Classic Roots live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 31 December 2015

The night was billed as NYE in #DOWNTOWNPA, and the hashtag did most of the local work. PA is Port Arthur, the lakeside city that merged with its neighbour Fort William to become Thunder Bay. Forty-five years on, people still use the older name for the downtown blocks, and a club on Cumberland Street South was inside them.

The merger itself was a New Year’s event. Thunder Bay was formed on 1 January 1970, and a ceremony at midnight renamed the old boundary arch the Unity Arch. A midnight party on 31 December 2015 was, in a small way, the city’s birthday eve.

The night had three names on it: Classic Roots, Rogue and Elaty, all DJs. The announcement went up on 9 December, three weeks ahead, which was early enough to sell tickets at leisure and late enough that nobody had planned their holidays around it.

What the night promised

The promise was a spread of styles rather than one sound: electro, house, hip-hop, top 40, reggae and club remixes. That is the standard menu of a New Year’s Eve room, where the crowd wants whatever still works at midnight. Party favours came with the night, and the party was set to run until 3 a.m.

The start was 10 p.m., and tickets were $10. That is a low figure for the date. Across the fourteen priced Crocks shows of 2015 on this site, prices ran from $5 to $95, so a ten-dollar New Year’s Eve sat near the bottom of the range. Five hours for ten dollars is the short version.

Where the tickets were

Tickets were sold at Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita, Renaissance Cafe and Espresso Joya, and there was a dedicated New Year’s Eve page online. Those are the same street-level outlets that carried the promoter’s other shows that autumn, including the DJ BL3ND night in October.

Notice how few of them were music shops. A pita counter and two coffee places were doing the ticket work for a room that ran on bass. It worked because people passed those counters daily.

The address was 16 Cumberland Street South, close to the Lake Superior waterfront and inside the stretch of downtown that the hashtag claimed for itself. Anyone stepping out at 3 a.m. stepped into a January night in northwestern Ontario.

The first name on the bill

Classic Roots is the stage name of a DJ and producer from Long Lake 58 First Nation in northern Ontario, working in house and techno, and now based in Toronto. The DJ’s own website lists this Thunder Bay date among its shows. Of the other two, Rogue and Elaty were billed without further detail, and nothing more is claimed for them here.

That the first name on the bill came from northern Ontario, and not from a touring circuit, is a small point in the night’s favour. It reads as a party put together from the province’s own people, which is what a hometown New Year’s Eve is for.

The DJ’s own biography talks about rhythm, movement and the link between the person at the decks and the floor, and a midnight crowd is about as direct a test of that as exists.

A Thursday midnight

The calendar shaped the night. New Year’s Eve fell on a Thursday, so 1 January 2016 was a Friday, and a party that finished at 3 a.m. left a long weekend to recover in. That is a reading of the calendar, not a stated reason.

Matthew Good played Crocks on 24 November, on a $35 advance ticket, and the next show on this site after the party is The Sheepdogs on 10 February 2016. In between came one long party, priced at under a third of the Good ticket and built for people who wanted a dance floor, not a songwriter.

A midnight countdown is the fixed point of any such evening, and the rest is stamina. Ten o’clock to three in the morning is five hours, a long stretch for three DJs to cover with a menu that wide. Whether the room filled by midnight is not something anyone kept track of.