St. Joseph Elementary School. Cochrane, Ontario, Februay 8, 1975


"Some of our early fans were also confused by our new direction, as this next episode illustrates: our career, it seemed, was on the up and up, but we were still mostly opening for other bands, so whenever an opportunity to do a headline gig presented itself, Ray would seize it, and in February 1975 he booked us a week of dates beginning some 800 klicks north of Toronto. When my fellow countryman Neil Young sang, 'There is a town in north Ontario,' he was singing about Thunder Bay, but I'm referring to an even smaller, more obscure one called Cochrane, where you can still catch the Polar Bear Express, and where it was cold-like, well-below-zero cold. I mean, like, thirty-eight-degrees-below-zero cold. Still, because it was Canada, we were expecting a warmer reception than the one we got. The local secondary school auditorium wasn't exactly Madison Square Garden, but at least we were top of the bill, playing to a full house seated cross-legged on the floor. Then after the first song . . . silence. Subsequent songs were also met with a disturbing quiet. So we finished our set and said good night-again, to silence and zero applause. We went back to the classroom repurposed as our changing room, and were halfway into our street clothes when the promoter, a nice-enough fellow, entered the room and said, 'You guys are doing an encore, right?' 'Are you kidding?' we said. 'Did you see what just happened? They hated us, man. We bombed.' 'No, no, they loved you!' he insisted. 'Loved us? But nobody applauded! You can't do an encore when no one asks for one!' He was getting upset. 'Your agent said you'd play an encore!' he said, clearly not grasping how encores actually work. 'Oh, wait. I get it. You guys from the big city need fans to tell you they love you before you'll play, right?'” - Geddy Lee My Effin' Life