Big Bop manager Dominic Tassielli and Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham share their memories of the soon-to-be-shuttered Queen West club complex
In nearly every history lesson about Toronto’s burgeoning hardcore and metal scene in the early 1980s, one venue gets mentioned at least as often as the name Brian Taylor: Larry’s Hideaway. A scuzzy basement bar housed in a hotel of ill-repute, Larry’s Hideaway hosted the likes of local stalwarts Anvil and Sacrifice, as well as the first Toronto shows for bands like Slayer and Testament, not to mention a well-documented appearance by R.E.M. As infamous as this locale was, it is now but a patch of grass at the north end of Allan Gardens.
In the future, when historians talk about Toronto’s re-burgeoning heavy music scene circa the mid-to-late 2000s, they will also be dropping the name of a non-existent legendary venue: The Big Bop, a multi-room space that included Kathedral, Reverb and Holy Joe's. Queen West concertgoers had their weekend ruined by news of the venue’s imminent demise on Jan. 31, 2010, as reported Friday night by the Globe and Mail.
I headed down to the big purple building yesterday afternoon to chat with Big Bop manager Dominic Tassielli. He confirmed the unfortunate news, saying, “We sold the building three years ago, and I just kept leasing from the new owner. Now he has a tenant coming here, a big furniture store from the States.” Some speculate that this will be a Crate & Barrel subsidiary CB2, but all Tassielli says is that “this building is going to look like a landmark because the owner has to put about $3 million into it.” At least it’s a historical building, so no one can knock it down to make way for a condo tower.
But this transformation doesn’t bode well for what earlier this year I dubbed the “ungentrifiable intersection” — a stretch of Queen West I thought would remain impervious to the influx of corporate coffee shops simply because of punk-friendly places like the Big Bop complex. Or, at the very least, that Queen and Bathurst would be a place where the up-market and downtrodden would have to find a way to coexist.
This development is a bigger bummer for the leather-clad patrons of the Big Bop — those legions of music fans lined up in front of the building smoking cigarettes and looking lethal on most nights of the week. According to a Tweet from local radio host/music historian Alan Cross, The Big Bop was the first venue he visited when he started working at CFNY in 1986. But for younger generations, the Big Bop complex was a regular watering hole to hear live music with aggressive tendencies. Among the many local and international acts to grace the cavernous Kathedral stage, At The Drive-In played here twice in the pre-Mars Volta days, while Billy Talent and Alexisonfire frequented the venue before becoming MuchMusic darlings.
Polaris Prize-winning hardcore powerhouse Fucked Up have hosted part of their annual Fucked Up Weekend here over the past few years as well. I spoke with the band’s singer Damian Abraham yesterday on the line from the business-class lounge at Heathrow as he was preparing to return from the ATP Festival; he says that this was the first he’d heard about the Big Bop’s closure. “I legitimately have no idea what we will do for the next [FU] weekend if we do one,” he laments. “It’s going to totally change the way we do things.”
You see, beyond being a welcoming home for heavy music, The Big Bop was also one of the city’s few all-ages venues. According to Tassielli, The Big Bop started in 1985 as a DJ nightclub back when the Entertainment District hadn’t been developed yet. But by 1993, the venue fell on hard times because all the Richmond Street super-clubs were up and running. Tassielli bought the building in 1996 and decided to turn it into a live venue, but had difficulty securing bookings that were big enough to fill the venue. He took over booking shows around 1998. “It was weird because I found a business with all-ages," Tassielli says. "And that’s what we ended up being known as: an all-ages venue.
“We turned it into quite the business,” he adds. “And now it’s nuts. I didn’t realize the effect but there are kids out there wanting to chain themselves to the door. They want to save the Bop.”
As impressed as he is with their commitment, it’s pretty clear his mind is made up. “I’ve had a lot of businesses before this and closing is no big deal. Now what’s happening is that I’m taking my act to the west end at Kipling and Dundas. It will be a similar idea, with a single-storey venue about the size of the Reverb.”
Abraham is more concerned with the cultural impact of losing the three venues he calls “torchbearers for all-ages venues in Toronto”: Kathedral, Holy Joe’s and the Reverb. “They were really important,” he says. “It’s so much easier to do a 19-plus show, but it’s so much more rewarding to do an all-ages concert. Meeting a kid — who is like myself at one point, who’s at the show and singing along — is so much more exciting than playing to someone who would go to a bar any other night of the week and see live music.”
As for Abrahams’ favourite Big Bop moments, he lists AFI, Converge and Cro-Mags as standout moments. “I saw AFI do a show at the Kathedral just as they were getting popular. They should have been playing the Opera House or a venue twice the size, so it was just a spectacular vibe. [Kathedral] has such a horribly placed stage that somehow works perfectly.
“And the last Swarm show was in 2000 — I kind of look at that show as being the birth of the era of punk rock that Fucked Up came out of,” he says, before reminiscing on Fucked Up’s own Big Bop experiences.
“For us, playing a hometown crowd at a venue where I had seen all these amazing shows was just an absolute dream come true. Though one time while we were playing there, two crusty kids started having sex on the couch — they used to have a really disgusting couch just off to the side of the stage. It was probably the most shocking moment of my entire life that we elicited that kind of response from an audience. It was super early on, which makes it even more unbelievable that they found romance during one of our songs. But there are only so many places in Toronto where you can have that kind of experience. I can’t really picture two crusties having sex on a couch at the Drake. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
Echoing my earlier sentiment, Abraham concludes, “The landscape of that corner will be so different this time next year from this time last year.” With a defeated sounding laugh he adds, “The ungentrifiable corner might finally be totally gentrified.”
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