Article originally published September 17, 2013 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).

One of the largest and longest-lasting gay dance clubs in Toronto, this Sherbourne Street super-club went through a number of evolutions as it spurred the local mainstreaming of gay culture during the ’80s and ’90s.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Boots/Boots Warehouse, 592 Sherbourne St.

Years in operation: 1981-2000

History: The story of Boots, one of Toronto’s best-known and longest-lasting gay dance clubs, begins in 1980 at the Waldorf Astoria apartment building. The basement of what was once a hotel at 80 Charles St. E. was rented to a group of men; their first incarnation of Boots proved popular enough that there were noise complaints. The lease was not renewed.

The original Boots on Charles Street. Photo by Joan Anderson,
courtesy of the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

By late summer of 1981, Boots re-opened in another lower-level location, this time at 592 Sherbourne St., site of the historic Selby Hotel. Once a grand mansion, the building was constructed in the late-1800s, and was home for more than 20 years to members of the wealthy Gooderham family. In 1910, a large addition built on the rear of the mansion opened as Branksome Hall, a private school for girls.

The Selby. Photo via Upper Jarvis Neighbourhood Association.

The mansion became a hotel in 1915. Ernest Hemingway and his wife took up temporary residence there during the 1920s while the writer worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. The address is also said to have housed a brothel, and a popular licensed establishment in the 1950s named the Skyway Lounge. By the 1970s, it was in decline—however, Boots’ best-known co-owners, Rick Stenhouse and Jerry Levy, were not deterred by the Selby’s rundown state.

“Rick and Jerry were part of a group of businessmen that had individual interests in a number of enterprises,” explains Brent Storey, a Boots regular-turned-staffer who soaked up a great deal of the Selby’s history from stories told to him by two long-serving bartenders and the building’s handyman of four decades.

“Jerry was best known for the Club Toronto [bathhouse], while Rick also owned Crispins and Buddys [later the Bijou] at Gerrard and Church [as well as the Bourbon Street jazz club and dinner theatre at 180 Queen St. W.]. Boots was really Rick’s place.”

Ads for establishments owned by Rick Stenhouse, circa early-1980s. Image courtesy of Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

The Selby’s rear sub-level was large, and divided into multiple areas, some of which had already operated as taverns and other social spots. This allowed the owners to open a lounge space, dubbed Bud’s, alongside Boots.

“Bud’s was in what had been a men’s draft hall, named after one of the original bartenders,” says Storey. “Boots had the ‘Ladies Lounge,’ which is where a huge bar was installed, with booths along the windows. The remainder of the addition’s basement was a warren of rooms that were used as coat check, pool rooms, and small washrooms.”

Bob Harrison Drue, known simply as “Bob Harrison” during his DJ days, recalls that Boots, like many gay bars of the time, was initially a “stand-and-stare cruise bar for men.” (Women were not welcome until years later.) A jukebox provided the music, both on Charles Street and initially at the Selby location, where Drue would soon assume the role of Boots’ resident DJ.

“Boots had limited seating,” recalls Drue. “I loved the crushed red-velvet semi-circle booths in front of the long bar and windows that looked out onto Selby Street. There were stand-up tables, and beer barrel tables throughout. It was a relatively dark cruise bar. There was a wall behind the long bar and, on the other side of it, they installed a dancefloor near the back—it was put in as an after-thought, and it was small.

“Bud’s had pub-like seating, and was usually not as busy as the Boots side,” says Drue. “Later, a DJ booth was added, and TVs with videos run by Peter Frost.”

Capacity at Boots and Buds in the early years is thought to be in the range of a few hundred people. This would increase greatly over the years as both sides were renovated, expanded, and developed for a variety of uses and identities.

Boots and Bud’s ad courtesy of Bob Harrison Drue.

Why it was important: Boots opened at a time when gay bars were reasonably plentiful, largely based on or near Yonge Street, but there was not yet a centralized Gay Village. That would come in the mid-to-late-1980s, as businesses like Second Cup—with its infamous steps—and Woody’s became anchoring social spots near Church and Wellesley.

Boots and Bud’s also opened a mere half-year after the February 1981 police raids on four gay bathhouses that resulted in over 300 arrests. Large related protests helped spark a strong gay-and-lesbian rights movement in this city and beyond.

Boots—along with bars like Katrina’s, Cornelius, The Barn and, soon after, Chaps—would serve as important gathering places and signifiers of change.

“Toronto was vibrant compared to now,” says Storey of the years that followed the bathhouse raids. “Those were the days when we actually had a ‘community,’ and the bars were our means to connect. For years before, bars that were going under would ‘go gay’ for the final months, but gay bars were becoming more respectable, cleaner, and nicer. We were winning the battle for our rights. We were proud.”

Boots reflected this growth with its own development.

Bob Harrison Drue, circa 1982. Photo courtesy of him.

Drue, who’d begun DJing in Vancouver while a UBC student during the mid-1970s, helped usher in change at Boots. From late 1981 to September 1983, he played there Monday through Saturday.

“The DJ booth was very primitive,” he recalls. “The turntables weren’t meant for DJ use, the mixer was a poor quality Citronic, there was one amp, and the speakers were in beer barrels on a small dancefloor. There was no disco lighting except for a mirror ball.

“Unfortunately, unlike Montreal and Vancouver, gay bars in Toronto—other than Stages—didn’t spend money on sound and lights. It took a lot of convincing to have Boots add disco lighting and better equipment. I had to buy my own 1200s [turntables], and eventually bought my own mixer. The needles skipped when people got down on the dancefloor, and this wasn’t corrected until Boots was renovated years later. The initial lights installed at Boots were done by a friend—RIP Robert Love—and consisted of air-ductwork tubes outfitted with coloured lights, a mirror ball and two strobe lights. Convincing Boots to pay a lighting person was a victory, as it was unheard of in gay bars in Toronto before that, except at Stages and Charly’s [disco atop the St. Charles Tavern].”

These were humble beginnings for a bar that would become a gay Toronto institution.

Drue—soon joined in the booth by lighting man Richard McNicoll, later of Stages—was adventurous in his musical tastes. He played a mix of disco, R&B, new wave, and Salsoul recordings.

“Unlike after-hours, drug-oriented dance clubs where folks will dance to anything, I never found it particularly easy to play for a drinking crowd—unless you were a DJ who played one established hit after another, which I definitely didn’t,” emphasizes Drue. “I constantly played new music, and was never ashamed if a new song cleared the dancefloor. After all, folks were still drinking, and I knew they would start again on the next one.

He mentions favourites from the era, including Voyage’s “Follow The Brightest Star” and “Let’s Get Started,” and The Flying Lizards’ “Money.” One song’s release especially stands out.

“Peter Frost was in NYC, and came back with two promo copies of The Weather Girls’ ‘It’s Raining Men’ in 1982. I played the damn thing for 45 minutes straight; we couldn’t get enough of it!”

Boots’ Top 100 Chart for 1982. Courtesy of Bob Harrison Drue.

Boots’ location—slightly off the beaten path at Sherbourne, just south of Bloor—did not limit its popularity.

“That had little affect,” says Drue. “Walking home was a bit scary—some of us walked with canes or baseball bats just in case. It was a scary time, but Boots was social and an escape.

“It quickly became the bar to be at—we were busy all the time, with line-ups. Its success had a profound effect on the few other gay bars, and changed the landscape of gay Toronto in those days. Charly’s suffered as a result, as did others.”

Initially known as a leather bar, Boots soon grew to attract a range of men of varying ages.

“There were certainly jocks, and uniforms were quite popular; Boots hosted some of the hottest men around—sexy, sweaty men dancing shirtless,” describes Casey McNeill, who began going there in the early 1980s, while still underage. Boots was his first gay bar, and would later become his place of employment.

“Boots had a sense of community as everybody used to go there at some point, and it was really a regular hangout for many, but it definitely was a butch crowd,” says McNeill. “It was easy to meet new people there—for whatever reason!”

Posters courtesy of Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

Boots boasted no shortage of heat.

“When the bar had the right mix of folks who wanted to party at any and all costs, which was frequent, it was a lot of fun—until they got too wild and started jumping on the dancefloor, making the needles skip,” Drue recounts. “The A/C couldn’t keep up with the packed houses, so it did get quite steamy at times, and, even though I hated it, when the whistles started blowing, the level of energy always increased. There were a lot of fun, hot, and sweaty nights that I recall fondly.”

Frequently packed, with line-ups outside, Boots went through its first major expansion in 1982. That July, management announced increased capacity, four dancefloors, and a new “dining lounge.”

But the club’s many mirrors didn’t reflect a capacity crowd for long; in October 1983, Chaps launched on Isabella just east of Yonge. Former Boots’ general manager Ward Hagar opened it with Alek Korn (later a co-owner of Woody’s) and along with them went key Boots’ staff, including McNicoll and other lighting men, head bartender Michael Moran, and Drue.

“I took my lighting people, records, and my turntables when I left,” says the DJ, who went on to work at indie Canadian dance label SPG Music, where he put together several compilations. (Drue now works in television, licensing original productions for Canada.)

“Once Chaps opened, Boots was a ghost town… until many years later.”

DJ Alberto Zara helped turn things around when he became resident at Boots late in 1986, and remained until 1994. Well known in the community for his years spent spinning at clubs including Dudes, The Barn, and Solteros, Zara began with an experience remarkably similar to Drue’s.

“When I took over at Boots, they had one mirrorball and one pinspot on the dancefloor, and still a false ceiling with tiles. I had to bring my own turntables in. There was nothing there.”

He describes dealings with Rick Stenhouse and his then-new “silent partners who weren’t involved in the club or in the gay community.” (Stenhouse, who is believed to have moved to Vancouver, could not be located for comment.)

“To many people, Rick was a very, very difficult person,” Zara says. “He was very much a businessman; he had a vision for the hotel and the whole club. I worked for him for eight years, and we had our ups and downs, but I could work very well with him. A lot of the stuff I wanted to do to help transform Boots, he supported.

Boots’ DJ Alberto Zara (left) with owner Rick Stenhouse. Photo courtesy of Zara.

“I’m very handy, and I wanted to make that place beautiful,” adds Zara, who lived across the street from the bar at the time. “I rewired the whole place, and had them put televisions everywhere.”

Zara also brought in friend Shawn Riker, who he’d met at Solteros.

“Shawn is a big part of making Boots happen the way it did. He’s a genius when it comes to sound and lighting. We changed the room, getting rid of the false ceiling, peeling off the plaster from the walls, built an amazing DJ booth—with fridge and telephone—and many more things that made Boots the place to be.”

Riker, along with DJs Rafael Meli and Barry Harris, also filled in for Zara on occasion, but the resident DJ played at Boots four-to-five nights each week for eight years, spinning disco, radio hits, remixes, and more underground sounds purchased at Starsound Records.

“In those days, there was one main DJ for each club, and that was part of a club’s identity,” Zara recalls.

“I played a lot of disco—Sylvester, Divine, ‘Pink Cadillac,’ the classics—and people used to go nuts. Slowly, I moved to play some house, as it was the new sound. I snuck it in, and then came the techno and Euro stuff.

“I think those were the best eight years of my entire life, and I’m 61 now. People would scream so loudly at the beginning of a mix; it’s something that I feel to this day. When I would pull a record out of its sleeve, it would instantly get soaked—the energy, the heat, the condensation would hit the record immediately. I loved it, and I had an amazing following, as did Boots. My DJing always was a mix of what the people wanted and what I liked to play.”

Zara also mentions performances by the likes of Eria “Savin’ Myself” Fachin, and special events ranging from thematic parties to the popular “Friends Helping Friends” fundraisers, which supported children living with HIV and AIDs through Sick Kids Hospital.

He also emphasizes that Boots’ substantial patio, occupying the south side of the building, gave the club an edge over competitors like Chaps, The Barn, Colby’s and Komrads.

“We had a huge patio, Boots’ main room with another room adjacent, plus Bud’s and the patio upstairs. At times, there were up to 2,700 people coming through in a night. Boots made a lot of money,” Zara says.

“We had a primarily older, more established crowd. There were a lot of beautiful, beautiful people—men in tank tops, so many muscles. Chaps took the trendy, younger crowd. In those days, each crowd had their own place.”

Casey McNeill behind the bar at Boots. Photo courtesy of him.

McNeill, who began as a busboy at Boots in 1989, and would go on to become a head bartender and co-manager over the next 11 years, agrees that the late-1980s through very early 1990s was another peak period for the club.

“Everybody was going there, the tunes were hot, and there was a real sense of freedom—especially since we were really making headway with gay rights then.”

Zara left Boots in 1994, after the crowds again departed en masse. (He continued to DJ, and now shares mixes on his popular YouTube channel.) He tells me that a $2 cover charge added in 1993 was a definite turn-off for revellers accustomed to free partying.

This small cover—along with many interviewee mentions of noise complaints from Hotel Selby customers—helps illustrate the relationship between Boots and the hotel business at large.

“I’m not sure when Rick Stenhouse became sole owner, but his dream was a boutique gay hotel,” says Storey. “However, the hotel was in poor condition, and he recognized the bar was his cash cow. He invested in renovating Boots’ many small rooms into larger spaces, and installed two large washrooms and the unusually large patio, which increased the capacity.”

Boots’ late-1980s renovations also included removing a wall that separated the main long bar from its closest dancefloor, and adding a café, called the Purple Cactus. It never took off.

In the early 1990s, Stenhouse reportedly spent more than $500,000 to repair the Selby. The mansion’s damaged rooftop was replaced with slate, a grandiose front desk was built, and wrought-iron fencing in front of the building was reconstructed to match the original.

“Rick had made substantial improvements to the hotel but, in order to finance the major renovations, he had taken second and third mortgages on it, totalling $5 million,” shares Storey.

“Unfortunately, the real-estate crash of the late-’80s had reduced the property value to around $3 million. An astute businessman, Rick focused on the bars to generate maximum profit.”

Boots staff, including Casey McNeill (in denim shirt) and Brent Storey (in white tank top). Photo courtesy of Storey.

Storey—one of Toronto’s best known fan dancers, who had practiced in the mirrors of Boots and danced there for years—became a big part of the club’s next chapter when he started working there “by accident, on Pride Day 1993.”

“My lover had passed away three weeks’ prior so, not knowing what to do with myself, I went back to Boots because it always felt comfortable,” Storey recounts.

Friend Barry Harris—with whom Storey had worked at clubs including The Copa, 101 Jarvis, and Chaps—was DJing that night and invited Storey to play with Boots’ new lights.

“I jumped at the chance, and blissfully stayed till the last song. I ended up there every Saturday, and many Fridays, for months—my reward being beer.”

Soon officially hired as Boots’ lighting man, Storey also did event décor, assisted in promotions and, significantly, helped develop and build the club’s next iteration.

The new-and-improved Boots Warehouse dancefloor. Photo courtesy of Brent Storey.

The reincarnation: By 1994, things weren’t looking good for Boots.

“When I first was asked to go back to Boots, it was like a giant bowling alley—it was dead,” recalls Greg Matchett, the club’s general manager from 1985-1988.

Upon his return in ’94, Matchett started by hiring new resident DJ Alain Plamondon, fresh from his stint at the popular Bar 1.

“When I walked in, attendance at Boots was down,” agrees Plamondon. “Greg hired me to cater to an older crowd, but there wasn’t an older crowd to spin for. I went in my own direction, and played for the existent, younger, crowd. Within months, the crowd grew.”

This trend continued as Matchett and Storey spearheaded Boots and Bud’s most radical transformation yet: into Boots Warehouse, Toronto’s largest gay dance club of the time, and the Kurbash, an unabashed sleaze bar, complete with a maze, gargoyle glory holes, and a shower.

Kurbash was developed first. Out went Bud’s drag shows and karaoke, in came metal and rougher edges.

“The drag queens left, and the leather-and-denim crowd came back,” says Storey. “The word-of-mouth buzz was enough to fill the place, and Boots also experienced an increase in numbers as men would use ‘Going to Boots’ as an excuse to head to the Kurbash’s infamous maze. Once the Kurbash was established, and the money increased, Rick decided to take the next step, and finally remove the cumbersome main bar in Boots. I designed the new space and built most of it, plus revamped the logo and the name.”

The removal of the massive, long bar in favour of small satellite bars doubled the main room’s dancefloor space. Boots Warehouse was industrial and modern.

“The room had a purple floor, metallic silver walls, and a corrugated steel ceiling,” Storey says. “Lighting was hung from a TV-tower truss, and a system of receptacles allowed me to rework the show. We upgraded the sound to a kick-ass digital system. In spite of the 10-foot ceiling, I was able to fire off pyrotechnics over the crowd!”

“The layout was also spectacular,” McNeill reminisces. “It had something that is ultimately important in gay bars—flow. People like to be able to walk around a lot and hang out in different areas. Boots provided this very well.”

“Within a year, we became the place to go again with a younger crowd,” recalls Plamondon. “The Kurbash brought in an older crowd. Together, they attracted everyone.”

Says Matchett, “I went after the post-AIDS crowd: men around 35, like myself, who were so guilt-ridden because we were healthy—the lucky ones—and most of our friends had died.

“We catered to a demographic that needed to release the AIDS cloud hanging over them. To me, they were and are the generation of gay men that has defined our strengths and gave dignity to our community.”

Theme nights were developed, disco was again celebrated, and artists, including house vocalist Byron Stingily, were booked to perform.

“I remember The Weather Girls being a great deal of fun, energetic, and working the crowd,” says McNeill.

“The Weather Girls were a hoot,” agrees Matchett. “When I booked Thelma Houston in for a night, she had not performed in a while, and was very nervous. After a lot of vodka, she got onstage and blew the crowd away. She was and is a diva.”

Sealing the deal was Plamondon’s ability to mix energetic, crowd-pleasing sets of “everything popular in commercial dance, house, Euro, and tribal,” as he puts it.

“Boots wasn’t afraid to be a gay bar and we played ‘gay dance music,’” summarizes Storey. “Alain was always enthused, critical of himself, and eager to perform well, which he did. He was always concerned about people having a good time.”

By 1995, Boots Warehouse frequently attracted crowds of 2,000 people, which helped fund a stunning renovation of the club’s huge patio.

“Now with 12 bars open on weekends, sales reached $2.5 million that year,” enthuses Storey. “We were packed every weekend!”

Poster for Circuit Wednesdays, courtesy of Scott Cairns.

Who else worked/played there: Matchett says that Boots’ core staff included approximately 25 people at any given time, with some bartenders and staff dating back to the pre-Boots’ days, as jobs were unionized through the Hotel Selby.

Many interviewees make mention of long=time head bartender Brent Savoy, while Alberto Zara also points to barkeeps including Scott Middleton, Rick Pereira, Jimmy Carmichael, John Boutilier, and Virginia. (“The only woman who worked at Boots at the time; she was very popular.”) Drag queen Amanda Roberts was adored, both for her on-stage performances and skills as a shooter girl.

Managers were key, with original GM Ward Hagar followed by men including Matchett, Robert Rochon, Doug Laufman, and the creative David Heymes, who’d also worked at clubs including Nuts & Bolts, The Copa, and Lizard Lounge.

In addition to Richard McNicoll and Brent Storey, regulars like Brian Wheatley, David Beaulieu, and Pascal Pennella lit up Boots’ dancefloors while DJs Krys Shepherd and Bob Currer played in the club’s early years. [Addendum: Following the original publication of this piece, Bob Currer responded to say that he had DJed five nights weekly at Boots from 1985 to 1987, and to dispute that the club was "a ghost town" during this time. His full statement can be found in the comments thread below.]

Alberto Zara and Boots also helped inspire DJ/producer Barry Harris to return to the booth. Harris had known Zara since the days when they’d both DJed at Dudes cruise bar, with Harris going on to play clubs including 101 Jarvis, The Copa, and Stilife before he formed pop-dance project Kon Kan in 1988, and had a massive pop hit in the form of “I Beg Your Pardon.”

Kon Kan was slowing by the time Harris visited Zara at Boots, and was asked to fill-in on occasion.

“I fell back into DJing after taking three years off; it was like riding a bike,” exclaims Harris, who played many a weekend night at Boots, between 1992-94.

“For fun, I did a Kon Kan track show of ‘Sinful Wishes’ in my underwear, along with a big muscular body builder and three nuns in drag. I guess that was the last ‘show’ Kon Kan ever did.”

Harris tells me he felt a little stifled by the Electric Circus and Energy 108 pop leanings of Boots’ crowds, but also enjoyed playing many tracks of the time, like “Swamp Thing” by The Grid, and Lectroluv’s “Dream Drums.”

“I still love this track! It really turned me on to the ‘new house’ scene,” says Harris, who observes that by 1994, “house—real house—was finally becoming huge in the gay scene.”

Harris points to the rise of gay Toronto DJs like Scott Cairns and Mark Falco, both of whom played at Boots Warehouse for brief periods. (Cairns’ Circuit Wednesdays ran during the warm months of 1996 and, despite the event name, featured underground house.)

Circuit promo courtesy of Scott Cairns.

“It was like another whole new generation was moving into the gay dance-club scene again—something I’d already seen happen when the 1980s generation took over from the ’70s disco generation,” Harris adds. “But Boots was still a part of the ‘old’ generation. I could get away with only a bit of the mainstream vocal pop house that was coming out, like Juliet Roberts’ ‘I Want You‘ and Crystal Waters’ ‘100% Pure Love.’

Frustrated, he left in the fall of 1994 to develop a house night on Wednesdays at The Barn before moving to Los Angeles in 1998, and soon hitting it big with Thunderpuss remixes of Amber, Whitney Houston and others. (More recently, Harris has returned to his alt-rock roots as he fronts the band Sick Seconds. He also continues to DJ and produce dancefloor remixes.)

I also DJed at Boots for a few years in the mid-’90s, first as a resident of the Betty Page Society Fetish Night; presented by Northbound Leather, this bi-weekly affair ran for many years at Boots, and is at the root of the fetish events they continue to produce. Then, I became the host of Crush, a series that raised funds for queer community groups for much of 1996.

Despite all the success of Boots Warehouse and the Kurbash, however, all was not well behind the scenes. Stenhouse took Hotel Selby and the Boots Warehouse complex into receivership in fall of 1995, prompting Matchett and others to leave.

“I found out that Rick was going to let Boots go into receivership a few days before Pride ’95,” Storey reveals. “It was a crushing blow to learn the news, and I was one of only a very few he told. We were going strong at that point, and I was excited about the Pride décor, free barbecue, pyrotechnics, and Boots’ parade float. Having to hold this secret that weekend was a burden; to do it cheerfully was an effort.

“Rick continued to operate the place for a couple years after the banks took over. A few managers who weren’t familiar with the bar or club scene were hired, before the eventual sale.”

Still, weekends at Boots remained hugely popular. One manager appointed by the receivership company had even suggested a Sunday retro night, which proved to be a big hit.

“When that night began, we weren’t too sure how it would go,” admits its resident DJ, Alain Plamondon. “The third week fell on a Labour Day weekend holiday Sunday, and I will never forget that night. We were packed! For nearly two hours solid during peak time, people on the dancefloor cheered for every mix I did. After that, Retro Sundays were a success.”

Boots Warehouse and the Kurbash were now packed all three nights of the weekend.

The final iteration of the Boots bar, circa 1997. Photo courtesy of Brent Storey.

What happened to it: In late 1997, the building was purchased by husband and wife Nazir and Anish Akbarali, who initially developed Hotel Selby into a Howard Johnson.

“Nazir and Anish were in the hotel business, but kept Boots running for a few years because it generated money,” says Plamondon. “Anish had a brother named Ralph who became a manager, and was loved by the staff.”

The Akbaralis’ daughters also worked coat check at Boots Warehouse, but all was not harmonious.

“Anish did not believe in nudity of any kind,” says Plamondon. “The Kurbash had to go! The porn on the TVs had to go! Any nudity—even if it was on a safe-sex poster—had to go! This infuriated many, and we lost part of the crowd. We were still quite busy, but the crowds slowly dwindled.”

“The Akbaralis always claimed ‘not to have a problem’ with homosexuality, but never intended to keep the bar long anyway,” adds Storey. “It was a cash cow to generate money to put into the hotel’s renovations. They always put the hotel first, and allowed the bar to deteriorate. It was a battle to keep it going as long as we did.

“Before Pride 2000, there were problems with the sound, lighting, and bar equipment, so [friend and then manager] Roger Bonnell and I had a planning meeting with the owners. They announced that no repairs would be done, there was to be no money spent, and that they were planning a $10 Friday and $20 Saturday cover charge. They explained that any ill will generated didn’t matter as they were closing Boots soon after.

“After sleeping on it, I called Roger, and we quickly agreed we didn’t want to be part of it, and quit. The owner seemed quite pleased he could start building hotel rooms in the bar space sooner.” (In an Xtra! article dated June 28, 2000, Anish Akbarali cited sound complaints as reason for closing the club.)

Others on staff, including Plamondon and Casey McNeill, also made it clear that they would not work the weekend of Pride 2000.

“It was our way of slapping them in the face by not allowing them the immense profits of one last Pride,” says McNeill. “Plus, we all got Pride off! It was a little bittersweet for the staff.”

Boots Warehouse closed with a hastily produced, but well-attended party on June 18, 2000.

Storey decorated with his personal collection of staff t-shirts and other Boots memorabilia, many of which were taken by patrons for souvenirs. Some people also smashed toilets in protest.

“On that last night, people were in shock when they walked in, and the word went around,” explains Plamondon, who closed the club with Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

“After DJing in the gay scene for 26 years, I can honestly say that Boots Warehouse was my all-time favourite club to play at,” he says. (Plamondon continues to DJ, including at Woody’s, The Vic, and Zipperz/Cellblock, where his Retro Sunday tradition lives on.)

“Boots was an original, and has never been duplicated; I don’t think it ever will,” says McNeill. “What always comes to mind are the positive feel, and the energy of the place. People celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, Pride, Halloween, anything. Everybody has a few good stories about their times at Boots.” (McNeill later worked in hospitality, and as an HR coordinator at an entertainment company before returning to school this year to study business.)

Storey, who went on to do lighting and décor at Fly nightclub for six years, maintains an interest in the development at 592 Sherbourne St., but his heart belongs to Boots.

“I lost my connection to the building as soon as the entrance to Boots was bricked in, but I still remember the fun people had there, and I’m proud of what we achieved in giving them the best we could.”

592 Sherbourne currently operates as The Clarion Hotel & Suites Selby.

592 Sherbourne currently operates as The Clarion Hotel & Suites Selby. The building, which was granted official heritage status in 1989, is likely to be relocated closer to Sherbourne as part of The Selby Condos, a 49-storey development project now in pre-construction stage.

Thank you to participants Alain Plamondon, Alberto Zara, Barry Harris, Bob Harrison Drue, Brent Storey, Casey McNeill, and Gregg Matchett, as well as to Scott Cairns, the late Rick Bébout for his Promiscuous Affections diaries, and the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

The post Then & Now: Boots appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published March 26, 2013 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).

In its brief lifespan, this ‘70s hotspot served as both a gay disco and punk-rock haven—before it all ended in a mysterious fire and murder.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Club David’s, 16 Phipps

Years in operation: 1975-1977

History: The allure that the Yonge and St. Joseph area once held for creatures of the night has been detailed in a number of previous Then & Now pieces, including those about early 1980s venues Voodoo and Club Z. Here, we visit a prior decade to travel a short distance south, down a once-existing strip of the St. Nicholas alleyway, to a barely-there street called Phipps.

Moving and storage company Rawlinson Cartage constructed the building at 16 Phipps in the late 1890s. A small tunnel, thought to once hold a conveyor belt, connected it to the building directly north, at 11A St. Joseph. As with a number of neighbouring structures, it was also erected by Rawlinson.

In the early 1970s, 11A St. Joseph was home to popular all-ages gay male dance club The Manatee. Nearby Yonge Street bars The Parkside Tavern and St. Charles Tavern were gay hotspots, as was intimate Isabella Street disco Mrs. Knights.

Club David’s added new possibilities to the mix when Jay Cochrane and Sandy Leblanc opened it in the spring of 1975.

Image courtesy of Wendy Peacock.

“Jay had already experienced many clubs in the U.S. and was meticulous about how he wanted things run,” recalls John Weber, the discotheque’s main DJ. “He wanted to create a safe atmosphere for everybody to enjoy.

“David’s was a step up on the décor [of the time]. It was really clean, they had sofas in there, and carpeting. You could go and actually sit on what felt like living room furniture. David’s had a billiards room too. It was the beginning of Jay’s vision of having a place where you could socialize and do more than just go and dance.”

Not licensed to sell alcohol at first, David’s opened doors to men aged 16-and-older. The club ran Friday through Sunday, with music heard until 6am on weekend nights. The crowds would soon grow far more mixed.

Photo courtesy of Wendy Peacock.

Why it was important: Although David’s was not the biggest or even busiest gay disco of its time, the club was one of the first to actually be gay-owned and so elaborately decorated.

The club was a sizable, two-level layout. Once opened, David’s heavy wooden door revealed a path that went up a few stairs, past a ticket booth, along a catwalk, and to your choice of billiards room or the main bar. In the upper part of the main room there was plenty of seating – sofas, tables and chairs, and booths alike. The floors were red carpet. Some of the walls were, in part, also covered in red carpet while others were heavily mirrored. It was, after all, the ‘70s.

St. George riding all-candidates meeting at David’s, June 1977. Photo from The Body Politic, courtesy of Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

Two winding staircases led down to the dancefloor. Most famously, the stairs also curved around the club’s star attraction: a fountain containing a larger-than-life, and, by many accounts, excessively well-endowed replica of Michelangelo’s David. There was also a stage, raised go-go platform, and a DJ booth that overlooked the dancefloor. Of course a large mirror ball reflected the pink, purple and multi-hued lights, and the sound system is said to have been quality. David’s also boasted a snack bar, pinball machines, and a high-tech coat check system, complete with revolving hangers.

Months after it opened, David’s adopted a somewhat radical door policy. While most gay and lesbian bars of the time were segregated by gender, and most social spaces were assumed to be either straight or gay, Club David’s advertised itself as open to all genders and sexualities. Some ads, in fact, promoted it as a bisexual club. A membership policy was adopted and bouncers were on hand to keep an eye out, but in general, people mixed freely and easily.

Club David’s welcome policy, courtesy of Wendy Peacock.

“When David’s became bi-gender, it attracted those people ‘on the fringe’ or ‘closet-y,’” says gay activist and senior Ken ‘Father’ Andrews, once a phototypesetter and board member of the Canadian Homophile Association of Toronto (C.H.A.T.). “A lot of women and men came out in that club.”

“One of the things I liked most about David’s was that I could see my female friends too,” says Weber, who got his start DJing the C.H.A.T. dances and was recruited to spin by David’s original soundman, Michael Roberts.

A 17-year-old Weber began to DJ at Club David’s in the summer of 1975.

John Weber in David’s DJ booth. Photo courtesy of Andrea Wood.

Given its 16-plus-door policy, David’s was a haven for queer and questioning youth.

“David’s was home-away-from-home,” states Jacky ‘Jake’ Gabay, later to be known by the stage name of Vicki Sue. “It was difficult being out at that time, especially for teenagers. David’s was a retreat, a place where you could be yourself. I remember the first time I walked in; it was like being born again, among people like me. I was 16-going-on-17 at the time, and was enthralled by it all.”

Wendy Peacock was a Mississauga teen when she began attending David’s in 1976.

“I dated a boy, named Dave Soulsby, who worked there from 1976 to 1977,” Peacock begins. “He worked at the door, and was a go-go dancer. He was called the best robot dancer in the clubs, and even had a spot on CityTV’s Boogie show, dancing with his little brother.”

The two met at David’s, on an evening when Soulsby attended door.

“I had never been to a club so I was floored by the lights, and the sound,” she explains. “I went as much as possible. Guaranteed, I was there every Friday and Saturday night for about a year.

“I met a wonderful array of people. This was my first foray into the real world from my very suburban upbringing, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to meet such diverse personalities. Everybody went to this club—straight, gay, bi, tough, not so tough, drag queens, transgendered people, pretty people, not so pretty people.

“There were a lot of young lesbians at the club,” Peacock adds. “Of course, they mostly went to the Cameo or other all-women clubs, but it was a young woman at David’s—she looked just like Jodie Foster—who made me dump my boyfriend.”

It’s especially difficult to resist a Jodie Foster-lookalike’s charms when the beats are pumping.

Thanks to John Weber, and his fill-in DJ Greg Howlett, David’s was a serious disco hotspot. Both men would go on to win the Billboard Disco Forum Award for ‘Best Regional DJ’ (Howlett in 1979, Weber in 1980), but before then, each would pack the David’s dancefloor as they played anthems like Silver Convention’s “Get Up and Boogie,”

“My favourite DJ at the time was Greg Howlett,” offers Weber during a lengthy phone chat. “I really admired his music and mixing.” (Visit the Then & Now Mixcloud page for live DJ sets by Howlett.)

Weber, who also DJed at The Manatee during this same period, was both a crowd-pleaser and trendsetter. As was then de rigueur, Weber would play a couple of slow songs every hour or so, but he excelled at blending danceable pop and rock—think Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music,” and “Long Train Running”—with dancefloor soul and breaking disco anthems.

“The Supremes’ ‘I’m Gonna Let My Heart Do the Walking‘ and ‘He’s My Man‘ were huge at David’s, as were Vicki Sue Robinson, with ‘Turn the Beat Around,’ and Gloria Gaynor,” says Weber.

“Another song that was huge for us was “I Got Your Love” by a group called Stratavarious, which was formed by John Usry Jr. He worked back in the days with people like the O’Jays and the whole MFSB fold. He came to Toronto and formed the Stratavarious orchestra.

Poster courtesy of Wendy Peacock.

“Jay Cochrane allowed me to do a lot of things that a lot of other club owners would have shaken their heads at. He had vision, and allowed us to bring Stratavarious, a live disco orchestra, in to perform. That was quite something. I was also able to get Shirley & Company, who did the song “Shame, Shame, Shame,” to come and perform at David’s. Carol Williams, who was the first solo female artist signed to Salsoul Records and had done a disco version of the song “More,” also performed at David’s, and became a lifelong friend. Vicki Sue Robinson spent time at the club as a guest.”

Namesake female impersonator Vicki Sue, a.k.a. Jacky Gabay, was hired to perform at David’s by Tony Brown, who also took to the stage as Toni Brown.

“I auditioned for Tony in the summer of 1976, and performed “Blind Date” from Funny Lady,” recalls Gabay. “Little did I know that there were four other performers watching, including Michelle Ross. At the end of my audition they all applauded. Tony said to me ‘You’re not a drag queen like everyone else. You’re a performer, an actor.’ That was the best compliment I could have.”

Vicki Sue became part of the roster. Drag queens performed Friday nights at 2 a.m., with other memorable greats from the David’s days including Brown, Ross, Jackie Loren, Danny Love, Twilight, Jo-Jo, and Ronnie Holliday.

Vicki Sue, known for her sense of humour and original performances, won David’s Miss Starlight Pageant title in 1977, after performing solo sets on nights that included a Supremes tribute.

Vicki Sue. Photo courtesy of Jacky Gabay.

“People were in total awe the night that The Supremes—post Diana Ross—sat with me in the DJ booth, and watched themselves be performed by female impersonators,” describes Weber. “Tony Brown performed Diana Ross so gracefully, and had all of her movements and gestures down. That made this night an especially sweet moment because so many people loved and admired Tony.

“David’s was packed like a sardine can because word had leaked that The Supremes were going to be there. Tony asked if they would consider coming out of the DJ booth to say ‘Hi,’ and they did. People cleared a path a path from the booth, down the steps to the dancefloor, and Mary Wilson, Cindy Birdsong and Sherrie Payne took to the stage to greet everyone. It was one of those special club moments that was totally a David’s thing. Mary Wilson kept in touch with both Tony and I long after that.” (Brown, who went on to work and perform at clubs including Komrads, has since passed away.)

Peacock, a fan of David’s drag artists, recalls another favourite performer.

“There was this one queen there who I adored. His club name was Sister Rock-On, and his best stage act was an Elton John impression.  He was beautiful as a woman, but Elton just blew you away. He looked exactly like him.”

For a period—especially most of 1976—Club David’s flourished. People flocked to the disco for its music, performances, and anything-goes reputation.

“I got hooked on the place because of the diversity; it was the craziest place in the world for that,” states Larry Adolphe, who’d initially gone to David’s because his good friend Gordon Bishop worked there as a manager.

“If somebody had walked in there with a cow, I don’t think anybody would have batted an eyelash.”

Adolphe, whose own music tastes leaned to rock, started working at David’s in the summer of 1977. He bussed, bartended, made popcorn for the snack bar—whatever was needed. By this time, the crowds had dwindled yet the club was open nightly.

David’s audience had shrunk for multiple reasons—including the opening of red-hot gay afterhours dance club Stages in January 1977.

Jay Cochrane left David’s behind early that year, and opened the large Studio II complex. Located at the northeast corner of Carlton and Church (where gay club Zipperz now sits), Studio II was a gay paradise, with multiple dancefloors, private rooms, a library, restaurant, movie theatre and more.

John Weber and his music went with Cochrane.

“My loyalty was with Jay, and I wasn’t personally interested in the direction that things were going with Sandy,” explains the DJ. “I believed in Jay’s vision more, so was more than happy to go to Studio II.”

Leblanc, with new American co-owner Mark Lefkofski, set about trying to keep Club David’s afloat. He built an adjoining disco, called The Garage, at 19 St. Joseph. When it didn’t take off, Leblanc converted The Garage into a restaurant, open 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. nightly. That did well, and soon people were walking through the doorway that connected the spaces.

Advertisement in Directions magazine. Courtesy of the Canadian Gay & Lesbian Archives.

David’s crowd now skewed heavily to those aged 22-and-under.

“Sandy really liked the street kids, and they liked hanging out there,” recalls Adolphe. “That was the scene at the time.”

People hung out at The Garage and danced all night in the disco, but the programming changed.

“With the opening of Studio ll, David’s lost a lot of its patrons, and the shows were changed to late afternoon on Sundays,” explains Gabay, who performed at the club as Vicki Sue until they no longer booked drag shows (He continued to perform until 1981, at clubs also including The Manatee, Carriage House, MayGay, Katrina’s, and Studio II.)

“David’s started catering to the punk crowd.”

The Ugly at David’s. Photo by Vince Carlucci.

Who else played/worked there: After the short-lived Crash ‘n’ Burn space ran its course in the summer of 1977, Club David’s became the unlikely home of Toronto’s early punk scene.

Filmmakers Tibor Takács and Stephen Zoller were the reason why.

Though he’d never set foot in David’s to dance, Takács was well aware of the club.

“David’s was sort of a big deal at the time,” he tells me in a phone call from California; “It was such a cool place – down an alleyway, with people always falling out onto the street. David’s was a very decadent, underground club that had a bit of a New York vibe to it. When David’s was in its heyday, I don’t think there was anything else like it at all in Toronto.”

He and Zoller had first approached Leblanc about shooting a scene for their first feature film, Metal Messiah, at David’s in 1976. They stayed in touch. Takács would go on to act as manager for pioneering Toronto punk bands Viletones and, to a lesser extent, Cardboard Brains.

“When we needed to find a venue for the Viletones to play in, because they were kicked out of everywhere else, we decided to go to David’s,” says Takács. “Sandy made us a good deal—we got the door and he got the bar.”

For the last four-to-six months of 1977, punk bands including Viletones, The Ugly, The Curse, B-Girls, Teenage Head, The Androids, and Cardboard Brains played at David’s once or twice a week.

The Viletones at David’s. Photo by Vince Carlucci.

“I would show up on Fridays or Saturdays to see or snap band photos,” says photographer and musician Vince Carlucci, guitarist and co-founder of Cardboard Brains.

“There was not that many bands initially – you could count all the Toronto punk bands with less than 10 fingers. Besides the Crash ‘n’ Burn, David’s was the venue for these new bands to play. There were a few gigs at The Colonial, but [it wasn’t] until 1978 and on when there was an explosion of venues and indie bands.”

Carlucci, who also documented early Toronto appearances by the likes of Patti Smith, has a soft spot for David’s to this day.

“David’s didn’t feel like a typical beer bar or club, like The Gasworks, or Yonge Station, or any of the other live music venues,” he describes; “It was kind of charming in a cheesy sort of way.”

While David’s was clearly in decline – fellow musician and photographer Don Pyle recalls that the fountain had long dried up and the club’s carpets were dirty and frayed – the club’s worn, wonky aesthetic, permanent stage, and sunken, pit-like dancefloor were perfect for the punks who played between 9pm and midnight.

“The vibe was pretty exciting, especially when bands like the Viletones played,” enthuses Carlucci. “Steven Leckie had a way of inciting kids – getting people pissed or dancing or moving. He was never much of a singer technically speaking, but had a great and sort of creepy persona onstage.

Teenage Head at David’s. Photo by Vince Carlucci.

“When Teenage Head was on, the place would typically be packed, and there was always a feeling that a riot may break out – what with all the booze and dope that was being used, and the odd mix of people. It was just not that common in ‘77.”

While the Viletones played at David’s more than any other band, Leckie recalls one especially magical night at the ‘punk palace.’

“The Poles, Teenage Head and Viletones were all on the bill,” Leckie begins. “It was like a vacuum; that was as tight as you got. I’d hear female singers later, like say in The Adverts, and think ‘Man, she doesn’t come close to Michaele Jordana.’ Teenage Head were off the map, in my opinion. They were as good as it gets. They could have been bigger than Cheap Trick.”

While footage and interviews from this show were infamously reported by punk-fearing CBC host Hana Gartner, the nascent scene at David’s was lovingly recorded by people like filmmakers Colin Brunton and Kire Paputts who shared the footage below. (Their detailed documentary about the early days of Toronto punk, The Last Pogo Jumps Again,  contains additional footage shot at David’s and is excellent.)

“David’s was an important lily pad you needed to jump onto to continue the arc of punk,” says Leckie, who sometimes DJed between bands too. “Without David’s being there, there would have been a real gap after the close of Crash ‘n’ Burn, and before the opening of The Edge. I felt absolute freedom at David’s and with Sandy. It was beautiful.”

As a venue, David’s also underscores a fact about pioneering punk scenes in Toronto and New York alike.

“The earliest days of punk had deep roots in gay spaces as safe havens or as accepting of other outsiders,” states Don Pyle, a gay man who came up in the punk scene, and came out in his later teens.

“I was only 15 when I first went to David’s and was still closeted and fearful so going there was a threat to my ‘secret,’” says Pyle, who nonetheless saw many bands at 16 Phipps (some of Pyle’s photos taken at David’s are found in his 2011 book, Trouble In the Camera Club).

Pyle points out that there were a number of “visible gays in the artier side of the punk scene—in bands like The Dishes and Drastic Measures.”

Toronto artist Bruce Eves, also co-founder of CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art and Communication), where the tiny Crash ‘n’ Burn once ran, expands on this.

“The ‘punks’ were largely art students or recent grads so the scene was, relatively speaking, fairly integrated for the time. I’d never made any secret of the fact that I’m a gay man, and had never felt threatened in any way. Some of the bands attracted a more hardcore following, but I never felt hassled.

“All this said, I would say that the punk and disco scenes were pretty segregated. Gays would go to punk concerts because the scene was hot, but not the other way around.”

The Curse at David’s. Photo by Vince Carlucci.

While most of the people I speak with say that the punk kids and disco dancers who did come together at David’s mixed comfortably (“There was this kind of respect and camaraderie betwixt the punks and the gay crowd,” says Carlucci; “Both cultures were kind of loners, rebels and rejects in a way.”), Eves’ story about one of the few times he went to David’s also speaks volumes.

“I don’t remember who was playing; it was probably the Diodes because we were friends, had collaborated on a few art projects and I was a fan,” says Eves. “During a break between sets, I was chatting up a guy I was interested in, and we kissed. This guy nearby freaked out and punched me. There was blood everywhere. I was hauled out through the restaurant, past shocked patrons with forks suspended midair. Evidently a gang of punk girls beat the shit out of the guy in revenge – my own little Altamont. I still have the scar to prove it.”

Still, the staff at David’s was just as mixed as its clientele. Leblanc also hired people from the punk scene.

“Waiter Randy Roudette was someone I came to know from just being around the scene,” offers Pyle. “He had a T-shirt that said ‘Mr. Shit’ on it the first time I recall seeing him. It was the name most people knew him by.”

Leblanc also took to booking bands. A few interviewees mention seeing Rough Trade at David’s. Disco acts still performed on occasion.

“At a certain point, Sandy started booking his own shows,” says Takács. “We were a little pissed off at him, but really, we’d run the gamut of Toronto punk groups, and he was looking for new acts. He brought in these guys from Detroit. They were a very clean-cut, new wave pop band, called The Romantics. Eventually they became kind of famous. I remember walking in and hearing “What I Like About You,” and thinking ‘Fuck, these guys are commercial. This is a hit song man.’ The first time I ever heard that song was there.”

Poster courtesy of The Last Pogo Jumps Again.

What happened to it: Club David’s burned in a fire following a New Year’s Eve punk show on December 31, 1977.

“We were one of the three unfortunate bands to have played the night the club burned down,” says Carlucci. “It was the final gig at Club David’s.” (Carlucci has written about this night in a memoir in progress, tentatively titled I Was A Cardboard Brain. He continues to take and exhibit photos, performs with the band Station Twang, and also blogs regularly.)

Cardboard Brains, along with members of Viletones and The Ugly, lost a lot of gear in the fire, which remains a mystery to this day.

“There were some rumours as to whether or not it was an insurance thing, but I was always skeptical of that because that was Sandy’s life,” says Adolphe, who worked at David’s that evening. (He now owns L&J Cycle on Davenport.)

“Sandy liked the kids, and he actually lived there—he had a loft that in the building, right above the snack bar. I think in some ways, he had more to lose.

“After it burned down, he still tried to help us out by giving Gordon and I shifts, pulling down smoke damaged drywall and cleaning the place up. Sandy had a big heart. It’s quite possible that the fire was staged, but that just didn’t seem to fit with who Sandy was.”

Takács also has his doubts.

“Something I remember very distinctly from that night is that people were throwing their cigarette butts on the wooden dancefloor. I went around stomping them out at points.”

The David’s site as it appeared in 1979.
Photos by Joan Anderson, courtesy of the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

Now splitting his time between Toronto and Los Angeles, the director of films including The Gate, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Spiders 3D recalls trying to meet with Leblanc many months after the fire.

“I remember going to Sandy’s to discuss the insurance. We knocked on the door, went back a few times, and wondered ‘What the hell? Where did Sandy disappear to?’”

Leblanc was murdered in September 1978. The Toronto Star reported that he’d been stabbed more than 100 times. No one was ever charged.

Sandy LeBlanc, as featured in Directions magazine. Courtesy of Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives.

“There were suspects, but no proof,” says Ken Andrews, now retired and active as a community volunteer as he nears age 79.

“A friend discovered Sandy’s body when paying a visit to his apartment. He called police, of course, and a certain then-homicide detective by the name of Julian Fantino was an investigator. My friend thought it odd that a follow-up interview never took place.”

A few years later, former David’s co-owner Mark Lefkofski, who also co-owned Detroit men’s bar Menjo’s for a period, was murdered in that city.

“It was absolutely devastating, the way that Sandy was murdered, but at the time, it was seen as possible that he’d brought the wrong person home,” recalls John Weber, who went on to DJ at clubs including Sutton Place disco Stop 33, Space disco and The Barn (he’s now retired).

“But then, when it came to Mark also being murdered, it seemed like there was something else involved there. Maybe bikers or mob money – it seems we’ll never know.”

16 Phipps remained unused for years after the fire. In the mid 1980s, it was reborn as gay dance club Le Mystique. From 1995 to 1997, it was the home of house-centric gay afterhours club, JOY while at other points in the ’90s the building hosted underground warehouse parties and raves.

The building was torn down more than five years ago. In its place stands the 20-storey condo build on the south side of Eleven Residences at 11 St. Joseph. The St. Nicholas alleyway no longer extends that far north; it has been filled in by ongoing construction of Five Condos at Yonge and St. Joseph.

Thank you to participants Bruce Eves, Don Pyle, Jacky Gabay, John Weber, Ken Andrews, Larry Adolph, Steven Leckie, Tibor Takács, Vince Carlucci, Wendy Peacock. Thanks also to Alice Lipczak, Andrée Emond, Caroline Azar, George Fichna, Helen Lenskyj and the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, Vince Degiorgio, and to Colin Brunton and Kire Paputts, producer/directors of The Last Pogo Jumps Again, for their suggestions and sharing of resources.

The post Then & Now: Club David’s appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published March 12, 2013 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).

Denise Benson revisits both the original Isabella Street location that laid down the breeding ground for Toronto’s early-‘80s alternative music and fashion scenes –also seeming to be U2’s home away from home– and the Yonge Street haunt that later served as a hangout for goths, punks and ska fans alike.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Domino Klub (1 Isabella St.), later Klub Domino (279 Yonge St.)

Years in operation: 1979-1987

History: In the late 1970s through much of the ’80s, Yonge and Isabella was an epicentre for emergent music, arts, and fashion culture. The area came alive at night, with numerous booze-cans and after-hours clubs drawing dancers to upper-level locations on Yonge and decadent discos on side streets, especially St. Joseph. Before Domino’s opened upstairs at 1 Isabella, the venue had been the Cheetah Club. Owned by Gunther Weswaldi, whose background was in the food and beverage industry, the Cheetah was short lived. It’s thought that Weswaldi and his wife Darlene opened Domino at this address in early 1979. (Weswaldi’s current whereabouts are unknown.) Advertised as a venue where people could meet for “lunch, dinner, dancing, disco,” Domino’s was a licensed restaurant and nightclub open daily. It did not launch with a distinct identity.

Image courtesy of Roy Paul.

Rock station Q107, which had gone on-air in mid-1977, promoted a number of events at Domino’s before street-savvy event producer Michael Gallow and pioneering post-punk DJ Dave Allen approached Weswaldi with the concept of entertaining downtown denizens interested in a new wave of sounds and styles.

“Dave and I had participated in the earliest days of the punk-rock explosion in town,” writes Gallow by email. “By early 1979, that energy had degenerated into teenage-male aggro. The arty/fashion element of punk was mutating into new wave, and fit well with our Yonge and Bloor crowd. Elements of the Church/Wellesley ghetto were still partying hard, and there was a blending of that uptown scene with ours.”

DJ Dave Allen. Photo by Alice Andersen, Wonderland Photography.

Gallow and Allen soon brought a fashionable mix of people to 1 Isabella.

“The first event was a post-concert party for [British band] Japan, in late November 1979, with promo and ticket giveaways on Q107,” says Gallow. “I remember David Sylvian looking like a deer caught in the proverbial fan’s headlights.”

Gallow also recalls that Weswaldi was interested in having his venue play host to new sounds and scenes, with an emphasis on dancing rather than the live acts Q107 personnel had proposed. This also made Domino’s different than live music venues like The Edge, The Colonial, El Mocambo, and Horseshoe Tavern, which all booked punk and new-wave bands, to varying degrees.

“Dave and I felt there were enough live venues around, but nowhere for the evolving new music/fashion/art scene to hang out,” says Gallow.

They were given the go-ahead.

“Gunther called the spot Domino’s. We suggested the Domino Klub—a tip of the hat to the Mudd Club in N.Y.C. That worked for him.”

Michael Gallow (left) with the Doc. Photo courtesy of Roy Paul.

Why it was important: Domino was Toronto’s original post-punk and new-wave dance club. Sets of new wave could be heard at nearby gay clubs like Stages and Club David’s; The Edge was ground zero for pioneering live music; and Nuts & Bolts, Twilight Zone, and Voodoo would all soon open doors to dancers seeking brand new sounds. But Domino was the first.

“Most of our music was post-punk and the beginnings of electro-pop,” says Gallow, who purchased much of Domino Klub’s music. “I knew we would be a hit when I looked out at a sardine-packed dance floor as Gary Numan’s ‘Cars‘ and The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette‘ boomed over the sound system. We were definitely the only spot in town for that experience.”

The original Domino had a number of things going for it, in addition to a prime location. Not only did its dining room attract a crowd looking for cheap, decent food, it also provided a quieter space for people to talk, and friendships to develop. Further down the hallway was the large main room, ideal for dancers and voyeurs alike. The sizable dancefloor—much of it stainless steel—was slightly sunken, overlooked by a long bar and a variety of seated and standing areas. Dancers tended to face a wall of smoked mirrors.

“All the better for making sure your moves were cool,” says Gallow.

The men’s bathrooms at Domino Klub. Photo by Alice Andersen, Wonderland Photography.

Domino may have smelled of smoke and beer—Black Label was the drink of choice—and had only adequate sound and lighting, but the layout allowed enough options for punks, skinheads, fashionistas, and artists of all stripes and sexualities to gather comfortably. Dave Allen’s range of edgy sounds also connected crowds.

“Dave had a tremendous enthusiasm for the music, and he was able to communicate that,” offers Gallow. “He was willing to explore the less obvious music, and had an intuitive grasp of what each segment of the audience wanted to hear. [He’d play] up-and-coming tunes early, peaked with hits for the large mixed crowd, and got more dark and experimental as the early hours of the morning arrived.” (Allen himself could not be reached for comment. Even close friends are uncertain of his whereabouts.)

Chris Sheppard in the Domino’s DJ booth. Photo: Dusty Reeves.

“The original Domino’s was ground zero for the re-birth of club culture,” says Canadian DJ/producer Chris Sheppard. His interest in new music, dancing, and meeting girls had made him an early regular at Domino Klub, and he soon got his DJing start there.

“Chris was the first person to control the DJ booth beyond Dave or myself,” confirms Gallow. “And that was only as a replacement on nights when we couldn’t.”

Sheppard, who later became Domino Klub’s main resident, was finely tuned in to the sounds of the time. Even now, he underscores the difference between the music of Domino and that heard at Nuts & Bolts, which launched as an alternative dance club in 1980.

“1 Isabella was much cooler,” proclaims Sheppard. “Punk had progressed, and Domino was an important part of the post-punk movement. Nuts & Bolts was The Cars and Elvis Costello; Domino was Fad Gadget, 4″ Be 2″, Gang of Four, Japan, and more Japan. Domino was The Associates, The Jam, Nina Hagen, Cabaret Voltaire, The Cure, Blancmange, and Joy Division; Nuts & Bolts was ‘Hey Mickey.’”

The Domino Klub charts, circa March 15, 1980. Courtesy of Roy Paul.

Regardless of the nuances that might seem subtle to some ears, all of this music was so new that nightclubs played an essential role in it being heard. Bands toured with support from club DJs, record shops, magazines, and select media outlets. In late 1970s Toronto, only upstart radio station CFNY played such music with consistency.

“Ivar Hamilton would come and listen to the tunes we were spinning, and they would show up on the CFNY playlist,” recalls Gallow. “I also have strong memories of Jeanne Beker and J.D. Roberts coming by regularly to do interviews at the club. The NewMusic on City-TV had just started, and we were a convenient spot for filming.”

Record labels and concert promoters also took note.

“Almost every band The Garys brought into town came by the Domino Klub to hang out,” states Sheppard. “I remember deep conversations with Simple Minds about where they were going musically.”

Sheppard, like many, still recalls the excitement of David Sylvian and Japan’s early visits.

“When Japan came and hung out at the club for a week or so, it was like meeting with the messiah at the time. Japan was so important to us all, as a group and for their fashion sense.”

The members of U2 also became frequent visitors.

“I have a strong memory of seeing U2 at the El Mocambo,” Gallow enthuses. “It was their first Toronto gig. Dave and I grabbed them in the dressing room, and took them to Domino’s by cab.”

“Dave Allen gets credit for being the first [Toronto] DJ to push U2,” adds Sheppard. “Off the back of their first 7-inch single, we knew U2 was going to be huge one day. So we all went down to their first gig at the El Mocambo. The place was not even half full. I remember Dave telling Bono and The Edge that they could be so much better. They were a fixture at 1 Isabella, every time they came back to town, which seemed like every other week.”

Although Domino Klub did not focus on live shows, members of many local bands were among the early core crowd, and did perform.

“Platinum Blonde was like the house band,” says Sheppard. “When they were not playing, they were hanging out. It’s where they started.”

Platinum Blonde at Domino Klub. Photo by Alice Andersen, Wonderland Photography.

“Mark Holmes, founder of Platinum Blonde, was around all the time in the early days,” agrees Gallow. “The English accent came and went, but he was very determined to be a flashy rock star. Good on him, as he achieved his goal.” (Holmes is now also co-owner of College Street venue Mod Club.)

Other homegrown talents, like The Deserters and Nash the Slash, performed. Montreal’s Men Without Hats made their Toronto debut at Domino. N.Y.C. no-wave band Bush Tetras also played there, as did Cali punks Black Flag.

Poster courtesy of Roy Paul.

“There was also a time when Marianne Faithful came up to the booth and requested her own music,” recalls Avery Tanner, a DJ who got his start playing at York University while also a Fine Arts student.

He and friends including DJ Don Cochran (later a Twilight Zone resident) and Arthur Wanner also produced downtown parties where Wanner’s extensive Beta-tape collection of music videos would be shown. In the summer of 1981, Tanner and Wanner were invited to do Wednesday video parties at Domino.

Record labels including PolyGram hopped on board, with Domino’s also hosting themed video nights featuring breaking bands like Killing Joke. The labels, along with hipper media outlets, turned to Domino not just because the club’s DJs played the newest of the new, but also because it attracted a loyal crowd of trendsetters.

“It seemed that people just lived there,” says Tanner. “They were there all week long. It really was a cultural resource centre for freaks of all ilks.”

“It was everyone your parents were afraid of and warned you about,” says early-’80s Domino Klub regular Carson Foster. “We all would read The Face each month, and adopt the fashions immediately afterwards.”

Domino was the very first club Foster went to. He was brought there by “a 15-year-old Rosedale runaway I’d let stay with me,” and kept going back for “the fashion, the music, the danger, the posing.

“Bits of new wave were starting to eradicate the Boston and Kansas frontal lobes I’d grown up with, but Domino was like an immersion tank,” says Foster, who later worked as The Rivoli’s talent booker and founded the Kickass Karaoke series. “The music was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. The common thread was that it was new, and not on any radio station I’d heard. [It was] funk, punk, rap, and rock all mixed together.”

Now a professional grip working in Canadian film, Foster then also had ties to Domino as an employee of fashion-forward Canadian designers Parachute.

Carson Foster outside Parachute. Photo courtesy of him.

“We were fortunate to hook up with the gang from the newly opened Parachute clothing store in Yorkville,” recalls Gallow. “They were from Montreal and were, without a doubt, the most experimental fashion crowd Toronto had ever seen. One sales associate, named Mitchell, would stop traffic at Yonge and Bloor when he strolled down the street. The Parachute crew really cemented our fashion status, as they needed a place to be seen streetwise, and our space and music combo was perfect for them. Things build on one another, and quickly we gained a reputation as a sympathetic spot for new British music and edgy fashion.”

Gallow, Allen, and friends had created a space where expression and originality were paramount. People of varying genders, sexualities and subcultures came together. Many in Domino’s core crowd would become active members of Toronto’s cultural vanguard.

“It was such an amazing group of talented, beautiful people,” enthuses Sheppard. “The scene then was so small that we all developed friendships that last till this day.”

Image courtesy of Roy Paul.

Sheppard mentions many by name, like lighting designer Stephen Pollard, who would go on to work with bands including Psychedelic Furs, U2, and Simple Minds; jewelry designers Ruth Weller and Richard Vermuelen; Tim Blanks, renowned fashion journalist and one-time host of Fashion File; and photographers including Alice Andersen.

“There were a lot of creative people that hung out at Domino,” agrees Andersen, a very familiar face during the club’s first two years.

“What still stands out the most [to me] is that the regulars at Domino bonded, and were like a family. Many maintained relationships outside of the club, and some lived together. I made a lot of good friends at Domino.”

Andersen mentions dozens by name, including visual artist Mike Hansen; lighting tech, Ironhead impresario, and “dancing king” Danny Regan; interior designer Caroline Robbie; special-effects artist Gerald Lukaniuk a.k.a. Score; and the late, great hair stylist John Steinberg, founder of seminal salon Rainbow Room. Many Domino regulars were hair stylists, especially with House of Lords directly across the street.

Some of Andersen’s many photos of Domino’s early devotees are featured in the photo gallery at the top of this page.

“Gunther and Darlene were very open to allowing not only bands to perform, but also to other art forms,” credits Andersen. “Fleur Govaerts and myself created a slide-show story set to music, with Domino kids dressing up as specific characters and participating in the ‘film shoot.’ It was called The Tenement, and we premiered it at Domino.”

Despite all of the cultural collaboration, there were a number of key personnel shifts. Michael Gallow left by the end of 1980, having “realized that Gunther was making all the money through our hard work, contacts, and initiative. He refused to pay anything more than a token fee for the DJ services.”

Gallow opened influential afterhours club Voodoo at 9 St. Joseph in August of 1981. (He now owns marketing company Benchmarx Data Services.) Dave Allen became Voodoo’s main DJ, and many in the Domino crowd shifted allegiances or bounced between venues. Chris Sheppard took over as resident at Domino for a period, followed by Avery Tanner, the club’s inventive full-time DJ who worked most of its last two years.

In early 1984, Domino Klub re-opened as Klub Domino at 279 Yonge St.

Image courtesy of Roy Paul.

“As I recall, the reason for the move was that Gunther’s lease had come up for renewal, and the landlord wanted too much money,” explains Tanner, who moved with the club and was closely involved in the new venue’s renovations. He installed sound and lights, built the DJ booth, and was the core resident during Domino’s first two years on Yonge.

Despite the move to a more commercial part of town—across from the Eaton Centre, no less—the club’s identity as an alternative-music hotspot remained. The new venue had only one room, but it too was up a long narrow flight of stairs. This time, a Centipede video game was found at the entry. Once in the club, patrons could choose between seating areas or a big wooden dancefloor in front of the DJ booth. As a lesson learned from the original location, mirrors were installed on both ends of the dancefloor for those who enjoyed their own reflection. Red and black were the main colours. Black Label beer still reigned supreme—it’s where I had my first one. Canadian cop drama Night Heat even filmed scenes at the new location.

Not surprisingly, most of the original Domino regulars I speak with stress that the second location was not “the real” Domino Klub.

“The second Domino’s was home to the next generation of goths, punks, and electro fans who were too young when [the first location] happened,” says Sheppard. “The only thing it had in common with the original was the name. Isabella was when everything was still so brand new.”

Sheppard did DJ at 279 Yonge in its early days, but left Domino behind later that year to develop Sundays at The Copa. His career exploded when Sheppard became the star DJ at RPM, a host on CFNY, and the main producer behind breakout dance act Love Inc. (He claims to have since earned three Ph.D.s in neuroscience, and says he continues to produce electronic music under a variety of undisclosed project names.)

“The sense that the Isabella location was the ‘real’ Domino is more to do with the cultural mecca that made that place so special,” offers Tanner. “The scene at Dundas was still a wonderful, vibrant, and creative one, but lacked the diversity and grit of Isabella.

“But I don’t feel that there was any compromise or dilution musically,” he emphasizes. “It’s impossible to explain how eclectic the times were. At one moment, I would be playing the ethereal ‘Ghosts‘ by Japan, and the next there would be the thunder of Doc Marten boots pounding the stainless steel floor to ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag.’ The Clash, Heaven 17, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Stranglers were some of my personal favorites.”

DJ Larry Saint and friends in the Klub Domino DJ booth, built by Avery Tanner. Photo courtesy of Saint.

After bringing in friend Larry St. Aubin, a.k.a. DJ Larry Saint, to take over weekends and, eventually, all six nights at the club, Tanner left Klub Domino to spin at the Catwalk, Big Bop and, most famously, New York’s Webster Hall, where he was a star resident from 1992-2012. (He returned to Ontario last summer, and is now a visual artist based in Hamilton.)

Tanner speaks fondly of Domino to this day.

“Gunther Weswaldi was an older, surly man of few words, but I never once had a problem with him. He gave me complete freedom with the music. It may have seemed that Klub Domino was just a business to him and that he was not interested in the cultural movement that it pivoted upon, yet I feel that he was very proud that his baby was such a phenomenon.”

Who else played/worked there: Montreal native Ivan Palmer is synonymous with the last two years of Klub Domino. He was a fixture while Tanner and Larry Saint DJed, and had gained a reputation by spinning at Toronto venues including Zambukie on College, The Catwalk on Richmond, and The Diamond Club on Wednesdays.

Palmer had also DJed at Oz, the nightclub that had moved in to 1 Isabella post-Domino. (The address would later house gay club Komrads.) In 1985, Darlene Weswaldi hired Palmer to play at Klub Domino where he would spin a mix of rock, punk, ska, electrobeat, industrial, new wave, and more multiple nights a week.

“In my view, Klub Domino was the perfect breeding ground for creative people,” says Palmer, perhaps best known and loved for his lean towards goth music and culture, which he championed at Domino.

“Wednesdays were for the Batcavers—a mix of what we now call goth music, and the industrial that was the booming sound of that time,” offers Palmer, listing bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen, Virgin Prunes, Cassandra Complex, Front 242, Sex Gang Children, and Death in June.

He bounced between venues, also including Nuts & Bolts, The Silver Crown, and Club Magic, but Palmer’s Batstrack Wednesdays at Domino were especially popular.

“We would shred garbage bags and hang them on the ceiling, and rip some cheese cloth to dress the whole club up like a cave,” details Palmer. “Many people would come in early to help for free admission. “One week night, all the members of Skinny Puppy came in and stayed the whole night. I played ‘Chew You to Bits‘ by Portion Control, a band that influenced them a lot. Nivek Ogre came up to the booth, gave me the big thumbs up and said, ‘Ivan, Portion Control. Right on!’ I was a really big Skinny Puppy fan, and played a lot of awesome obscure music that night.”

The scene at Klub Domino. Photos courtesy of Silvy Calloway.

Along with Palmer, Stephen Scott, Siobhan O’Flynn, and Philip Brown were some of the last main DJs to work the Domino booth. I danced to all of them, multiple nights a week, during Domino’s closing year—my first living in Toronto.

“I pushed the ska, reggae, and punk revival at the time, as electronica dominated the dancefloors,” says Brown, who played Thursdays and Saturdays. He cites a playlist packed with two-tone ska (The Specials, The Beat), indie and local ska and reggae (The Untouchables, Satellites), original punk (Ramones, Sex Pistols), California hybrids (Fishbone, Dead Kennedys), and more obscure sounds (The Teardrop Explodes, Captain Beefheart).

“Unlike Isabella, the Yonge Street space became more of a punk hangout,” states Brown. “It had more of an edgy, divey vibe to it than Bolts or the Dance Cave, and was not nearly as fashion- and make up–forward as spaces like Voodoo or the Iguana Lounge. Ripped jeans, t-shirts, Doc Martens, kilts and suspenders, black leather, studs, PVC, and silver skull rings were the standard fashion statements.”

Silvy Calloway in a Klub Domino washroom. Photo courtesy of her.

Most Klub Domino staff, like roller-skating waitress Silvy Calloway, and bartender Bastian Cassidy (“she was the heart and soul of the place,” says Brown) shared the aesthetic. Managers—also including Bill Delingat, who worked with Gunther Weswaldi at the original Domino’s; former Nuts & Bolts manager Art Gilewski, and finally Gary Pinter—didn’t necessarily, but they did keep the club humming as best as they could.

“279 Yonge was very low-tech, with a hanging-together-by-tape sound system,” recalls Brown. “It was clear from the lighting system, sound, and bathrooms that absolutely no more money was being spent in the place.”

Poster courtesy of Philip Brown.

What happened to it: “We were a ship that the owners had abandoned, being steered and repaired by the crew, and we had an amazing time doing it,” Brown adds.

“But, as other clubs appeared, with owners and management that saw running a club as a professional enterprise, and as staff jumped ship to better paying or more productive ventures, the last of us knew it was only a matter of time. Rather than just let a piece of Toronto music history shrivel and die, we decided to throw the end-of-an-era, giant blow-out to say thank you, and goodbye.”

Brown, who went on to play at clubs including the Dance Cave and Lizard Lounge, DJed the closing parties in March 1987. (He now works as a real-estate agent in Toronto.) Palmer and Siobhan O’Flynn joined him in closing out the club.

In the mid-’80s, Gunther Weswaldi opened the massive Spectrum Nightclub on the Danforth. Weswaldi also maintained his lease at 279 Yonge, working with people including Bill Delingat (now co-founder of Cashbox magazine; interview requests to him went unanswered) to open both La Cage Aux Folles and Top of the Square Dinner Theatre.

The address is now home to the Hard Rock Café’s Upper Level. Heavily renovated, and almost unrecognizable, the room is available for private and public bookings.

The Hard Rock Cafe upper level.

The spirit of Domino is celebrated through occasional reunion parties, organized by early devotees including Isabelle Moniz and Marika Suha (known during the Domino Klub days as Scary Mary). Palmer, who went on to play at venues such as Spectrum, Catch 22, and his own Night Gallery, now works as a mobile DJ and produces quarterly Batcave parties. Palmer has also DJed at some of the Domino reunions, and says he has plans to produce another. Those interested should keep an eye on his Facebook group, as well as the Domino Klub Alumni group.

Thank you to participants Alice Andersen of Wonderland Photography, Avery Tanner, Carson Foster, Chris Sheppard, Ivan Palmer, Michael Gallow, Phillip Brown, and to Bastian Cassidy, Crystal Watts, David Heymes, Michael Sweenie, Richard Vermuelen, Roy Paul, Ruth Weller-Malchow, Siobhan O’Flynn,and  Silvy Calloway.

The post Then & Now: Domino Klub appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published December 21, 2012 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).

In this edition of Then & Now, we travel back three decades—and up 1,100 feet—to revisit the CN Tower’s beloved in-house discotheque.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Sparkles, 301 Front St. W.

Years in operation: 1979-1991

History: When the construction of Toronto’s iconic CN Tower began in February of 1973, few would have imagined it filled with strobe lights and spandex. The Canadian National Railroad’s Tower would be an impressive engineering feat, serving as both tourist attraction and a communications boon for radio and television broadcasters seeking a taller building on which to place transmitters for stronger signals.

The CN Tower opened to the public in June 26, 1976. At that time, the surrounding area was far from dense or residential. The north side of Front Street was largely parking lots, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre had not been built, nor had the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre). In fact, one accessed the Tower by walking through a pedestrian bridge—starting from where Rogers Centre is now—that crossed over sets of train tracks. There was a reflecting pool at the Tower’s base, and fields nearby.

In 1979, to coincide with the Tower’s third anniversary, one-third of the indoor observation level was developed into a discothèque. The goal was to attract diverse evening crowds to this floor, which lay below the Tower’s rotating 360 Restaurant and above the outdoor observation deck.

The nightclub was given its identity as Sparkles by Thornhill resident Judy Godsman, winner of the Toronto Star’s “Name the Disco” contest, in August 1979. There were more than 15,000 entries, with other name suggestions including Cloud Nine, Glitters, and Infinity.

Sparkles opening invite. Courtesy of Linda Keele.

Godsman and the 25 contest runners-up were invited to Sparkles’ Oct. 4 opening party. A preview article that appeared in the Star that day revealed that 500 guests would be entertained in the new $750,000 dance club by a disco fashion show. (Think flashing lights and skin-hugging jumpsuits.) Two more nights of launch parties followed.

In late-’70s Toronto, there were plenty of places to dance. The city’s more than two million residents finally had options outside of hotels, like Yorkville discos Checkers, Fingers (later known as Chimes), PWDs, Arviv’s, Mingles, and Remy’s. Yonge Street held Hotspurs, The Hippopotamus, Rooney’s, The Ports of Call’s downstairs disco, and more. Not so far away were after-hours hangouts including Le Tube and Katrina’s on St. Joseph, Stages on Yonge, and Peaches on Pears (named after its location on Pears Avenue). Said to be largest of all was Heaven, a glitzy disco in the bowels of the Hudson’s Bay Centre at Bloor and Yonge.

But Sparkles, built at 1,136 feet or 346 metres and promoted as “the highest nightclub in the world,” clearly had the height-and-view advantage. Open as a lounge by day and full-blown disco by night, it would operate every night of the week for more than a decade.

Sparkles promotional shot from a 1982 CN Tower souvenir book. Courtesy of RetrOntario.

Why it was important: “Sparkles was definitely a destination,” says Randy Charlton, a manager at the club from 1980 to 1985. “We had a lot of regulars, and it was surprisingly busy considering attending wasn’t as easy as parking your car and walking in the door. There was the hassle of walking across the pedestrian bridge to get across the railroad tracks, then coming down an escalator, then going up an escalator, getting in line to pay your [usually $5] cover, and then going up an elevator 1,100 feet.

“On a calm night, it would only take a minute to take the elevator up but, if it was windy, the computers in the Tower would automatically slow the elevators to a quarter speed. At the end of the night, if a lot of people had stayed until then, there was always a line-up at the elevators. I think it’s a testimony to Sparkles being a really good experience for the patron that so many people came back week after week and went through the whole process.”

This journey was part of the adventure. When patrons first exited the elevators and walked in to Sparkles, they literally entered a different dimension.

“Think of the room as one third of a donut,” Charlton describes. “Right in the middle of that donut is a horseshoe-shaped dancefloor and an elevated DJ booth.”

The back of the DJ booth faced out over the city while the dancefloor was directly in front of it. Red booths and stainless-steel tables were positioned alongside windows that curved around the room. And although its view may have been Sparkles’ shiniest star, the club’s lighting and effects certainly commanded attention, too. There were more than 50 strobes, loads of neon tube lights, lasers, smoke machines, and so many bells and whistles that the DJ booth was said to resemble a plane cockpit because of its high-tech lighting-control panel. Mirrors reflected it all back while people also responded to Sparkles’ booming soundsystem.

The New York Times, reporting on Sparkles’ opening in an October 10, 1979 article titled “A New High for Disco in Toronto’s Tower,” stated that the sound and light system had been installed by John Savill, employee of Bacchus International Discotheque Services of London. (Savill passed away in the 1980s.) The Times also revealed that fellow Brit and Bacchus talent Paul Cohen, “a disc jockey who is working his way around the world,” was the night’s DJ. Cohen would go on to be one of Sparkles’ longest-serving resident spinners.

The fact that CN would hire an international DJ service to supply equipment and talent wasn’t a shocker—this was still a fairly common practice in hotels and more corporate environments—but it certainly surprised the local DJ community.

“There’d been great rumours about who was going to get hired at Sparkles,” recalls songwriter and producer Vince Degiorgio, then a DJ at Le Tube and employee of Disco Sounds, one of Canada’s earliest dance-music shops.

“The fascination of seeing Sparkles for the first time was there but, since nobody we knew got the DJ job, the feeling was ‘the outsiders are coming in,’ and people weren’t sure what to make of them. The first time I went up, I was completely horrified, because there was this guy from England and his people, and they talked over everything. To a disco purist, that was utter sacrilege. We would call ‘last call,’ but that was the only time in a bar you would ever use the microphone.”

That said, Degiorgio and many other local DJs did take in Sparkle’s sights and sounds.

“In the beginning especially, it was a real club and absolutely a place to go, although I don’t know how much people were going for the music,” Degiorgio recounts. “Sparkles was an event. A lot of people would go to the CN Tower first, and then they’d go to the after-hours spots, like Le Tube or even Peaches or Chimes, which stayed open until 4 a.m.”

DJ Paul Cohen (right) with Sparkles waitress Suzanne. Photo courtesy of David Kurtz.

One thing the Bacchus-hired DJs understood above all else: They had to do more than play music. They had to entertain. Paul Cohen, Sparkles’ on-and-off anchor DJ until the mid-’80s, is said to have set quite the example.

“I remember one Halloween, Paul was made up as Dracula, and we were all dressed up like pallbearers,” recalls Charlton. “At midnight, we carried a coffin through the crowd, and then Paul sprung out of it and started DJing.”

“Paul was one of the greatest DJs and entertainers I have ever met,” says David Kurtz, a Toronto-born DJ who started at Sparkles in 1979 as Cohen’s back-up, signed a contract with Bacchus, and played at the Tower until 1981 during his first stint there.

“Paul, who was my mentor and changed my life forever when he hired me, is someone I will always respect.” (Cohen later went on to DJ in the Middle East, but left the nightlife behind when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. He now lives in the U.S.).

Another DJ who enjoyed his dual residency with Cohen—Sparkles had two DJs on most evenings, trading back and forth between the decks and lights—was fellow Brit Alan “Gibbo” Gibson. Hailing from Birmingham, where he was an established DJ by the age of 19, Gibson arrived in Toronto in 1985 as a Bacchus talent who’d lived and played briefly in Norway, Thailand, and Germany.

“When Bacchus tried to hire me, I insisted on having [a residency at] Sparkles within a year of signing with them,” Gibson recalls. “They said it was impossible as it could only be local DJs, but we worked it out.”

At the age of 22, Gibson worked six nights a week alongside Cohen. He may have only landed a six-month work visa, but Gibson’s personality was so huge he made a lasting impression.

“Alan was a great mixer, and got up to all kinds of antics,” says Charlton, who later named a son after Gibson. “When we hosted a party for [Liberal Party candidate] John Turner, who was running for Prime Minister and later won, Alan stood in the background of a photo wearing those glasses where the eyeballs come up on springs. Any time anybody was in there shooting a news story, his head would pop up around the corner. He was certainly a character.”

“I wore a wig, red suit and tails, red bow tie, red shoes, and generally tried to be the life of the party,” says Gibson of the Turner party. “I liked to chat, be funny, do dedications, make fun of people or myself. I just had to play the clown, play the pop, and please the people. Hence, the wigs, pink suits, huge glasses, juggling, moonwalking, dancing on the speakers or the bar or the tables. I’d spin on my back on the floor when there was space. I even ate fire, but the low ceiling and fire regulations soon put paid to that! I also did magic tricks at tables during early evening or on quiet nights.”

Paul Cohen (left) and Alan Gibson (centre) with friends. Photo courtesy of Gibson.

While Charlton regales me with tales of Gibson mixing bits of Monty Python into Spandau Ballet’s “True,” the DJ mentions favourite tracks of the time including Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls,” Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” Psychedelic Furs’ “Heartbeat,” and Pukka Orchestra’s “Cherry Beach Express,” which he plays to this day.

“I realized that, in a club like Sparkles, the music’s familiarity was key,” emphasizes Gibson by email. “[The patrons] were office workers on a night out, tourists looking for a good time, or girls and couples looking to hear the songs they heard on the radio.

Sparkles playlist. Courtesy of Alan Gibson.

“Sure, I could mix with the best of them, but I realized that our guests wanted to hear the three-minute pop song that they knew—not some poser DJ who could scratch, mix or whatever. I think I went against the grain compared to the rest of T.O. at that time.”

“I remember Alan as being a little bit fearless,” comments Degiorgio, who also co-ran T.O.P.A. (Toronto Programmers Association), an important 1980s DJ pool of which Sparkles’ DJs were members. “Alan was a fusionist; he was unafraid to play New Romantic stuff alongside the productions of people like Bobby Orlando. He loves to be a part of the party.”

Following Gibson’s departure in late summer 1985, Toronto native David Kurtz returned to serve as Sparkles’ lead DJ for the next two years. By then, he’d worked for Bacchus in clubs across the U.K., Norway, Switzerland, and Thailand.

David Kurtz (left) and Tony Meredith (right) with friend Kim Race at Sparkles.
Photo courtesy of Kurtz.

Kurtz had learned more about the DJ-as-entertainer role, and was most frequently paired in the Sparkles booth with “my great partner in crime, Tony Meredith a.k.a. Tony T.”

Meredith, who’d been a regular on 1970s CityTV dance program Boogie, had been hired at Sparkles after his dance group performed one night and he particularly impressed.

“I took the mic and energized the crowd,” says Meredith who then worked for years as a Sparkles hype man, lighting person, and DJ.

“Tony and I were more than just DJs,” says Kurtz. “We entertained, rapping and dancing in sync, back before most DJs even thought to do it. The music we played had rhythm and soul. We were very heavy into artists like Earth Wind and Fire, The Whispers, Kool and the Gang, and Rick James. We played mostly commercial stuff but, every now and then, we found some strange, great dance groove and played the hell out of it.”

“We had to swing it a bit to the audience that was there, but we got to take some chances too, like running Bette Midler’s ‘The Rose’ over rap beats—that kind of thing,” Meredith tells me in a phone call from Oslo, where he and Kurtz now both live. “Sometimes, we could go a little bit off, but at the CN Tower you had to be versatile. You had to create magic.”

Photo courtesy of Alan Gibson.

By all accounts, Sparkles’ crowds were a mix of suburbanites, tourists and downtowners, generally dressed with great care, ready to party and pose.

“The crowd was made up of the rich and famous as well as suburban yuppies and everything in between,” describes Kurtz. “The people who were regulars came out almost every night. They loved good music and danced to anything we threw at them. Our amps would overheat on the weekends, with the excessive heat caused by way too many people on the dancefloor and around the booth.”

Meredith recalls that some in the audience especially stood out.

“There were some regulars who’d just come in and go off,” he chuckles. “There was a model named Dorset who’d come in and dance and dance. There were a number of Korean and Filipino dancers who’d really get down. Certain people just added a whole lot while others sat and watched.”

Meredith also speaks highly of DJ Julie Ley, with whom he was partnered in the booth in the early ’80s.

“We had something special going on,” says Meredith of the DJ, who got her start at Sparkles. “Julie has such a beautiful personality and that great, raspy voice on the microphone. I called her ‘Tina Turner on the wheels of steel.’ We had so much fun, and would just blow that place out.”

Ley had been spotted working the door in a club by a Juliana’s Sound Services rep, who dug her voice, presence, and clear love of music. (Juliana’s bought Bacchus in 1982, and the two international companies provided club services under both names.)

“A few lessons, and they threw me into the lion’s den,” is how Ley describes it. “There I was, at the highest nightclub in the world! I had to find my own rhythm, not only in music but also in personality. I talked a lot on the mic, with a tambourine in hand, just getting down with the sound. We had three turntables, which made it interesting to play. There was lots of scratching, and double playing on the same song.”

One of only a handful of women spinning in Toronto at time, Ley went on to DJ for 20 years, becoming a lesbian icon as she injected huge energy and hits into mainstay clubs including Togethers, Chez Moi, and The Rose.

Julie Ley (left) and Tony Meredith. Photo courtesy of Meredith.

Who else played/worked there: Numerous DJs added their playlists and personalities to Sparkles over the years, including yet another Brit, DJ Tony TG. In the early-to-mid-1980s, Sundays featured the sounds of swing and big bands, with host Paul Fisher of CHFI. Mondays were devoted to oldies, with CFTR personalities Mike Cooper and Dan Williamson alternating from week-to-week.

There were occasional concerts, ranging from the jazz of Jim Galloway and The Metro Stompers to the new wave of Michaele Jordana of The Poles, a local band who had an underground hit in the form of 1977 single “CN Tower.”

Sparkles also hosted loads of fashion shows, including one featuring the designs of Gloria Vanderbilt in 1980. But lesser-known is the fact that the disco was taken over by some cool overnight events that same year.

“These parties would go all night, from midnight on, in Sparkles and the entire indoor observation level,” explains Charlton. “They would go until daybreak; the party would end, and it would turn back into the observation level.”

On Victoria Day weekend, a group of promoters and friends associated with the clubs Stages and Dudes presented a spectacularly gay affair with Sunrise High, featuring star DJ Greg Howlett. More than 1,000 people attended.

Later in 1980, punks and new wavers got their all-night play time in the Tower at parties with names like Spaced Out and Paradise Lost. Not surprisingly, Sparkles was also a bit of a celebrity magnet.

Paradise Lost memories. Courtesy of Isabel Moniz.

“There was no place anywhere else where there was a dance club 1,100 feet in the air, overlooking a major city,” says Charlton. “Sparkles drew its fair share of celebrities. Andy Gibb appeared in a Mirvish musical at The Royal Alex, so he was frequently up there. I remember Peter Fonda being up for an event, and Peter O’Toole, too, when he was in town shooting a TV version of Pygmalion with Margot Kidder.

Spaced Out memories. Courtesy of Michael Sweenie.

Meredith, being both personable and a great cook, became friends with people he met at Sparkles—including Gibb, Tina Turner, her piano player Kenny Moore, and members of The Harlem Globetrotters—and would host stars and Sparkles’ staff alike at his Dundas and Sherbourne condo. (Today, he’s a popular chef in Oslo and owner of cross-cultural restaurant The Backyard.)

There was, of course, also dozens of managers, bartenders, waitresses, and other staff that made Sparkles run over the years. Many mention managers including Ahmad Ali, Pepi (Margaret) Perenyi, and Guy LeBlanc. Gareth Brown, who would later make his mark as a rock promoter and manager of clubs including Rock & Roll Heaven, was among Sparkles’ security staff. Charlton, who later became main manager at The Diamond Club, brought there with him Sparkles’ bar staff, including Pat Violo (co-owner of Catch 22 and now Velvet Underground) and Caroline Toth.

Another early Sparkles bartender was Victor Miller, founder of the long running Bartending School of Ontario and a familiar face for those who went to Toronto live music venues Piccadilly Tube and Blue Note. Miller still remembers logistical frustrations at Sparkles, including a constant lack of clean drink glasses and the club’s early adoption of an automated drink-dispensing system.

“The bar was computerized, and this was unique, but a real pain in the ass,” writes Miller in an email. “It did not allow us to make all the cocktails that were asked for due to poor programming by the management. It also did not allow us to monitor shots, so many would become quite drunk in a short time.

“Maybe the altitude had something to do with this fact. Many people dressed to the nines were sick in the elevator and lobby while leaving for home.”

The Tower’s elevators figure into many a story.

“I had one golden rule: before I got in the elevator to either go up or down, I went to the bathroom and peed first,” laughs Charlton. “In my five years, never once did I get stuck in an elevator, and I think I’m the only employee that didn’t.

“Also, I must say that I never got tired of looking out the windows. The view was absolutely outstanding. We were on the side of the Tower from which you could see the TD Centre and Bank of Montreal buildings, and Union Station. You could see the trace of the lake, all the way to Niagara Falls and the lights from Rochester on a clear night. Amazing.”

David Kurtz (second from right) and friends at Sparkles. Photo courtesy of Kurtz.

Similarly, David Kurtz—now a marketing manager for Norwegian publications Reis and Travel News—remains friends with many DJs he met at Sparkles, including fellow Toronto native Tony Meredith, the godfather of his children.

Sparkles got a sound and lighting overhaul in 1985, when management ended their contract with Bacchus/Juliana’s. Still, it remained busy right into the late-’80s.

DJ/producer Paul Grace, who played there for about three years following the club’s transition away from Bacchus’ DJs, shares some insights into the period.

“You’d think a place like that wouldn’t do so well, in terms of getting a solid local crowd, but they did,” he says. “I loved the space, and enjoyed working there, but I didn’t like the management. Things started to get really corporate. They’d even close the dancefloor down for certain corporate parties. You just don’t do that.”

While I was unable to locate anyone who could be specific about decisions leading to Sparkles’ closure, Toronto Star listings reveal that the venue was promoted as more of a dining room and lounge by early 1991. It closed later that year for renovations.

Flyer for the Vertigo rave designed by Terence ‘Teeloo’ Leung (original was die-cut and folded). Courtesy of Claudio Santon.

In May 1992, the space relaunched as pop, jazz and R&B lounge, Horizons. Live acts like The Hi-Lites performed weekends while DJ George Andrew played similar sounds throughout the week. Occasional special events still took place in the venue, including the legendary Vertigo rave produced by Atlantis (Don ‘Dr. Trance’ Berns, Iain McPherson, Claudio Santon, and James K) in October of 1993.

Today, the space is known as upscale bistro and private event venue Horizons Restaurant.

Thank you to participants Alan Gibson, David Kurtz, Julie Ley, Paul Grace, Randy Charlton, Tony Meredith, Victor Miller, and Vince Degiorgio. Thanks also to Barry Harris, Claudio Santon, Ed Conroy of Retrontario, Irene Knight (PR for CN Tower), Isabel Moniz, Linda Keele, Lorne Goldblum, Michael Sweenie, Timothy Hopton of Bacchus, and the Vintage Toronto community.

The post Then & Now: Sparkles appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published December 4, 2012 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).

With the help of two rare DJ mixes, we revisit the early-‘80s Yonge Street club that provided Toronto’s gay community with a safe haven and showcased cutting-edge dance-music sounds, before the spectre of AIDS brought the party to a close.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Stages, 530 Yonge

Years in operation: 1977-1984

History: The northwest corner of Yonge and Breadalbane was once occupied by the Hotel Breadalbane. In 1945, the Bolter family purchased the hotel and would transform the downstairs of 530 Yonge into The Parkside Tavern. The Bolters also owned The St. Charles Tavern, at 488 Yonge. By the mid-1960s, both taverns were known to be gay bars.

At that point in history, gay nightlife in Toronto was still very much underground. It was common for the heterosexual owners of gay bars to be contemptuous of their clientele. This seems to have been the situation at The Parkside, a dingy beer hall largely frequented by a daytime crowd. The Parkside’s owners allowed police to regularly spy on patrons in the washrooms, waiting to nab men engaged in any sort of sexual acts. Arrests were made, and the practice continued throughout the 1970s, even as gay activists organized leafleting campaigns and called for boycotts of the bar.

These conflicts were characteristic of the time. During the mid-to-late-1970s, Yonge Street was the main artery of Toronto gay social life (it would shift to Church in the mid-1980s). Those looking to dance could hit a number of spots near Yonge and Wellesley, like The Manatee, The Quest, Katrina’s, Club David’s, The Maygay (later Charly’s), and Cornelius, which sat above biker bar The Gasworks. By 1977, there were even two gay-owned bars in the area: The Barn, opened by Janko Naglic at 418 Church, and small cruise bar Dudes, opened by Roger Wilkes, a founder of the York University Homophile Association, and his partner David Payne in an alley just behind The Parkside.

While there were lots of options to dance and cruise, Yonge and its surrounding streets were not necessarily safe for queer people. Not only did the police frequently harass gay hangouts (most notoriously during the 1981 bathhouse raids), gay men and lesbians were all-too-often physically attacked.

“Those were the days when, on Halloween, people would throw eggs and ink at drag queens,” says Arnie Kliger, the man who would open Stages. “It also wasn’t particularly safe for gays to walk around the side streets.”

Kliger had both safety and glamour in mind when he worked with partner Stephen Cohen to open after-hours gay disco Stages. Its location, above The Parkside, had housed numerous clubs since the late-’60s, among them The August Club, Mama Cooper’s, The Milkbar, Quasimodo, and Bimbo’s.

Influenced largely by New York gay and after-hours clubs like The Saint, Studio 54, and 12 West, Kliger and Cohen chose to open an unlicensed dance club where music, dancing, and men would be the focus. There was nothing like it in Toronto at the time.

Stages’ doors opened at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 1977. People lined up to begin the new year in this new disco that would raise the bar for late-night dancing in Toronto.

“Many of the straight-owned clubs were rundown, the owners didn’t care, and just wanted to make a buck,” recalls DJ/producer Barry Harris. “Charly’s upstairs at the St. Charles Tavern was a good example of that. The gay crowd accepted it for years as gay clubs were still somewhat taboo, but eventually stopped supporting them.

“Stages was opened by an owner who appreciated good sound, good quality everything, and took care of his customers.”

Courtesy of Andrée Emond.

Why it was important: “We wanted to offer a different late-night experience, and take the whole party to a higher, better level,” says Kliger of his venture with Cohen (who would depart a few years after the Stages’ opening to pursue his main interests in design and architecture).

Kliger was committed to creating an experience as good as—or better than—those he had at the New York and San Francisco clubs he frequented. When patrons made it through the line that ran up the stairs to Stages, they turned left, paid a small cover (generally $5-$8) and walked in to a sizable but intimate rectangular room with a large wooden dancefloor in the middle. At the far end was a long bar that sold juice, water, and oodles of Perrier. The bar was adorned with bouquets of flowers and trays of fresh fruit, while bartenders would also pull out boxes of percussive instruments—tambourines, bongos, maracas—for customers to play. On the east and west walls, overlooking the dancefloor, were two built-in bleachers that ascended almost to the ceiling. They were deep and upholstered, with huge custom cushions adding to the comfort.

“Arnie Kliger was the best bar manager Toronto ever had,” DJ/producer Paul Grace tells me. “Arnie wanted a space where he would be comfortable and happy partying—one that was safe, where there were no problems. He set up the club so people could relax.”

Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.

Kliger created membership cards for Stages, and hired former policeman Bob Bush, nicknamed Gloves, to keep potential troublemakers out.

“Gloves was an ex-London bobby, and he was our sole security man,” Kliger says. “He could take care of 10 guys trying to come up that stairway. In the entire time Stages was open, there was never a problem inside—no fights, nothing. I think that speaks volumes.

“We wanted people to have a safe place when they came in with their friends, all twisted and bent,” Kliger adds. “They knew that once they got off of Yonge Street and through those doors, they were secure to do whatever they wanted—party, take their shirt off, play a drum, whatever. Nobody came there for an hour; they stayed till morning. Most of our clientele carried sunglasses.”

Stages ran Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with doors generally opening at 11 p.m. and music heard until 6 a.m. or later. The 600-capacity club attracted large, loyal crowds, primarily of gay men, but also lesbians and straight folks attracted to the music and vibe.

“Stages was the only club I had ever heard of at the time that was mixed, gay and straight,” recalls Harris, an occasional customer who would later fill in as a guest DJ there. “I believe this was unusual, but was also something that made Stages very ‘chic.’”

“Fridays were definitely more straight, or mixed, but Stages was a place that was very ‘tolerant’ on any night, sort of setting up for a sensibility the Twilight Zone carried through,” recalls musician, producer and photographer Don Pyle, a Stages regular for years after his sister introduced him to the club in 1979.

“More than tolerant, Stages had a slightly decadent feel because it was night people and pretty sexual on the dancefloor, with all orientations having fun.”

Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.

Club people flocked to Stages for many reasons, with its stellar sound and lighting high on the list.

“The lights came from New York’s Times Square Lighting,” says Kliger. “I couldn’t afford [renowned sound designer] Richard Long, but I copied his music systems.”

“Stages was one of those magical clubs you just had to experience,” states Paul Grace. “It’s still my favourite club, and that includes [clubs in] New York. It was relatively small, but had a killer soundsystem and great lights. There were these lovely big scoop speakers for bass that you could actually crawl into. I knew guys who would, and then they’d trip on the bass all night.”

“On the dancefloor, it was like a nice, warm fuzzy blanket because you were cocooned in the lights and the music,” recalls Richard “Bambi” McNicoll, a Stages lighting tech from 1982.

“The speakers completely surrounded you. Stages was intimate and had sound that could have been in a club three times its size. The lighting was also far ahead of its time. Where most club lighting systems were pretty static and the fixtures stayed where they were, what made Stages so unique was that you could change the light show every week—and that’s what I did.”

Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.

McNicoll, who came to Stages after working lights at Charly’s, was shown the ropes by lighting woman Andrée Emond. A veteran of venues including Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven, Emond worked at Stages from 1980 to 1983, brought in by one of her best friends, legendary Toronto DJ Greg Howlett. Emond and McNicoll would squeeze themselves into Stages’ tiny booth, working to create energy and mood directly beside DJs including Howlett, Wally MacDonald and, later, Paul Grace.

Emond recalls taping up her fingers to work the many toggle switches on Stages’ vertical lighting board, built into the wall. The DJ booth was directly on the edge of Stages’ dancefloor, with nothing but wire fencing separating crew from crowd. Five mirror balls were clustered in the dancefloor’s centre.

“The square dancefloor had a fairly low ceiling—pin spots, spinners and strobe lights were set above and on a suspended industrial grid that covered it,” says Emond. “But it was the Christmas lights and the Kelly controller that blew me away. There were at least 1,500 hundred lights that could be changed to provide rows of basic colours.

“The crowd would scream with excitement when those blasts of bright light came perfectly timed with the music. I learned not to be afraid of the dark, and to let music flow through my hands at Stages. Greg and Wally’s music, mixes, and effects provided all of my cues.”

Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.

Stages, as all the people I interviewed tell me, was largely defined by its music. The crowds were deep into new sounds, and they were educated by some of the greatest dance-music pioneers this city has ever produced.

“The two DJs who played Stages for years were Greg Howlett and Wally MacDonald, both very good, with very different styles,” says Grace, who danced at Stages during the years when he himself was DJing at venues including Cornelius, the CN Tower’s Sparkles discotheque, and Yorkville’s Bellair Café.

“Wally played lots of weird shit—he liked to wake the crowd up all the time—whereas Greg was the master of the continuous mix. He’d start at 11 o’clock, slowly build the tempo up, and by 4 a.m. he’d be around 140bpm, then start to bring it down. By 5 a.m., he was down below 120 bpm, getting sleazy. It was very trippy and wonderful.”

MacDonald—who DJed during Stages’ earliest years, as did his brother Larry on occasion—was also adored for his impeccable mixing, late-night sleaze sets and devotion to underground disco.

“Wally loved to twist songs around and inside out,” says Barry Harris. “He also used a reel-to-reel tape machine to fuck with people’s heads by using the delay playback, bringing the echo in and out. In 1979, DJ mixers were just mixers; there was no delay, reverb, echo or effects at the time. It was very difficult to even find a mixer to buy, so Wally was doing a lot of really innovative and creative DJing.”

MacDonald was also a pioneering remix artist. He reworked songs like Antonio Rodriguez’s “La Bamba” and Harlow’s “Take Off” into epic extended versions. MacDonald’s masterful remix of Amanda Lear’s “Follow Me” sounds fresh to this day.

“Wally influenced me greatly during my entire DJ and remix career,” says Harris, who started DJing in 1983 at Dudes (whose address, coincidentally, is now home to pro-audio shop Saved By Technology).

“I remember one Sunday, Wally played “At Midnight” by T- Connection,” Harris continues. ”He was playing a reel-to-reel tape version that he had re-edited himself. He extended the big percussion intro and played bits and pieces of ‘I Will Survive’ intro overtop. Now, something like that sounds like no big deal, but at the time, no DJ used to remix anything like this—they simply played the records.

“Another time he played “Heroes” by Big Ben Tribe, then somehow mixed into the original David Bowie version. Brilliant! By the end, the whole crowd started applauding. I had never seen an audience applaud a DJ.”

MacDonald would bounce between clubs as a resident DJ, also playing venues like Sugars, 18 East, The Albany, and Wonder Bar.

Greg Howlett would soon become Stages’ main music man. This former resident DJ at Le Tube was known to play joyful, uplifting dance music, with a lean towards dancefloor classics and disco edits, like “Souvenirs” by Voyage and Yvonne Elliman’s “Love Pains.”

“Greg was our house DJ for at least five years,” enthuses Kliger. “Greg was the star. He had such a following, and an amazing ability to read the crowd and do it right. I trusted him 9,000 per cent.”

“I loved listening to Greg, and I try to emulate him to this day,” offers Grace. “He would play for hours, and you’d never know when one record was going into another. He was so smooth, and really worked at that. He constantly had a new set of stuff he’d play each night.”

DJ Greg Howlett. Photo courtesy of Andrée Emond.

Andrée Emond shares a favourite example of Howlett’s confidence behind the decks.

“I will never forget one evening with Greg. The crowd was particularly bored, so he turned off the turntable and stared at them. They stood there, shocked. Once the drone came to a complete stop, he played their favourite song of the day. Everyone went crazy and the rest of the night was amazing.”

Both Howlett and MacDonald were trendsetters, but took different paths as dance music began to splinter.

“The big ‘disco crash’ occurred around 1979,” Harris explains. “Dance music was fragmenting, and everyone was very confused as to where club music was going. It was the beginning of a new decade, new attitude. New wave was now cool, and disco was not. So the ‘cool’ Stages people followed the trend; my perception is they followed Wally, who really embraced the new sound as a fearless risk-taker. Greg did not follow the new sound, and would not—no way. He was going to stick to what he felt was ‘gay music.’ Greg stuck to his guns, and took a lot of shit and attitude from a lot of people.”

“Wally MacDonald was the only gay club DJ in town playing new dance music that had come out of post-punk or early electronic scenes,” confirms Pyle, author of Toronto punk–history book Trouble in the Camera Club.

“Some songs I distinctly remember being very excited to hear in a gay club were ‘Nowhere Girl’ by B-Movie, ‘I Travel’ by Simple Minds and ‘Numbers’ by Kraftwerk. ‘Numbers’ was always a very late-night track, with the breakdown at the end being used to shift the mood.”

“Stages was an amazing dance club because of the DJs, and when it came to mixing, no one was better than Wally,” enthuses Lena K, former bartender at restaurants like Le Pigale, Cornelius above Gasworks, and a regular at Stages for most of its existence, especially on the eclectic Sunday nights. “I still feel the electricity run through me when I think about Wally’s mixes.”

As the disco-vs.-new-wave battles played out on Stages’ dancefloor during the early ’80s, MacDonald was let go from the club, and then notably rehired in January of 1983.

DJ Wally MacDonald. Photo courtesy of Lorne Goldblum.

Stages had a devoted following. Like all the best nightclubs, it fostered both a feeling and a community.

“I knew what I wanted to see, and have people feel: happy, happy, happy,” says Kliger. “And they were. We had the tambourines, the fan dancers, the whole works going. I made the place and gave people somewhere to express themselves, but the crowd created it for themselves.

“I’m sure some of the drugs contributed to this”—poppers and MDA were the main substances of the day—”but there was a feeling of membership, camaraderie, friendship, love. We fed a feeling, and it worked.”

Pyle also fondly recalls the club’s festive vibe. “It was a very celebratory space. Everyone really got down. I recall men in skirts, cheerleader outfits, fan dancers. There was so much excitement and anticipation.”

Kliger tells the tale of an evening when uniforms were especially prominent: “There was a fetish party one night on Church Street, with everything: guys dressed up in police uniforms, there were bras and garter belts, transsexuals, you name it. We had very heavy theatre-type dry ice at Stages—we didn’t use the cheap smoke—and it creates a very heavy steam. We would pump that place so full of dry-ice smoke that you couldn’t see yourself, with gigantic fans that would suck the air out onto Yonge.

“This night was in January and, when I turned the fans on, some people on the street thought the building was on fire. Toronto Fire responded quickly, came running up the stairs, and I happened to be at the front door. I looked down the stairs and said to Bob, the bouncer, ‘Don’t charge them. They’ve got great outfits.’ I got pushed up against the wall with an axe by a fireman telling me to get out of the way, and then I realized my mistake. Greg, being as sharp as he was, put on the song ‘Fire in my Heart.’”

Lighting man McNicoll also recalls a strategic use of the dry ice machine.

“It wasn’t used all that much, because proper dry ice costs a lot. Back during the days of ‘It’s Raining Men,’ somebody decided to splurge. The dry ice came out over the dancefloor through dryer hoses and billowed down. As soon as it did, everybody opened umbrellas and started dancing around with them. Stages was one of those mad places where every weekend, something happened.”

Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.

Who else played/worked there: Paul Grace came onboard at Stages after a young Chris Sheppard had brought more new wave to Fridays and a stretch of Sundays.

“Fridays were fairly mixed, a bit trendy, and eventually became more alternative in music and everything else,” explains Kliger. “That’s where Chris came in, later. He ran the Friday switchover to alternative music and club kids in crazy outfits—’Rock Lobster’ and all that kind of stuff. I just didn’t understand it because I’m hardcore gay, but I learned.”

Kliger did understand the allure of late-night socializing, and was equally at home mingling with the owners of clubs including Le Tube and Twilight Zone, as well as TIFF (then still known as the Festival of Festivals) party planners. Stages, in fact, hosted some of the film fest’s earliest parties, with appearances from celebs like Tom Cruise, Peter O’Toole, Richard Chamberlain, and Kathleen Turner.

Tina Turner also paid the club a visit, as did longtime gay favourite Eartha Kitt.

“Eartha Kitt happened to be playing at the Royal York’s Imperial Room—it was at the time that ‘Where Is My Man?’ was big—and I did everything I could to get her up to Stages,” shares Kliger. “We sent flowers, notes, a bottle of scotch, and begged her to come up. We sent a limousine to the Royal York and, sure enough, she bit. Greg had the back-up tracks going and we had a microphone ready, even though she wasn’t engaged to perform. She loved it so much she grabbed the mic and did the song.”

Stages’ staff tended to be just as attractive as the celebs they served.

“The staff and family at Stages were incredible, along with being some of the beautiful men you ever saw,” says Emond, citing people like bartender/manager Andy Armstrong and cashier John Bannerman.

“It was a casting call,” agrees Kliger. “We wanted to have the best-looking people with their shirts off. The bartenders were more than bartenders; they were friendly, they were happy, and, in the middle of the night, if it got hot—and it would get really hot in there—we’d send them out on the dancefloor with trays of watermelon and cantaloupe, oranges, ice, popsicles and water. Clubs didn’t do that.”

Stages bartender Brent Storey, who would later be an integral staffer at gay bar Boots,  was also one of Toronto’s most avid of fan dancers.

“There were a lot of fan dancers at Stages,” says Grace. “When it was busy, they would dance around the edges and, as the night got later, and people started to leave, these guys would start taking over the dancefloor, until finally, the whole floor was full of fan players.”

The fan dancers were a key part of Stages’ core family, and certainly helped to establish the club as decidedly gay at a time when more sexually ambiguous alternative clubs, like Voodoo and Nuts & Bolts, appeared on the scene.

“There was no shortage of places to dance, but nothing could touch Stages—Stages was like finding Mecca,” says Lena K, who now works in the legal field, specializing in intellectual property law. “Although I had gone to other dance clubs, there was no other place where I felt as safe and blissfully free to just be me. I made real friends there, most of whom have been lost to AIDS, but a handful remain and are still friends over 30 years later. That club brought us together every weekend, and that’s some kind of special thing.”

Greg Howlett’s calling card. Courtesy of Andrée Emond.

What happened to it: By 1982, there was talk of GRID, a.k.a. gay-related immune deficiency, later to be known as AIDS. Many in the gay community began to die in this time of great uncertainty.

“The AIDS crisis was just beginning, and people were really afraid,” shares McNicoll, who would later work the lights at clubs including Boots and Chaps. “We were losing a lot of artists and friends, and nobody really knew what was going on, so there was a lot of fear. I think that really had a detrimental effect on club life as a whole. There was a tremendous loss.”

Both Greg Howlett (who would go on to heat dancefloors at clubs including Komrads and Chaps) and Wally MacDonald passed away from HIV-related complications in the 1990s.

“I made and lost many friends at Stages,” says Emond, who later worked the lights at both The Copa and The Diamond, and is now a web developer and teacher. “I still miss the wonderful people I met, and was honoured to play with during that special time. The memories are bittersweet.”

But Stages also closed because Kliger felt it was time.

“It started running out of steam,” he offers. “I felt that what could be done there had already been done, and I was out of themes and ideas. I wanted to take the Stages family out on a high note, so I made the decision that it was best to put a period at the end of a sentence.”

Stages held a final New Year’s Eve party on December 31, 1983 and closed in early 1984. Within weeks, Kliger was hired by the Chrysalis group to transform the former Jarvis Tavern into gay club Bar 101. (Years later, the same space would become Tazmanian Ballroom, home of the infamous Rock & Roll Fag Bar.) Kliger later managed venues including The Copa, Bemelman’s, and the Bellair Café before moving into the hotel business.

Barry Harris would follow Kliger to DJ at both Bar 101 and The Copa, before becoming a resident at Charles Khabouth’s Stilife. He later had a huge production and remix career as half of both Kon Kan and Thunderpuss. More recently, Harris has returned to his rock roots and is working on an as-yet unnamed project.

Paul Grace also became an in-demand producer/remixer, particularly as a member of Boomtang Boys. He then turned his talents to scoring for film and television, was a music consultant for the TV show Queer As Folk, and maintains a home studio.

Before all of this, Grace partnered with Brent Storey and David Strand to re-open the Stages space as Avalon in 1984. About a year later, the upstairs of 530 Yonge briefly reopened as Changes. Both it and The Parkside Tavern below closed in March of 1986 to make way for a Burger King. The building is now a Sobeys Express. [Addendum: the Sobey’s has since closed, with the location listed for retail opportunities.]

Thank you to interviewees Andrée Emond, Arnie Kliger, Barry Harris, Don Pyle, Lena K, Paul Grace, and Richard McNicoll, and to Carlos Mondesir, Eric Robertson, and James Vandervoort. Special mention to Lorne Goldblum for the DJ mixes and to the late Rick Bébout for his Promiscuous Affections documentation of gay Toronto social life.

The post Then & Now: Stages appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published June 21, 2012 by The Grid online (TheGridTO.com).

In this edition of her nightlife-history series, Denise Benson takes us back to the after-hours nightclub that helped mobilize Toronto’s gay-rights movement in the 1980s.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Komrads, 1 Isabella St.

Years in operation: 1985-1991

History: In 1980s’ Toronto, street corners and dance clubs still served as essential meeting spots for gays and other marginalized communities. The stretch of Isabella closest to Yonge called out to many, especially after dark.

On the outer edges of the Church and Wellesley-centred gay village, the corner was close to popular homo haunts including Yonge Street’s St. Charles Tavern, Trax, and the Parkside Tavern, with gay dance club Stages above it. Nearby bathhouses were plentiful, Queen’s Park was still a major pick-up spot, and easy bar-hopping meant that gay men had lots of options even in those pre-Grindr days.

“The Yonge and Isabella area was really amazingly gay,” recalls event producer Maxwell Blandford, once a key figure in adventuresome Toronto clubs and now based in Miami. “Many bars, along with stores like Northbound Leather, were within a couple of blocks and infused thousands of gay people into that corridor.

“There were loads of transsexuals, rent boys and other sex workers, cross-dressers, goth kids, punk-rockers, and glam-rockers hanging out around House of Lords. There was loads of cruising all over that area. You could find anything anywhere and at any time.”

The upper level at 1 Isabella was a known hub. In the 1970s, it had housed discos including Mrs. Nights and Cheetah Club. Come the early ’80s, it was the original home of influential alternative spot Domino Klub. That club gave way to notoriously tough gay-and-straight dance club Oz, which boasted entrance hallways designed to look like yellow brick roads.

Alain Plamondon, who would become one of Toronto’s most beloved gay DJs, was a busboy at Oz. He tells the story of 1 Isabella’s transition into Komrads, a club he helped build and would go on to work at as busboy, server, bartender, lighting man, and, eventually, DJ.

Alain Plamondon (right) with friend. Photo courtesy of Plamondon.

“Basil Mangano was the owner of the space at 1 Isabella,” Plamondon begins in an email. “He hired John Burt to be a manager near the end of Oz’s existence. John was well-known in the community, and extremely active in gay politics. He convinced Basil to close down Oz to build a club that would bring class to the gay community.

“Komrads, with its shiny, stainless-steel dancefloor, hi-tech sound and lighting—including pink and purple neon lights—was a hit, and the talk of Toronto’s gay community when it opened in August of 1985.”

Komrads shiny dancefloor. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.

Why it was important: Open seven nights a week, with a café serving food from the afternoon onwards, Komrads was a safe and well-maintained club that cared about its gay clientele. The club boasted not only state-of-the-art sound, but also the largest dancefloor of any Toronto gay club at the time.

“John Burt was good at attracting crowds,” says George Fichna, one of Komrads’ longest-serving weekend doormen; he had also worked for landmark local gay bars Club Manatee and St. Charles’ Maygay room.

“John kept the place looking nice, with new carpets, paint, marble countertops on the bars, overhead TVs in the dining room, and so on.”

John Burt (left) with Komrads doorman David. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.

Partly as a result, Komrads often entertained crowds of 500 to 1,000 people, many of them spilling in from other bars after the 1 a.m. last call.

“For a while, Komrads was the only permanent after-hours club around,” Fichna explains. “In the early days, the bar closed at 1 a.m. and then served coffee, water, or soft drinks. Later, they served under the table.”

Whatever time the crowds arrived, Komrads was a key gathering spot for a community that had grown increasingly organized and politicized. The 1981 Toronto gay bathhouse raids marked a turning point in the community’s fight back against police harassment and other forms of discrimination.

Gregory Plytas (left) and friend in the stairwell. Photo courtesy of Plytas.

A gay and lesbian liberation movement swelled as queers across this country fought against censorship, worked to win key human rights (we were awarded provincial protection in 1986 when “sexual orientation” was added to the Ontario Human Rights Code as a prohibited ground for discrimination, with the federal equivalent granted only in 1996), and mobilized against the onslaught of HIV/AIDS as it took the lives of far too many friends, lovers, and talented people.

“We were fighting for our rights in the ’80s, and Komrads was the place to go to celebrate our political ‘wins,’ with John Burt at the helm,” Plamondon says. “We chose to celebrate life, and had a ‘We’re not going to take crap from anyone’ attitude. We celebrated and we had a political voice at Komrads.”

Komrads matches. Photo courtesy of Andrew Boyd.

At the time, gay and lesbian bars were an intrinsic part of our liberation movement. The dancefloor served as rallying point as much as it did a place to party. For a number of years, Komrads set the pace with its size and unequivocally gay programming.

In the 1980s, the music in gay bars was notably different than most straight dance spots. Whether playing disco, hi-NRG, new wave, underground house, or more commercial house, gay DJs leaned towards remixes, re-edits, and 12-inch extended versions of songs.

Good DJs break new ground, and Komrads’ star resident, Greg Howlett, was one of this city’s best. (Visit the Then & Now Mixcloud page to hear a number of live mixes by Howlett recorded at other venues.)

“Three or four months after Komrads opened, John hired Greg Howlett,” recalls Plamondon. “With Greg at the turntables, Komrads’ success was sealed. Greg played the best that dance music had to offer. He was brilliant.”

Dundas, Ontario native Howlett had played in clubs both straight and gay, including Le Tube, Mrs. Knights and Stages, and came to Komrads as an already-established trendsetter.

“Greg was a risk-taker, and often the first DJ to play songs,” recalls Vince Degiorgio, a good friend of Howlett’s who had DJed alongside him and is now involved in music publishing.

“Because of Greg, there’d be this stampede to stores like Starsound, J’s, and Disco Sound to get what he was playing. Numerous DJs would sit with notebooks, writing down what he played in order to copy what he was doing.

“Greg’s mixing was positively sublime and built a rush. He was a legitimate rock star long before DJs were allowed to be. And he was unique—not in a two-hour residency gig, but in a four-nights-a-week, never-let-you-go, I’m-gonna-peak-your-brains-out style.”

Howlett packed Komrads’ dancefloor during its first few years, but then left the club to work next door at equally popular gay bar Chaps (9 Isabella St., now a Rabba). Howlett played at Chaps until late into his fight against HIV/AIDS. He passed away in 1992, and is reported to have left Komrads in response to internal management struggles.

Gerry Nault (left) and Greg Howlett. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.

Plamondon tells me that John Burt resigned as manager after three years at Komrads.

“John, it was his baby, but politics came into play, and Basil and him parted ways in business. John left in the middle of Komrads’ success, and his leaving changed everything.” (Burt chose not to respond to questions about Komrads while Mangano could not be reached for comment.)

Following Howlett, a number of DJs stepped up to Komrads’ turntables at a time when competition was stiff—not only with Chaps next door, but also Club Colby’s at 5 St. Joseph St. and Boots & Buds at 592 Sherbourne.

Lighting man and Starsound Records’ employee Gerry Nault became the key Komrads resident until he too became too sick to DJ. After him, DJs including Carlos C, Kevin Laforme, and Allan Young played for years, but Komrads was equally popular for its live performances.

“Komrads was a dance club, yes, but it was always meant to showcase dance artists and female impersonators as well,” explains Plamondon.

Bronski Beat ticket courtesy of Andrew Boyd.

“Divine was featured twice, and was a huge cult hit both times. Many more would perform, like Sylvester, Thelma Houston, Loleatta Holloway, Bronski Beat, and Jennifer Holliday, from the original cast of Dreamgirls.

“Our most successful concert event was by Village People. Unlike the other acts, Village People were promoted on MuchMusic, and much to everyone’s surprise, 80 per cent of the crowd was straight. We gave local talent the spotlight as well; I have great memories of watching Eria Fachin perform her huge hit anthem “Savin’ Myself.””

Randy Cole as Tina Turner. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.

Komrads also featured some of this city’s greatest female impersonators, including Craig Russell, star of the film Outrageous!, and members of legendary drag troupe The Great Imposters such as Randy Cole, who frequently performed as Tina Turner.

Years later, professional female impersonator Stephanie Stephens, now known for her troupe The Imposters and for her own take on Tina Turner, would perform Thursday and Saturday late nights at Komrads. The show, named Hot Spot, also featured performers including Dale Barnett (The Great Imposters), Jackae Baker, and Komrads’ doorman Tony Brown, who appeared on stage as Toni.

Poster courtesy of Stephanie Stephens.

“I will always remember Toni Brown,” says Stephens. “She was the head doorman and wore short spandex pants, and a weightlifting belt around her tiny waist. Toni was eight feet tall, with a James Brown perm. We were friends, and she used to make me laugh, asking people for ID or asking a drunken queen to leave the club, calling them ‘Mary.’

“We had the only late-night show and after-hours crowd, and the place was packed,” Stephens tells me. “It was the spot for drag shows and good DJs. Komrads was lively and welcoming, with little attitude. There was a real sense of community; people seemed to care about what was happening around them.”

Stephanie Stephens (left) with Komrads doorman Omar. Photo courtesy of Stephens.

With its gender inclusive door policy—Komrads was one of the only gay men’s clubs of the time that welcomed women, both gay and straight—late nights, and capacity crowds, the club attracted audiences who mixed more comfortably some evenings than others.

Doorman Fichna recounts a favourite memory.

“I remember a night when a group of girls came in with some straight young men, and we had to remind them that they were in a predominately gay place so if they got a pinch or a grope, they should let it pass. If they started a fight, they’d get thrown out.

“Two of the guys went to the washroom, and then behind them a transsexual. I had a feeling so I stood in the can and watched. The two young men were apart with a urinal in between them, and the [trans woman] stood in front of it, hiked up her dress, and proceeded to urinate. The two boys finished up quick, and got the hell out of there. When she came out I asked, ‘You just couldn’t just use the toilet stall like a lady, could you?’ She replied, ‘It was more fun that way.’ I agreed.”

Packed dancefloors. Photos courtesy of Shawn Riker.

Who else played/worked there: Bars often rise or fall based on the word-of-mouth created by their staff. Komrads employed dozens of popular young men, with bar staff including Todd Gibbons, Tom Paradis, Bradford Paolini, and Roger Reynolds mentioned frequently, along with doorman Omar and a beloved manager named Beatrice.

Popular gay producer/DJ Shawn Riker was a key Komrads employee—maintaining the sound, doing lights, acting as a manager and more—long before he would co-found current gay hotspot FLY Nightclub.

Some of today’s best-known local gay DJs—including Plamondon, Mark Falco, and Cory Activate—DJed at Komrads during its final years.

DJ Scott Cairns became Komrads’ Saturday late-night resident at the close of the 1980s, and recalls playing a mix of underground and crossover house along with more commercial sounds.

“When I first started there, Komrads was basically just another gay dance club, except it stayed open late,” says Cairns. “Because of this, it cleaned up.”

Jackae Baker (right) with Allan Tam on Halloween, 1990. Photo courtesy of Tam.

By 1990, however, this was no longer the case. Komrads had lost much of its crowd. Gay men had flocked to after-hours dance clubs like Twilight Zone, and went on to frequent weekly events hosted at mixed clubs like The Diamond, Boom Boom Room, and Tazmanian Ballroom.

Komrads’ owner Basil Mangano approached innovative promoter Maxwell Blandford, who’d been the force behind Tazmanian Ballroom’s successful Rock & Roll Fag Bar weekly, in 1990.

“Basil asked me to take Komrads over and try to revive the venue,” says Blandford.

He agreed on the condition that Mangano would renovate and allow Blandford to reinvent the space. Blandford created a club-within-a-club as he developed a front-room pub dubbed The Amazon Queen.

“We bought the inside of a 1940s gentleman’s club that I found in the Beaches, and installed it,” he says. “We opened with a Madonna Truth or Dare premiere party benefiting the Toronto PWA Foundation, and hosted a voguing ball with Willi Ninja.”

The Amazon Queen also featured Vancouver singer Naomi McLeod (who’d sung with Sarah McLachlan and Skinny Puppy) performing under the persona of Dolly Kelekatrone, and a selection of tunes that ranged “from Nina Simone to Jimi Hendrix.”

Blandford also hired DJs including Cairns, Falco, and Mark Oliver to play “socially relevant house music” in the club’s main dance club area.

“By the time of Amazon Queen, all bets were off,” Cairns recalls. “There was a new attitude and all that high-energy cha-cha music was pretty much abandoned.

“We all bonded over Warp Records, and the label’s output of records like LFO, Tricky Disco, and Sweet Exorcist’s ‘Testone,’” adds Cairns, who would later make his name at clubs including Chaps, The Phoenix and JOY.

“This UK bleep techno, along with deeper house sounds, were finally breaking into the more mainstream clubs. Amazon Queen and Max brought in a cooler crowd, although that period was more sparse than in the club’s heyday.”

Parties with titles like Fruit Machine and Electric Ass may have brought in trendier gays and celebrities including Boy George, Deee-Lite, George Michael, Depeche Mode, and Adeva, but Blandford couldn’t revive a done deal.

“Our biggest attraction was probably that we served liquor after-hours like a booze can, and never seemed to have any issues,” Blandford admits. “I was told that the reason we were able to remain open was because there was a serial killer targeting gay people on the loose, and the police believed that he was hanging out in Komrads so, by allowing us to stay open, they were able to get better leads. There were always loads of cops in Komrads after hours, and we were never shut down or given a ticket so the story made sense.”

People often gathered on the street outside of Komrads. Photo courtesy of Shawn Riker.

What happened to it: According to Plamondon, Komrads closed in the spring of 1991.

“Komrads closed when Basil sold to the people from Colby’s,” adds Blandford; “Basil gave no notice whatsoever. We just showed up one day and the doors were locked.”

By summer, 1 Isabella St. had re-opened as Bar 1.

“I was fired and later rehired,” recalls doorman Fichna. “When I came back, it was Bar 1, and Basil had his fingers in it again.”

Some of Komrads’ later DJs, including Falco, Cory Activate, and Plamondon—now at The Barn and DJ of the 13-year-strong Retro Drama Sundays at Zipperz/Cellblock—also played at Bar 1. It closed in 1995.

1 Isabella would later host clubs with names like Generations, Radius, and Spincatz, but will long be remembered as Komrads.

“I think Komrads employed a lot of flamboyant gay people who would have had a tough time being themselves working in other venues,” summarizes Blandford. “The volume of clientele that Komrads and the other clubs produced allowed gays to have a serious physical presence, and empowered gay people to rally against homophobia and create community spirit though those dark times.

“Komrads was the anchor of that corner and, as it died, sadly much of the gay presence at that corner ended.”

Today, the site is home of Yonge Street Fitness. [Addendum: Yonge Street Fitness closed doors in December 2013. The space remains vacant.]

Thank you to all who participated, with a special nod to the very helpful Alain Plamondon. Thanks also to Shawn Riker, John Wulff, Gregory Plytas, Allan Tam, Andrew Boyd and the members of Facebook group Komrads Nightclub Survivors.

Late gay activist Rick Bébout provided invaluable history through his important online memoirs, Promiscuous Affections: A Life in the Bar, 1969-2000.

The post Then & Now: Komrads appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published June 7, 2012 by The Grid online (TheGridTO.com).

In this edition of her nightclub-history series, Denise Benson revisits the most sexcess-ful, celeb-studded gay house club of the ‘90s.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: JOY, 16 Phipps

Years of operation: 1995-1997

History: The rapidly changing streets surrounding Toronto’s Yonge and St. Joseph intersection were once a mecca for adventurous late-night dancers. Some of the hub’s gay and after-hours history was explored in earlier Then & Now pieces about influential 1980s venues Voodoo and Club Z; now, we return during the ’90s, before the area was transformed by the massive condo development we see today.

The tiny Phipps Street is tucked in just north of Wellesley and south of St. Joseph, running east-west from St. Nicholas to Bay. In the mid-’70s, while big gay dance club The Manatee drew crowds to 11A St. Joseph, Club David’s brought gay revelers south down the alley, to 16 Phipps, where a gold rendition of Michelangelo’s David presided over the dancefloor. In the ’80s, David was out and mirrors were in as the building became new gay club Le Mystique.

Although it later housed a variety of warehouse parties, early raves and other one-off events, the building still featured some of Mystique’s décor when John Wulff and silent partners went to view 16 Phipps early in March of 1995. The former storehouse, complete with its old loading dock and a small tunnel that connected it to 11A St. Joseph (it’s thought a conveyor belt once ran between the two), was in rough shape.

Outside 16 Phipps, pre-JOY. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

Wulff—who’d been socializing “seven days a week” in Toronto’s downtown gay scene since he was 16, and had worked for clubs including Gilles Belanger’s B-Bar—was ready to produce something of his own. He saw the 6,000 sq. ft. space as being well-suited to his vision of an after-hours dance club, located near the gay village, that would feature house music, art, and performance.

“The space was big, raw, and warehousey,” recalls Wulff. “We ripped everything out, soundproofed the walls, sprayed everything black, and installed a sound system.”

Inside of 16 Phipps, pre-JOY. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

“Physically, JOY was a big black box,” adds DJ Scott Cairns, who would become the club’s Saturday night resident. “It was mainly dancefloor, with a raised area in the back where people could get a bird’s-eye view of what was happening below. It was dark and sexy. The lighting was minimal, with the focus being the giant disco ball in the centre of the floor.”

JOY opened its doors at 1 a.m.—then last call at licensed bars—on Friday, March 17, 1995. Although the promotion of Fridays faltered at first, JOY’s Saturdays were an immediate hit and soon regularly exceeded the legal capacity of 472 people.

“JOY quickly became the late night go-to spot,” says Cairns. “Mainly a gay event, the Saturdays were heavily attended by a wide cross-section of people: drag queens, muscle boys, dykes, models—all the usual suspects—with a gay-positive hetero element. Straight girls and their terrified boyfriends were often on hand.”

JOY dancefloor. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

Why it was important: The timing of JOY could not have been better. As a gay-heavy, house music focussed, late-night dance club, it filled a lot of gaps. The warehouse scene had slowed, raves had grown larger and younger, and the music at Toronto gay bars had become increasingly commercial.

“JOY was completely on its own,” says Wulff. “The gay clubs, like Boots, Colby’s and The Barn, were playing Top 40 with the occasional house song while raves were playing Euro-ish fast beats. JOY was playing the newest and best underground house music, and felt like warehouse parties in Chicago or Detroit. JOY didn’t feel like Canada; it felt very New York, and people were very excited to be part of the energy.”

“JOY was very important at the time as it offered an after-hours experience that was safe and close to home for a big portion of the gay community,” adds Cairns, a 30-year DJ veteran who, by then, had wrapped up popular residencies at both The Phoenix and OZ.

“There was a definite thirst for something new in the core. I feel we provided that big time.”

“The JOY space had cachet from being a gay and alternative club over many years,” says James Vandervoort, better known as James St. Bass, a friend and frequent DJ partner of Cairns’. Vandervoort had come out while dancing in nearby ’80s clubs like Stages, Avalon, and Voodoo, and had himself brought gay clubbers west of Yonge while DJing boys’ nights at both Go-Go and Boom Boom Room.

“By the time JOY got started, it felt like coming home to gay after-hours dancing, but it was our time and our generation that was running it. JOY took the tradition of those earlier after-hours dances, but had more glamour, energy, and perhaps danger than the others that came before. It was raw, dark, sexy and, best of all, so central. JOY had the sound and feel of an illicit warehouse party, but was there every weekend—and with no chasing phone-line prompts to find it!”

Scott Cairns (left), John Wulff and Gilles Belanger. Photo courtesy of Wulff.

Cairns created much of the atmosphere with his music, often playing five full hours of the house he loved.

“Some of the best house was coming out in 1995 to ’96,” Cairns enthuses. “Big records for me at JOY included tracks from Farley & Heller a.k.a. Roach Motel, like ‘Wild Luv‘ and ‘Work 2 Doo.’ The dub of Joi Cardwell’s ‘Jump For Joi‘ was massive, as was H2O’s ‘Satisfied (Take Me Higher),’ and Robbie Tronco’s ‘Walk for Me.’ Tracks from producers like Danny Tenaglia, Roger S., MURK, Angel Moraes and Mousse T. were really big.

“And then came Boris Dlugosch and ‘Keep Pushin’,’” Cairns continues. “My friend Mitch Winthrop had just came back from visiting Boris in Germany, and arrived at JOY with a test press of this forthcoming single. I dropped it immediately and the reaction was intense. Later, in June of 1996, I had the pleasure of being joined by Boris at JOY. During his set, he dropped Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Chase.’ It’s one of my strongest memories from the club.”

LISTEN: Scott Cairns Live at JOY

The intense atmosphere of Saturdays at JOY can also be attributed to the dreams and antics of host John Wulff.

“My responsibility was to create an experience every week, and I’m proud of the events we put together,” he says.

For Halloween of 1995, Wulff performed as Carrie, complete with wig, white dress, pyrotechnics and Gilles Belanger as his Tommy Ross.

Another week, he recounts, “I rode into JOY on a motorcycle, in a star-spangled bikini, wrapped in an American flag and did Sandra Bernhardt’s strip tease from Without You I’m Nothing to [Prince's] ‘Little Red Corvette.’”

Frequently, Wulff could be found lying on a bed placed in the middle of the club on a scaffold.

“It was a mattress with gold satin sheets where whoever was feeling it would lounge or simulate sex shows,” says Wulff. “Various guests starred on that bed, from me to porn stars to beefcake male gymnasts stretching in silver sequin g-strings.”

He also recalls that JOY’s New Year’s 1996 party was perhaps the height of their (s)excess.

“We re-did the interior from black box to a glamorous ’30s speakeasy,” Wulff explains. “We installed two large chandeliers, and had an artist paint a 27-foot-long Tamara de Lempicka naked-woman portrait. We squeezed 1,200 people into that room. It was raining from the sweat and condensation—everyone was pretty much naked. I’ve never felt energy like that.”

JOY mural. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

Wulff, in fact, starred alongside the many local and international celebs who passed through the club’s doors on weekends. Dozens of actors, models and musicians took part, ranging from Madonna and her tour dancers to Alanis Morissette, Terrence Trent D’Arby, John Goodman, Geena Davis, Montreal supermodel Ève Salvail, 90210 star Kathleen Robertson, and Heather Tom of The Young and the Restless, a soap widely adored by gay men.

But it wasn’t just Saturday nights and celebrity cameos that made JOY special. About a month after the club opened, Fridays were properly launched, with Jennstar at the helm. The promoter and hostess had already worked for years at Queens Quay nightclub RPM, was a columnist for TRIBE magazine, and was known for bringing warehouse heads, clubbers, and ravers of all sexual orientations together.

Jennstar at JOY. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

Jennstar recruited fellow Futureshock crew members Gavin Bryan and Nnamdi Gryffyn a.k.a. DJ Gryphon, and they assembled a team that brought the Friday night concept called “Jennstar…She’ll Make You Famous” to life.

“We were inspired by fashion, fabulousness, fierceness, all the F words—including ‘famous,’” says Jennstar. “Everyone who attended JOY was fierce in their own way. This was a time when a lot of people were just starting their businesses—hair, make-up, graphic artists, performers, club-kids, you name it.”

Flyer courtesy of Jennstar

Opening night was packed, with NYC’s Frankie Knuckles on the decks and Jennstarr performing as Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Fridays consistently bridged crowds and communities, with ace rotating resident DJs Gryphon, Jason Hodges, Matt C, Mario J, and Kenny Glasgow working their musical magic.

“I remember walking down the alley, hearing the music get louder as you’d approach, and then turning the corner to see a lineup of people trying to get in every week,” recalls Hodges of his first real residency. “It was a rush.”

Lineup outside of JOY. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

“JOY was a place where that warehouse vibe was strong,” adds Hodges, a now-established DJ/producer. “The sound was big, and the vibe was dope. It was a solid night that drew music-driven crowds who knew what was up.”

Most of Fridays’ cast of players—from door staff to DJs and dancers—very much knew what was up. Many would form the core of Industry Nightclub, which opened about a year and a half after JOY.

One of these people was Rommel, a house-music lover who danced many weekends away at JOY, and frequently hosted Fridays’ VIP room.

“JOY was my version of Studio 54,” says Rommel. “Favourite memories include Frankie Knuckles playing an amazing set, Franklin Fuentes performing his club hit ‘If Madonna Calls,’ and, of course, our very own Jackae [Baker], with her many fabulous performances.”

John Wulff (left) and Rommel. Photo courtesy of Wulff.

“Jennstar, Rommel, and Jackae brought the glamour and the fun,” says Vandervoort. “It was decadent for sure, but also very funny. There were feature shows and drag-fashion fabulousness that got sloppier the later it got, so it never had the heavy dark feeling of some raves; it was more pure gay lasciviousness and bold fun. You could be any orientation and be welcome at JOY, but you likely had a better time if you liked to take most of your clothes off and dance like a maniac.”

This video, with original JOY footage shot by Rob Cluff in August of 1995, serves as evidence.

“At JOY we got away with a lot,” agrees Jennstar. “There were no rules really back then. Warehouse parties had died and the cops were paying attention to the raves, so we skirted under the radar for quite a bit. Just a bit, but boy was it fun. JOY was a place where you could come and hear fierce music and be who you wanted to be. It was definitely a birthplace for many events and parties that followed.

JOY was named the Best Nightclub of 1995 in Toronto Life magazine. It also helped bring deeper shades of house back to gay bars.

Wulff offers this tidbit: “Colby’s opened Voodoo Lounge one year after JOY, and copied it directly.”

Matt C (left) with Jason “Deko” Steele at JOY on Hallowe’en. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

At JOY. Photo courtesy of John Wulff.

Who else played there: Jennstar’s Fridays featured many guest DJs, with a heavy Montreal lean. Frequent visitors included Luc Raymond, Christian Pronovost, and Alain Vinet, now Musical Director for Cirque du Soleil.

“The biggest international artists who played JOY for us were Deep Dish,” says Jennstar. “It’s kind of a funny story. Ashley from [promotions crew] Better Days called to ask if they could come and play the night before the [Better Days’] rave; the Deep Dish boys really wanted to get a feel for the city. I said sure, but had no real idea who they were, and we didn’t have money to pay them. They showed up and rocked the house.”

While Saturdays at JOY were mainly a showcase of Scott Cairns, guests like Montreal’s Mark Anthony and Sylvain Girard were sometimes found. Matt C also guested one Halloween, as caught on film above.

JOY also occasionally opened its doors on other nights for special events, including a House of Trance Wednesday series produced by Don Berns a.k.a. Dr. Trance.

JOY dancefloor. Photo courtesy of Scott Cairns.

What happened to it: JOY closed abruptly in early 1997.

“I had a falling out with my partners,” shares Wulff. “They changed the locks, and changed the name of the club to the Cubicle. Also, I was very tired and didn’t want to fight it. The fire department was all over us for capacity and sound issues, plus [then City Councillor] Kyle Rae was not a fan and wanted us closed.”

The Cubicle was short-lived. After it closed, 16 Phipps opened very briefly again under the name of JOY, though Wulff was not involved. According to him, the building was demolished roughly five years ago. In its place stands the 20-storey condo build on the south side of Eleven Residencies at 11 St. Joseph.

Wulff left the club business after JOY, moving into corporate branding and marketing. After recovering from serious health issues in 2011, however, he decided to “come out of retirement to do quarterly events,” beginning with a JOY reunion this Friday (June 8). Many of the JOY faithful will congregate in the rooms of Buddies In Bad Times Theatre (12 Alexander Street). Mark Falco DJs in the Cabaret, while Scott Cairns plays the main Chamber.

“I’ve been crafting the music for this night for months,” says an excited Cairns. “I’ve listened to probably a thousand records, trying to trim it down to the perfect set. I hope everyone has the best time, reuniting with friends and reliving the glory days of JOY.”

LISTEN: SCOTT LIVE at JOY mix 2

Jennstar, James St. Bass, Rommel and fellow JOY devotee Charles Pavia will host, while artists Drasko Bogdanovic and the Young Astronauts provide a wall of projections.

“With the reunion, it’s the old JOY mission: house music combined with artistic expression, through striking visuals, but on overdrive,” says Wulff. “I want to provide not only a good house-music party, but one that leaves you visually in awe.

“Also, Rommel will perform at 12:30 a.m., in something that I’ve described as her ‘Madonna Super Bowl Halftime Show.’ She’s accompanied by four clones of herself—you will die!

“I think that people are ready to have a different experience in nightclubbing,” summarizes Rommel. ”I would encourage attendees to put on their best boogie shoes, and to be as outrageous, if not courageous, in your club couture. JOY was especially known for that. Above all, I encourage everyone to just be you; that’s what JOY was and is all about.”

The post Then & Now: JOY appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published March 15, 2012 by The Grid online (TheGridTO.com).

Denise Benson looks back at the massive, corporate-owned Yorkville spot that helped create Toronto’s big-ticket nightclub experience in the early 1980s.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: The Copa, 21 Scollard

Years in operation: 1984 – 1992  [Original article stated 1983 - 1992]

History: Yorkville dance club and concert venue The Copa made its mark as one of the largest and busiest nightclubs to emerge in early 1980s Toronto. Opened in August 1984, the hotspot was located on the south side of Scollard, in a mixed commercial and residential area.

Its owners, the Chrysalis Group, were no strangers to Yorkville, having already opened trendy restaurants Bemelmans and the Bellair Café nearby. Chrysalis, in particular its CEO Tom Kristenbrun, would also go on to open Toby’s Goodeats and Bistro 990, but Chrysalis Group would make their mark with music as well as food.

“They were rocker guys, tavern guys with long hair from North Bay who came into town with some money and bought The Ports of Call on Yonge Street, the El Mocambo on Spadina and the Jarvis House Tavern,” recalls Arnie Kliger, former owner of Stages Nightclub on Yonge Street, who also worked as assistant manager at The Copa during its first year of operation.

“They were beer and wings guys who had a dream of opening a restaurant after having the bars,” says Kliger.

Chrysalis, while still known as Consortina Inc., made their mark on 1970s Toronto with The El Mo, The Ports and 101 Jarvis, but by the early ‘80s they were hosting celebrities, society types and Toronto Film Festival parties at their Yorkville venues. Opening a mega-club was a logical new feather in their corporate cap.

The Copa may have been corporate-owned, but to place it in context, it was large (legal capacity 1100) and licensed, where most other dance clubs of the time were either unlicensed (Twilight Zone, Club Z, Focus), or licensed and located in hotels or other touristy spots, as with the CN Tower’s Sparkles disco.

The Copa, as observed from the balcony. Photo by Julie Levene, courtesy of Barry Harris.

Why it was important: In this environment, The Copa emerged all shiny and new. Chrysalis spared no expense, installing an incredible and intricate sound system, computerized lighting and lasers, and banks of television monitors on which music videos played. The DJ booth was custom-built and massive, there was a raised stage area in the middle of the narrow, rectangular-shaped room, and an overhanging balcony ran the club’s entire length.

While opinions vary as to whether this balcony added to the party by offering a primo view of the action below or dissipated the club’s energy by its placement, the young, fashionable, heavily uptown crowd packed the place. The Copa, with its 39 bartenders, VIP room and super VIP room (behind closed doors, with its own bathroom and bar), was ready to serve. In order to meet the food-to-liquor-ratio laws of the day, The Copa also had a full-time chef who cooked up the club’s infamous buffet. Opinions on the quality of the food also vary wildly, but numerous Toronto clubbers have told me they went to The Copa in part to eat a full meal.

Open Wednesday through Sunday, the club featured DJs most nights, augmented by live concerts. The Copa—along with The Diamond and, later, RPM—put Toronto on the map as far as licensed venues go, but its music format was a lot more commercial than many dance clubs of the era, especially on Fridays and Saturdays.

Early resident DJs included Terry ‘TK’ Kelly (who later established himself as the DJ at RPM) and Jeff Allan, a dance music DJ who was also an announcer at rock station Q107. Now a morning show host at Kitchener’s 570 News, Allan created extended dance mixes of rock songs during his Copa days, including this one of Glass Tiger’s “Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone.”

Although bars at that time had to stop serving alcohol at 11 p.m. on Sundays, they were consistently among The Copa’s busiest and most musically adventurous nights. Early on, Sundays were alternative nights DJed by CFNY’s Chris Sheppard and hosted by the station’s equally infamous personalities Earl Jive and Beverly Hills.

When that crew departed to work at RPM—opened by a group that included Martin Arts, The Copa’s original general manager—Sundays morphed into one of Toronto’s first house music weeklies in a licensed club. DJ Barry Harris was hired in the spring of 1986, and thoroughly transformed Sundays during his year-and-a-half residency.

“I originally slid in quite comfortably by playing Ministry, The Cult, Beastie Boys and other CFNYish music, which I enjoyed,” recalls Harris, who had previously DJed at 101 Jarvis. “It was great playing Sunday nights as it was known as ‘alternative night’ and not commercial.

“As the alternative crowd started to discover RPM a few months later, my Sunday night music became more influenced by the Twilight Zone and [CKLN’s pioneering Sunday afternoon program] Dave’s Dance Music. Host Dave Ahmad recommended The Copa to his audience each Sunday and by fall of 1986, the crowd had completely changed. We continued to maintain an average of 1100-1300 people, but it morphed naturally into a house night. House music was really starting to explode in 1986, and soon the crowd would stop dancing and stare me down if I played rock or something like Ministry. They reacted more positively to freestyle artists like The Cover Girls.”

The line at the front door of The Copa. Photo by Julie Levene, courtesy of Barry Harris.

Harris also took on The Copa’s Saturdays for a few months in the summer of 1987, but found the crowd too mainstream for his liking.

“Sunday nights were the best, and my favourite night to play,” he says. “It was a DJ’s dream gig as the audience was magical. They really knew their music and were hungry to hear the latest house. Really, the night kind of became ‘The Twilight Zone part two’ of a weekend; if you wanted more of that sound and spirit, then you came to The Copa on a Sunday. I think the night introduced house music to a lot of people who might not have went to the Zone.”

The Copa and Twilight Zone had another key element in common: fierce, crystal clear sound designed by New York’s Richard Long, known for his systems at clubs including Paradise Garage.

“That system felt very powerful, almost overwhelming at times actually,” Harris recalls. “With an Urei mixer and three floating turntables as well, it could be quite a rush from a DJ’s point of view. The Copa was a large, rectangular warehouse space, but Richard Long thought of everything, including digital delay for speakers placed further away from the stage.”

The Copa DJ booth, with coat check below. Photo by Julie Levene, courtesy of Barry Harris.

Barry Harris with Jimmy Sommerville in The Copa’s massive DJ booth. Photo by Julie Levene, courtesy of Harris.

Harris left The Copa in October 1987 to become the main resident DJ at Charles Khabouth’s Stilife, and later had a massively successful production career, recording as Top Kat, part of Kon Kan and, most notably, Thunderpuss, the duo who crafted smash dance club remixes for pop stars including Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Britney Spears.

The Copa had, by then, also become a house haven on Wednesday nights, thanks to influential promoter Wanda Marcotte and DJ Jason ‘Deko’ Steele. The two had been a core part of The Diamond’s success—Steele was its star resident DJ for five years before defecting to The Copa—but jumped ship after a falling out (Marcotte) and frustration over pay (Steele).

“Wanda was one of my favourite people ever and the reason I went to The Copa,” says Steele. “She was this fucking obnoxious lesbian dressed in black from head to toe, she smoked profusely, wore French braids, and had the most gorgeous lover, Irena Joannides. It wouldn’t be fair at all to do a story about that time and not cover Wanda. She was everything. Wanda was largely responsible for a third or more of the scene, in terms of the progression of house, new wave and the Queen Street art fag kind of crowd in the 1970s. She was an absolute cornerstone who, sadly, died of ovarian cancer about a decade ago.”

Together, they transformed The Copa’s Wednesdays. The crowds went from a few to fifteen hundred as house was added to Deko’s already eclectic mix.

“Really, nobody but Barry Harris and I were playing house music in big, licensed clubs back then,” says Steele. “But I didn’t just play house. I’d also play “Go See the Doctor” by Kool Moe Dee, old Aretha Franklin, some great old disco tracks—basically the roots of house.”

For a period, Steele entertained The Copa’s crowds several nights a week.

“My signature was that I didn’t have one particular sound,” he recalls. “I made sure that everything was played in a night, from the pop stuff you had to play to some edgier stuff. I’d literally play Bob Marley, go into U2, and then into something completely different.”

Unhappy with The Copa’s vibe and weekend crowd, Steele returned to The Diamond within seven months. There he was greeted by bigger pay and great fanfare.

Photo by Julie Levene, courtesy of Barry Harris.

Who else played / worked there: The diverse DJ Dante held down weekends for much of 1987. That same year, Dave Ahmad, host of Dave’s Dance Music and a resident DJ at Club Z, took over Sundays for a period. Unlike Steele, he was a fan of the club.

“The Copa was the big cheese back in the day,” says Ahmad. “It was definitely the ‘beautiful people’ spot, with a hip, fashionable crowd who knew their music. Everyone would come through on a Sunday—lots of DJs, flight crews, young professionals, people from The Zone.

“The Copa was absolutely influential,” Ahmad emphasizes. “They showed that big dance clubs with multi-format nights could work. You could go The Copa on any given night and hear something that you had not heard before. It was a commercial bar, but the music mix was smart.”

CKLN host Dave Ahmad. Photo: Keith Beaty/Toronto Star.

Sundays returned to an alternative music format circa 1990, when DJ Iain McPherson, then still calling himself DJ EN, was brought on board by promotions manager Max Blandford, formerly of Nuts & Bolts.

“Sundays became ‘Piccadilly Circus: A Human Zoo,’ a delightfully irreverent night that did quite well for a while,” McPherson says. “There were ‘go-go humans’ in cages, hard-core clothes, and I played emerging underground electronic sounds, like New Beat and early Acid House. It was a far cry from the mainstream dance music that The Copa was known for at the time. We even had in live acts, including Karen Finley and Skinny Puppy.”

The Copa is largely remembered for hosting an impressive array of live shows, with 1980s appearances by the likes of Fela Kuti, Tina Turner, Herbie Hancock, Ray Charles, Berlin, Chaka Khan, Beastie Boys, A Flock of Seagulls, X, Erasure and Ministry.

Reggae greats including Burning Spear, Dennis Brown and Freddie McGregor performed, courtesy of late, great promoter Lance Ingleton and his LIP Entertainment. Jermaine Stewart performed in December of 1986, and received a gift from Santa. The Cult played in 1987; vocalist Ian Astbury notoriously smashed an overhead neon light with his mic stand. A bootleg recording of The Cult’s set from this night can still be found online.

“The biggest thing I remember about The Copa is that there was a constant diversity of crowds,” summarizes Boris Khaimovich, a Copa doorman who also worked as head of security and assistant manager between 1987-1989.

“We went from doing reggae nights to fetish nights. We did everything from black-tie events to hosting a Skinny Puppy concert two days later. The Copa was a club that was able to morph into whatever was needed, and even though it was corporate, the managers were given a fair amount of leeway to make decisions.”

The Copa’s large staff was filled with talented people who made their mark at that club and beyond. Many interviewees give special mention to The Copa’s main lighting woman, Andrée Emond, who worked in early dance music record shops and provided a visual aesthetic for numerous dance clubs. National Velvet vocalist Maria Del Mar was a Copa cigarette girl (yep, people could smoke and buy cigarettes at clubs back then). Promotions manager Max Blandford now promotes and markets large events and venues in Miami.

“I tried to give somebody a brief history of the Toronto nightclub scene the other day and it all kind of led back to The Copa,” says Khaimovich, who himself went on to manage Toronto clubs including Go-Go and Limelight. He now owns Maple Crescent Farm in Northumberland County.

Copa lighting technicialn Andree Emond. Photo courtesy of Barry Harris.

What happened to it: While The Copa had its heyday in the ’80s, it continued to operate until the early ’90s. Online research indicates that the club closed in 1992, while some of those I spoke with thought 1991 to be more accurate. What is clear is that The Copa was inundated with noise complaints throughout its existence and, in fact, was made an example of by Toronto city councillors when they voted to create the Entertainment District through a series of new zoning laws (read more about this here).

21 Scollard became The Barracuda in 1992. The sports bar and dance club famous for its cheap beer, indoor beach volleyball court and car on the roof closed in 1996. The property was heavily renovated in the early 2000s and is now a seven-storey condo, attached to the building at 18 Yorkville.

Thank you to contributors Arnie Kliger, Barry Harris, Boris Khaimovich, David Ahmad, Iain McPherson, Jason Steele, and to Carlos Mondesir, David Heymes, Don Berns, Julie Levene (R.I.P.), Mitch Winthrop, Shawn Squires.

The post Then & Now: The Copa appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.

Article originally published November 16, 2011 by The Grid online (TheGridTO.com).

In this instalment of her nightclub-history series Then & Now, Denise Benson looks back to a time when Toronto nightlife orbited around Yonge and St. Joseph thanks to early ‘80s after-hours haunt Voodoo, which brought goths, gays and fashionistas together—only to be brought down, ironically, by Jack Layton.

BY: DENISE BENSON

Club: Voodoo, 9 St. Joseph

Years in operation: 1981-1985

History: To discuss this deeply influential alternative after-hours club space is to delve into a history of Toronto nightlife that was anchored around St. Joseph Street and the surrounding area from the late 1970s through the mid-’80s. It’s a history of emerging sounds and fashions, diverse sexualities and late-night community—all played out in a city centre then becoming increasingly residential.

Before Voodoo opened in August of 1981, the original Domino Klub on Isabella was home to punks, rockers and gays alike; there were boozecans along Yonge (most notably on the corner of Maitland Street, above vital clothing store South Pacific); and the addresses 5-9 St. Joseph housed rock bar The Forge at street level, with disco club Bellows above. St. Joseph was a key street for Toronto’s growing gay community; The Forge space became famed gay dance club Katrina’s, with neighbouring homo and mixed social spaces including Le Tube, St. Joseph Café, Stages and Club Manatee.

Against this backdrop and above Katrina’s, Michael Gallow opened unlicensed, after-hours dance club Voodoo. He and DJ Dave Allen had already been involved in promoting Domino Klub and “a series of after-hours uptown warehouse events,” but wanted “to create our own environment for the emerging fashion/music culture of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The theme of the club was—as stated on the brass plaque at street level—‘Metal Music in the Modern Jungle.’”

JenniferG, JCAndrew, Davidson. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gellatly.

Voodoo was open Friday and Saturday nights from midnight to dawn, with occasional fashion shows, concerts and other special events taking place before the dancing began (or on different nights of the week). The approach was low budget, with most areas painted fully black amid a minimalist lighting system. No matter. The creative people who partied there—it may have been unlicensed, but plenty of patrons snuck in booze and other “party favours”—added colour to a club where the main door policy was “no blue jeans.”

Lighting man Danny Regan (left) with DJ Dave Allen at Voodoo. Photo courtesy of Roy Paul.

Why it was important: Voodoo opened at a time when most licensed bars closed at 1 a.m. and crackdowns on boozecans meant that late-night dancing was mainly limited to gay discos. Voodoo added greatly to the musical soundscape of the day and became a hub for the fashion-minded, sexually adventurous avant-garde. Internationally renowned shoe designer Patrick Cox was Voodoo’s first doorman/greeter and many staff members were immersed in new design and music forms.

“The uniqueness of Voodoo was its street-level vibe,” says owner Michael Gallow. “David Allen and Danny Regan [Voodoo’s lighting man] were part of the street scene in the neighbourhood and always kept everyone aware of happenings at the club. It was a very welcoming home for all those creative and fashion-forward individuals in the city. Many of the regulars were experimenting not only with their look, but their sexuality and relationships.”

Michael Sweenie and Isabel Moniz. Photo courtesy of Michael Sweenie.

“I was a Voodoo regular and the inclusive attitude of the place is what made me dream of opening my own bar or club,” says Michael Sweenie (pictured above getting ready for a night out), now owner of Andy Poolhall on College Street. “Your sexuality was not what defined you at Voodoo, just the love of music and an individual fashion style or sense. It was also the first place I ever saw with washrooms that were gender neutral; there were just as many guys doing their makeup in the mirror as girls.”

Voodoo was a key place to hear bold new sounds pouring out of Europe, America and Toronto itself. Music not heard on the radio had a home here.

“I think Voodoo really made dance clubs that came after more open musically,” says Sweenie. “It brought new wave, punk and the New Romantic scene into other clubs that usually played disco only.”

Michael Scott. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gellatly.

“Voodoo revived the post-bar dance scene and laid the groundwork for many of the late night places that came along,” Gallow summarizes, mentioning Biorhythm, Catwalk and Twilight Zone, of which he speaks highly.

“I always think of the Twilight Zone as the yin to our yang,” says Gallow. “They helped introduce the emerging New York dance scene to the diverse people who were settling in Toronto from around the world. Our focus at Voodoo was very European and fashion-driven.”

DJs, such as myself, who came up playing in the alternative clubs of the mid/late-’80s owe a great deal to Voodoo and its legacy.

Ryan Carleton and Danielle Gellatly. Photo courtesy of Ryan Carleton.

“Voodoo was the club that opened my mind to both the culture and music that was exploding in the underground at that time,” agrees Iain McPherson a.k.a. DJ Iain, a Voodoo regular who brought that influence with him as he got his start spinning at 1980s alt-club Nuts & Bolts. “Voodoo was groundbreaking and unique. It was unlike any of the mainstream clubs of its time or even the more ‘traditional’ underground clubs that followed.”

Todd Trepanier. Photo courtesy of Tracy Graham.

Who played there: “Dave Allen was the spiritual soul of Voodoo,” says Michael Gallow of the DJ who shaped the club’s soundscape. Gallow may have purchased much of the club’s music—at the original Record Peddler, natch—but Allen broke ground with what he chose to highlight. He didn’t mix the songs—unlike jocks at Biorhythm and Twilight Zone, for example, who beat-matched—but Allen played the music first.

“In my mind and, no doubt, all those who were fortunate enough to experience it, Voodoo was the first truly modern, post-disco ‘underground’ music venue,” writes McPherson.

Rob Wheaton, Jennifer Gellantly, Stephen Butson. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gellatly.

“Dave Allen was a truly fearless DJ. One of my favourite memories is the week that Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream album came out. Dave got on the mic at the height of prime time and announced, ‘This is the new Simple Minds album,’ put on side A and let it play straight through—while he joined everyone on the dancefloor. When the side came to an end, he ran back up the booth, flipped over the record, made a typically cryptic announcement, ‘Side B!,’ and played it through non-stop. The dancefloor remained packed throughout. Such was the adventurous, wonderfully musically open-minded nature of the crowd. This was a special venue at a special time in music. And we couldn’t get enough of it.”

Tracy, Dave, Danny. Photo courtesy of Tracy Graham.

Voodoo also hosted fashion shows by Parachute Clothing, concerts promoted by The Garys (including A Certain Ratio, John Cooper Clarke, DNA, and The Professionals), and even plays like the Dora Award-winning musical Sid’s Kids. Cutting-edge guests often visited the club.

“We had an excellent relationship with visiting bands and hosted great parties with Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Adam and the Ants, New Order, Flock of Seagulls, and others,” recalls Gallow. “In that sense, Voodoo was a great symbiosis between the music and fashion biz.”

Sadly, despite the fact that CKLN 88.1FM broadcast Radio Voodoo live from the club for many months, I couldn’t locate any audio or video recordings to share.

Terri on New-Years Eve. Photo courtesy of Tracy Graham.

What happened to it: Voodoo closed its doors on February 2, 1985. The area had become increasingly residential and neighbours were unhappy with the late-night revelry. Many venues on St. Joseph faced fines, noise complaints and challenges over issues like not providing enough parking for customers.

“Interesting to note that our main adversary was Jack Layton, then the local Alderman,” says Gallow. “I understand his position in hindsight—he was acting on behalf of his constituents—but there were some acrimonious meetings about our existence. I felt that the energy that had driven the club was dissipating and it was better to go out on a high note.”

Gallow also opened trend-setting (and licensed) lounge/restaurant Century 66 at Yonge and Charles, and now owns marketing agency Benchmarx Data Services.

5 St. Joseph, November 2011, mid construction. Photo courtesy of Steve Ireson.

Soon after Voodoo’s close, 9 St. Joseph opened as Backstreet, which drew a similarly mixed clientele, while Katrina’s continued downstairs at 5 St. Joseph. These addresses later went on to house a number of gay and after-hours spots, including Colby’s, Brooklyn and 5ive, with Level 3 Fitness also holding the lease at number 9 for years. Today, the entire corner of Yonge and St. Joseph is under construction to become FIVE Condominiums.

“It is fascinating to see the space today,” Gallow says. “The huge metal structure securing the building’s facade is worthy of a photo essay. The whole district was zoned for condos back in 1984 and guess where we are today. I doubt anyone who buys there now will have been a nightly visitor back then, but how romantic a notion if they were.”

Thank you: to all who shared your thoughts and photos. Thanks also to Carlos Mondesir, David Heymes, Jill Cribbin, Kiki a.k.a. Kaos Theory, Steve Ireson and the members of Facebook group Voodoo Club Alumni for your input.

The post Then & Now: Voodoo appeared first on Then and Now: Toronto Nightlife History.