This past September marked the 20th anniversary of my move from Charlottetown to Toronto, and during these dark days, with everything shut down and everyone shut in, I’ve been thinking a lot about the live music and the (many now struggling or closed) performance spaces I have enjoyed in this city throughout the past two decades.
When I first arrived to this city in 2000, going out in the evening to see bands and attend performances was a big part of my life. After a few years, I got inspired by some rock-loving pals to take it seriously enough to commit, like them, to see at least 100 live bands a year. It might sound like a lot of bands, and people used to tell me it sounded like a lot of bands, but really, it wasn’t that difficult to achieve. Toronto had lots of small and medium-sized venues with live music nightly, so really, you could go sit in any number of bars and hear a band or two (or more.)
But having the 100 bands goal did make it more of a game, and more of an incentive to go hear a band when I might have begged off to stay at home. It was fun to go through the Now listings, or local websites and boards, to see who was playing where and when.
Most of these venues, too, offered incredibly low ticket fees, or else passed the hat between sets, so the cost of entertainment wasn’t prohibitive.
I came across the collage of images above while looking through some old files over the holidays. I had made it as a tribute to the shows I saw in 2007. The images trigger a lot of memories of great music and nights out in the city. Some of the shows were ticketed one-night events, with a big name from out of town (Steve Earle! Neko Case!) While others were local bands playing in a line-up at a small bar (I am pretty sure I saw local band Terror Lake in a very tiny room in the basement of a bar off College Street where you could only access through an alleyway.) Others included weekly performances, like Wednesday nights at Gate 401, a jazz bar on Roncesvalles, where my friend and I would drink half-priced martinis and listen to Julian Fauth on the piano.
And yes, my collage includes non-rock. That year was also the year my sister and brother-in-law convinced me to join them for an all-Shostakovich series with the TSO. But I have long argued that Shostakovich is almost rock-like in his approach to music, so didn’t hesitate to include some of those performances in my band tally.
Those were the days (well, mostly nights.) And reflecting back on that time during this pandemic makes me all the more aware of how lucky I was to get to have that time.