Beenie Man live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 15 April 2014

Four places in Thunder Bay sold the $30 advance ticket for Beenie Man, and one of them was a pita shop. Bean Fiend, Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita and Crocks itself each carried tickets, and the promoter’s website took online orders. The announcement went up on 6 March, 40 days before the date, and nothing about the retail side was elaborate.

The date was Tuesday 15 April 2014, at 16 Cumberland Street South. Doors opened at 8 p.m., the show was 19+, and photo ID was required. Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presented it as one night only on the Hottest Man Alive North American Tour.

The résumé on the poster

Billing called him a Grammy Award winning international reggae superstar, and that one is easy to check. Beenie Man, born Moses Anthony Davis in Kingston on 22 August 1973, won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album at the 2001 ceremony. The record was Art and Life, his twelfth studio album, released in July 2000 on Virgin.

The album reached number one on the American reggae albums chart and number 68 on the Billboard 200, with guests including Wyclef Jean and Mýa. Mýa is the featured voice on “Girls Dem Sugar,” a single issued on 14 September 2000. It is the first of the four songs the poster named. The others were “The King of Dancehall,” “Romie” and “Rum & Redbull.”

Four songs, fourteen years

The four songs named came from a narrow window. “Girls Dem Sugar” was fourteen years old in April 2014, and the album called The King of Dancehall was ten. “Who Am I,” one of his other American hits, is missing from the list, which suggests it was a sample of the catalogue and not a running order.

The wording matters as much as the songs. One dance night earlier that year was billed as a party. This one said “live in concert,” with a tour name and a claim of one night only.

Whose crown

The title on the poster has a history. Yellowman, a veteran deejay, claimed the title as his own from the early 1980s, and he objected when Beenie Man released an album named The King of Dancehall in 2004.

Beenie Man himself had started young. He won the Tastee Talent contest in Kingston in 1981 and recorded a first single, “Too Fancy,” with the producer Junjo Lawes that same year. Twenty-three years passed between that record and the album that reopened the argument over the crown.

He was also tied in dancehall memory to a feud with Bounty Killer that began in 1993 and went to a soundclash at the Sting festival in Jamaica. It fed into his 1994 album Guns Out. By 2014 it was ending. The two recorded a single together, “Legendary,” released in November 2014, seven months after the Thunder Bay date.

A Tuesday among the rest

On 30 March, sixteen days before, the Glorious Sons played with Teenage Kicks.

A week before Beenie Man, on 8 April, came SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque. Nineteen days after him, Swollen Members, the Vancouver hip-hop crew, played on 4 May.

The days of the week are worth noticing. The Glorious Sons and Swollen Members both played on Sundays, and SuicideGirls and Beenie Man were back-to-back Tuesdays. None of the neighbouring dates fell on a Friday or Saturday.

A Tuesday slot may have an ordinary explanation. A touring artist has to fit between larger cities, and the weekend dates in those cities go elsewhere.

Thirty dollars in context

Across the ten priced shows in the 2014 record, admission ran from $5 to $50. The $30 advance sat in the middle of that range.

At six times the $5 cover of the DJ Ruckus dance night two months earlier, it was also three-fifths of the most expensive ticket of the year.

Bounty Killer and Beenie Man did share a stage, at Reggae Sumfest in 2019, the yearly festival in Montego Bay, five years after the night at Crocks. The Thunder Bay date fell before that reconciliation became a record.