Back to the Bandshell
Venue regains status as Ex’s musical heart,
There was a time, some 80 years ago, when the CNE Bandshell was the annual fair’s musical calling card, back in the days when there was a CNE Music Department.
Eventually it was superseded by the Grandstand, the centre of all concert activity in the city, but that was demolished in 1999. Now the Bandshell is again being regarded as the musical centre of the Ex. It opens Aug. 21 with British rock act America. “We spend $800,000 in talent,” says Virginia Ludy, the first female general manager in the fair’s 136 years.
Built in 1936, the Bandshell was meant to be Toronto’s classy, up-to-the-minute answer to the Hollywood Bowl, our own art deco backlit movie set right out of a Fred Astaire dance spectacular. Yet it signalled something deeper as well. Its steady diet of patriotic military bands — the Welsh Guards, the 48th Highlanders and the like — reminded out-of towners of the more modest bandshells found everywhere in the country.
Even today, the Bandshell suggests that the CNE is as much about old Ontario as zippy new Toronto. It’s our own once-a-year Mariposa, not of folk-festival fame but from Stephen Leacock’s sunny small-town confection.
(“Mariposa is not a real town,” Leacock wrote; “on the contrary, it is 70 or 80 of them.”)
The Bandshell evolved from the age of radio music. The Grandstand — its third iteration built in 1948 — extolled big-time celebrity (mostly American) and TV (ditto). Ed Sullivan. Victor Borge. Lassie.
When a Bandshell act bombed, it merely meant people ambling away to elsewhere in the Ex. Not so with the Grandstand. When a seemingly tipsy Gene Autry fell off his horse, Champion, crowds buzzed and newspapers gossiped. Autry, given a private dressing down by CNE brass, later claimed the humiliation changed his life.
Howard Cable, the Grandstand’s former musical director, still conducting at 94, remembers how relatively easy it was to get the good bands for the Bandshell — “the best big bands from Britain and America,” he says — and how difficult the Grandstand proved to be.
“The CNE executives weren’t particularly artistically minded,” Cable says. “We had to fight them every year just to get the Grandstand going.”
So Ludy seems correct that now is the time to rethink the Bandshell’s importance in the Ex’s greater scheme of things.
There’s plenty of historical precedence. The 1972 Bandshell appearance by Brave Belt — soon-to-be Bachman Turner Overdrive — “was the moment when everything changed,” wrote Craig MacInnis, former Star rock critic, in a piece a while back. “Early BTO was a revelation: the first irrefutable sign of our burgeoning ‘hoser culture.’ ”
There’s a through line from the venue’s musical past to its present in one of this summer’s Bandshell acts.
Devin Cuddy, son of Blue Rodeo veteran Jim Cuddy and a solid jazztinged piano player, opens with his namesake band Saturday for Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea.
He says he might not be a musician if not for Louis Armstrong, who played the Bandshell in the rocking early ’60s.
“That Armstrong Greatest Hits was the one thing that did it,” says Cuddy, of the day he came across the collec- tion. “Ken Burns’ Jazz (the 2001 miniseries) was also on TV then. So it was the perfect time for me.”
It was a big deal to hear Armstrong, I tell Cuddy, during a lazy summer afternoon, one that changed my life. To catch him meant I had to sneak away from my unprofitable CNE job of hawking programs just inside the Princes’ Gates. It got me fired by my aunt Mamie even though she landed me the job in the first place.
Years later, during an interview, I told Armstrong about losing my CNE job. “Wish I’d known,” he said. “Did you ever find work?”
The CNE is on from Friday until Sept. 7. Peter Goddard is a freelance writer and former Star jazz critic. He can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca