Editorial by Christopher Bernst
There are certain things we enjoy complaining about in Thunder Bay: roads, construction, the weather, Toronto, and, somewhere near the top of the list, “Why don’t any good bands ever come here?”
We say this a lot, sometimes while a good band is actually here, sometimes a week after one left, and sometimes a month before another one arrives. Those apparently don’t count because they aren’t the particular good bands we had in mind. This is the first problem with the argument—the word “good” is doing an enormous amount of work.
What we usually mean is, “Why doesn’t a band I like, on a night I’m free, at a venue I like, for a price I approve of, come to Thunder Bay and somehow make sure I personally hear about it?” Now we’re getting somewhere.
Thunder Bay does get bands. Maybe not enough and certainly not everybody we want. Sometimes a show also seems to be promoted using an innovative marketing strategy known as hoping you somehow find out about it. I’ve discovered after the fact that artists I absolutely would have paid to see played here while I was sitting at home, presumably complaining that nobody ever comes here. There’s enough blame in that situation to spread around. Promotion matters, but at some point so does paying attention.
None of this means the original complaint is completely wrong. Thunder Bay is a ridiculous place to route a tour. We’re not a convenient two-hour drive between major markets. There’s a lot of highway on either side of us, and touring involves fuel, hotels, wages, equipment, and all the other things that stubbornly continue to cost money. Sometimes a band skipping Thunder Bay isn’t an insult. It’s arithmetic.
Geography can explain why a band might not come here, but it doesn’t explain what happens when they do. Maybe that’s the question we should be asking more often.
A show gets announced and everybody is excited. We tag our friends, click “Interested,” discuss whether the ticket price is reasonable, and say we’ll probably grab tickets closer to the date. Then the date gets closer and somehow Thursday—a day that has occurred once every seven days for our entire lives—has become an unexpected scheduling problem.
The truth is, going to a concert is inconvenient. You have to buy a ticket, leave the house, find parking, stand around, maybe pay too much for a beer, and maybe sit through an opening band you’ve never heard of playing songs you don’t know. I’m guilty of finding reasons not to go too. We love the idea of live music, but the actual practice requires putting on pants and leaving the house.
Unfortunately, promoters can’t pay guarantees with Facebook reactions, and bands can’t put “I was totally going to go” in the gas tank. Nobody planning a tour has a personal vendetta against Thunder Bay. They’re looking at routing, costs, venues, previous ticket sales, and whether putting Thunder Bay on the itinerary makes sense. Promoters and touring bands are smart enough not to argue with the evidence. If people show up, somebody notices. If they don’t, somebody notices that too.
The same applies to local music. We can’t complain that touring bands don’t stop here while ignoring the people making music here every week. Not every local band will be your thing. Not every touring band is either. That’s sort of how the word “good” got us into this mess in the first place.
I spend my weekends selling records in a building that used to be Crocks N Rolls, and people still walk into the store and tell me about seeing The Tragically Hip, Sloan, Blue Rodeo, SNFU, and countless others there decades ago. The stage is gone, but the stories aren’t. That’s the strange thing about live music: a show lasts a couple of hours, and people can talk about it for 30 years. Nobody has ever come into my store excited to tell me about the night they almost bought tickets.
None of this means every concert deserves our money, or that Thunder Bay can magically overcome geography by trying harder. Promoters need to promote, venues matter, ticket prices matter, and touring economics matter. Showing up matters too.
So the next time we wonder why a band drove past Thunder Bay, maybe instead of only asking why bands don’t come here, we should occasionally ask, what happens when they do?