Just the other week, an Urban Outfitters opened up on the south side of Queen Street West, just a stone’s throw away from the Cameron House. It joined its cousins American Apparel and H&M, both relatively recent additions to the transformation of Queen West from an erstwhile bohemian mecca into a shopping strip geared toward consumer-alternative youth.

The appearance of the big box outlet in what, two decades ago, was ground zero for the city’s grassroots arts movement just happens to coincide with the lead-up to the Queen Street Celebration producer Martin Robertson is organizing as part of the Luminato fest. The Queen West fest, which features ‘80s T.O. veterans like The B-Girls, Mary Margaret O’Hara and — of course — the Parachute Club (who perform with dub poet Lillian Allen, ex-Nylon Micah Barnes and Truths and Rights co-founder Mojah) takes place Saturday, June 7 at 100 McCaul.

I mention this not to get on a soapbox and rail against gentrification, but because it’s got me thinking about what it means to lament the death of an era I never experienced. We ‘80s babies who first encountered the soca-infused, politically engaged strains of Lorraine Segato singing “Rise Up” through a McCain commercial missed out on one of the most vital creative surges in Torontonian culture.

“I was a downtown kid, so I kinda knew the kids at [the then-Ontario College of Art] were making a ruckus,” says Barnes. “All the pieces of what made the Queen Street scene possible fell into place in the ‘70s. We thought of ourselves as the bright-idea people, where all these concepts were fermenting. The New York underground influenced the way we thought about all of this — the focus on personalities, the idea that you didn’t have to be a master of your craft and that your ideas were more important. The philosophy of punk rock helped democratize things — and when I say ‘punk,’” he laughs, “I mean ‘art,’ because a lot of the early bands emerged from art studios. Starting a band was more a form of great performance art.”

Allen claims it was a time of “art as community building.” She notes, “That’s when the kind of integration that we see in the arts crystallized or started to happen. It was when black artists started to come downtown, and we were invited and welcomed by various people who came out to our communities. There was a drive for a bigger world and a different Canada.”

O’Hara, who graduated from OCA at 16 (and designed, along with the Rivoli signage, many early album covers and concert posters for Queen West bands), was inspired by the anything-goes aesthetic of those early years, particularly the freeform and improv jazz experiments of folks like N.O.M.A.’s Tom Walsh and his peers.

“I feel kinda unworthy to talk about all this,” she says bashfully. “I really did just kinda fall into the scene. As far as discovering — it didn’t feel like discovering at the time. It was really fun being in a band. At a bar like the El Mocambo, or a bar that used to be around called Jarvis House — my brother Marcus called it the Jive-ass House — they’d have you play for six nights. You’d learn a heck of a lot, but you didn’t notice that you were even working or learning, because you’d be there to have fun.”

To varying degrees, all three artists harbour a sense of nostalgia for the Queen West culture that was. O’Hara jokes about a frenemy who wrote a sour grapes letter to a local paper after she got signed to Virgin, claiming she was “not Queen Street at all.” Nevertheless, O’Hara suggests that losing that original community-oriented vibe was part of why she dropped out of the spotlight after releasing 1988’s tremendous Miss America.

“I remember recording my album in England, and the band was way behind me, and I just felt like, ‘Where is my band?’ I think that’s why I stopped doing stuff after I did the album because before that we were, like, in a joke band and having fun and making each other laugh. Then,” she sighs, “all of a sudden I was up front, being the Girl Singer.”

While Barnes claims that the rise of commercial interests has led to what he feels is a sort of regression in the local music scene, Allen insists that “the system kind of failed us. The kind of promise that happened on Queen Street, we saw sparks of it catching on, but when it made it to the next level, the system was too late and lagging and unsuccessful in nurturing those voices that remained.

“Those of us who survived,” she laughs, “were so good and so persistent, we would’ve survived no matter what.”

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