El Mocambo set to reopen?
Corb Lund may have let the cat out of bag by announcing concert,
Is the El Mocambo reopening in a couple of months? Country artist Corb Lund seems to have confirmed it on Friday by revealing a May concert date at the long-shuttered Toronto venue.
The Spadina concert spot has hosted shows by the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Queens of the Stone Age, Elvis Costello, U2 and Blondie in its history stretching back (through a few closures and several owners) to 1948. In 2014, it was closed and sold to “Dragons’ Den” star and rock aficionado Michael Wekerle, who pledged to keep it from becoming a computer store and planned an ambitious renovation.
Now Lund, the Alberta country-music veteran, has announced a May 22 date at the fabled spot touring his new album “Agricultural Tragic.” Official spokespeople for the venue said Friday that they were “unable to confirm an opening date for the El Mo, but can tell you that we are very close.”
The return of the fabled rock bar would be a shot in the arm for the local live music scene, which in recent years has seen the shuttering of the Silver Dollar, the Cadillac Lounge, the Hoxton, the Comfort Zone and more, plus the failure of the Matador to reopen and the long shuttering of Massey Hall for renovations of its own.
Visiting the ElMo renovations in 2018, Star music critic Ben Rayner noted that the plans were for a 400-person capacity venue on the ground floor and a long, wide room in the 600700-person range — and a newly installed recording studio.
“In reality, (Wekerle) has actually built a recording studio” that also functions as a concert venue, Andy Curran, the musician turned head of Wekerle’s El Mocambo Entertainment, told the Star then. “The whole thing is wired. Each floor is soundproofed. The amount of work that went into soundproofing is, as our production manager says, so crazy that you could potentially have the Dropkick Murphys on the ground floor and Diana Krall playing a jazz set upstairs and you would not hear anything.”