One look at the daunting number of concert listings in Eye Weekly or Now Magazine reveals that Toronto is a city with a thriving music scene—there are at least fifty shows to choose from every night of the week. But things weren’t always so prosperous.
A little bit of research reveals Toronto’s development from a conservative backwater into a musical hotbed, and the devastating regression during which an inexperienced band could barely get a gig.
It’s only ever been documented in scattered pieces, but our rich history of independent music would be nearly impossible to document in its entirety. This story is a mere introduction that presents a selection of our city’s great music stories. But it’s a worthwhile start, because to get a good sense of where we’re going, it helps to know where we’ve been.
The beginnings of Toronto’s counterculture movement can be traced to the unlikeliest of places—a tiny art gallery at Bay and Gerrard, circa 1955. The Greenwich Art Shop, located at 77 Hayter St., was the brainchild of Avrom Isaacs, whose career in the art world would make him one of the important art dealers in Canadian history.
Isaacs graduated from University College in 1950 and started a tiny business for framing the graduation pictures of his classmates. “Very modest beginnings,” says Isaacs. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was up to. We put a desk up in the front of University College and we called it University Framers. And it was so successful that, like fools, we decided to go into business full time.”
Slowly he took on other framing projects, befriending local artists and displaying their work in the store. “The artists came around and put their pictures up on the walls, and the pictures started to sell. When I became more aware of what I was doing,” says Isaacs, “I changed the name to the Greenwich Gallery.”
As Isaacs developed his sense for artwork, a neighbourhood of beatniks began to assemble around his shop. Isaacs calls it “a minor artsy neighbourhood—a leftover from the old concept of Greenwich Village in New York. Greenwich Village on a very minor scale.”
Gerrard Village, as it was called, became ground zero for new and exciting art movements in Toronto, and Isaacs had landed in the centre of the action. “Like so many concepts, ideas, and movements, it might have started somewhere, but it very quickly spread into a network. When the beatnik kids came along, it was a self-developed spontaneous combustion, aided by what was happening elsewhere.”
The beat artists brought with them an appreciation for neo-Dadaism and abstract art. The city simply wasn’t ready for such an explosion of new ideas, and the underground art movement was contained to a few select blocks. “Toronto at that time was a very conservative city. It still had the Anglo profile about it. [Soon] the immigrants started to come in and turn things around. The Italians, the Jewish—they started to affect it slowly but surely.”
And the beat generation became an early example of American counterculture working its way into Canada. “A lot of young American kids came over to Canada. I started offering them so they could come across the border. There was a big influx of American youth, and [they] added a certain amount of vitality and energy to the place.”
Despite the apparent American influence, Isaacs held firm to his convictions to show primarily Canadian art, though this decision was motivated by necessity more than patriotism. “The city was small enough that I was in touch with most of the artists. I selected a certain number of them to represent, which included Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry, Rick Gorman, and Gordon Rayner.” Colts in Isaacs’s first stable, they all became celebrated Canadian artists, though Snow’s work remains the most visible—he’s responsible for the flying geese at the Eaton Centre and the two groups of baseball fans entitled The Audience, which adorn either side of the Rogers Centre.
But Snow and his contemporaries weren’t just visual artists, they loved jazz too. Performing under the name of The Artists Jazz Band, the group provided accompaniment to the Greenwich Gallery poetry nights, which began in the spring 1958.
“I got tied up with [Governor General’s Award-winning poet] Ray Souster,” says Isaacs, “who came to me with the idea of having poetry readings. I only had a superficial interest in those sorts of things, but I said sure, and we proceeded to have three years of readings by the great poets of Canada—Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Leonard Cohen—you name them, they read in my gallery.”
These “Happenings” were mixed-media concerts that Isaacs and his artists hosted once a month. They were among the first underground convergences of fine art and music, and they laid the foundation for what would become a sustained independent music scene.
“I was involved in a lot of media,” says Isaacs, “and I even published a few books. I had a pretty active time.”
But by March 1961, the Gerrard Village counterculture was shifting, and Isaacs was wise enough to realize that Toronto’s bohemian centre was moving north, to Yonge and Bloor. He designed a custom-built space on Yonge Street, and headed for Yorkville.
•••
Richard Flohil emigrated from his native England in 1957 because, in his own words, “I was a besotted fan of early American jazz and blues, and Toronto was the nearest place where I might be able to meet, see, and hear Muddy Waters, which eventually I did.”
Over the years, Flohil has built a reputation as one of Toronto’s most famous music industry personalities, but when he arrived in Yorkville it was just beginning to take off as a musical hotbed, though he’s unsure why it became the place to be. “Why the bohemian quarter jumped to Yorkville is odd—there was lots of cheap housing at the back, on Scollard, Hazelton, and Cumberland. People could live there cheaply, and coffee houses were inexpensive [entertainment].”
Indeed, the Yorkville neighbourhood was built by its coffeehouses, particularly Bernie Fiedler’s famed Riverboat. Liquor licenses were hard to come by in Toronto the Good, thus the dominant sound became melodic, acoustic-based folk, set to the endless clinking of coffee cups and saucers.
Though as Flohil remembers it, the Yorkville sound hadn’t yet found its footing in the early ’60s, and was still relying on outsiders for inspiration. “A new Bob Dylan album would come out,” Flohil remembers, “and all the folkies would be lined up at Sam’s so they could buy it and learn at least two Dylan songs to sing that night. It was very, very imitative.”
But as Yorkville flourished along with the profiles of artists like Ian & Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, and The Mynah Birds (featuring the unlikely combination of Neil Young and Rick James), the first signs of social unrest began to set the folkies against the local authorities.
“As more and more people were drawn to Yorkville, the place where it was all happening, cars couldn’t even get through. The city was totally unable to fathom what the hell was going on, and the Toronto Police force at that time was as WASP an institution as you can find.”
Once the British Invasion swept North America, Yorkville followed suit, translating its sound and style to fit the changing tastes. “There was a band called Kensington Market who played with a Union Jack hung over the front of their drum kit. And the closest they’d been to England was Whitby, Ontario for a one-night gig!”
It was only with the take off of psychedelia shortly thereafter that local highlights became abundant: Jefferson Airplane touched down for a free show at Nathan Phillips Square, Kensington Market soon morphed into an artful psych-rock outfit, and their debut album Avenue Road was declared by The Globe and Mail one of the greatest Canadian records of all time, and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s performance at a love-in at Queen’s Park made her the darling of Toronto.
But the perils of the ’60s were beginning to sweep North America, and Toronto was no exception. Speed and heroin arrived in the summer of 1968, by which time motorcycle gangs like the Vagabonds had infiltrated the neighbourhood. Yet it was a different sort of enemy that sparked the beginning of the end for Yorkville: an outbreak of hepatitis. Fifty cases were reported in downtown hospitals, and, according to Flohil, “It emptied Yorkville literally overnight. Suddenly the city health department said that hepatitis was rife. Business stopped overnight, and that really was the end.”
Flohil believes that scare tactics were partly to blame. “Of course the newspapers jump in on something like this. And there are angry parents in Scarborough wondering what their children are doing—well, their children are in Yorkville smoking dope and listening to folkies.”
The hepatitis scare was just the first indication that the dream couldn’t last forever.
By 1970, nearly all the flower children had moved to nearby Rochdale College (the structure of which stills stands at the corner of Huron and Bloor), a drug-laden co-op residence and experiment in alternative education. Worst of all, Yorkville’s biggest stars (Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot) had achieved massive success south of the border, and, as many Canadians who conquer the U.S. do, they weren’t coming back.
To Flohil, the gentrification that swept through the neighbourhood was seemingly inevitable. “The Yorkville thing peaked—just as the Queen Street scene has peaked, and is moving somewhere else. What’s happened on Queen between University and Spadina is absolutely parallel [to Yorkville], says Flohil. “In comes the Gap, there goes the neighbourhood.”
Hippie Yorkville was dead, and famed real estate developer Richard Wookey was working to ensure that Prada and Chanel were on their way. Whether this was a consolation prize or a saving grace is a matter of opinion.
A present-day visit to Isaacs’ spacious condo is another reminder of how much the area has changed. He still lives in the neighbourhood, but he’s now perched above Yorkville on the 46th floor of the Manulife Centre. The walls are lined with his favourite works by his closest friends, a lasting testament to a faded counterculture.
•••
The after-effects of the Yorkville scene spawned a number of outdoor music festivals in the city, one of which was the Toronto Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival. Held at Varsity Stadium in September 1969, the show was headlined by John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, and it was a resounding success. Suddenly, folk and psychedelia had become big business, leaving many of Toronto’s smaller bands on the outside looking in.
By the early to mid-’70s, Gary Topp had hosted a number of important local shows, including the debut of Rough Trade at the Danforth’s Roxy and Captain Beefheart at Convocation Hall, which he calls “probably one of the worst concerts in Toronto history.” The Captain’s band had quit on him at the last minute, and their replacements were less than stellar, but Topp felt a rush from live music that his career as a film presenter couldn’t match.
He was screening films at the New Yorker Theatre (now Yonge Street’s Panasonic Theatre) when he got his hands on a copy of New York filmmaker Amos Poe’s The Blank Generation, which featured silent footage of early punk bands playing live at Manhattan’s famed CBGB.
Topp was inspired. “I wanted to bring these bands to Toronto,” he says, “because not many people here had heard of them. So we built a big stage in front of the screen, and I went to an agent…and I said, ‘you ever heard of a band called The Ramones?’ ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you find them?’”
Toronto music journalist Liz Worth is the author of the forthcoming book Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. “For a lot of people, the genesis for the Toronto punk scene was the Ramones show at the New Yorker Theatre in 1976,” she says. “It was [the first moment] they noticed that there were a lot of people into the same type of music and fashion.” A new scene had been born overnight.
Topp and his business partner Gary Cormier became known as The Garys—and their work from 1976 forward laid the groundwork for the alternative concert business in Toronto as we know it.
Worth believes The Garys were “really visionary in that way. They were tuned into stuff that was going on elsewhere, stuff that no other Toronto venues were doing.”
Yet despite having all the right elements, the Toronto punk scene couldn’t seem to get itself off the ground. Worth recounts the history of Toronto’s first punk club, the Crash ’n’ Burn, which opened up in the summer of 1977.
“It’s the fabled Toronto punk rock venue,” says Worth. “It was interesting because it was started by The Diodes, but [operated] by a group of people in the scene. It was a very small, DIY thing—they would only get a liquor permit on the weekends so everything was legitimate. But it was really short lived—it only lasted one summer, and by August 1977 it was done.” The Diodes and their cronies had been evicted.
The Crash ’n’ Burn was one of many failed ventures in a Toronto scene that seemed to false start every time the movement gained momentum. Worth puts some of the blame on the media for their continued lack of support: “The Toronto media was not extremely supportive of it—for the most part it was kind of a field day. They thought of it as something so extravagant and strange, and they really wanted to make a spectacle of it, which doesn’t help the public’s perception.”
She mentions a video clip on the CBC website featuring an interview with The Viletones, Teenage Head, and Michael Jordana. “It’s interesting to see how the media is reacting [to punk]. The reporter is telling them that they’ve created a generation gap, even between people in their own generation.”
Meanwhile, The Garys moved their operation to the Horseshoe Tavern in 1978 for eight successful months—until the owners pulled the plug on them.
“They lied to us and said they wanted to go back to country, but I think they just wanted to do it on their own.”
The Horseshoe’s decision to turn its back on punk was immortalized by Colin Brunton in the documentary The Last Pogo, which chronicles what was then billed as “the last punk rock concert” in Toronto.
Lesser known is Saturday night’s event, The Last Boundup, which starred The Garys’ favourites Rough Trade and The Everglades.
Despite the repeated attempts to shut it down, Toronto punk survived, and The Garys moved in 1980 to the Edge, a Ryerson student pub at Gerrard and Church.
Though it was rife with struggles, Topp looks back on these formative years fondly. “At the time when this all started it was exciting because people were…developing their own styles. We were giving all these kids a place to develop and to perform. They might not have all been the best musicians, but the energy they showed was better than anything.”
•••
By 1983, The Garys’ work bringing in high-profile acts from out of town had hit mythic proportions, and the local scene was desperate for renewal.
“They had moved up from running venues like the Edge and the Horseshoe,” says William New, a Toronto scene veteran and current part-time student in the English department. (Look out for him in your detective fiction class.) “By the time I started doing shows in ’83, [The Garys] were…I hate to say ‘mainstream,’ but the small bands that they had championed like the Talking Heads or The Police were doing stadium shows.”
Like most great inventions, New’s famed concert series, Elvis Mondays, was the product of necessity. It started as a weekend-long opportunity for his band to play Queen Street’s Beverly Tavern, a small bar frequented by art school kids from the OCA (now OCAD). When New agreed to transform his successful event into a weekly showcase, he unknowingly set himself up for a lifetime of nurturing emerging Toronto bands. “We thought it was going to be a one-off, but it ended up being a label that’s lasted for 25 years.”
While the continued success of Elvis Mondays has cemented New’s legacy, he balks at the notion that he picked up the mantle of local scene pioneer from The Garys, because as he sees it, they had very different goals. “Those guys were bookers doing touring acts, which was a much different approach from what I was doing, which was completely a local scene.”
New argues that a local scene existed, but it wasn’t exactly thriving. He lists off no more than eight venues where a new band could get a gig. “There were places to play,” he says, “but they weren’t necessarily alternative venues.”
It was this lack of options that forced New to take Elvis Mondays west to Parkdale, which at that time was a far cry from the gentrified enclave it is today.
“People had tried doing shows at the Drake Hotel on and off since the ’70s. When I was given the opportunity to book the Drake in ’92, I took it because I thought it might have potential, but I really wasn’t convinced that it would work. So I was quite surprised when it did quite well.”
Local musician and promoter Jonny Dovercourt considers the early days of Elvis Mondays at the Drake to be a formative experience: “It was the first time I discovered noisy music in Toronto. But that neighbourhood was the Wild West. I couldn’t get anyone from university to get on the streetcar to go that far west to see bands—I had to go myself. It was sketchy, but I liked it.”
While the Drake closed in 1993 due to a mortgage gone bad, New’s early days there make him partially responsible for inventing Parkdale as a place where bands could grow.
He’s modest about Elvis Mondays’ contribution to Toronto scene, calling it “a place to play and be seen for a couple generations of bands. Having said that, it’s just a Monday night in a small bar, so its impact was limited by its humility.”
The mid-’80s saw the rise of metal, and a burgeoning scene was born in a string of Yonge Street venues between Bloor and Wellesley. The rise of this decadent musical aesthetic seems like a macho antidote to the minimalist punk and new wave acts nurtured by Elvis Mondays, but New downplays any sense of rivalry, claiming that the metal scene “had very little to do with what was happening on Queen Street—it was a completely different milieu.”
But with the early-’90s grunge boom, interest in metal slowed significantly, and the local scene failed to catch up. By the time the Gasworks (where legend has it a teenage Sebastian Bach was discovered handling front man duties for a band called Kid Wikkid) shut down in 1993, Toronto’s music scene had degenerated into a place where local bands could barely get off the ground.
•••
There is a mission statement at the top of www.wavelengthtoronto.com, written by founder Jonny Dovercourt. It reads: “Wavelength is a weekly live music series based in Toronto. It was founded in late 1999 by a loose collective of frustrated yet hopeful independent musicians trying breathe some life into some of the darker corners of Toronto’s perpetually overlooked indie music scene.”
A decade removed from the writing of that paragraph, Dovercourt laughs the description off, dismissing it as irrelevant. But his attitude looking back is perhaps the best indicator of how much things have changed for the better in the local music scene since the early ’90s.
“It’s hard to put into context where we don’t sound like huge whiners,” he says. “It’s not like there wasn’t a Toronto indie scene—it definitely existed and people were aware of it. But I was [left wondering], ‘where are our heroes?’”
Dovercourt, a former U of T student and UC Gargoyle editor-in-chief, went on to describe the frustration that he felt as a struggling local artist.
“Being a local band in the early ’90s, just getting a gig was hard enough, but getting beyond that to how to tour and get our records out—it seemed impossible. It was mystifying how bands we looked up to did it. That was what it was like for most of the ’90s.”
“It seemed like it was really hard to break out beyond that little circle. Everyone would try to tour and they’d come home broke. You’d put on local shows and it was a big success if you got more than 50 people to come. In the local scene, it seemed like everyone was fighting over scraps. Things just weren’t happening.”
“But we were still trying to play that game, even though we didn’t believe in it.”
Noah Mintz started the band hHead with Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning at Brock University. When they relocated the band to Toronto in 1991, they too found that opportunities were scarce. “I can’t think of any independent labels that were doing well in the early ’90s,” says Mintz. “DJ culture took over for a while. Dance music was doing really well and indie rock was going through a transition.”
In September 1999, a meeting of frustrated but hopeful musicians was called, and Wavelength was the outcome. It started as a zine, but soon transitioned into live shows held every Sunday night at Ted’s Wrecking Yard at College and Euclid.
To Dovercourt, its mission was to make up for a lack of excitement in the scene, and to “bring things together that you wouldn’t normally see on the same bill. You’d go out to El Mocambo or Sneaky Dee’s and you’d see the same three bands playing together who were all friends. To me that was symbolic of Toronto, of the coldness it used to have.”
“A lot of people say Wavelength created a sense of focus for this community that was coming up and starting to discover itself. Suddenly the music scene became accessible to itself.”
Ted’s Wrecking Yard closed down in the fall of 2001, and Wavelength made a brief stopover at Lee’s Palace before moving to Sneaky Dee’s in May 2002, where it’s been ever since.
Around the time that the Wavelength music series kicked off, a massive change happened in the music scene—one that saw Toronto bands begin to turn away from traditional methods and take matters into their own hands. It was the beginning of a trend that would carry into the present day.
•••
After the success of Dovercourt’s Wavelength and other music series like it, the doors soon opened for an exciting and influential new generation of Toronto indie bands, several of which were comprised of a group of kids from U of T. This group, which included Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras, playwright and Republic of Safety singer Maggie MacDonald, and Barcelona Pavilion founder Steve Kado, who came together under a concept called the Bad Bands Revolution—a group of local bands who stressed audience participation ahead of technical skill and musical aptitude.
This philosophy implied that not only was music a do-it-yourself venture, but also that anyone who wanted to was capable of making it. This distinction was a central tenet in the creation of Blocks Recording Club. Conceptualized by Kado and Mark McLean of The Sick Lipstick, Blocks is a record label that functions as a workers’ co-op instead of a business.
Former Blocks president and Bad Bands member Katarina Gligorijevic describes Blocks as “a local community of musicians who wanted to be involved with helping each other put out records. We wanted to put the means of production into the hands of the musicians themselves, because it’s not actually that hard to figure out. Just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean you can’t also figure out a budget for a record.”
“A lot of bands have learned how to do stuff on their own that otherwise they wouldn’t have experience with. At a normal record label, you don’t get the chance to go through the process every step of the way.”
Blocks is now a label on the vanguard of our city’s musical progression. They’ve since turned part of their attention to releasing records on vinyl, the only physical format that’s seen dramatic increases in sales over the course of the last year.
Gligorijevic rightly believes that Blocks has made a positive impact on the Toronto scene. “I think a lot of the things that have happened over the past eight or nine years in Toronto have significantly affected artists’ attitudes towards what they can do to put out their own stuff.”
“People who have interacted with Blocks have been affected by the approach that we take. I’ve seen a lot of local artists begin to take matters into their own hands They’ve seen other people do it, and they understand that these things don’t have to be as intimidating as they seem.”
Elvis Mondays, Wavelength, Blocks, and the like have created the most important element of a healthy music scene—a support system that nurtures creativity. The results are all around us, and William New is right to call it an embarrassment of riches. The strength of the scene proves fifty years of hard work hasn’t fallen on deaf ears.•
