DJ Ruckus live in Thunder Bay, 15 February 2014

Five dollars, paid at the door, was the entire cost of the night. There were no advance tickets and no service fee to add. That made DJ Ruckus’s return to Thunder Bay on Saturday 15 February 2014 the lowest admission in the whole 2014 run of priced shows, where the other prices climbed as high as $50.

The poster went up on 22 January, 24 days ahead of the date, under the usual banner: Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presenting. Its own headline called the evening “the biggest weekend dance party in Thunder Bay.” That is the poster’s claim about its own event, and nobody else is quoted for or against it.

What was promised

The wording was short. DJ Ruckus was returning, so he had played the city before, and the night was 19+ with photo ID required. Music ran until 3 a.m. for anyone with a valid wristband, the same late-night arrangement printed on the dance posters of the autumn before, and the poster gave no other terms. The room is not named.

Nothing else is printed: no support acts, no doors, no ticket outlets. Above the DJ’s name sat one line, “returning to #downtownpa,” so the word applied to the neighbourhood as much as to the man. A card that plain sold the DJ and the price and left everything else to habit.

A winter weekend with a lot going on

The calendar is worth a look. Friday 14 February was Valentine’s Day, so the dance party fell the night after it. Monday 17 February was Family Day, the Ontario holiday that has fallen on the third Monday of February since 2008, and it made the weekend a long one. The Winter Olympics in Sochi had opened on 7 February and ran until 23 February.

Hockey mattered in Canada that fortnight. The women beat the United States 3-2 in overtime in the final on Thursday 20 February, and the men beat Sweden 3-0 on the closing Sunday. The party fell in the middle of a stretch when the country was watching a screen.

Then there was the weather. By mid-February 2014 about 88 percent of the Great Lakes surface was frozen, according to the American lab that tracks it, and the ice peaked at 92.5 percent in early March. Lake Superior, the lake Thunder Bay sits on, averaged 95 percent ice cover that winter.

Any of those could have kept people home or sent them out. Nothing printed says which it counted on, and that is a reading of the dates, not a stated reason. What a long weekend does remove is the Monday-morning alarm, and a 3 a.m. wristband suits that.

Five dollars in context

Ten days earlier, on Wednesday 5 February, Bleeker Ridge played Crocks with tickets at $8. Set beside that, the Ruckus night cost less than a hard-rock band’s midweek cover, and a sixth of the $30 advance that a dancehall headliner would charge two months later.

The gap to that $8 ticket was three dollars, and the gap to the $50 top of the year was forty-five.

That headliner was Beenie Man, and his poster shared a hashtag with this one, “#DOWNTOWNPA.” The tag reads as shorthand for the downtown core.

Thunder Bay was formed in 1970 from Port Arthur, Fort William and surrounding townships, and Cumberland Street South, where Crocks stood until October 2018, lies on the Port Arthur side. Reading “PA” as Port Arthur is a natural fit, though neither poster spells it out.

Half of a ten-dollar night

The season before had two comparable dance dates. Mysto and Pizzi played on 27 September 2013 and MAKJ on 18 October, and both charged $10 for the same kind of Friday. Both also billed a headliner with a record behind him. Ruckus arrived at half that price and with no credit list at all, only his name and the word “returning.”

The winter did the rest of the work. A five-dollar Saturday in the deepest part of a very cold season asked little of anyone who wanted to get out.