How my rock band changed Canadian law... sort of.

I was standing at my bus stop in front of the MTS center today and I saw a nice young lad putting up a poster on a pole. His technique was ok: he was using allot of tape and he was sure to cover the tops and bottoms of the posters (preventing edges from being exposed; edges that make ripping down posters quite easy). I remember when I was a poster rookie, and I used tape to fasten posters to poles. That was until I learned a more effective and somewhat more asinine method.

When my former rock band, the Velvet Pill, did a tour of southern Ontario, we brought along hundreds of posters. The posters were generic enough that they included a picture of the band and our website, but left a portion at the bottom completely blank so we had space to fill in specific concert information for each city/town.

We made our way east, through Dryden, Thunder Bay, North Bay, Ottawa and eventually ended up in Toronto. As soon as we got to town, we hit up Queen Street to start promoting our shows. A couple band members were in charge of bringing flyers to the two venues we were playing at later in the week, and the rest of us set off to put up posters.

We put up nearly 100 posters in the first day we there; which is an impressive feat even for experienced posterers (it’s my word, back off!).

The next day we went downtown to get a coffee and noticed that all of our posters had been taken down already. Even though we likely used a half a dozen rolls of tape, the posters were gone!

Later that day, while reapplying posters to essentially the same places we targeted the previous evening, we ran into a fellow who gave us a sound piece of advice: “You should use wallpaper compound, those damn things will never come down,” he suggested.

Still feeling pretty pissed off about having all of our posters ripped down, we drove to Mississauga immediately to find a hardware store that sold this mystifying compound. Sure enough, we found the stuff; it was a powder compound that simply needed to be mixed with water. Now we were rally excited to get postering. At this point, we didn’t even care about promoting our show; we just wanted to redeem ourselves.

So we spent the rest of that evening postering (and pub hopping, along Queen and Jarvis… cuz that’s what you do when you’re a naïve rock-star-wannabee and you’re in the T-Dot for good times). The technique worked great. Not only was it easier to apply posters to pretty much everything, but the posters were practically plastered to the poles… you’d need a steamer to get them down. We certainly felt a sense of redemption; and we had a shit load of that compound left over too.

The rest of our tour took us to London, Hamilton, Sudbury, back to Toronto (for reasons I won’t explain here) and then eventually back to Thunder Bay.

Our second stay in Thunder Bay on this tour was an extended one. You see, in order for us to be able to tour accross the country as an original rock band, we had to play covers in certain towns (usually for 3 or 4 day stints), in order to be able to eat, buy gas and shelter. On this particular tour, we were scheduled to play the Inn Towner as Pelvic Thrill (the cover band) from Thursday to Sunday (that’s not a typo, it’s a four day gig and Sunday is the big night at the Inn Towner). Our Velvet Pill show was scheduled for Tuesday night at the Apollo (God bless your hearts, the Apollo).

That meant that, aside from sitting in on classes for free at Lakehead University (which Jer and I did), or checking out Centerfolds (which Guy, Jon and Doug did), we had ample time to put up posters.

For those of you who are not familiar with Thunder Bay, Ontario, it’s not a big town. One might even say that it’s a small town.

We began postering the first day we got into town. This was the last show on the tour, so we figured that we would use up the rest of our posters. We figured that because Thunder Bay was so small, if we put up a ton of posters our band’s name would become a household one, and that eventually we would conquer T-Bay and then the world.

About a month after we returned home from said tour, we got an email from a town resident. It was an email informing us that as a result of our insane postering, a law had been passed that prohibited bands from putting up posters in public places, other than the pre-designated spots.

I’m sure they wanted to sue our asses, or at least put us in jail, but without a law in place, they had no book to throw at us (other than the T-Bay constitution; which I think only has one rule, and that is “you can’t kiss your sister on Sundays”… which they all break religiously).

As stupid and naïve as this sounds to me now, I was actually pretty proud. It was somehow an accomplishment that we had littered the town with hideous posters, creating such an eye soar for the people who actually had to live there.

The next time we played Thunder Bay, we played the Apollo and there was roughly 5 people there, including the bartender. Our super-awesome-shitty marketing campaign was clearly a flop… but I sure have a cool story to tell!!!