Loffredo & Associates, the Thunder Bay Promoter Behind Crocks

Loffredo & Associates presented most of the concerts recorded on this site, and it described itself in plain business terms. Its own summary called it a full-service agency with about twenty years of experience in event management, club promotion, talent buying and artist representation. A tagline on its ticket pages, several years later, put the figure at more than thirty.

The firm worked from Thunder Bay and named its owner’s tenure as running from 2008. Before that, the same summary listed a general manager’s role at a company called Multi Media Entertainment from 1999 to 2008. Those dates come from the agency’s own biography and are repeated here as its claims.

Crocks and the room on Cumberland Street

The venue at the centre of the archive is Crocks, listed in that biography as a club the agency owned and bought for “from start to finish”. A press release dated March 2010 named a downtown building at 16 Cumberland Street South as the future home of Crocks, which it called the original home of independent music in Thunder Bay.

Dated posts from 2013 to 2015 give the same address for shows. The club stayed there for about nine years.

Then it moved. On 5 October 2018 all events under the Crocks name shifted to the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road, a slightly bigger room that could be set up for large shows or for smaller, quieter ones. That is why 2019 ticket pages say Crocks at NV.

The rest of the 2019 season ran through other rooms as well: Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie, the Urban Abbey in Thunder Bay and, once, The Coulson in Sudbury.

Festivals, casinos and campus rooms

The concert work reached well beyond one club. The agency’s own list of past involvement included the Thunder Jam Festival, where it named itself coordinator in 2002, and the tenth anniversary of the Dragon Boat Festival in 2008. It also listed the Da Vinci Centre’s Thunder Fest and the John Ricci Memorial Music Festival, the latter from 1999 onward.

Grand Portage Lodge and Casino sits less than an hour south of Thunder Bay, across the border in Minnesota. It appears on the same list, from 1999. In June 2012 the agency helped stage the casino’s Retro Rock Revue weekend, headlined by Smash Mouth, and an update to that announcement said all ticket sales would go to the Thunder Bay flood fund.

Lakehead University’s campus rooms, the Outpost and the Study, hosted various concerts arranged through the agency. Other work is described only as concerts and festivals across northern Ontario.

Services beyond the stage

A second strand of the business was aimed at artists. The agency advertised electronic press kits with a printable poster template, a biography page with a technical rider and song list, website setup with a domain name, and touring guides with venue and promoter contacts across North America.

It also sold event coordination, covering production, lights, technical requirements and the negotiation of artist fees. For the right project it offered to move from advice to a full management contract. Almost none of this is visible in the shows archive, which records only what reached a stage.

In 2010 the firm’s marketing arm planned a quarterly publication with the newspaper Chronicle Journal to promote downtown Port Arthur, the older district of Thunder Bay. The first issue was scheduled for distribution on 14 June, with an advertising deadline three days before.

How the archive is organised

The shows page lists every recorded date by year. The venues page describes the rooms, and the archive overview charts the calendar from 2010 to 2019. Each show has its own page with the date, the bill and the ticket details as they were announced.

Shows are sorted by the night they took place, not by the date a post appeared, which is why a date in the archive can sit months after the announcement. Where a source gave no year, the year is worked out from the ticket sequence and the weekday, and pages say plainly when a date is inferred.