A place that burned bright and died young
Ted’s Wrecking Yard kick-started Toronto’s indie music scene
Unnoticed by passersby and often unmarked by plaques, numerous Toronto addresses with big parts to play in cultural history sit mostly uncelebrated. In our series Local Legends, we tell you about them and put them on your mental map. A lot of live-music clubs have come and gone during the nearly 20 years since this music writer arrived in Toronto — a terrifying number of them within the past 18 months or so alone — but the one where I forged my first connections to an actual, suddenly happening Toronto “scene” was the late, lamented Ted’s Wrecking Yard on College St.
That was just a lucky accident of timing, really. One of the first friends I made upon landing here was Yvonne Matsell, whom I initially encountered as the talent booker for the now also sadly departed Reverb club on Queen West, and when she was unceremoniously booted from her job at that venue in 1998, and subsequently scooped up by Ted Footman to give his then one-year-old venue at 549 College St. a bit of a lift, I happily followed her there.
Ted’s Wrecking Yard — the stated “home of both kinds of music” and a species of revenge on Footman’s part on the city of Toronto, which had previously thwarted his attempts to introduce live music to his Ted’s Collision and Body Repair dive a few doors away to the east — had been staggering along OK since July 1997 with a weird mix of rockabilly, country and cow-punk upstairs, and with more eclectic programming that tended toward jazz and classical performances in the brighter, airier room downstairs known as Barcode.
Under Matsell’s sage stewardship, however, it completely caught the turn-of-the-millennium indie-rock zeitgeist that would elevate Toronto to the hallowed position it currently enjoys on the international stage as a relentless purveyor of cooler-thancool music of all stripes.
Ted’s Wrecking Yard was not only one of the places where that was all allowed to happen, Ted’s was a place where you could actually feel it happening as it happened. The careers of Broken Social Scene, Feist, Peaches, Metric, the New Deal, the Hidden Cameras, Billy Talent — when it was still called PEZ — and Sum 41were all incubated there.
The Constantines played their first Toronto gig there on a Sunday night in 2001 in front of an audience that consisted primarily of four music writers and the two founders of Three Gut records, and left with a record deal and a four-way press cosign on their instant reputation as the hottest young live act in the area.
Ted’s also helped build the burgeoning stables of lofty local labels such as Three Gut, Paper Bag Records, Teenage USA Recordings and Arts & Crafts, while Toronto audiences got their first tastes of out-oftown artists as varied as Kathleen Edwards, the Weakerthans and Richard Ashcroft of the Verve and Mel C of the Spice Girls as solo acts in that black-painted 200-capacity box where the washrooms rarely functioned and the perennially pothazed backstage band room was licensed to hold a whopping 40 people.
“Oh, we knew we were cool,” Footman laughs, having a pint across from the old Ted’s location — now an LCBO, after an ill-fated attempt to turn it into a boutique hotel left the space derelict for a long stretch of time — on the Cafe Diplomatico patio with BFF and fellow Welsh expat Matsell one recent afternoon.
“And it was. It was fresher than the Horseshoe and Lee’s for a bit, because that s--- kinda perpetuates itself. We were like the fresh princes in town.”
“It was literally like the music was starting to free flow and it was just a very fertile time for music,” Matsell says. “It was a really fertile musical time. It was just that time of ‘Hey, there’s something really cool happening in this city.’ And it was all happening at Ted’s Wrecking Yard.”
Ted’s also had a couple of regular features feeding Toronto’s late-’90s/ early-2000s indie boom in the form of sometime Social Scenester Jason Collett’s Radio Mondays songwriters’ circle for a few months during 2001 and the invaluable Wavelength music series, which got its start on Sunday nights at the Wrecking Yard on Feb. 13, 2000, and still exists today as the driving force behind a semiregular concert series and the Camp Wavelength festival on Toronto Island.
“It’s still my favourite club of all time,” says Wavelength co-founder Jonathan (Jonny Dovercourt) Bunce. “It’s still a perfect rock club, to me, in terms of sightlines, vibe, sound and just the fact that you’d always be excited when you went there. And it’s still the spiritual home of Wavelength . . . We finally had a home for people coming from the shoegaze and noise-rock and experimental and CIUT (radio) scenes, the kind of stuff that was really underground and never really had a name, but with Wavelength we finally kind of put a name on it. It let the popularity of that scene grow beyond our circle of five or six bands.
“It sounded amazing, too. I remember it had incredible sound and it had great sightlines, and for me — coming from El Mocambo and Sneaky Dee’s — it felt kind of elevated. It was a slightly elevated experience. It was a club that was easy to book like El Mo or Sneaky Dee’s, but it had a Horseshoe level of quality.
“Also, one of the great things about Ted’s Wrecking Yard was even though it had an ‘adult’ kind of feel, it was also very punk rock. Ted was very ‘not by the book.’ Ted would just break the rules and just lived to piss off the inspectors.”
Footman was also perpetually struggling to make the $8,000 a month in rent required to keep the two floors of the Wrecking Yard and Barcode afloat, and Matsell smilingly recalls that she and the bartenders employed there would often race to the till at the end of the night to make sure they got paid before Footman got there first.
One time, Toronto Hydro cut the power during the middle of North by Northeast, prompting an evening of candlelit acoustic performances until Footman finally came up with the cash to get the power turned on around midnight.
He was also simultaneously battling councillors and city officials for the simple right to stay alive, even though Ted’s Wrecking Yard was, on the whole, probably preferable to the dodgy restaurant that preceded it.
“Little Italy was not impressed by the hillbilly bar” in the first place, Footman recalls, and persisted in “making life hell” until the landlord finally chained the doors shut on Oct. 24, 2001. Footman had attempted to keep the place alive by joining forces with the team then being ousted from El Mocambo, but it went sour quickly and he and Matsell were suddenly left with no club and a bunch of shows that had to be cancelled.
“It was terrible. It was heartbreak- ing,” recalls Matsell, who had a CDrelease party for Sam Roberts’ first EP scheduled for the very next night. “Just a sick feeling and hoping things would change.”
Footman, no longer involved in Ted’s Collision or the College Street Bar he’d also started years previous, got out of the club game altogether and went back to the job in architecture for which he’d trained. He’s even kind of kept a foot in the bar scene, helping build popular spots including 3-Speed and Reposado since.
Still, he concedes, he and Matsell — who remain friends even though she once banned him from his own venue for being too noisy — “always talk about opening up another one.” “I see a spot and I call her,” he says. “Yeah, we get nostalgic all the time,” Matsell nods. “It was just a fun place. The thing is, Ted liked music. A lot of owners who run bars as music venues are not necessarily music lovers, but he just loved music.”
“It’s probably better for your health if you don’t,” Footman chuckles. “But I enjoyed it. It was really good. We had the best spot, right? No one stopped me. Even when you weren’t making money, it was still good fun.”