LIVE AND KICKING
Year that saw many of the city’s clubs shut down ends on a high note — with big hopes, plans and expansions for some of its most historic live music venues
Fans of live music have witnessed a lot of casualties on the local scene lately, with one club after another closing or threatening to, so they might understandably fear the worst.
But lurking behind all the talk of a “venue crisis,” there’s also some pretty good news.
The places we lost over the past year or so include the Silver Dollar, the Hoxton, the Holy Oak, the Central and the Hideout, while Hugh’s Room and Cherry Cola’s At the barely same time, achieved though, stays the of Horseshoe execution. Tavern just celebrated its 70th birthday, the 69-year-old El Mocambo looks to finally reopen in the spring, and the revamped Danforth Music Hall turns 99 next year.
Plus, after seven years of fighting for the 102-year-old ballroom’s survival, the new (-ish) owner of the Matador is cautiously optimistic that he might finally reach a compromise with the City of Toronto to open again in 2018.
Next year will see the city’s most famous music venue — Massey Hall — close its doors for at least two years for extensive renovations, but when it reopens there will be two additional live venues in the building besides the restored main hall. Deane Cameron, president and CEO of the Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, admits it will be very strange without the 123-year-old theatre while it undergoes its extensive makeover.
But when Massey reopens, not only will it have removable seating on the main floor to expand its capacity to nearly 2,900 for general-admission shows, it also will have remodelled the Centuries basement bar into a 500-capacity venue downstairs. It will have another 500-cap space on a fourth floor that will be part of its expansion into an adjacent property.
Cameron says those rooms fall into a capacity range Toronto “really needs” right now and will enable Massey Hall to operate most days of the year “with some activity in one of the rooms.” We’re coming out of this ahead in the long run.
“It’s unfortunately been left too long and it’s quite rundown. But honestly, when people see that building with 100 stained-glass windows all cleaned up, it’ll still look like Massey Hall — we’re not trying to overdress it — but it will look beautiful and it will be ready for another 125 years,” Cameron says.
Massey Hall’s temporary closure will leave a 2,750-seat gap in the busier-than-ever Toronto concert market — the third-largest in North America — but that could translate into a boom for other mid-size venues in the city, such as the 1,400capacity Danforth Music Hall.
Danforth’s manager, Michael Sherman, says he’s already had some preliminary discussions with Massey about providing a home for some of its concert programming during the downtime, although it’s not like the Music Hall has been hurting for business. The theatre hosted 202 shows in 2017, up from only 36 in 2012 when local concert-promotion company Embrace first took over running the space and subjected it to upgrades.
“We’re already up 40 per cent in bookings in the first quarter of next year, which hasn’t even been affected by Massey closing,” Sherman says.
Not bad for a former movie theatre that had fallen into grave disrepair in the hands of a succession of owners “who didn’t care.”
Their efforts to resurrect the venue — which now include an adjacent restaurant and plans for a small boutique hotel next door — haven’t gone unnoticed by actual owners of the building, he adds.
“The landlord . . . has made a very strong commitment to us for a long time, so that’s allowed us to invest in the business without fear of being kicked out.”
A sympathetic landlord and/or stable ownership of the property is key to any “legacy” venue’s survival in this city. Even the Horseshoe Tavern survives on the good graces of the descendants of the building’s original owner Jack Starr, who purchased the property in 1947. As a legend recently retold by David McPherson in his book The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern has it, Starr first brought music into the venue at the behest of migrant workers from the East Coast, who suggested it might be nice to hear some country tunes while they drank in the tavern.
“The temptation is always there for people to get their money and move on,” says McPherson, crediting the Horseshoe’s agreeable landlords — in addition to skilled programmers — with sparing it the fate dealt so many other vintage venues in this city, from the Gaslight and the Colonial to the Diamond and the Penny Farthing, where “all they are now are plaques and the memories in people’s heads.”
In El Mocambo’s case, though, a change of ownership was exactly what it took to keep the place alive.
When the future looked grim for the landmark live spot at Spadina and College in 2014, tech trader and Dragon’s Den star Michael Wekerle
“We’re already up 40 per cent in bookings in the first quarter of next year, which hasn’t even been affected by Massey closing.” MICHAEL SHERMAN DANFORTH MUSIC HALL MANAGER
rode in at the 11th hour and snapped it up for nearly $3.8 million. It’s been shuttered ever since for renovations that have proven more challenging than initially expected, Wekerle spokesperson Kelly Pullen says. But the plan is to reopen in May 2018 — and to have a rebuilt version of the club’s famous “neon palm” sign returned to its rightful perch above the entrance and relit by March or April.
“The sign is ready to go up but there’s no point in putting it up for the winter,” Pullen says. “And hopefully by then the ground floor will be done so people can actually come in.”
And what of the Matador, the onceinfamous after-hours boozecan at College and Dovercourt? Owner Paul McCaughey has been trying to reopen it as a legitimate event hall and concert space, against much neighbourhood and institutional opposition, since he purchased it from the late Ann Dunn seven years ago.
“I’m giving the city the benefit of the doubt and I believe the city is perhaps now willing to give the Matador the benefit of the doubt,” McCaughey says, as he prepares for yet another round of zoning and preplan reviews in early 2018.
This is a remarkable change of tone for McCaughey. By mid-2017, he was ready to give up the fight and sell what he’d hoped to reopen as a 650cap live venue and event space with a bar/restaurant in the front to a developer. Then fate intervened in the form of Canadian rock icon Robbie Robertson, who wanted to shoot part of a documentary on his life in the Matador.
“I spent the summer soul searching, and I decided that I had to see this thing through — again,” McCaughey says. “When I stood in that room I could not see that room becoming a Shopper’s Drug Mart or a Rexall or any of those other things. So once I decided that and once I turned that corner, I thought ‘What am I going to do?’ And not three days later did White Pine Pictures walk in the back door and say, ‘We want to shoot a Robbie Robertson documentary in your hall.’ ”
The first music to echo around the Matador’s walls in seven years thus arrived in October in the form of an acoustic version of the Band’s “The Weight,” and Robertson made sure he added his signature to the backstage wall that already bears the names of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Co- hen and Stompin’ Tom Connors before he left.
The experience proved a “turning point” for McCaughey, who went back to the city hoping to have the room back open in time for a planned premiere party for the documentary in 2018. He has since received some “positive feedback” from the city and feels “there’s room for some practical optimism on this.”
If the century-old Matador — which almost became a City of Toronto parking lot a decade ago — emerges victorious, Toronto will have been spared the anguish of watching yet another historic venue demolished at the hands of a condo developer.
And music fans in this town will have a much-needed piece of good news to celebrate.
“How many venues do we have left that are of this age and of this stature?” McCaughey says. “In this particular case, we have a venue that generations of people have moved through. We’ve lost so many venues in just the last year, and it’s heartbreaking. So at this point in time, saving a heritage, ‘legacy’ venue, I think, is something of core importance to who we are as a city.
“Where are the places that we can go to and show the children where we grew up?” Fourth in a series celebrating the silver linings in a dark year of entertainment.