Late one night in December 1992, RCMP drug inspector Claude Savoie sat alone in his Montreal office. In the next room a group of his colleagues were preparing to interrogate him about serious allegations of corruption. An investigative journalist working for the CBC’s The Fifth Estate had uncovered evidence that Savoie had taken over $200,000 in bribes from West End Gang drug kingpin Alan Ross in exchange for inside information. The expository show was set to hit national airwaves— and make headlines—in less than 24 hours. In one last attempt to escape justice, Savoie reached to his hip, drew his standard-issue revolver, and shot himself once in the head. He died instantly.
Dan Burke, the CBC journalist who uncovered Savoie’s hypocritical dealings, would have his own life undone by drugs two years later. But unlike Savoie, Burke is a survivor. Rolling with the punches, Burke’s own fall from grace saw him land on the streets of Toronto where he’s now known as one of the top independent music bookers in the city. Booking and promoting live shows for The Silver Dollar at College and Spadina, Burke has become something of a living legend. Still struggling with addiction, Burke lives an unpredictable day-to-day existence—his name having become synonymous with crack-cocaine, erratic behaviour, and street-level hustling, but also with indie celebrity, and some of the most memorable rock shows Toronto has ever seen.
In a word, Dan Burke is an anomaly. Blessed with moxie, wit, and intellect, Burke has the skills and musical taste to be a big-time booker. At the same time, his absolutely heroic intake of drugs, transient life-style, and subsequent inability to control his finances virtually guarantees him a life of marginalized vagrancy. Somehow, every day, Burke manages to navigate this near-impossible tightrope between success and total self-destruction. He’s become an unlikely yet fascinating cultural icon.
“I’m better than I was, but I’m not where I want to be,” admits Burke. We’re chatting in a run-down Internet café above the Burger King at College and Spadina. It’s his office, and he’s paying to use it by the minute. “I’m just trying to fucking expand my life,” he says. But for Burke, life seems to be one long tiresome hustle.
Born in Montreal in 1958, Burke had ink in his blood. His father, Tim Burke, is a nationally recognized sports columnist who used to shoot the shit with Mordecai Richler back in the day. The younger Burke landed his first print job as a copy boy at the Montreal Gazette on his seventeenth birthday. Following a six-month stint at the Edmonton Sun in his late teens, Burke enrolled in the journalism program at Ryerson. Just one year shy of earning his degree, Burke quit school to take on a full-time job reporting for the Toronto Star’s east metro bureau.
His career in journalism began to skyrocket when he moved back to Montreal in the early ’80s to write for a city-wide weekly called the Sunday Express.
“The paper was shit,” recalls Burke, “But it was a good job. I was an investigative journalist specializing in organized crime.” His work was published in Saturday Night and Maclean’s. An article titled “An Uncommon Criminal” secured him an honourable mention from the National Magazine Awards in 1987.
This work would at once lead him to the biggest story of his life, and the method of his own undoing.
By the middle of 1991, Burke had landed a job as a researcher for the CBC news program The Fifth Estate. He was a rising star. He had also become addicted to crack cocaine. “I was on drugs then and I was fucked,” admits Burke, but it was his drug connections that ultimately led him to Claude Savoie’s criminal dealings with the West End Gang—journalistic gold.
“I found out about it from one of the drug traffickers I knew,” recalls Burke. “Savoie was corrupt. He was taking money from one of the biggest drug traffickers in Canada.” Burke investigated and interviewed Savoie at length, all the while preparing to blow the lid off of the RCMP inspector. But Savoie beat him to the punch, “he blew his fucking brains out the day before the fucking show aired.”
“For all I know, it may have been a choice his colleagues forced him to make because they didn’t want him to reveal further corruption. I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t feel fucking bad about it.”
As Burke’s journalistic success mounted, so did his drug dependency. One night in December 1994, after being made an associate producer, he lost it completely. “I just left work one day and I never looked back.”
Burke didn’t surface until landing in Toronto in April 1997. Alienated from journalistic circles, but swearing to stay clean, Burke decided to enter into the business of nightlife. With a few partners he conceived, renovated, and opened a nightclub called Club Shanghai just south of Dundas on Spadina, above a 24-hour Chinese supermarket. In the three months it took to ready the space for business Burke insists he was temporarily clean.
“I built Club Shanghai clean for three months, going to AA meetings—Fuck!—When did I fall off the wagon? The first fucking night! Because of the stress! My opening show was a failure and half, and the stress—fuck man, I went right back on the pipe.”
Despite it’s weak opening—the first show was booked on Canada Day, a rookie mistake as holidays are a notoriously bad time to promote events in the city—Club Shanghai became a hit, attracting high-profile acts including The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Sloan, The Deadly Snakes, and Davy Love’s seminal brit-pop dance party Blow Up. Even after his relapse into hardcore drug abuse, Burke earned a reputation for booking strong talent, tirelessly promoting events, and ultimately attracting large crowds. But still he struggled.
“There were times at Shanghai when I went to great depths, but somehow I maintained.”
By mid 1998 his erratic behaviour had him on the outs with the Club’s owners. While Burke was able to secure a decent buy-out/ severance payment from Shanghai, even that didn’t last long.
“I’d gotten about $2,300 of a $5,000 settlement I was supposed to get,” he remembers, “and I spent the whole fucking thing in about four days.”
Determined to build on his reputation as a solid club booker, Burke set his sights on the El Mocambo—a once-iconic institution of Toronto rock music that had fallen into decline by the late 1990s. Burke had gotten word from Love—who had moved Blow Up there from the Shanghai—that the El Mo lacked a booker for its small upstairs room. Burke, once again in the depths of poverty, saw a glimmer of opportunity.
“I got to the El Mo with $60 in my pocket, no job, and no home. Somehow I ended up booking the whole club, so I must have done something right.”
True to form, Burke worked the upstairs room so well that despite his vices he was eventually trusted with booking the entire club. Utilizing his journalistic research skills, he was able to learn about rising bands in other cities—The White Stripes and the Von Bondies being two prime examples—and book them to play the El Mo just before they exploded in popularity.
“As bands would graduate to the next level, I would graduate with them. I was big back then at the El Mo, and we all grew at the same time.” Burke’s booking acumen put the El Mo squarely back on the map, and helped him form essential relationships with some top talent agencies.
This period at the El Mo was the best paying job Burke had since his time at the CBC. In fact, he had enough income to contribute thousands of dollars towards restoring the El Mocambo’s signature neon palm marquee to working condition, something he correctly labels a “civic duty.”
For Burke, things were pretty much as good as they were going to get. “I had a $1,000 line of credit with the club, two fucking floors on Fridays, and 15 points at the bar.” He even found love.
“It was the summer of 2001—the night I had The Frogs in from Milwaukee—it was a Tuesday, and that night I moved in with this girl, we started going out and I moved immediately in.” Unfortunately, stability seems to shun Burke at every turn.
“We were living together when I got news of the eviction from the El Mo,” recalls Burke of the fateful day in September 2001 when the El Mocambo was bought out from under him.
“It was the week of September 11, and we were given 45 days to get out. My business associates didn’t have a lease, and this made it easy for the owner of the building to sell the property.”
To add insult to injury, the new owner, Abbas Jahangiri, planned to undo all of Burke’s hard work. The building, he said, would be transformed into a dance studio.
“Of all the places he had to pick to make a fucking dance studio. He didn’t care at all about rock music then, not until I got all kinds of publicity making a stand against him in opposition to the eviction. It got so much publicity that it made him realize the value in rock music. We were hostile enemies for a while.”
Unfortunately for Burke, the universe was packing a one-two punch. On November 5, the morning after his last show at the El Mocambo, his girlfriend left him. He was devastated.
“When I got news of the eviction from the El Mo, I was living out of my pocket. I had a lot of money in there—about $18,000— but when I lost the club and then lost her I knew I’d lost the two things I loved in my life. I just deteriorated, and fuck did I ever deteriorate.”
After an initial hail-Mary plan to relocate the El Mocambo (name, neon sign, and all) to Ted’s Wrecking Yard fell through due to building code violations, Burke hit rock bottom. He eased his pain the only way he knew how: by taking copious amounts of drugs.
He did find a new club to book, The Tequila Lounge (now the Annex Wreck Room) at Bloor and Bathurst, but it wasn’t the same.
“Booking Tequila lasted almost a year, from January 2002 to the end of that year, but they were ripping me off on my bar points and all this shit. It was another fucking disaster and a lot of fucking shows went wrong, and I lost a lot of fucking money so, fuck, my morale went way down, and my money also went way down. That $18,000 I had when I left the El Mocambo, it was all gone by May 2002.”
It wasn’t until early 2003 that Burke landed in his current home, The Silver Dollar. A Blues club with 50 years of history, The Silver Dollar took a chance on Burke’s taste for garage and indie-rock.
In the five years since, Burke has re-built his stature as a solid booker bringing in acclaimed international acts like The Zoobombs from Japan and Soundtrack of Our Lives from Sweden, alongside hot Canadian bands like King Khan, Cities in Dust, Death From Above 1979, BBQ, Handsome Furs, The Disraelis, Anagram, Katie Stelmanis, The Old Soul, Germans, and more.
He’s also taken an interest in helping younger bands develop, booking them on reputation, faith, or a demo alone, and offering them honest criticism afterwards (one example: “The Diet Pills. I fucking yelled at them the first time they played here, they were so sloppy and uncaring of the audience, almost disdainful of the club and everyone there because they were so cavalier. So I said, ‘That’s fucking bullshit,’ but now they’ve really got it together, and they’re fucking amazing now.”) He’s also been named promoter of the year by both Now and Eye. But old demons insist on haunting him.
“It’s not the nature of the scene, but the business of nightlife,” explains Burke of his affinity to drugs. “I don’t know what I’m escaping, it’s just the freight train of habit. The key fucking thing of all of this is you get immersed in rock nightlife and there’s booze and cocaine around. I’m just trying to say that it’s not all black and white. I know I’ve made mistakes, and I do take responsibility for every aspect of my life. I don’t think I’m a bum. And I’ve contributed a lot to Toronto.”
While Burke’s dedication to the cultural development of Toronto, particularly to the intersection of College and Spadina, has been significant, and potentially historic, he still goes without many of the basic necessities of life. He admits to a precarious living situation (“right now I don’t have a very good home”), his few remaining teeth need serious dental attention, and the past five years have seen him spend three days in a coma and suffer a serious heroin overdose while visiting Manchester, England. Still, he refuses to seek help.
“I ain’t gonna go to fucking rehab, because rehab ain’t for me. The next place I go is the grave,” he states ominously.
Burke isn’t out for sympathy. All he wants is stability and companionship. He’s tired, lonely, and desperately in need of an office.
“My life would be a lot easier if it had some stability or foundation to it. I don’t have a fucking office here,” he says of the Silver Dollar. “All I want is some office space with a computer and the fucking Internet. It’s necessary— look at the office at The Horseshoe.”
Burke spends so much time at the College Street Internet café above Burger King, researching bands and promoting shows online that he’s incurred an insurmountable $600 tab, which the owner is constantly harassing him to pay off. “I’ll fucking pay him over time, you know?” says Burke, “Twenty bucks a shot or whatever.”
Despite his crippling addiction and fly-by-night ethos, Burke’s work isn’t going unrecognized. Just last week, SPIN profiled him as one of Toronto’s “Local Heroes” alongside luminaries Carl Wilson and Jonny Dovercourt.
His ability to straddle the line between success and addiction—between gainful employment and complete destitution—while still making a significant mark on the culture of Toronto’s musical landscape is nothing short of remarkable.
So what does the future hold for Dan Burke? “I don’t know,” he says, “I just got $60 bucks, so I guess I could go and pay that fucker at the internet cafe across the street, fuck, whatever. I’m not trying to amplify or glorify myself, I just want to be able to do my job.”
When asked if he would do anything differently if given a second chance, he answers instantly and honestly, “I don’t know if I could.”
