Any Night of the Week

A D.I.Y. History of Toronto Music, 1957-2001

Jonny Dovercourt, Jonny Dovercourt

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781770566088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The story of how Toronto became a music mecca.

From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto's music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more!

"Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto's music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it's happened – the live venues that come and too frequently go – as well as on the people who've devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it'd rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales." —Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard's '100 Greatest Music Books of All Time'

"Toronto has long been one of North America's great music cities, but hasn't got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto's place in the music universe." —Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music

"The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that's not just a time capsule, but a time machine." —Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers

PUNK CRASHES, BURNS, INVENTS QUEEN WEST1976-78

A back-to-basics musical mentality, combined with a modern art aesthetic and alternative sexuality, marks the start of the DIY sensibility – and the early beginnings of the Queen West countercultural strip.

Punk rock was my gateway beyond pop radio as a kid. When the Minutemen said ‘punk rock changed our lives,’ I could definitely relate. I spent most of Grade 9 listening to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. When I was finishing high school, MuchMusic aired a short documentary series on the fifteenth anniversary of punk, which contained a few eye-opening exposés on Canada’s contributions to anarchy. Though I dug vancouver-area acts like NoMeansNo and Art Bergmann, I knew nothing about Toronto punk, and it blew my mind to learn that in 1977, my hometown had –by some estimations – the world’s third-biggest punk scene, after London and New York. (Though Los Angeles might disagree with that.)

Bands like the viletones and the Diodes became urban legends. Few of the first wave of Toronto punk bands released more than one record. The air of mystery was enhanced by the tidbits of local lore I could pick up: the Diodes didn’t like playing regular bars, so they started their own. The viletones spray-painted their band name all over town. Teenage Head started a riot at Ontario Place.

Thankfully, much light was shed on the reality of Toronto punk with the 2009–13 publishing of a wealth of literature – books by Liz Worth, Don Pyle, and Sam Sutherland, plus Colin Brunton and Kire Paputts’s film The Last Pogo Jumps Again – which made the scene’s struggles and accomplishments even more impressive.

Though they received plenty of local media coverage at the time, the T.O. punk bands didn’t attract enough attention from international music press like the NME or Trouser Press to spread their notoriety beyond the city. With no influential independent labels to champion them, they were either left in the hands of big, indifferent record companies or forced to release their own records when DIY was still a brand-new approach. Without classic albums to memorialize the scene, Toronto punk rock left its mark in other ways. It helped establish the most stable foothold for live, original music in Toronto: Queen Street West.

The stretch of Queen between University and Spadina – ‘Classic Queen West’ – has gradually gentrified into an outdoor shopping mall over the last thirty years. But Queen West was a very different place in 1976, a dull, forgotten, near-derelict commercial strip of used bookstores and textile outlets. Second-floor apartments above these shops were cheap, plentiful, and spacious. The four-storey Neo-Gothic terracotta edifice that’s now CTV/Much-Music headquarters was then just an empty warehouse. Across the street was a chicken slaughterhouse.

Mark Gane (Martha and the Muffins): It was really down and out. The rents were low, so that’s why artists lived there. I remember a lot of dusty storefronts with passed-out drunks. It was dead on the weekends. And as Johnny McLeod [of Johnny and the G-Rays] said, the bands, meaning the collective scene, we made that area cool.

Right next door to the slaughterhouse sat an unsuspecting old-man bar. The Beverley Tavern was a working-class watering hole, but without the joie de vivre of Grossman’s. A few country and western bands played there, but they couldn’t compete with the Horseshoe Tavern, the big hall down the street, where a punk icon of sorts, outspoken country patriot Stompin’ Tom Connors, had stomped out his name.

A block up the street, on McCaul, was OCA – the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD). The ‘Bev’ became the unofficial OCA ‘cafeteria,’ where students and faculty would gather after class to quaff ninety-cent quarts of Black Label. A band made up of OCA students asked the owners if they could play the Beverley’s small upstairs room; thankfully, the owners would book anyone.

The Dishes began a weekly residency at the Bev in February 1976. In an era overpopulated by long-haired, bluesy hard-rock cover bands, The Dishes stood out: not only did they wear their hair short; they played short, sharp, angular, art-rock inspired by glam heroes David Bowie, roxy Music, and Sparks. The lack of musicians’ union rules at the Bev meant they played what they wanted, and they began to develop an original sound.

The Dishes courted a new hip, fashionable audience. A vibrant contemporary arts scene had emerged in Toronto during the first half of the seventies, through the emergence of the artist-run centres: institutions like A Space Gallery and Art Metropole, the latter opened by the influential Toronto-based conceptual art collective General Idea. Mostly started by artists’ collectives as spaces to create and exhibit challenging, contemporary work, the ARCs helped make Toronto a world leader in progressive art.

General Idea were known for subverting elements of pop culture, from beauty pageants to TV talk shows, and publishing their own satirical lifestyle magazine, FILE. GI became some of the Dishes’ biggest fans and supporters and later designed their two record covers. Both collectives were also gayidentified (though the Dishes were more ambiguous), and along with Carole Pope and rough Trade, queer artists had a huge influence on Toronto punk and new wave.

Arty proto-punk band the Dishes, at the Hart House Quadrangle, University of Toronto, 1977.

The bemused outsider perspective of being both gay and Canadian informed General Idea’s work, as did a rock’n’roll sensibility. The trio of AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal were more like a band themselves, inserting themselves into their own artwork as if staging their own campy promo photo shoots. They anticipated the utopian/dystopian science-fiction aesthetic of punk with multi-year conceptual projects like The Miss General Idea Pavilion 1984, which dated back to 1971 and continued beyond its titular, Orwellian year.

CCMC HANGS MUSIC IN A GALLERY

Just steps away from the Beverley and the OCA, another group of artists decided they wanted their own clubhouse. On the cold night of January 25, 1976, the members of free-jazz improvising group CCMC unlocked the front door to the warehouse space at 30 St. Patrick Street that they had all been pitching in to renovate. Drummer Larry Dubin hung up a sign that said, ‘No Tunes Allowed.’ No one came to the show. The band played anyway.

Michael Snow had moved back to Toronto in 1972. He’d become an art star during his near-decade away but never lost his love for music, especially jazz and improvisation. Circa ’74, he began playing with some new cats, a mix of trained players from York University and self-taught blasters from the Artists’ Jazz Band. The CCMC was born. They never publicly stated what the acronym stood for – it could change from show to show (e.g., ‘Craven Cowards Muttering Curses’) – but it was quietly, officially, the ‘Canadian Creative Music Collective.’

The fall of ’75 saw renewed activity in the local free-jazz scene. One night, the band called a meeting. After brainstorming, they decided to apply for a Canada Council for the Arts grant to open a place of their own. Jazz music was just starting to get recognized as an art form by government funding bodies, and CCMC asked for a hundred grand. They got twenty – plus another six from the Ontario Arts Council. It was enough to run their whole first year.

CCMC played every Tuesday and Friday night at the new venue, which they named the Music Gallery. Their shows were equally rehearsal and performance; for free improvisers, there is really no distinction. There may or may not be an audience. CCMC’s music is by turns wonderful, maddening, surprising, cacophonous, and even tuneful. It’s not for everyone, and it may not be for anyone.

They began presenting a proper ‘concert season’ featuring groups such as Arraymusic, the Glass Orchestra, and the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, expanding their programming to includecontemporary classical, electro-acoustic, and various world musics. The Music Gallery also launched its own in-house record label, Music Gallery Editions; among its more intriguing early releases was Whalescapes by Interspecies Music, a human-voice imitation of whale songs.

CCMC were just as punk as punk rock, hermetically sealed from trends, fashion, and marketability. And unlike any other venue in Toronto, the Music Gallery was adaptably movable; 30 St. Patrick was the first of now five different locations for Toronto’s first artist-run centre for music and sound. (I worked at Music Gallery from 2002 to ’11, after the CCMC ended its affiliation, doing almost every job there from publicist to general manager to artistic director to bartender to impromptu sound tech.)

Though GI was based out of a studio on Yonge Street, their social tentacles extended into Queen West. They included punk scenesters in their artwork, including model/singer Anya varda and restauranteur Sandy Stagg, whose greasy spoon Peter Pan, at the corner of Queen and Peter, was a hangout for new wave art hipsters – Dishes frontman Murray Ball worked there as a cook. But what General Idea really imprinted on the punk movement was the DIY sensibility.

As the first band to put up photocopied flyers on telephone poles to promote their gigs – ads in the daily papers being too expensive – the Dishes changed the streetscape of Queen West. By repurposing the Beverley as a performance space, they laid the groundwork for a new venue network that valued independence, creativity, and community.

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Punk rock exploded on Queen West, but the fuse was lit back on Yonge Street. New York’s ramones played the New Yorker Theatre at a show booked by the Garys on September 24, 1976, exactly ten years to the day after the ‘Toronto Sound’ concert at Maple Leaf Gardens. The first wave of Toronto punk bands formed within weeks. And the first two became the city’s best known.

Brilliant self-publicist Steven Leckie fronted the Viletones, vicious rivals to the Diodes.

While the viletones were tough, streetwise kids fronted by a brilliant, self-educated self-publicist named Steven Leckie, a.k.a. Nazi Dog (an offensive moniker he later dropped), the Diodes were art students with music-biz aspirations. Forming at OCA, the power-poppy Diodes began playing gigs in the college’s auditorium, including opening for New York’s Talking Heads in January ’77, and a seminal show entitled ‘3D’ alongside the Dishes and another OCA band, the Doncasters.

The viletones, meanwhile, played their first gig in April ’77 at the Colonial underground and immediately served notice that Toronto punk rock had touched down, with their vicious back-to-basics sound, Leckie’s self-muti-lating antics, and a provocative typewritten manifesto that began: ‘Don’t even think about groups from England or the States. Just think about Toronto groups’ – though, it should be noted, the missive also disparaged fellow Toronto groups, including rough Trade and Goddo.

Leckie’s advance publicity tactics – much of which involved intimidating rival bands at their own gigs while advertising his band’s name on the back of his leather jacket – meant the viletones’ debut was packed to the rafters. ‘Not them! Not here!’ was the horrified headline in the Globe and Mail, with journalists fearing/hoping the media firestorm created by the Sex Pistols had jumped the pond.

First-wave Toronto punk band the Diodes on stage at Crash 'n' Burn, the DIY venue they ran, 1977.

Steven Leckie (the Viletones): We were really into promoting this apocalypse to come, and it came. It came. We did it. (to Liz Worth, Treat Me Like dirt, 2009)

The Diodes didn’t feel the same rebellious glory when they played the Colonial. After ignoring requests to turn down the volume, the band were brutally attacked by the club’s bouncers at a gig a few weeks later. That effectively ended the Colonial’s brief run as a punk club, and the Diodes’ interest in the bar circuit. At the start of summer ’77, the band set about creating a safe space for punk rock in Toronto – which would become one of the most mythologized sites in the city’s music history: the Crash ’n’ Burn.

Located on the punk-friendly stomping grounds near OCA and the Beverley, the Crash ’n’ Burn existed for just two brief yet explosive months in the basement of a building on Duncan Street, three blocks south of Queen. Now the heart of the Entertainment District, in 1977 the area was virtually uninhabited. Toronto’s original DIY venue didn’t have to worry about noise complaints.

In contrast with the fussy puritanism of today’s DIY spaces, where self-reliance is often fetishized, the Crash ’n’ Burn was supported by an arts patron: CEAC (the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication) were more politicized, leftist rival...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Any Night Of The Week
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Yonge Street, 1957–65
• Yorkville, 1960–68
• Jamaica to Toronto, 1967–75
• Aftermath: Cancon and Back to the Strip, 1968–75
• Start Spadina, 1971–77
• Punk Crashes, Burns, Invents Queen West, 1976–78
• Queen West: The A-List Assembles, 1981–84
• The Club Boom, 1984–87
• The Export Boom, 1987–91
• Toronto Hip-Hop’s First Wave, 1989–91
• Go West: The Drake Before the Drake (And Drake), 1991–93
• All Ages, All Hours, 1993–96
• Queen West: The (Counterculture) Establishment Digs In, 1995–97
• The Last Rock Show: College Street Rises up, 1997–99
• The First Wavelength: Beginnings at the Ends, 1999–2001
• Epilogue: Any Corner of the City
• Bibliography
• Photo Credits
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author