First off, if you don't care about any of this and would rather be watching the Gilmore Girls, I highly recommend that you skip this entirely trainspotty post and read this instead.
My indie promoter story in this week's Eye has turned into quite the tempest on the Stillepost message board--five pages and counting. Perhaps against my better judgement, I jumped into the fray--somewhere around page four, I think.
Much of the chatter is the usual qualms about why so-and-so wasn't mentioned--mostly smaller club promoters, in a story that is about promoters who book larger venues and festivals. But it has broken off in several different tangents, including a spirited and somewhat productive discussion about why artists and their agents don't take smaller promoters with them when they jump to larger venues.
Naturally, there's also been much discussion about how much my article didn't cover in the 1000 words I had to play with. So, for the uber-geeks who care passionately about this issue, here are the notes.
I didn't transcribe these as faithfully as I do everything else here, because at the time I didn't think anyone would care about the minutiae. Some questions are reconstructed from memory, or reduced for the sake of brevity. Also, the conversations frequently went off the record or went on irrelevant tangents, so there are large chunks missing from each of these. I also interviewed other people as background that don't appear here.
All of these interviews were conducted between April 25 and May 7, 2007.
Ali Hedrick, booking agent with Billions [large American booking agency that handles people like Joanna Newsom, New Pornographers, Constantines, Sufjan Stevens, etc.]
How has the Live Nation/House of Blues merger [of July 2006] effected the live market in the U.S. over the past year?
Hasn’t changed it too much. I don’t have a problem with Live Nation so much. I have a bigger problem with Ticketmaster, the facility fees that are on top of tickets, meaning you can have a $15 ticket with a $6 service fee per ticket from Ticketmaster. The band doesn’t see any of this money; the promoter doesn’t see a dime. They’re a big part of the problem with higher ticket prices.
With Live Nation buying House of Blues, they’ve kept all the same promoters intact, as far as I can tell. I’m dealing with all the same people I dealt with at House of Blues.
What differences do you see on both sides of the border, in terms of how the markets operate? Is it easier to use independent promoters in Canada than it is in the U.S.?
I use a mixture of both. I’ve been booking bands for 12 years, so in Canada I do use independent companies. In Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, I always use independent promoters. In the States, I do use Live Nation and larger promoters a lot more. When I work with smaller promoters, the costs are down, which in some ways helps the bands make more money. But in Canada, your taxes are so much higher than in the States.
Because of border crossing?
No, to do a show in Toronto, 16 per cent comes off the door automatically from dollar one. Your tax rates are higher everywhere. But it’s understandable.
Any hypotheses as to why there are more indies here?
Live Nation and Clear Channel bought up a lot of the smaller companies in the States. They’ve done a bit of that in Canada, but they haven’t bought the companies I’ve been working with: Against the Grain, Peter at Timber in Vancouver, Sealed with a Kiss in Vancouver and Victoria, Blue Skies Turn Black in Montreal. They all do fabulous jobs. There’s no need to use a larger promoter.
Is that a last resort for you?
I try to pick a promoter based on who’s going to take care of my bands and do a good job for them.
How does the fact that Live Nation owns many of the large venues effect things?
Live Nation does own a lot of venues and you’re kind of forced to work with them. Even if I wanted to avoid them, I really can’t. I would have to skip a certain city altogether. It can be done, but it’s very, very difficult.
Are local independents locked out of those venues at all?
No. A lot of my independent promoters can still go into Live Nation venues. They don’t lock people out, unless they feel a promoter doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s certainly not company policy. I have Sealed With a Kiss going into the Commodore, which is a Live Nation venue in Vancouver. My San Diego promoter will be doing a New Pornographers show at the House of Blues.
Jonathan Ramos, REMG [Toronto hip-hop/R&B promoter, responsible for this July's Rogers Picnic featuring the Roots]
How do you think the Toronto, or by extension Canadian, live music scene compares to the U.S., where they’re increasingly headed towards a monopoly situation?
We’re on par with what’s going on in a lot of the major cities. There are the bigger corporate promoters, but like any other city, we have an amazingly prosperous independent scene. It’s an oft-used word, so it depends on how you look at it. I don’t think we have more or less than either. The players in the U.S. are the same players here, though Live Nation and House of Blues are still operating as two separate companies here. I don’t know how they’re working exactly.
Are there barriers for a promoter of your size to booking larger venues?
Not really. The natural barrier is money. With myself or other independent promoters, when bands start playing at that level, then you’re on the radar screen of the major promoters. That’s when it starts to get tough and you have to start fighting. REMG has existed since 93, usually in harmony with everyone around us. We co-produce shows with HoB all the time. I have co-produced shows with what was at the time Clear Channel. We all bump heads once in a while, but that’s just the business. I’ve run across Jacob [Smid of Emerge] and Amy [Hersenhoren of Root Means Square] with competing offers, but that’s music today.
What effect, if any does this have on concert consumers?
It effects it on a larger level. When you start dealing with acts who play venues larger than 3000 people, that’s when the monopoly comes into play. It’s like any industry: it’s in the consumers’ best interest to have competition. When they operationally complete the merger in Canada, that will create a situation where there’s only one player on that level on a national scale. That’s a problem: for me, for everybody, because it’s a natural function of a monopoly to bully. That’s just what they do. When I say bully, I mean everybody: independent promoters, agents, bands, and right down to the consumer. That’s a dangerous thing. But on an independent level, we have a thriving scene at every level: from the grassroots to where REMG exists.
What effect does a competitive and independent promoter scene have on the local music community?
You can compare it to the recorded music industry. Just as there are lots of independent labels out there doing their own thing and not relying on major label distribution or funding. Same with promoters. People like Eric Warner find acts and a market for those acts that most people haven’t heard of. Companies like ADD do a lot of parties, and it’s very healthy.
When did this change in Toronto? My memory of the mid-90s were all about MCA Concerts doing the bulk of the large shows I saw.
It’s the function of the music business changing, and how people access that music. It used to be that if it was on the radio and MuchMusic and it was in the print media, that’s how people got their music. Now, a company like House of Blues can’t troll websites and be on blogs looking for the next big band. It’s not as simple as having MuchMusic on in the office eight hours a day and talking to the programmers at the radio stations. If it’s an act like Final Fantasy, that came through a whole different side of it, not the major media. Those are the things that make Toronto’s live music scene healthier than it’s ever been.
Scroll through Eye Weekly or Now, and it’s astounding to me to see how much music is coming through the city. The audience is there, and how early some of these things develop. There isn’t a week that goes by when I read either of those publications where I don’t discover a new band. Or my jaw drops, and I think, ‘How is that band playing the Kool Haus?’ Or, ‘These guys got 300 people to the ElMo on a Monday night?’ It’s astounding. People like ATG, RMS, Emerge, ourselves, we’re all having great years. Look at the number of shows Jacob is doing. It was unheard of five years ago for an independent promoter to be taking out a full page ad in the weeklies. That was the domain of House of Blues. That says a lot.
What have been your biggest shows, beyond, say the Kool Haus?
Erykah Badu at Massey, R. Kelly at ACC, 50 Cent, K-Os and John Legend at Ampitheatre. All shows there were co-productions with HoB. That’s a condition. You either cut them in on it, you co-pro with them, or they’ll send you the rack rate sheet for how much everything costs, which of course will be inflated beyond belief. That’s just the cost of doing business. If you want to grow, you have to do business with the big boys, and dollars aside, it’s hard to compete with them on a national or—in the case of these companies—a multinational level. If a band really wants to work with REMG in Toronto, the company could say [to the band], ‘Listen, as a company we represent 40 per cent of your touring schedule, and you want to jeopardize that for one show?’ Those battles you can’t really fight. We bump heads with them on a regular basis.
But it’s not so adversarial, by the sounds of it—not if you’re doing co-pros with them.
Sometimes it is, and it goes there quite often ... A lot of people who work at these big companies now were never independent promoters. They always had some kind of backing as a buyer, whether they worked for universities or whatever.
Elliott Lefko, ex-House of Blues Canada, currently at Goldenvoice in L.A. [also co-presenting V-Fest this September in Toronto, with Jacob Smid of Emerge]
How would you compare the Toronto live market to American cities, specifically the number of independents here?
It’s difficult in L.A. for independent promoters. In America, most of the good independent promoters have been gobbled up by Live Nation or AEG, so everything falls under those two. In Toronto, there is really only one major promoter there with Live Nation and House of Blues working together, so there is room for other people to come in there. What happened is that a number of promoters who were working as little ones and developing artists were able to maintain their relationship with those artists, such as the Arcade Fire with Amy. And in Jacob’s case, a lot of artists really like working with him.
When I was working in Toronto, doing stuff by myself with no money, I’d go out and get great acts, but then CPI would gobble up all my acts and push me to the side. I wasn’t able to maintain a relationship with artists like Nirvana, Chili Peppers, people like that, that I worked with. Now, because there are a lot of independent booking agents out there, who are less likely to just turn everything over to a bigger promoter, they don’t mind working with people who brought them to the table in the first place.
Plus, these guys are more sophisticated. When I first started doing shows, I didn’t know what a monitor board was or why it was important, or why bands needed catering. I was just naïve. That’s not the case anymore. People are more sophisticated, and the independent promoters in Toronto can deliver the goods so that acts don’t feel the need to work with a big promoter.
Does any of this make a difference to a concert consumer?
They get to see a lot more shows, more than other cities. And there are probably more shows in Toronto than there was 10 years ago, because there are so many people bringing artists up here now. It’s a healthy thing for artists and for the fans to see all these shows. It gets so many shows because a lot of times, artists might not play outside of New York or Los Angeles, but they’ll put Toronto in there to get some representation in Canada. It’s an important market to play.
Look at someone like Craig Laskey at the Horseshoe, he covers a certain base of music so completely. Explosions in the Sky did two great sold-out nights there [at the Opera House two months ago], and now all their friends in bands will come back and play because they know what a great market it is.
One thing that’s happened recently here is the ability of indies to put on big festivals or work in big venues.
When I was working in Toronto and starting out, I couldn’t do a show at Massey Hall or Air Canada Centre or some outdoor festival by myself. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to do that. Amy is sophisticated: she knows how to do it, she gets the job done, everyone’s happy, they want to continue working with her. Arcade Fire, a long time ago they would have gone with a larger promoter. Now they can say, wait a second, we don’t have to sacrifice the people who worked with us before. A lot of bands want to maintain a relationship with an independent promoter because they want to get a good relationship with them and they’re covered. The way the technology is these days, it allows people to grow faster in terms of their ability to put on concerts and do everything for people. Her and some of these other people have acts who are able to get to these bigger places faster.
It’s been suggested to me that the Toronto live market opened up considerably when you left. Would you care to comment?
In some cases, it opened things up a bit, the fact that I was gone. I had a lot of great connections and people liked to work with me. Some stuff went to HoB, other stuff went to some other people. It opened it up a bit. Again, some of the independent promoters were already established, people such as Amy and Craig and Jacob and of course Ramos. They were all doing really great shows, so they were well on their way to making things happen.
[talk turns to the Arcade Fire, and the fact that they didn’t have a manager for the first six months after Funeral took off]
People like Arcade Fire are very protective of what they’re involved with. Years ago, people just signed with the first guy who came along and then got in trouble. Now they know they can do it themselves, and when they’re ready they’ll find somebody. With Win, he’s very, very protective of what he was doing and who he was going to work with. He wasn’t going to be swayed by people telling him this is what you got to do. That’s why he’s working with Amy, with Botch [at Billions], with [manager] Scott Rodger. He got the people he really wanted to work with, and now he’s surrounded. A lot of the horror stories of people surrounding themselves with bad people are less and less.
And he’s not alone. There are other people taking the same path at that level: Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, people who build things up from the bottom.
Things have definitely changed from the way they used to be. The artists that you mentioned, and Explosions and Spoon and these guys, have created their own record company world. I’m sure when those guys and Arcade Fire get their statement every month, they’re getting paid because people like Mac [of Merge] can get the job done. When all these artists are doing it their own way, they’re not making less money because of that, and they're keeping control.
There are so many independent booking agents out there now, too. There’s one guy who is the agent for Jack Johnson, and he just operates out of his house. For years he thought he had to work for someone else until he realized he could do it from home, have a few clients and do a good job for them so that they don’t need to go to a bigger company. He gets the job done, everyone’s paid, everyone’s happy, and his life is easier because he doesn’t work for a giant company. There are all these other people out there like that.
Amy Hersenhoren, Root Means Square
Five or ten years ago, would it have been possible for you to book Massey Hall or Ricoh Coliseum?
It would have been possible, but I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do it, in terms of both myself and the acts I was booking. Ten years ago I was not here [she worked in NYC from 97-99], but five years ago, probably not. I grew into what I’m doing now.
Was there a specific shift when it became possible for smaller promoters to put on bigger shows?
I think there was a shift in the business at a certain point. The 90s was a time of big record company advances and big tours and that came to an end. The benefits for independents increased after that. It happened more in the record business, but there was a shift in the entire business where people realized that working with independents could be better for them, whether that was a record label or a promoter. I personally saw that in New York more than I saw it here.
In both record companies and promotion?
Not necessarily in live music, but there was a trickle down effect. Bands like Franz Ferdinand, I’m not sure that would have happened in 1997, the way it went down. There were a lot of cool people who worked at major labels. It could have ended up on a major label and…
It is on a major label here, though.
It is, but it started off on an independent, and that independent is still very involved in their career, even touring in America. Look at bands like Modest Mouse, too. They stuck by people like Peter McCullough out west for their whole career. He’s their promoter in Vancouver. He does all their western dates, from Vancouver to Winnipeg.
Did it make it easier to artists to stick close to people who helped them up the ladder as opposed to signing over to the first big cheque that came their way?
I think it did. If you go back to the book you wrote, go back to that time [1985-1995], that whole independent scene at the time was a bit fake, because no one had any real success at it. There was the odd thing like Hayden, but a lot of people on independents couldn’t support themselves financially or achieve any kind of middle class existence within what they were doing.
Many of them wanted to sell out. They still thought a major label deal was the end goal, because remaining independent at that time required lots of work and limited access.
Yeah. There were a lot of people who jumped on that bandwagon, and then failed, and then the business of throwing money at everything failed, and when everyone came back down to earth, people were comfortable with finding independent people who could get the job done and work within everyone’s means.
What does this mean to consumers?
Independents keep ticket prices down. Me, I’m in a unique situation because I have a free office, being part of the ATG infrastructure without necessarily having to be ATG. For me, it’s just me. I do everything: my ticketing, run my own shows. I’m not trying to support 100 people. If I charge $10 to see something, that’s fine. I think the consumer does benefit from that.
Is it a given, then, that HoB would have a higher ticket price for the same act?
I can’t say that for sure... The agent drives a lot of what the ticket price is: more than the market does and more than your opinion [as a booker]. But I don’t have to make money in a million different areas to keep a big office afloat.
What does it mean to artists? Do they care about loyalty to a certain promoter?
Absolutely they do. I’ve been very lucky that way. So do agents. The live music business is entirely based on relationships. [plenty of off the record talk] When you’re tight with an agent, you take the good with the bad. [They might say,] ‘Maybe that band is worth $200, but I really need you to give me $1000.’ Plus immigration, and, and, and. You do it, you take the hit. You have to be smart about it, because it’s a valued relationship.
What barriers are there for you to book a larger venue?
Toronto is a wide-open market that way. There is no barrier. If you have a deposit, you’re good to go. The only barrier is the risk, if you’re willing to take it. When you do shows like that and you’re a little business, the risk is that much more. If you’re off by 100 tickets, that’s a substantial loss, like four or five thousand dollars. At a place like Massey Hall, you only make your money on the last few hundred tickets. It’s important to have good instincts about moving things up to that level. In the case of Arcade Fire, it’s a no brainer. They didn’t want to go larger—I tried, oh, how I tried! They wanted to play a venue that size, but we could have done six nights there.
…
The bigger the event, the easier it is to execute. If you do something at the Air Canada Centre, the people who work there are going to make sure that nothing goes wrong, that you haven’t forgotten to order security. There’s no way the building itself is going to let you screw up badly, because it’s a risk for everyone.
What do you think will happen if Live Nation decides to buy or build venues?
I do think about it, but I’m not sure I have an answer. Half of me wants to say that my relationships will stand through whatever. Currently, because all the venues in the city are independently owned, it’s in their best interest to deal with as many promoters as they can. Because they want to fill the room. If HoB or Live Nation built a thousand or two thousand seater, there will always be the Phoenix and the Kool Haus.
Any final thoughts?
It’s a great, healthy scene here. Having so many competent people doing what they do keeps us all honest. The scuzzy promoter behaviour of the 70s would ever dare rear its ugly head here, for fear of being caught. You have a choice of moving over to a bunch of other people you could work with. Toronto gets so many more shows here than almost any other city in North America, and we all do well.
…
It’s great that I can do Arcade Fire and Interpol and all these other things that jumped to a next level, but let’s not forget that I do about a hundred shows a year at Lee’s Palace for a couple of hundred people. Most of my ticket prices are about $12-15, and no matter how depressed the economy is, people usually have $15 and enough money for a couple of beers.
Jason Grant, talent buyer at House of Blues Canada [email response to on-the-record questions, some of which inquired about the current relationship between Live Nation and House of Blues Canada and the pending merger]
I can only speak to any of the questions as an employee of House of Blues Concerts Canada. I'm not privy to the status of any dealings with Live Nation, so I can't speculate or offer any info on any of those questions.
I think that Toronto has, far and away, the most (and the most successful) independent concert promoters of any city in the country. This stands to reason based on the population size alone... but it's also a product of the tremendous appetite for live music here, and the very informed and culturally active populace.
In most American cities the independent concert promotions scene is tied to venue ownership and exclusive booking arrangements that given promoters enjoy at particular venues. Toronto is more or less free of that particular scenario, which levels the playing field and allows promoters (big and small) to work with an artist from their infancy to superstardom, as long as they are willing and able to take on the extra financial risk as the artist grows.
What this all means to consumers is kind of unclear... artists want to come here because Toronto is a large and important city where they can command decent fees and have a successful show. Good promoters help nurture the environment where that success can perpetuate itself, but no more so than good venues, supportive media, or the fans' enthusiasm for live music in general. If a bidding war erupts among promoters over an artist it can drive ticket prices up, but most artists' representatives and promoters have a good feel for the marketplace, so having a show so grossly overpriced that people won't attend on that basis alone is pretty rare. That's the only potential downside to the consumer as a result of superheated competition among promoters.
What this means to artists is also unclear... some artists and their representatives are fiercely loyal to the promoters who were there at the beginning of their career, others less so. Some of them get to know us by name, go for dinner with us, or even stay at our houses, while others could care less. If you do good work as a promoter, everyone profits... you make a little money, the artist makes money and has a great experience, and most importantly, the fans have a great experience.
Most artists recognize that, but in the whirlwind of a 20 show tour in 21 days, every club, arena or theatre can look the same as the last one, and it can be hard for some of them to make those kind of fine distinctions about why their show went very well that night.
-end-
Showing posts with label Elliott Lefko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elliott Lefko. Show all posts
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Elliott Lefko 2000
Today's Eye Weekly has a moderately in-depth story I wrote about independent promoters in Toronto.
The crux of the argument is that while the U.S. is largely dominated by Clear Channel subsidiary Live Nation--which acquired many of the country's largest indie promoters as well as main rival House of Blues--Toronto (and by extension, Canada) has a thriving indie promoter scene with no fear of a monopoly taking over any time soon. And those promoters are responsible for increasingly bigger shows, including this week's Arcade Fire gig at Massey Hall, and this September's V-Fest.
One of the people I interviewed for the piece was Elliott Lefko, who started as one of the city's most successful indie promoters in the 80s before being hired by MCA Concerts (later Universal Concerts, then House of Blues) in the early 90s. He's a giant in Toronto concert history, and more than one of my other sources credited his 2001 flight to L.A. as opening up the indie promoter scene in Toronto, and loosening House of Blues' grip on the market. Lefko now works for Goldenvoice, the company that puts on Coachella--who, not uncoincidentally, usually has quite a few Canucks on the roster.
I first spoke with Lefko in 2000 while researching Have Not Been the Same. Most of the book focused on interviews with artists, with very few industry voices. But there are few people with more experience in both the underground and the mainstream in Toronto/Canadian rock history between the years 85-95, and Mr. Lefko was a great help.
It's funny, of course, to see how many of his memories are based on how much money certain artists cost, and whether or not he was able to eat that night. But his was/is a high risk business, and he took chances on a lot of artists--especially Canadian ones.
At the beginning of this conversation, I don't think he understood what it was I wanted to talk about, but after that, he required little more than name prompting to embark on long tangents for the rest of our hour-long conversation, which stopped abruptly when I ran out of tape.
Elliott Lefko
June 6 2000
Locale: squatting awkwardly on the floor of the hallway of Universal Concerts’ office in the Molson Ampitheatre
When did you start promoting?
I started off being a journalist and a publicist. I was working for my friend Ron Mann, who did the film Poetry in Motion, and so I was doing publicity for him. I got involved in bringing some of the writers to town: Jim Carroll, Ed Sanders. I liked the performance aspect of it. Then I started doing Cdn writers, trying to put a bit more bite into poetry performance, because I thought it was definitely happening, as you can see from watching the movie.
After that, working with Jim Carroll and Groovy Relgion, and doing shows, I liked doing rock more than poetry. I was presented with some theme weeks down at the Bamboo [pivotal reggae club on Queen St. W], they were doing a ‘white roots week’ where it was cowboy stuff instead of reggae, so I got to program that. Then I brought the Del-Lords in. I’m really good at finding things. So presented with the challenge of finding cowboy bands, which nobody liked, so I found the Del-Lords, Kinky Friedmann, the Texas Jewboys, stuff like that. I had a really good time, so I started doing more theme weeks down there, with girl band week, surf band week. It was lots of fun.
When I went down to New York to find some of these bands, I ran into this whole scene where things were happening. Bands like the Replacements, Green on Red, True Believers. All the agents in New York were working on this kind of stuff, it was a beehive of activity for tons of great bands. They said, ‘we need help bringing in these bands,’ and I was more than happy to do it. I started working at RPM [now the Guvernment] doing indie Wednesdays and bridging Cdn bands like A Neon Rome and bands like that with the best of the young American bands, and having success at it. I brought in British bands too, like the Jazz Butcher.
I really grew to love that, and my niche was the American stuff. There were other promoters in town who were bringing in the more corporate stuff and more British stuff. My thing was more young American bands. I had this friend in Buffalo, these Buffalo kids used to come up to Toronto a lot, and we’d go down there for some shows.
There was this girl Cindy Hersh, and she gave me this tape one time with one side of Buffalo bands and Seattle bands on the other side. The Seattle bands were The Fluid, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana, everybody. I thought, fuck, there’s all these great bands out there I can bring in, and nobody knew about it at the time. I found out who booked them. At the time I was at the Apocalypse Club, and I was able to bring them in for $100. Phone up Niranva. $100. ‘Yeah, we’ll get there somehow.’ They couldn’t make it that time; they got lost in a snowstorm. But Fluid came up, Tad came up, Mudhoney, they all came up for really cheap prices and the kids came out.
I remember doing Soundgarden for the first time there. It was $1000 for Soundgarden. They all came in, they were so quiet, they sat on the bus at the end of the show, very nice and well behaved. At the time Chris Cornell had great long hair at the time so girls wanted to fuck him and the guys wanted to be him. It was like our version of Black Sabbath. It was beautiful, there was this great energy and uncharted territory.
Were you booking local people on the Bamboo series, or mostly New York people? Shadowy Men?
Shadowy Men were there and they were very helpful in playing those kinds of gigs. It was funny because at the time in Toronto there was – and still is – a band called Bunchofuckingoofs. There was a girl I met and we had a fun idea to form a band called Bunchofuckingsmurfs, with a little kid in the band, and it was really funny. We put this band on stage, and the owner came out and started freaking out: ‘you have a kid on stage!’ but it was really fun. It was funny, because Bunchofuckingoofs went crazy, they thought we were making fun of them. I said, ‘Isn’t this what you’re all about? You can’t take a joke?’ There was also the Dundrells from Toronto. There were some really great country bands, too. Prairie Oyster was there, Handsome Ned. It was a cross-pollination.
Where did you see Handsome Ned and what role did he play in bringing roots music to Queen St.?
I loved country music. I don’t know why, but I did. I would go down and see him on Queen St., at the Cameron, and he also had a show at CKLN. He was the nicest guy. I had a poetry show there that I did with Chris Twomey, and I’d see him all the time. He was a real sweet guy. Always willing to help, always wanted to talk. Whenever I wanted to do something, he was there. ‘No problem.’ He was involved, I didn’t have to ask. Blue Rodeo was in its infancy at the time, and they’d be the opening act for some of these weeks, and down at RPM, too. Handsome Ned was the star. I would do shows with him, and he’d be just such a sweet guy. I really like working with him.
Did you see how he influenced different people?
Yeah. (pauses). I guess I did.
That was around the time Blue Rodeo started.
Yeah, he did some shows with Blue Rodeo. (stammering). He was a very sweet guy and I was very sad when he died. When I heard about it, I walked down to the Cameron House. We’d have parties after the shows with the True Believers, Alejandro Escovedo and some of those people, and Ned would be with us. We’d have a lot of fun together. I don’t really see that sense of community now that we had then, where everybody would have a really good time together after the shows.
Was there something about his songwriting that set him apart?
He was a really great songwriter, a really great voice. He had a lot of presence on stage, which is the hardest thing to get. You couldn’t stand behind him (Ned) at a gig, because he’d be wearing his giant cowboy hat. A very sweet guy. I remember riding home from his funeral with Greg [Keelor] from Blue Rodeo, in this really old beat up car. I remember listening to the radio and feeling really sad about it. At the time, Blue Rodeo really wanted to play a lot. There weren’t very popular yet, but they certainly were afterwards.
Did you know Blue Rodeo’s early incarnations?
They had went down to New York and then moved back here, so I started to work with them a lot. They would do anything at the time. If you needed them to do a show, there was no problem to get them to play. They opened some really great bills.
Were there turning points in their evolution that you saw?
When they put out the first record, they had a really good manager at the time, John Caton, who subsequently had some heart problems and had to retire. When he was with them and Outskirts came out, Jim [Cuddy] had experience with video, so they were able to put out a really good video right away. It touched a nerve with a lot of people. The images were very clear. There was one song about Kennedy in a hotel room getting shot, and also “A Good Year for the Roses.” It seemed to touch a lot of people. Really good music, really good words, really good looking guys on stage. There was a time when the Queen St. thing was exploding, and they stepped out of that and into people’s homes, through their stereos.
In the beginning it seemed to be more of an adult thing, and then their audience grew.
The Cowboy Junkies, one of their first gigs was at the Bamboo for one of the country weeks. Michael Timmins gave me a tape with a couple of songs on it, and then they did a show there. Greg [Jim, actually] took those pictures on their record. Michael would lean over his guitar, and she [Margo] was very cheerful. They haven’t changed that much, in a way; they’re still the same band. Success came to them, left them, came back again, etc., but the band has stayed consistent. From the beginning, if you listen to their early music, it was that drugged-out kind of music then that they’re still playing now, with this graceful voice on top of it. The thing I liked about the Cowboy Junkies was they were able to go into the United States and tour, unlike a lot of other bands. They would go into a van. They saw themselves – maybe not an American band, but they never saw themselves as a Canadian band. Never did. That’s why they were successful.
Even before the first record.
Right away, they were touring. They got into the station wagon and toured. These other bands like Green on Red would play all over the world, and that’s what the Junkies were. They realised they wanted to fit on the same map. Even if they were only making 50 cents and sleeping on people’s floors. A lot of the other Canadian bands didn’t do that: they were scared to do that, or didn’t want to do that. That was a good thing about the Junkies.
Another guy was Jeff Healey. I knew him through this friend of mine Joe Rockman, who I grew up with, the bassist. He told me he was playing with this blind guitar guy. I was putting on a show with Dr. John, and I got Jeff Healey to be the back-up band for Dr. John. They hit it off like crazy, getting to play together on stage. They were his band. It showed a bit that he could rise above the level of just playing Grossman’s. Later they did get to see some success.
The Cowboy Junkies seemed an oddball choice for mainstream success. A lot of Canadian companies thought their records were demos.
Sure, if you look in terms of Canadian music and what was going on then, Haywire and the pop music that was coming out of Canada at the time. It was the furthest thing from it. But there was a different strata that was going on there. At the time I couldn’t even buy bands off of Canadian agents, they would laugh at me. But American agents were taking me seriously. The comparative thing with the Junkies was that they were appealing to things that were going on universally, rather than in Canada. Eventually A&R people would come and see them and think they’re really good. Or if they played at Maxwell’s, a place like that in Hoboken, then people would look at them as being a creative, interesting voice. To Michael Timmins’ credit, he didn’t really care. He was going to do it, and if people didn’t come, they didn’t come; if people came, then people came. That’s great.
Was there a point when that attitude changed in the industry?
Perhaps with people like Pursuit of Happiness, when they had some success. Or Chalk Circle. Those kinds of bands would play RPM on Wednesday nights, one of the many bands who would give me tapes. Eventually, they had good videos and got signed – maybe in the Pursuit of Happiness’s case because they made a really good video. At that point the A&R people saw that there was something happening here that they could work with. Still, to this day, though, people can’t really go out on a limb and sign a weird, eccentric Canadian band and think that that’s going to make money. They want more commercial stuff.
As a result, you saw Zulu Records and Og Records and other independents putting out stuff and having a little bit of success; Mint later on. Part of the problem in Canada is that when you leave out a couple of urban centres, people don’t care what’s going on in modern music. Our friends in Montreal and Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Calgary and in Vancouver, you hear this stuff on Brave New Waves, but try to sell a show with the Apples in Stereo outside an urban centre, and not many people are going to come and see it.
There was a lot of stuff going on in Montreal. I know you were a big Gruesomes supporter.
I really liked the Gruesomes. There were certain things in Canada that I would hear about that I thought were a combination of artistic – I thought they were really good – and money; I’d think, this is how I’ll make some money and eat that day.
The Gruesomes were fantastic. When I first found them, it was for one of the things at the Bamboo. I brought them to Toronto. They had really long hair, and all they wanted to do was eat cereal and candy. John Davis’s younger brother Eric must have been about 15 or 16; he got to the Bamboo gig and he didn’t have any drumsticks! He was about to go on stage, and I had to run down to the Horseshoe and get him some drumsticks. The guys at the Bamboo were howling on me: “What is this?” And yet the band would pack them in. People loved it, it was really good.
I’d do combinations like them and the Chesterfield Kings; at the time the Chesterfield Kings were so good, and the Gruesomes just rocked their heads off. They didn’t care about anything. They were really great on stage, so easy to work with, and fun, and people would come out. It was a pleasure for me.
Other bands at the time were the Asexuals. I’d heard the records, and it was as good in my mind as the Replacements. Another band was The Nils. Again, you couldn’t believe how good those records sounded. When they’d play Toronto, I’d offer them $2000 for a show and they’d make it easily, we’d all make a lot of money. Or the Doughboys. The first or second time we did the Doughboys, we did a free show, and it was just packed. There was this big fat doorman at the Silver Dollar who was taking money from people just to get into a free show. It became a carnival atmosphere. People really wanted to see this stuff, the shows would sell, and things were working. The bands were great, made great music. Later on, they became such a great band. Jerry Jerry was also a great band.
A lot of the credit at the time went to Lee’s Palace. Mr. Lee and Craig Morrison. I would do shows all over town, wherever there was a stage. But the best place was always Lee’s Palace. I quickly realized that places would come and go, but that place would always be there. There was one point where I had no money – I’d been fired from the Silver Dollar or the Apocalypse or some place like that. Mr. Lee called me and took me out for lunch, and said ‘Do shows here. We’ll give you money. Don’t worry about stuff like that. You’ll be okay.’ I felt so good. There were all these nights when I’d sit in their leaky basement counting my money and feeling really thankful that I had a place to go and a place for the bands to go.
There was another band in Toronto I used to make money off of called Rare Air, with bagpipes. Amazing band, really good. I used to promote their shows in Toronto, and I’d make $100 and I could eat that day. It was so much fun. Then the Vancouver connection was with bands like Slow. I brought them into Toronto because I’d seen their video, and it was really amazing. It was around the Expo thing, all the hype. I brought them in for a show with Soul Asylum, and then the next night they did their own gig. They were so good, so incredible, but so fucked up.
On drugs or in general?
Not on drugs, no. They were the kind of guys who could walk down the street and get into an accident because they stepped on the wrong thing. They were funny guys. To get to Toronto they spent all their money, so they had no money to go back home again.
So they slept in their van, parked in front of my apartment on St. George for three weeks or something. My friend across the street was like, ‘Hey, is that Slow?’ And he’d invite them in to listen to music at his place. Tom was sleeping in the van, and the inner linings of the top of the van went into his mouth while he was sleeping and he had to go to the hospital because he was swallowing fibreglass. Ziggy got into a fight at a club in Hamilton and broke his arm. Chris and the other guy got into a fight with Bunchofuckinggoofs and hurt himself.
Steven Hamm, we were invited to a party up north for this guy who really liked the song and wanted to impress his girlfriend, so he took us to his parents place. He went into the Jacuzzi when everyone else was downstairs, and he flooded the Jacuzzi, and there was water everywhere. They were that type of band: everything would happen to them, but once they got on stage, they were so good.
I recently saw Tom Anselmi, and the guy still looks like – if there’s a rock star in Canada, it’s that kid. He looks and dresses the part. It’s a bit of a shame that band never achieved the success that was due, because of all the problems they had and the guy was a prima donna. It’s only now that he’s able to act halfway normal, and be nice to people. He was such an asshole to people for so long that people wanted to bury him. When I see him now, I think, that guy’s a star.
Did you see Circle C? [the band that formed out of the ashes of Slow]
I got to work with them a little bit. I booked them when I first started working with MCA Concerts, and he sent me this t-shirt with the Circle C logo based on the Chanel thing. It was one of these Spinal Tap things, where they got the wrong dimensions, and it was too little [he holds his fingers three cm apart]. We had all these t-shirts we couldn’t do anything with. When I heard A Neon Rome’s record or the Circle C record, I thought these were grandiose, beautiful records that deserved their place in the whole thing of Canadian rock. But those records never really did anything. I loved the Circle C record, but they weren’t able to do it live at the time. Maybe their story will come out one day.
A Neon Rome.
Those guys were almost the house band down at RPM when I was doing shows there. They were very popular at the time. They were a great band live, they’d go off and do these long songs. One day I was sitting somewhere and I saw their record, which was put out by New Rose Records in France, who put out Replacements records, and I said, ‘I really, really want to put this record out.’ So I formed a record company called Rightside Records and I put the record out in Canada. I loved that record. I thought, how can anybody not put out a record like this, such a beautiful record, beautiful cover? What a great record! But the singer at one point stopped talking [literally: he took a vow of silence]. You wonder why a band like that never got signed or nothing ever happened with them, because they were incredible live.
I’ve heard they were also dangerous live, hurting people in the audience.
I believe that they were to a certain extent, and they also were dangerous to themselves, too, at the time. From wherever they came from in Toronto, they knew that they were making sophisticated, universal music that was coming out at the time. I don’t know from what place inside of them it came from, but it was amazing. It’s incredible. Nowadays, you have guys like John Borra, who’s still one of the nicest guys around, playing really excellent music. He eventually became part of the lineage from Handsome Ned, in terms of cowboy stuff. But at the time he was doing psychedelic music.
Ian Blurton [Change of Heart, C'mon] was their drummer for a short period of time.
I remember Change of Heart always being around. There was a scene at the Beverley, and they would play there with bands like Vital Sines, Breeding Ground. That guy probably started when he was 16 years old or something. He always put out really great records, did really good live. If you’re going to have scene people who you recognize as the Toronto music scene, there’s Ian Blurton, Handsome Ned, Jim Cuddy. Faces to the music, those were the guys. Ian Blurton, you wonder how the guy ate for all these years, because there was never any money coming in, but he’d always be playing gigs.
There seemed to be a glass ceiling for that band.
There certainly was. They were the quintessential traveling-across-Canada-in-a-van-for-$100 band, back and forth, they did it so many times. And tried to probably go to the United States. He never had the attitude; or, he never had attitude, really. That was the good thing about him; he just wanted to play.
How did people find out about those Montreal bands that drew so well? Where did people find out about them? CKLN? BNW? Nerve?
I think it was a combination of all of those things. And once they did a gig, they were really good. If they were shit, it wouldn’t matter, they’d be come and gone. But they were all really good bands. They came out of their circle; Foufounes Electrique was a really great club at one point. There was a really great scene going on with people in Ottawa like Eugene Haslam, and in Hamilton there were guys doing shows, and in Kitchener and London, James McLean was there. And Suffer Machine was coming out of there. Disappointed a Few People were an amazing band at the time, too. There was a whole scene where bands could come in and do ten gigs in a row and do very well.
L’Etranger [early 80s Clash-y new wave band with Andrew Cash and Charles Angus]. Was that before you started booking?
A little bit before, so I wasn’t involved with them very much. I worked with Andy Cash a lot after that. When he signed a deal with Island, that was a little bit of a milestone, for someone plugging away for a long time, had really good songs, had a really good personality on stage, and got recognized by a major record label. It’s funny, because Island recognized him, an independent in its own way. When he got his deal and his songs were getting some radio airplay, “Time and Place,” that was a really good thing going on there. He was a guy who always wore his heart on his sleeve and was political, but always was a face that you could recognize Toronto rock by.
Rheostatics.
I used to work with Dave [Bidini] at the Excalibur when I was a writer at York University, and he was too. He told me he had a band, and I did some shows with those guys. (pauses) There are some guys who are the good guys of Canadian rock. I’d look at Bidini as being one of those types of people. And all the people with him, like Dave Clark and all those guys in the group. They made you feel so good whether you were in the audience or wherever.
On stage, or professionally?
Professionally, for me. Sometimes it was not so much the music. For some people it was the music, and with others it was being associated with really great people, and for me the Rheos were more like that. They never had a bad word for people, they always had a smile for people. They were always going out of their way to help other people. The way Don Kerr or Dale Morningstar [owners of Gas Station studio] are now. That’s what those guys were like then. Bidini loves Canadian rock, like Max Webster and stuff like that. He sees them as the older brothers, like Led Zeppelin would be England. He treated them with respect. Rush, and people like that, he loved those bands. They would help him, and then he would help out the littler bands. That was the nice thing going on, a sense of community.
Barenaked Ladies. Was that a fluke of time and place?
Yvonne used to book them at Ultrasound and do really well with it. At one point I became aware of them and decided I had to get involved. They had really good songs, just excellent, excellent songs. Their father would sell the tapes out of the back of his car and do really well.
Jane Siberry paved a lot of roads for non-commercial music that did really well.
I really loved her. I first saw her when she was doing her folk stuff. I thought she was really beautiful and very talented and very poetic. I started to work with her when I was taking musicians and getting them to do poetry and spoken word and performances, and she fit into that well. She was very into the whole Laurie Anderson thing, and wanted to evolve out of that. She appealed to people and worked really hard to get her own thing going.
She was really smart. She had her band, she was the leader of her band, she put up her posters all over the place, and she worked her way up the ladder one rung at a time. From a little club to a bigger club. She had both things, which was the best thing about her: she had a firm understanding of what it takes to be successful and all the hard work she had to put into it, and she and Bob Blumer went into the United States early, and worked hard to get the level of recognition going. Subsequently, 20 years later, she can still go to places like New York and Los Angeles where she has a following, because she worked it back then.
She took a lot of chances, too, and sometimes she’d miss the mark. But because she did that, she stayed ahead of the game and didn’t get lost, whereas so many other people just got lost and became clichés afterwards. She never did become a cliché. Even now.
Why do you think her music became so accepted, beyond just her hard work?
People like her and, say, John Critchley [of 13 Engines], they have a very broad sense of what’s going on in the world. They look at you when you talk to them, but they don’t look at you totally in the eye. You can see that the wheels are always moving in their head. They’re always thinking about how they can change things, how to do something different from what everyone else is trying to do. With her, she always knew how to change things and make things different. She was never going to let anybody tie her down. It all came from within her. And she was an artist, too. That’s how her head worked, like Joni Mitchell. They were always going to change. I don’t think she even thinks about it; I think it just happens.
Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Again, there’s somebody to an extreme, though. She’ll be so popular that Michael Stipe announced her from the stage here.
And that’s 12 years later.
Yeah. People are still knocked out by her. With her, though, it’s her beauty and her fault that she can’t understand the mechanisms of commerciality. She won’t go down that road. In a way it’s artistically really good, because she’s able to put out a record like she did, and play with the Glass Orchestra or whatever she does, an evening of love songs, and then you won’t see her again. That’s the positive. The fault is that if she’d learn to take a step towards the centre of the road, she could be huge. But she won’t, or she can’t, or she doesn’t know how, or whatever it is.
Did you see the Go Deo Chorus? [O’Hara’s first band]
Yeah. There was this place in Toronto called the Blue Angel, where Ultrasound was, and it was kind of this white elephant of a place. She’d play there, and she also had her way of writing, and she did the logos for the Rivoli and posters for people. She would do those kinds of gigs. Very much a Queen St. diva at the time.
You mentioned Critchley, and there was another band who went to the States right away.
Critchley realized what was going on with Husker Du and the Replacements and all these bands, and he went down to Minneapolis to record and play in the States. He was doing something which a lot of people failed to do, which was just go down there and knock on some doors and eventually they would open. But they were hard.
I remember trying to get gigs for the Gruesomes in the United States, and there was nothing happening, nobody wanted to know. One time this girl sent us a letter saying she wanted to invite the Gruesomes down to New York to play and we drove down there, did the gig, and afterwards she had no money to pay us. That kind of stuff. For a Cdn band, it was very difficult, and difficult to draw across Canada because it was so huge. There were daunting tasks. You could sit down with Ian Blurton and he could probably list a million reasons why things never happen and why it’s so difficult.
Were you managing the Gruesomes?
I just booked them and was friends with them. I never did any managing, I was always just friends with people. There was this band, Rang Tango, at the time when Blue Rodeo was starting. They were such a big band in Toronto at the time, and she was so good, they were making great music and packing houses. That was the one time I went to someone and said, can I manage you? I guess they looked at me and said, ‘you’re too scruffy’ or ‘you’re not enough of a businessman’ or ‘we think we can do better.’ They said no. That sort of frightened me after that; I didn’t want to put myself on the line for people and ask their permission to work with them. I know I’m good and I know I can make money off of what I was doing, so I went back to that. I never managed everybody after that.
They got signed to a deal and then fired the band, is that what happened?
They got signed to a deal and got a lawyer to manage them. It was ridiculous. They’d be playing the Silver Dollar and this lawyer would be running around backstage, telling everybody what to do. And everything was fine beforehand. Then the record company said, ‘we want to sign you but fire the band.’ She had to make this hard decision. She made the wrong decision. It would be like saying to Blue Rodeo, ‘Fire that fat bass player! Fire that postman drummer! You don’t need all that stuff, just use your two beautiful singers.’ But that’s why bands are bands, it’s that intangible quality, and it also keeps the lead singer’s head down to a reasonable level, by having everybody in the band, and having band meetings and band practices. That’s what was wrong in her case. She made a lot of moves, but she’s paid everything back in spades in subsequent years. She realizes she made a mistake, and if she could take it back she would. Again, she’s one of the nicest people in Cdn rock.
The east coast explosion in ’91 with Sloan.
People were going out to the east coast and coming back and saying, ‘there’s this amazing band called Sloan down there.’ I brought them to Toronto to do gigs. They were not unlike the Gruesomes in that, um, they were totally naïve in the way they were. They were making really fresh music, really good music. They did very well when they played gigs. And then Eric’s Trip, they came down to open for Sonic Youth at the Concert Hall. Again, that started rolling. They were really good, they draw people, and all the other bands followed suit coming out of there. For a while there, there were a whole lot of really good bands coming out of there.
I seem to remember some Toronto snobbery towards those bands at the time. Or was it all hyped up too much?
I think those bands were really great bands. They had a lot of confidence. Because they came from so far away, they travelled 15-20 hours to get here, they built up a bit of protection around themselves and self-confidence. They did very well.
Edgefests.
The shining moment for me was when Dave Bookman and I booked an Edgefest at the Ampitheatre. I had done a few of them, and things went well and people came out. Lowest of the Low, Violent Femmes, the Rheos. One time [1995] we just wanted to do a show, it was the show with no fat, we called it; we didn’t want any bad bands on the show. We had so many great bands, 40 bands or whatever. Bookman’s girlfriend at the time did a poster and a t-shirt. There was only one bad band we had on the show, that we were forced to put on. What were their names—a funky bass player from Toronto, I forget.
But every other band was amazing. From Montreal there was Merlin, from the east coast there was Thursh Hermit—the Steve Miller set! [Thrush Hermit’s entire set that day was spent covering Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits album.] That was such a beautiful moment. To have the sense of irony that they had, and for the biggest moment in front of their biggest crowd, instead of going for it and playing a set to do that, that’s when you realize you have a sense of community here and a band with a guy like Joel [Plaskett], a superstar singer like that who said, ‘You know, I don’t care if I sell a million records. This is my moment and I’m going to enjoy it.’ And for him to make the audience enjoy it that much, everybody understood the joke at that point.
No bad bands on it, really good bands, people came out that day, about 4000 people. Bands like Cub and Pluto from out west, bands of every single kind, and Sloan was doing sort of their farewell gig at that time. That’s when you saw, there are 40 amazing bands in Canada doing really good and who can take their place with anything. A lot of credit goes to Dave Bookman, too, for thinking of the whole thing, and helping a lot of bands along. And Sloan for leading the charge with all these bands.
Any other highlight moments for you like that? Seminal shows or bands?
Well you know, all the marijuana smoked clouds my mind a lot. I really liked the Lowest of the Low. When you see a band like that achieve the commercial thing too, with people lining up to see them, that was exciting to see. [Lefko coaxed them out of retirement a year after this conversation, for three shows at the Kool Haus that sold out instantly. It was his last hurrah in Toronto before moving to L.A.]
Doing my first show at Massey Hall with Grapes of Wrath, and having John Critchley's 13 Engines open. Doing shows at the Concert Hall with Skinny Puppy, or Sarah McLachlan at the Diamond Club. Having giant line-ups and doing really well with those things.
-end-
The crux of the argument is that while the U.S. is largely dominated by Clear Channel subsidiary Live Nation--which acquired many of the country's largest indie promoters as well as main rival House of Blues--Toronto (and by extension, Canada) has a thriving indie promoter scene with no fear of a monopoly taking over any time soon. And those promoters are responsible for increasingly bigger shows, including this week's Arcade Fire gig at Massey Hall, and this September's V-Fest.
One of the people I interviewed for the piece was Elliott Lefko, who started as one of the city's most successful indie promoters in the 80s before being hired by MCA Concerts (later Universal Concerts, then House of Blues) in the early 90s. He's a giant in Toronto concert history, and more than one of my other sources credited his 2001 flight to L.A. as opening up the indie promoter scene in Toronto, and loosening House of Blues' grip on the market. Lefko now works for Goldenvoice, the company that puts on Coachella--who, not uncoincidentally, usually has quite a few Canucks on the roster.
I first spoke with Lefko in 2000 while researching Have Not Been the Same. Most of the book focused on interviews with artists, with very few industry voices. But there are few people with more experience in both the underground and the mainstream in Toronto/Canadian rock history between the years 85-95, and Mr. Lefko was a great help.
It's funny, of course, to see how many of his memories are based on how much money certain artists cost, and whether or not he was able to eat that night. But his was/is a high risk business, and he took chances on a lot of artists--especially Canadian ones.
At the beginning of this conversation, I don't think he understood what it was I wanted to talk about, but after that, he required little more than name prompting to embark on long tangents for the rest of our hour-long conversation, which stopped abruptly when I ran out of tape.
Elliott Lefko
June 6 2000
Locale: squatting awkwardly on the floor of the hallway of Universal Concerts’ office in the Molson Ampitheatre
When did you start promoting?
I started off being a journalist and a publicist. I was working for my friend Ron Mann, who did the film Poetry in Motion, and so I was doing publicity for him. I got involved in bringing some of the writers to town: Jim Carroll, Ed Sanders. I liked the performance aspect of it. Then I started doing Cdn writers, trying to put a bit more bite into poetry performance, because I thought it was definitely happening, as you can see from watching the movie.
After that, working with Jim Carroll and Groovy Relgion, and doing shows, I liked doing rock more than poetry. I was presented with some theme weeks down at the Bamboo [pivotal reggae club on Queen St. W], they were doing a ‘white roots week’ where it was cowboy stuff instead of reggae, so I got to program that. Then I brought the Del-Lords in. I’m really good at finding things. So presented with the challenge of finding cowboy bands, which nobody liked, so I found the Del-Lords, Kinky Friedmann, the Texas Jewboys, stuff like that. I had a really good time, so I started doing more theme weeks down there, with girl band week, surf band week. It was lots of fun.
When I went down to New York to find some of these bands, I ran into this whole scene where things were happening. Bands like the Replacements, Green on Red, True Believers. All the agents in New York were working on this kind of stuff, it was a beehive of activity for tons of great bands. They said, ‘we need help bringing in these bands,’ and I was more than happy to do it. I started working at RPM [now the Guvernment] doing indie Wednesdays and bridging Cdn bands like A Neon Rome and bands like that with the best of the young American bands, and having success at it. I brought in British bands too, like the Jazz Butcher.
I really grew to love that, and my niche was the American stuff. There were other promoters in town who were bringing in the more corporate stuff and more British stuff. My thing was more young American bands. I had this friend in Buffalo, these Buffalo kids used to come up to Toronto a lot, and we’d go down there for some shows.
There was this girl Cindy Hersh, and she gave me this tape one time with one side of Buffalo bands and Seattle bands on the other side. The Seattle bands were The Fluid, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana, everybody. I thought, fuck, there’s all these great bands out there I can bring in, and nobody knew about it at the time. I found out who booked them. At the time I was at the Apocalypse Club, and I was able to bring them in for $100. Phone up Niranva. $100. ‘Yeah, we’ll get there somehow.’ They couldn’t make it that time; they got lost in a snowstorm. But Fluid came up, Tad came up, Mudhoney, they all came up for really cheap prices and the kids came out.
I remember doing Soundgarden for the first time there. It was $1000 for Soundgarden. They all came in, they were so quiet, they sat on the bus at the end of the show, very nice and well behaved. At the time Chris Cornell had great long hair at the time so girls wanted to fuck him and the guys wanted to be him. It was like our version of Black Sabbath. It was beautiful, there was this great energy and uncharted territory.
Were you booking local people on the Bamboo series, or mostly New York people? Shadowy Men?
Shadowy Men were there and they were very helpful in playing those kinds of gigs. It was funny because at the time in Toronto there was – and still is – a band called Bunchofuckingoofs. There was a girl I met and we had a fun idea to form a band called Bunchofuckingsmurfs, with a little kid in the band, and it was really funny. We put this band on stage, and the owner came out and started freaking out: ‘you have a kid on stage!’ but it was really fun. It was funny, because Bunchofuckingoofs went crazy, they thought we were making fun of them. I said, ‘Isn’t this what you’re all about? You can’t take a joke?’ There was also the Dundrells from Toronto. There were some really great country bands, too. Prairie Oyster was there, Handsome Ned. It was a cross-pollination.
Where did you see Handsome Ned and what role did he play in bringing roots music to Queen St.?
I loved country music. I don’t know why, but I did. I would go down and see him on Queen St., at the Cameron, and he also had a show at CKLN. He was the nicest guy. I had a poetry show there that I did with Chris Twomey, and I’d see him all the time. He was a real sweet guy. Always willing to help, always wanted to talk. Whenever I wanted to do something, he was there. ‘No problem.’ He was involved, I didn’t have to ask. Blue Rodeo was in its infancy at the time, and they’d be the opening act for some of these weeks, and down at RPM, too. Handsome Ned was the star. I would do shows with him, and he’d be just such a sweet guy. I really like working with him.
Did you see how he influenced different people?
Yeah. (pauses). I guess I did.
That was around the time Blue Rodeo started.
Yeah, he did some shows with Blue Rodeo. (stammering). He was a very sweet guy and I was very sad when he died. When I heard about it, I walked down to the Cameron House. We’d have parties after the shows with the True Believers, Alejandro Escovedo and some of those people, and Ned would be with us. We’d have a lot of fun together. I don’t really see that sense of community now that we had then, where everybody would have a really good time together after the shows.
Was there something about his songwriting that set him apart?
He was a really great songwriter, a really great voice. He had a lot of presence on stage, which is the hardest thing to get. You couldn’t stand behind him (Ned) at a gig, because he’d be wearing his giant cowboy hat. A very sweet guy. I remember riding home from his funeral with Greg [Keelor] from Blue Rodeo, in this really old beat up car. I remember listening to the radio and feeling really sad about it. At the time, Blue Rodeo really wanted to play a lot. There weren’t very popular yet, but they certainly were afterwards.
Did you know Blue Rodeo’s early incarnations?
They had went down to New York and then moved back here, so I started to work with them a lot. They would do anything at the time. If you needed them to do a show, there was no problem to get them to play. They opened some really great bills.
Were there turning points in their evolution that you saw?
When they put out the first record, they had a really good manager at the time, John Caton, who subsequently had some heart problems and had to retire. When he was with them and Outskirts came out, Jim [Cuddy] had experience with video, so they were able to put out a really good video right away. It touched a nerve with a lot of people. The images were very clear. There was one song about Kennedy in a hotel room getting shot, and also “A Good Year for the Roses.” It seemed to touch a lot of people. Really good music, really good words, really good looking guys on stage. There was a time when the Queen St. thing was exploding, and they stepped out of that and into people’s homes, through their stereos.
In the beginning it seemed to be more of an adult thing, and then their audience grew.
The Cowboy Junkies, one of their first gigs was at the Bamboo for one of the country weeks. Michael Timmins gave me a tape with a couple of songs on it, and then they did a show there. Greg [Jim, actually] took those pictures on their record. Michael would lean over his guitar, and she [Margo] was very cheerful. They haven’t changed that much, in a way; they’re still the same band. Success came to them, left them, came back again, etc., but the band has stayed consistent. From the beginning, if you listen to their early music, it was that drugged-out kind of music then that they’re still playing now, with this graceful voice on top of it. The thing I liked about the Cowboy Junkies was they were able to go into the United States and tour, unlike a lot of other bands. They would go into a van. They saw themselves – maybe not an American band, but they never saw themselves as a Canadian band. Never did. That’s why they were successful.
Even before the first record.
Right away, they were touring. They got into the station wagon and toured. These other bands like Green on Red would play all over the world, and that’s what the Junkies were. They realised they wanted to fit on the same map. Even if they were only making 50 cents and sleeping on people’s floors. A lot of the other Canadian bands didn’t do that: they were scared to do that, or didn’t want to do that. That was a good thing about the Junkies.
Another guy was Jeff Healey. I knew him through this friend of mine Joe Rockman, who I grew up with, the bassist. He told me he was playing with this blind guitar guy. I was putting on a show with Dr. John, and I got Jeff Healey to be the back-up band for Dr. John. They hit it off like crazy, getting to play together on stage. They were his band. It showed a bit that he could rise above the level of just playing Grossman’s. Later they did get to see some success.
The Cowboy Junkies seemed an oddball choice for mainstream success. A lot of Canadian companies thought their records were demos.
Sure, if you look in terms of Canadian music and what was going on then, Haywire and the pop music that was coming out of Canada at the time. It was the furthest thing from it. But there was a different strata that was going on there. At the time I couldn’t even buy bands off of Canadian agents, they would laugh at me. But American agents were taking me seriously. The comparative thing with the Junkies was that they were appealing to things that were going on universally, rather than in Canada. Eventually A&R people would come and see them and think they’re really good. Or if they played at Maxwell’s, a place like that in Hoboken, then people would look at them as being a creative, interesting voice. To Michael Timmins’ credit, he didn’t really care. He was going to do it, and if people didn’t come, they didn’t come; if people came, then people came. That’s great.
Was there a point when that attitude changed in the industry?
Perhaps with people like Pursuit of Happiness, when they had some success. Or Chalk Circle. Those kinds of bands would play RPM on Wednesday nights, one of the many bands who would give me tapes. Eventually, they had good videos and got signed – maybe in the Pursuit of Happiness’s case because they made a really good video. At that point the A&R people saw that there was something happening here that they could work with. Still, to this day, though, people can’t really go out on a limb and sign a weird, eccentric Canadian band and think that that’s going to make money. They want more commercial stuff.
As a result, you saw Zulu Records and Og Records and other independents putting out stuff and having a little bit of success; Mint later on. Part of the problem in Canada is that when you leave out a couple of urban centres, people don’t care what’s going on in modern music. Our friends in Montreal and Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Calgary and in Vancouver, you hear this stuff on Brave New Waves, but try to sell a show with the Apples in Stereo outside an urban centre, and not many people are going to come and see it.
There was a lot of stuff going on in Montreal. I know you were a big Gruesomes supporter.
I really liked the Gruesomes. There were certain things in Canada that I would hear about that I thought were a combination of artistic – I thought they were really good – and money; I’d think, this is how I’ll make some money and eat that day.
The Gruesomes were fantastic. When I first found them, it was for one of the things at the Bamboo. I brought them to Toronto. They had really long hair, and all they wanted to do was eat cereal and candy. John Davis’s younger brother Eric must have been about 15 or 16; he got to the Bamboo gig and he didn’t have any drumsticks! He was about to go on stage, and I had to run down to the Horseshoe and get him some drumsticks. The guys at the Bamboo were howling on me: “What is this?” And yet the band would pack them in. People loved it, it was really good.
I’d do combinations like them and the Chesterfield Kings; at the time the Chesterfield Kings were so good, and the Gruesomes just rocked their heads off. They didn’t care about anything. They were really great on stage, so easy to work with, and fun, and people would come out. It was a pleasure for me.
Other bands at the time were the Asexuals. I’d heard the records, and it was as good in my mind as the Replacements. Another band was The Nils. Again, you couldn’t believe how good those records sounded. When they’d play Toronto, I’d offer them $2000 for a show and they’d make it easily, we’d all make a lot of money. Or the Doughboys. The first or second time we did the Doughboys, we did a free show, and it was just packed. There was this big fat doorman at the Silver Dollar who was taking money from people just to get into a free show. It became a carnival atmosphere. People really wanted to see this stuff, the shows would sell, and things were working. The bands were great, made great music. Later on, they became such a great band. Jerry Jerry was also a great band.
A lot of the credit at the time went to Lee’s Palace. Mr. Lee and Craig Morrison. I would do shows all over town, wherever there was a stage. But the best place was always Lee’s Palace. I quickly realized that places would come and go, but that place would always be there. There was one point where I had no money – I’d been fired from the Silver Dollar or the Apocalypse or some place like that. Mr. Lee called me and took me out for lunch, and said ‘Do shows here. We’ll give you money. Don’t worry about stuff like that. You’ll be okay.’ I felt so good. There were all these nights when I’d sit in their leaky basement counting my money and feeling really thankful that I had a place to go and a place for the bands to go.
There was another band in Toronto I used to make money off of called Rare Air, with bagpipes. Amazing band, really good. I used to promote their shows in Toronto, and I’d make $100 and I could eat that day. It was so much fun. Then the Vancouver connection was with bands like Slow. I brought them into Toronto because I’d seen their video, and it was really amazing. It was around the Expo thing, all the hype. I brought them in for a show with Soul Asylum, and then the next night they did their own gig. They were so good, so incredible, but so fucked up.
On drugs or in general?
Not on drugs, no. They were the kind of guys who could walk down the street and get into an accident because they stepped on the wrong thing. They were funny guys. To get to Toronto they spent all their money, so they had no money to go back home again.
So they slept in their van, parked in front of my apartment on St. George for three weeks or something. My friend across the street was like, ‘Hey, is that Slow?’ And he’d invite them in to listen to music at his place. Tom was sleeping in the van, and the inner linings of the top of the van went into his mouth while he was sleeping and he had to go to the hospital because he was swallowing fibreglass. Ziggy got into a fight at a club in Hamilton and broke his arm. Chris and the other guy got into a fight with Bunchofuckinggoofs and hurt himself.
Steven Hamm, we were invited to a party up north for this guy who really liked the song and wanted to impress his girlfriend, so he took us to his parents place. He went into the Jacuzzi when everyone else was downstairs, and he flooded the Jacuzzi, and there was water everywhere. They were that type of band: everything would happen to them, but once they got on stage, they were so good.
I recently saw Tom Anselmi, and the guy still looks like – if there’s a rock star in Canada, it’s that kid. He looks and dresses the part. It’s a bit of a shame that band never achieved the success that was due, because of all the problems they had and the guy was a prima donna. It’s only now that he’s able to act halfway normal, and be nice to people. He was such an asshole to people for so long that people wanted to bury him. When I see him now, I think, that guy’s a star.
Did you see Circle C? [the band that formed out of the ashes of Slow]
I got to work with them a little bit. I booked them when I first started working with MCA Concerts, and he sent me this t-shirt with the Circle C logo based on the Chanel thing. It was one of these Spinal Tap things, where they got the wrong dimensions, and it was too little [he holds his fingers three cm apart]. We had all these t-shirts we couldn’t do anything with. When I heard A Neon Rome’s record or the Circle C record, I thought these were grandiose, beautiful records that deserved their place in the whole thing of Canadian rock. But those records never really did anything. I loved the Circle C record, but they weren’t able to do it live at the time. Maybe their story will come out one day.
A Neon Rome.
Those guys were almost the house band down at RPM when I was doing shows there. They were very popular at the time. They were a great band live, they’d go off and do these long songs. One day I was sitting somewhere and I saw their record, which was put out by New Rose Records in France, who put out Replacements records, and I said, ‘I really, really want to put this record out.’ So I formed a record company called Rightside Records and I put the record out in Canada. I loved that record. I thought, how can anybody not put out a record like this, such a beautiful record, beautiful cover? What a great record! But the singer at one point stopped talking [literally: he took a vow of silence]. You wonder why a band like that never got signed or nothing ever happened with them, because they were incredible live.
I’ve heard they were also dangerous live, hurting people in the audience.
I believe that they were to a certain extent, and they also were dangerous to themselves, too, at the time. From wherever they came from in Toronto, they knew that they were making sophisticated, universal music that was coming out at the time. I don’t know from what place inside of them it came from, but it was amazing. It’s incredible. Nowadays, you have guys like John Borra, who’s still one of the nicest guys around, playing really excellent music. He eventually became part of the lineage from Handsome Ned, in terms of cowboy stuff. But at the time he was doing psychedelic music.
Ian Blurton [Change of Heart, C'mon] was their drummer for a short period of time.
I remember Change of Heart always being around. There was a scene at the Beverley, and they would play there with bands like Vital Sines, Breeding Ground. That guy probably started when he was 16 years old or something. He always put out really great records, did really good live. If you’re going to have scene people who you recognize as the Toronto music scene, there’s Ian Blurton, Handsome Ned, Jim Cuddy. Faces to the music, those were the guys. Ian Blurton, you wonder how the guy ate for all these years, because there was never any money coming in, but he’d always be playing gigs.
There seemed to be a glass ceiling for that band.
There certainly was. They were the quintessential traveling-across-Canada-in-a-van-for-$100 band, back and forth, they did it so many times. And tried to probably go to the United States. He never had the attitude; or, he never had attitude, really. That was the good thing about him; he just wanted to play.
How did people find out about those Montreal bands that drew so well? Where did people find out about them? CKLN? BNW? Nerve?
I think it was a combination of all of those things. And once they did a gig, they were really good. If they were shit, it wouldn’t matter, they’d be come and gone. But they were all really good bands. They came out of their circle; Foufounes Electrique was a really great club at one point. There was a really great scene going on with people in Ottawa like Eugene Haslam, and in Hamilton there were guys doing shows, and in Kitchener and London, James McLean was there. And Suffer Machine was coming out of there. Disappointed a Few People were an amazing band at the time, too. There was a whole scene where bands could come in and do ten gigs in a row and do very well.
L’Etranger [early 80s Clash-y new wave band with Andrew Cash and Charles Angus]. Was that before you started booking?
A little bit before, so I wasn’t involved with them very much. I worked with Andy Cash a lot after that. When he signed a deal with Island, that was a little bit of a milestone, for someone plugging away for a long time, had really good songs, had a really good personality on stage, and got recognized by a major record label. It’s funny, because Island recognized him, an independent in its own way. When he got his deal and his songs were getting some radio airplay, “Time and Place,” that was a really good thing going on there. He was a guy who always wore his heart on his sleeve and was political, but always was a face that you could recognize Toronto rock by.
Rheostatics.
I used to work with Dave [Bidini] at the Excalibur when I was a writer at York University, and he was too. He told me he had a band, and I did some shows with those guys. (pauses) There are some guys who are the good guys of Canadian rock. I’d look at Bidini as being one of those types of people. And all the people with him, like Dave Clark and all those guys in the group. They made you feel so good whether you were in the audience or wherever.
On stage, or professionally?
Professionally, for me. Sometimes it was not so much the music. For some people it was the music, and with others it was being associated with really great people, and for me the Rheos were more like that. They never had a bad word for people, they always had a smile for people. They were always going out of their way to help other people. The way Don Kerr or Dale Morningstar [owners of Gas Station studio] are now. That’s what those guys were like then. Bidini loves Canadian rock, like Max Webster and stuff like that. He sees them as the older brothers, like Led Zeppelin would be England. He treated them with respect. Rush, and people like that, he loved those bands. They would help him, and then he would help out the littler bands. That was the nice thing going on, a sense of community.
Barenaked Ladies. Was that a fluke of time and place?
Yvonne used to book them at Ultrasound and do really well with it. At one point I became aware of them and decided I had to get involved. They had really good songs, just excellent, excellent songs. Their father would sell the tapes out of the back of his car and do really well.
Jane Siberry paved a lot of roads for non-commercial music that did really well.
I really loved her. I first saw her when she was doing her folk stuff. I thought she was really beautiful and very talented and very poetic. I started to work with her when I was taking musicians and getting them to do poetry and spoken word and performances, and she fit into that well. She was very into the whole Laurie Anderson thing, and wanted to evolve out of that. She appealed to people and worked really hard to get her own thing going.
She was really smart. She had her band, she was the leader of her band, she put up her posters all over the place, and she worked her way up the ladder one rung at a time. From a little club to a bigger club. She had both things, which was the best thing about her: she had a firm understanding of what it takes to be successful and all the hard work she had to put into it, and she and Bob Blumer went into the United States early, and worked hard to get the level of recognition going. Subsequently, 20 years later, she can still go to places like New York and Los Angeles where she has a following, because she worked it back then.
She took a lot of chances, too, and sometimes she’d miss the mark. But because she did that, she stayed ahead of the game and didn’t get lost, whereas so many other people just got lost and became clichés afterwards. She never did become a cliché. Even now.
Why do you think her music became so accepted, beyond just her hard work?
People like her and, say, John Critchley [of 13 Engines], they have a very broad sense of what’s going on in the world. They look at you when you talk to them, but they don’t look at you totally in the eye. You can see that the wheels are always moving in their head. They’re always thinking about how they can change things, how to do something different from what everyone else is trying to do. With her, she always knew how to change things and make things different. She was never going to let anybody tie her down. It all came from within her. And she was an artist, too. That’s how her head worked, like Joni Mitchell. They were always going to change. I don’t think she even thinks about it; I think it just happens.
Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Again, there’s somebody to an extreme, though. She’ll be so popular that Michael Stipe announced her from the stage here.
And that’s 12 years later.
Yeah. People are still knocked out by her. With her, though, it’s her beauty and her fault that she can’t understand the mechanisms of commerciality. She won’t go down that road. In a way it’s artistically really good, because she’s able to put out a record like she did, and play with the Glass Orchestra or whatever she does, an evening of love songs, and then you won’t see her again. That’s the positive. The fault is that if she’d learn to take a step towards the centre of the road, she could be huge. But she won’t, or she can’t, or she doesn’t know how, or whatever it is.
Did you see the Go Deo Chorus? [O’Hara’s first band]
Yeah. There was this place in Toronto called the Blue Angel, where Ultrasound was, and it was kind of this white elephant of a place. She’d play there, and she also had her way of writing, and she did the logos for the Rivoli and posters for people. She would do those kinds of gigs. Very much a Queen St. diva at the time.
You mentioned Critchley, and there was another band who went to the States right away.
Critchley realized what was going on with Husker Du and the Replacements and all these bands, and he went down to Minneapolis to record and play in the States. He was doing something which a lot of people failed to do, which was just go down there and knock on some doors and eventually they would open. But they were hard.
I remember trying to get gigs for the Gruesomes in the United States, and there was nothing happening, nobody wanted to know. One time this girl sent us a letter saying she wanted to invite the Gruesomes down to New York to play and we drove down there, did the gig, and afterwards she had no money to pay us. That kind of stuff. For a Cdn band, it was very difficult, and difficult to draw across Canada because it was so huge. There were daunting tasks. You could sit down with Ian Blurton and he could probably list a million reasons why things never happen and why it’s so difficult.
Were you managing the Gruesomes?
I just booked them and was friends with them. I never did any managing, I was always just friends with people. There was this band, Rang Tango, at the time when Blue Rodeo was starting. They were such a big band in Toronto at the time, and she was so good, they were making great music and packing houses. That was the one time I went to someone and said, can I manage you? I guess they looked at me and said, ‘you’re too scruffy’ or ‘you’re not enough of a businessman’ or ‘we think we can do better.’ They said no. That sort of frightened me after that; I didn’t want to put myself on the line for people and ask their permission to work with them. I know I’m good and I know I can make money off of what I was doing, so I went back to that. I never managed everybody after that.
They got signed to a deal and then fired the band, is that what happened?
They got signed to a deal and got a lawyer to manage them. It was ridiculous. They’d be playing the Silver Dollar and this lawyer would be running around backstage, telling everybody what to do. And everything was fine beforehand. Then the record company said, ‘we want to sign you but fire the band.’ She had to make this hard decision. She made the wrong decision. It would be like saying to Blue Rodeo, ‘Fire that fat bass player! Fire that postman drummer! You don’t need all that stuff, just use your two beautiful singers.’ But that’s why bands are bands, it’s that intangible quality, and it also keeps the lead singer’s head down to a reasonable level, by having everybody in the band, and having band meetings and band practices. That’s what was wrong in her case. She made a lot of moves, but she’s paid everything back in spades in subsequent years. She realizes she made a mistake, and if she could take it back she would. Again, she’s one of the nicest people in Cdn rock.
The east coast explosion in ’91 with Sloan.
People were going out to the east coast and coming back and saying, ‘there’s this amazing band called Sloan down there.’ I brought them to Toronto to do gigs. They were not unlike the Gruesomes in that, um, they were totally naïve in the way they were. They were making really fresh music, really good music. They did very well when they played gigs. And then Eric’s Trip, they came down to open for Sonic Youth at the Concert Hall. Again, that started rolling. They were really good, they draw people, and all the other bands followed suit coming out of there. For a while there, there were a whole lot of really good bands coming out of there.
I seem to remember some Toronto snobbery towards those bands at the time. Or was it all hyped up too much?
I think those bands were really great bands. They had a lot of confidence. Because they came from so far away, they travelled 15-20 hours to get here, they built up a bit of protection around themselves and self-confidence. They did very well.
Edgefests.
The shining moment for me was when Dave Bookman and I booked an Edgefest at the Ampitheatre. I had done a few of them, and things went well and people came out. Lowest of the Low, Violent Femmes, the Rheos. One time [1995] we just wanted to do a show, it was the show with no fat, we called it; we didn’t want any bad bands on the show. We had so many great bands, 40 bands or whatever. Bookman’s girlfriend at the time did a poster and a t-shirt. There was only one bad band we had on the show, that we were forced to put on. What were their names—a funky bass player from Toronto, I forget.
But every other band was amazing. From Montreal there was Merlin, from the east coast there was Thursh Hermit—the Steve Miller set! [Thrush Hermit’s entire set that day was spent covering Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits album.] That was such a beautiful moment. To have the sense of irony that they had, and for the biggest moment in front of their biggest crowd, instead of going for it and playing a set to do that, that’s when you realize you have a sense of community here and a band with a guy like Joel [Plaskett], a superstar singer like that who said, ‘You know, I don’t care if I sell a million records. This is my moment and I’m going to enjoy it.’ And for him to make the audience enjoy it that much, everybody understood the joke at that point.
No bad bands on it, really good bands, people came out that day, about 4000 people. Bands like Cub and Pluto from out west, bands of every single kind, and Sloan was doing sort of their farewell gig at that time. That’s when you saw, there are 40 amazing bands in Canada doing really good and who can take their place with anything. A lot of credit goes to Dave Bookman, too, for thinking of the whole thing, and helping a lot of bands along. And Sloan for leading the charge with all these bands.
Any other highlight moments for you like that? Seminal shows or bands?
Well you know, all the marijuana smoked clouds my mind a lot. I really liked the Lowest of the Low. When you see a band like that achieve the commercial thing too, with people lining up to see them, that was exciting to see. [Lefko coaxed them out of retirement a year after this conversation, for three shows at the Kool Haus that sold out instantly. It was his last hurrah in Toronto before moving to L.A.]
Doing my first show at Massey Hall with Grapes of Wrath, and having John Critchley's 13 Engines open. Doing shows at the Concert Hall with Skinny Puppy, or Sarah McLachlan at the Diamond Club. Having giant line-ups and doing really well with those things.
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