Machine Gun Kelly live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 1 December 2014

Advance tickets for Machine Gun Kelly on Monday 1 December 2014 cost $35. That is a serious number in a year when prices at Crocks ran from $5 to $95, and a Monday night at that price says the promoter expected the name alone to carry the room.

Loffredo & Associates presented the night with H.I.T Management, under the banner of the No Class Canadian Tour. The venue line gave 16 Cumberland Street South. Immaculate was named as official tour support, and no local opener appeared on the bill, so the evening rested on those two names.

The rapper and the tour

Machine Gun Kelly was born in Houston and made his name in Cleveland, the city his records keep returning to. His debut album Lace Up came out on 9 October 2012 through Bad Boy and Interscope, with Sean “Diddy” Combs as executive producer, and entered the Billboard 200 at number four on first-week sales of 57,000 copies. It later went gold.

Three singles carried it, and the first of them came out more than a year before the album: “Wild Boy” with Waka Flocka Flame, “Invincible” with Ester Dean and “Hold On (Shut Up)” with Young Jeezy.

“Wild Boy” dates from September 2011. It peaked at number 98 on the Hot 100 and still went gold in the United States, so by this December it was a three-year-old song with a certification well above its chart position. Those were the songs a Thunder Bay crowd was likeliest to know, and the second album was nearly a year off.

The tour name comes from his first headline run, the No Class Tour. That one crossed North America in 33 shows, from Casper, Wyoming, on 7 September 2014 to Bismarck, North Dakota, on 31 October, with Limp Bizkit supporting on some dates. The Canadian leg followed, working from the east coast towards the west.

A fan review of the London, Ontario, stop describes one of those rooms from the floor. Thunder Bay sat late on the route, and the run finished with four shows in Ohio before the holidays.

Where to buy

Four places sold tickets in person: Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita, Waking Giant Coffee Co. and Crocks itself. Anyone who preferred to pay online used the promoter’s ticket store, where a service fee came on top of the $35.

That is a shorter list than the six outlets used for a rock show at the room in 2012. A coffee roaster and a pita counter now stood beside the older retail names, and more of the selling had moved to the web. Door times and an age limit were not published.

A week with two bills

Four days later, on Friday 5 December, The Trews played the same stage. Their advance ticket was $25, ten dollars under this one. A rock radio station, ROCK94, stood beside the promoter on that billing, while Machine Gun Kelly’s night named only the two presenting companies.

One night was a rap headliner on a Monday, the other a Canadian rock band on a Friday, and the room handled both with the same handful of ticket shops. A Monday date suits a touring act that crosses the country in one long line and needs the quiet nights. That is a reading of the calendar, not a reason anyone gave.

Ten dollars apart

For scale, Akon charged $45 for general admission at the same address in September 2015, plus a $5 online fee. Machine Gun Kelly’s $35 sat below that. The gap was ten dollars between a singer whose hits ran from 2004 to 2008 and a rapper still on his first headline cycle.

Cleveland sits on Lake Erie and Thunder Bay on Lake Superior, so a rapper who wrote about a lake city spent a Monday in another one. His second album, General Admission, followed in autumn 2015, about ten months after this visit. Other hip-hop and DJ nights at the room are collected on the shows page.