The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Promoter Who Made Toronto Cool

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Two men named Gary helped make Toronto cool in the 1970s, at a time when this city most definitely was not. They had no rule book. They didn't have a lot of money. But they had interests and ideas -- a lot of them crazy -- and they had the nerve to make things happen. First came movie theatres. Then came concert bookings. And what a roster of acts they introduced to the city... The Ramones, The Police, The Smiths, The Go-Gos and The B-52s to name a few. And now one of the Garys... Gary Topp... is the subject of a new book called He Hijacked My Brain, about his often wild career as a cultural curator. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Two men named Gary helped make Toronto cool in the 1970s at a time when the city most definitely was not. They had neither a rule book nor a lot of money. What they did have were passions and ideas, most of them decidedly outside the mainstream. First came movie theaters, then came concerts.

And what a roster of acts that Garry's introduced to the city. The Ramones, the Police, the Go-Go's, and Talking Heads to name just a few. And now one of the Garry's is the subject of a new book called, He Hijacked My Brain. Garry tops Toronto about his sometimes wild career as a promoter and influential cultural curator. And Gary Topp joins us now here in the studio. Great to have you here. Thank you.

I gotta tell you, this book is a work of art. It's not really, I mean, there's so much, well, you know this, right? Look at this book. I don't know if we can get some shots of this here, Sheldon, but here's the, this is the book itself, okay? That's the book, which is, I mean, just chock full of great images from the past.

And then you've got all this other stuff in here as well, right? That's a timeline, like a subway. Through the 70s? Yeah, yeah. Derek Emerson got me into this. He published it, and he's like the print genius. It's great.

Here's what I really enjoyed because I kept tickets from back in the day. And here you go. You've got like replicas of a lot of the tickets and images, almost like baseball cards from back in the day. What's this one here? There's the police, the police picnic.

You used to do the police picnic every year. Anyway, so much to get caught up on here. Let's start at the beginning. You're a lousy student, right, Gary? Not a great student at school? I was not interested in school whatsoever. I went through high school in the early 60s. I wasn't a rebel like the Proud Boys or anything, but I came out of the 60s

I was interested in when I was a kid. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps, James Dean. So what were you doing at home when you should have been studying? I was dreaming. Basically, not that I knew, but working on a career. In what ways did your parents support your unconventional interests from the time? Weekends, I was kind of locked in my bedroom without a key to study.

And I would cut out, read, blah, blah, listen to the radio and all that. But they did encourage me to, they knew what I liked, so they did encourage that love. When my parents would go to New York in the early 60s, they would take me along, sometimes even with a friend, and we'd go into the village and which you know there was nothing better than going into Greenwich Village in the 60s and hanging out and seeing musicians and meeting

people and all that so you know they knew what I wanted. I guess your first big gig as a producer or I guess what we would have called you an influencer back in the days, wouldn't we? Centennial College, you ran a film society there. What kind of movies did you play? Lots of foreign films and a lot of underground films, American underground films from the 60s, Kenneth Anger. One time I got hold of the Chelsea girls, Andy Warhol's three-hour split screen extravaganza.

And we were going to show it, and the auditorium was packed. And all in comes what was then called the Morality Squad. And they shut you down? They shut us down because the movie was infamous. There was nothing in it. I mean, it's like Nico combing her hair or crying. And it wasn't anything. But we were lucky to have at Centennial College a law course,

a very basic but really interesting law course. And the teacher was a judge at the time. And he said, you know how you get around this? Form a club, membership cards, you know, fee, and you can show it, which we did. Well, you took the next big step, and I remember this one. This was the original 99 cent Roxy Theater in Toronto in the East End.

So this would be in the early 1970s. Tell, I mean, we've got a lot of young people watching this program who will not know what Toronto 50 plus years ago was like. So tell us, what was it like? I guess they call it orange. Orange Toronto, that's right. Orange Toronto. Very Protestant.

I mean, you couldn't, not that I drank, but you couldn't get a drink on a Sunday, you couldn't go to a movie on a Sunday. You go to a park and they used to chain up the swings. You weren't even allowed to go to a park on a Sunday. I don't remember that, but it was pretty boring. And with the things that I was interested in, the rebellious artists in New York, the pop art, rebellious artists in New York, the pop art, the Rolling Stones in 1965, Bob Dylan in 1961,

John Coltrane, The Velvet Underground. I was into all this stuff, so I opened up this movie theater and decided to show two different movies every night. Did people come? And people came. It took a while, but people came. And to the point where the theater chains, famous players in Odeon, who are just west of us at Broadview and Danforth,

tried to boycott us. They were telling the film distributors, they're the ones that own the movies, represent the movie, not to give us movies, because we were doing 1,000 people a night and they were doing like 30. We weren't very popular. Let's do an excerpt from the book here

in which you describe those early days of the original 99 Cent Roxy. Sheldon, bring this up and I'll read along for those listening on podcast. The theater hadn't been used in months. It stunk. Every night we would burn incense to keep the smell down. We ran Hendrix at Berkeley for five weeks.

I had decided this is what I really wanted to do. We started with one movie a night, then two different movies a night, then added midnight shows and an all night show with five or six movies. So when people went to these. And 24 hour shows. 24 hour shows too.

Yeah, here's one of them. Schlocksy Roxy. Okay, which camera can we show this to? Okay. That's 24 hours of schlock movies. And how many movies would you show over 24 hours? Oh, at least 10, 12. Where'd you get them all?

From the film. We rented them. How much did it cost? They varied, but they were generally about, for these kind of shows, about $35 a night, whatever. And would you always make a profit? These shows were sold out well in advance. I mean, you know, we were giving away KTEL products

and all sorts of stuff. Now, besides seeing the movies, what else did the patrons do in the theaters? Well, it was a time when you could smoke in a movie theater. Smoke what? Smoke, period. Tobacco. Smoke anything.

I mean, marijuana wasn't accepted, but we allowed it. And at that time, the police would walk their beat. They wouldn't drive. They didn't have bicycles. They walked. And the Roxy became a stop for our officers. And they would come in, you know, get a drink or some popcorn come in, you know,

get a drink or some popcorn and, you know, they would open the door and it was like a blast furnace of pot smell coming through and, but never had a bust. They never busted you? No, I mean, we had great press and I think we did good, we, as opposed to well. We entertained, we informed, we kept people off the streets. It was safe.

And I think they appreciated that. You took the next step, getting the New Yorker Theater, just south of Yonge and Bloor. Right. And you started to book musical acts. Why did you move into that space? We moved in because, well, it's kind of a little story. At the Roxy, the air conditioning

was done through a large vent under the floor hallway kind of thing, with holes under each seat for the circulation. And it turned out that the cleaners, instead of sweeping the garbage into bags, would sweep it into the holes. So every so often, more than not, you would get a fire. A cigarette butt rolls into the hole and catches on fire or a joint, whatever. And we'd have these fires and the place was getting very, the walls were getting kind of sooty. And we were supposed, the landlord was supposed to

clean it up and we were gonna raise the rent so he could do it, not the rent, the price rather. And he never did it. The New Yorker, which was in my day, the leading art house in Toronto, I mean that's where Easy Rider played for like three years but all the foreign films and stuff, and it was available.

And we took it over, and one night I was screening this movie about all the new bands that were happening in New York at a club called CBGB in Max's Kansas City. And I'm sitting there and thinking, you know, I've been showing two different movies every night trying to make it unique. And for like five years, it's really hard. And I decided I gotta bring these bands in.

Well, okay, let me pick up the story there. Because almost 50 years ago, you brought the Ramones up, and they'd never played Canada before. How did you convince them to come up here? They'd never played outside of New York. Outside of the United States, rather, except for England, just prior to us. I went to an agent, I built the stage, went to an agent to see where I had to put electricity, all the outlets for the equipment and everything.

He says, where do you want to, who do you want to bring? I said, Ramones, you ever heard of them? No, I'll find them. A few days later he called, I found them, they want $5,000 for three shows. We were going to do a Friday midnight, a Friday evening show, a Saturday evening show, and a Saturday midnight show. And we did 1,000 people out of 1,500.

And I would say the scene back there, if you want to call it punk rock, was about 1,000 people. So they all came. Audience and bands included, and they all came, and everybody wanted to open. Now you teamed up with Gary Cormier at this point, right? Just after I booked the Ramones, I

was working with Jeff Silvermanman who runs Yuck Yucks and we wanted our candy bar, the snack bar at the theater to make some money. It's like popcorn was a big thing and we also wanted to bring Nathan's Hot Dogs to Toronto thing and we also wanted to bring Nathan's hot dogs to Toronto which the whatever agency food agency wouldn't allow us to do because of some chemical in the hot dogs but we met Gary and he was a carpenter at the time and he was a had been an agent but got fed up with the whole business. So he came in and he did the carpentry.

And as we talked about music, we formed a friendship. And one night, he left our office. And he got into his apartment. He lived on King Street. We were on Wellesley. We phoned each other at the exact same time. Do you want to work with us? And he liked, you know, he was really interested, so.

And your skills complemented each other, right, as opposed to competed with each other. Yeah, we were an amazing team. It was like we had, you know, we worked out of our own homes, which is strange for a business that was that busy. And it was like we had tin cans and a wire stretched across the city. Do you know how many times you booked the Ramones, you

and the other Gary, over the years? I looked it up once because we were invited to an opening at the Grammy Museum in LA for Ramones exhibit. And I was afraid that they wouldn't let me in, you know, there'd be some screw up and all that. So I looked it up and we did about 30, between 30 and 35 shows with the Ramones. Amazing.

Now why would they keep coming back over and over again? What was the attraction? Oh, they loved Toronto, they loved us, they loved our crew. We had all become friends. We treated them well. We understood the music. They liked it so much.

Dee Dee Ramone on the second Ramones album. Ramones leave home. Dee Dee's wearing the New Yorker t-shirt. Oh, nice. Which is quite a compliment. Here's the big question. Did you make money? which is quite a compliment. Here's the big question.

Did you make money? At the beginning we did not make money, and as Gary and I joke about it to this day, don't know how we did it. But we eventually started to make money, and as small groups or artists got big, we got big with them and they were very loyal to us. Did you ever think during the course of all of this,

particularly when it wasn't making any money, I gotta go out and get a real job? No. You never thought that? No. Because? Because this was our life. This is what we wanted to do.

I was into this from the first moment I promoted anything. I wanted to do this. I wanted to change, make a change and have an effect on Toronto and people in Toronto. And, you know, it didn't, it never really occurred to me. You know, this was life. You know, you make it or you lose it. It was all gambling. We're going to roll a clip now. This is Stuart Copeland, the drummer of The Police, whom you booked numerous times, you had a great relationship with. Here's what he had to say about you guys. Roll it if you would please, Sheldon.

When we first came to Canada, there was our good old buddy who promoted our concert down in, well, concert, I use the word lightly. It was at a club called The Horseshoe, and there was only about 10 people there who were all from the record company. And the promoter took some chances with us in the early days, and now that we've made it big, we're sticking with him.

Sticking with him. How did you engender that kind of loyalty? We cared. We understood the music. We looked after them. We didn't back down when a lot of people think it was 16 people. It was 30 people a night, but many of them were record company.

We were, I think we were the true promoters or the true, oh, whatever. I can't even think of the word now. But you guys were kind of, you were a bit of outlaws in the industry, oh, whatever, I can't even think of the word now. But you guys were kind of, you were a bit of outlaws in the industry, right? You didn't do business like everybody else. And they didn't like us. The other people in the business.

No. We had, when we were running the Horseshoe Tavern, for instance, Blondie was coming into town, and we had a meeting with an A&R person at Capitol Records at the horseshoe. And at the end of the meeting, she said, you know why you'll never get any of our acts? Because you don't have carpet in on the floor. And Blondie ended up going to the Alma Combo, which to me,

you know, it just, you know, it wasn't real. It was just a corporate thing. We were not corporate. We were part of the audience. We geared our shows to the audience and to the artists. We weren't walking around with attache cases handcuffed to our wrists or anything. We were fans.

Well, you used to do something called the police picnics. What were they? Oh, the police picnics were kind of like Lollapalooza or multi-act shows focused around the police, obviously based on the Toronto Police Picnic, the name. But we curated, the curator was the right word, we curated those artists, those shows, and we did one in a field in Oakville,

off Trafalgar Road, and we did two at the CNE. Here's how the news played it 44 years ago. Sheldon, if you would. The biggest rock success this summer was the police picnic held at the Grove just outside of Oakville, Ontario. 25,000 people showed up, although tickets were $20. The talent was organized by the Garys, and obviously they did something right. Unlike last summer's Heatwave Festival, which reportedly lost a million dollars, this outdoor concert may have broken even.

May have broken even, the reporter says. You read in the book, it did not break even. It did not, eh? No. You guys would lose money on these things? It lost money, yes. How can you have that many people there, and it loses money?

That was a good crowd, a huge crowd, sort of a groundbreaking crowd for that era. We were new to outdoor shows and there were problems and stuff. Like what? Well, you had to turn a farmer's field into a venue. At the last moment, it looked like the truss over the stage was going to collapse

and we had to bring cherry pickers in to hold it up. It's always something. There's always something, you're right. Now, at some point, you stopped doing the live shows, right, altogether? I did, yes. How come? I got fed up with the industry.

It was like 93. I just got fed up with the industry. I hated the bands that were coming out after Nirvana. They all sounded the same. None of them sounded legitimate or honest. The business of music was changing. It was almost like it was in the dinosaur years before the punk rock thing started. It was just, it was terrible.

My wife and I had bought some land up north and we built a cottage and I kept telling everybody if I didn't have this cottage, I would have been in jail for killing somebody. Do you miss it at all? I don't miss that aspect of it. I still do it as a hobby. I do beautiful shows now in a 30 capacity seated bookstore

on College Street. I promote people that I like. I give the money to the people. I do it gratis. I get to promote, like publicize. I get to help people. Kind of a nice way to end a career and also to come full circle, because, you know,

the first shows that I ever saw were in rooms the size of a living room. And I love the intimacy. I get the feeling though, Gary, that you couldn't do today what you did back then. Like you came along right at the right time where a couple of guys working out of their homes could have this much influence on the cultural scene

of the capital city of the province. Couldn't do it today though, could you? I think you can have some influence, but I mean, it's very difficult to compete. I'm doing a show in a couple weeks with an artist that I've worked with since 1980, Jonathan Richmond, who is sort of credited with sort of the first punk lyrics. He met and loved the Velvet Underground in the 60s

and who kind of changed the landscape. But it's in a venue that we used for years at the concert hall, the old Masonic Temple. I wouldn't want to be in it. And I don't think anybody that's doing it really cares to change the landscape. I think that honestly that between, from the Roxy through all the concerts,

that we did change or I was involved in changing the landscape of Toronto in the art process in Toronto. We encouraged kids to do it themselves. Restaurants were being, you know, during the punk thin, people who could cook were opening restaurants, they were cutting hair, they were designing clothes, they were opening galleries.

Real estate was changing. Neighborhoods that were crappy were now becoming viable. I think we had a lot to do with it. How old are you now? I'm 79. You're 79! I am 79. Good for you.

You look great. Last December. How do you feel? I feel great. I feel like a kid. Gary always says I act like a 12-year-old girl. I don't know if that sucks or what. Well, that was going to be my next question.

What's the nature of your relationship with the other Gary like? We're still friends. We talk a lot on the phone. He lives in Port Hope now, so I don't get to see him too much, and I hate driving on the 401. Well, they're going to put a tunnel under it soon, so you won't have to.

Yeah, yeah. That's terrific. Thanks a lot for coming in. I appreciate it. I mean, as you look back, it was a to put a tunnel under it soon, so you won't have to. Yeah, yeah. That's terrific. Thanks a lot for coming in. I appreciate it. As you look back, it was a hell of a ride, wasn't it? It was great. I tell people I'd be a great stand-up comedian

if I didn't have stage fright. That's great. Gary Topp, concert promoter extraordinaire. The name of the book is He Hijacked My Brain. Gary Topp's Toronto. Thanks a lot, Gary.