dance night at the same price began to look like a pattern for the room that autumn.

Across the nine priced shows the record holds for 2013, prices ran from $10 to $40, so MAKJ again sat at the floor. The next date on the calendar was Matthew Good on 5 November, eighteen days later. His Arrows of Desire tour date ran on a Tuesday at $35 general admission, more than three times the price of this Friday.