Next Wednesday (Nov. 26), local author and historian Aaron Chapman will release his new book, Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). Here's an exclusive excerpt from the book. All rights reserved.
It’s Saturday night on Granville Street. While Granville stretches nearly six miles (10 km) down the middle of Vancouver, it’s the five-block strip between Drake and Robson Street that encompasses the city’s nightclub district. Granville Street is looking better now than it used to; gone is much of the rough and tumble atmosphere, and the daytime drunks and other down-and-outers, common sights as recently as the 1990s, have died off. Many of the old stores, family businesses, and woebegone pawn shops, once seemingly permanent fixtures of the downtown south end of the street, have also disappeared, along with some of the theatres and nightclubs that made this section of Granville the city’s entertainment strip for more than eighty years.
Things seem to shift at the 800 block, and the nocturnal hum of Granville changes too. Young crowds still head south to the bars, but a different atmosphere takes over, and it’s not just because of the grey-haired audience leaving the Orpheum Theatre after a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert, the one occasion these days when a mix of ages is seen on Granville.
A little farther north, a lineup is moving its way into a building, and the mood of this crowd suggests that a night of drinking is not the sole reason they’re here. With tickets in hand, they’re lined up to see a show at the Commodore. There are no police out front—none seem required—and the doormen don’t stand with arms folded like goons.
The Commodore Ballroom is regularly voted the best live-music room in Vancouver in local entertainment weekly readers’ polls, and it frequently garners mention in national music trade papers as one of the best concert venues in Canada.
In 2011, Billboard magazine ranked the venue one of the top ten most influential in North America, along with such legendary concert halls as the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Bowery Ballroom in New York. Of all the clubs that made that list, the Commodore is the oldest. Tonight, patrons walk up the venue’s broad and elegant staircase, which thousands of people have climbed since the club opened more than eighty years ago.
The best concerts are not necessarily witnessed in enormous stadiums. On any given evening, the greatest show in the world might be happening at the corner dive where the band plays to a handful of people. But the Commodore has seen more legendary concerts than most places, and it could even be argued that the room itself has added to the quality of these performances. That’s one of the reasons that the Commodore has endeared itself to the city’s music fans, to the staff who’ve worked there over the decades, and to musicians from around the world who’ve played there.
Once inside the doors, the crowd winds up the carpeted staircase to a space that has witnessed the history of entertainment itself in Vancouver, and to a renowned dance floor that has seen everything from the Fox Trot and Jitterbug to slam-dancing and moshing. The history of the room is the history of how Vancouver has entertained itself, almost from its beginning.
•••
It might be said that the Reifel family, then one of the city’s wealthiest, made money the old-fashioned way—by selling alcohol during the US Prohibition and then investing cannily in real estate. Henry Reifel and his brothers Jack and Conrad had emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine area of Germany in 1886, and after working in breweries throughout California and Oregon, settled in British Columbia and started a single brewery on Vancouver Island. In a few years, they owned four breweries and two distilleries in the Lower Mainland under the name Brewers & Distillers Limited of Vancouver, along with a legal export business.
With the money flowing in, Henry’s sons George and Harry Reifel became involved in the business, and they eventually branched out into what has been Vancouver’s all-time favourite industry for those who have money and want more—real estate. George Reifel started Vested Estates Ltd., a real estate and insurance company with an office at 1200 Homer Street. In early 1929, Vested Estates was still in its infancy, but with the brewery business showing great profits, George and his wife Alma could spend their nights in luxury at the city’s finer establishments.
According to legend, it was Alma who felt that the Spanish Grill and Crystal Ballroom were getting too crowded and that the city needed another ballroom. One can only wonder what, exactly, Alma said to her husband on that fateful night, but she planted the seed in George’s mind. Was George tantalized by the prospect that he could call a place like the Crystal his own?
Luckily, he had the wealth to make these grandiose dreams a reality.
George Reifel selected Vancouver architect Henry Herbert Gillingham to design the ballroom. Reifel and Gillingham envisioned a whole complex, with a basement bowling alley and billiards area, ground-floor retail space, and a new ballroom cabaret on the second floor.
The ballroom stage was built as a mid-sized orchestra shell with a spotlight controlled from the stage. In the back were three rooms that could be used for banquets or private gatherings of up to 100 people.
The jewel in the Commodore’s crown lay under the patrons’ feet. Gillingham had designed the dance floor to be 40 by 80 feet, in the style of an English ballroom and the dance palaces of the era. But the Commodore’s dance floor was also “sprung.” That is, it was engineered to absorb shocks and it bounced slightly, even more so when there was a full house dancing on it—an advantage over the ordinary floor at the Crystal Ballroom.
In later years, the opening date of the Commodore would be inaccurately given as 1929, but the correct date was Wednesday, December 3, 1930.
•••
It’s safe to say that if someone like Drew Burns, with the energy and vision to navigate the Commodore into a new era, hadn’t come along, the club might have closed, been converted to a different business, or suffered demolition, as was the fate of many of the city’s now lost or forgotten ballrooms such as the Trianon, the White Rose, and the Pender.
The first rock ’n’ roll show at the Commodore was in July 1971. Billed as “Mitch Ryder and Detroit,” it had a stripped-down version of Ryder’s blue-eyed-soul show band, the Detroit Wheels, who had backed his early hits “Devil in a Blue Dress” and “Sock It to Me” and featured a horn section and young female back-up singers.
For the opening act, Burns booked Crosstown Bus, a local band he knew from the Fifth Day Club.
The crowd in attendance that night was a far cry from the ladies in long satin dresses and mink stoles and the Brylcreemed men in tuxedos who had patronized the Commodore for the previous forty years.
“The place was absolutely packed, and there were all these hippies sitting on the floor,” recalls Crosstown Bus lead singer and guitarist Jeff Boyne.
•••
The summer of 1977 was a pivotal period in the cultural landscape of Vancouver. New sounds, familiar to Vancouverites today, were heard for the very first time, including the first blast of the ship’s horn on the maiden sailing of the Seabus passenger ferry in Burrard Inlet, and the first whistle of the Gastown Steam Clock. Other sounds, also new to Vancouver, ensured that the city would never be the same again.
On July 30, 1977, Vancouver experienced its first punk rock show. Local band the Furies headlined at the Japanese Hall on Alexander Street with an opening set by the all-female punk band from Victoria, BC, the Dishrags.
One week later, at the Commodore on Granville Street, a bigger audience was on hand. It was a night that, in retrospect, seemed to herald a changing of the guard. That evening, four New Yorkers staying at the Castle Hotel grabbed their leather jackets and left the hotel to walk one block to meet the 600 punk rock fans and curiosity seekers who awaited them at the Ballroom. It was the Vancouver debut of the Ramones.
For the Vancouver audience, this exposure to a live punk rock band was a benchmark and catalyst for the local music scene. In attendance that evening were a considerable number of music fans and local rockers who would quickly cut their hair, ditch any clothes that had hippie overtones, and buy themselves leather jackets—and subsequently go on to form the first wave of Vancouver punk rock bands.
Starting in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, thanks to the shows that Perryscope concerts presented, the jazz and R&B artists that Drew Burns booked, and the acts that emerging concert promoters like Peter McCulloch’s Timbre Concerts began to stage at the Commodore, the Ballroom experienced a revival. This era also marked the close of the pioneering days of the concert industry, attracting corporate interest and sponsorship as never before. Those who had staked a claim in its early days enjoyed the great expansion of the business over the next decade.
Groups like the Stranglers, Iggy Pop, Depeche Mode, Joe Jackson, the Pretenders, the New Order, XTC, the Buzzcocks, 999, John Cale, the Cure, King Crimson, the Go-Go’s, Graham Parker, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Rick Danko, and Paul Butterfield all performed at the Commodore. And it wasn’t just the rock ’n’ roll bands – soul bands like Sam & Dave, blues bands Taj Mahal or Downchild, Cajun musicians like Clifton Chenier, and reggae stars like Peter Tosh also came to play the Ballroom as part of the burgeoning world music scene.
Allen Moy was just 21 years old when he went to the 1978 Patti Smith show and “walked away from it thinking, I can do this.” Moy would go on to start his own punk rock band as vocalist with Popular Front. Perryscope, always supportive of local bands, booked them for a March 1981 Cheap Thrills concert at the Commodore where they were to open for a relatively unknown Irish band on one of its earliest North American tours.
That band was U2.
•••
After decades of wear and tear, the Commodore’s stage was beginning to bounce as much as its dance floor. In 1994, during a performance by Courtney Love’s band Hole, Drew Burns noticed that the microphone stand was tilting even more unnaturally than Love, and a few months later, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco struggled to perform with a wobbling microphone stand that nearly hit her in the mouth.
The source of the instability was determined to be a cracked beam underneath the stage, and while Burns first hoped it would be just the beam that needed to be replaced, on further examination it became apparent that the entire floor needed renovation. Burns decided to put in a new floor. After soaking up more than sixty years of music, cocktails, and dancing feet, the legendary Commodore Ballroom floor was removed on January 3, 1996.
After more than three weeks of being closed, Britpop band Blur reopened the Commodore, headlining a sold-out show, with local group Pluto opening. That night, a full house of 1,000 patrons christened the new flooring and danced to Damon Albarn’s “woo-hoo” chorus in Blur’s hit “Song 2,” while downstairs at the Granville Book Company, only a handful of books fell off the shelves. The new floor didn’t have the same bounce as the old one, though some said it would take a few years to get “worked in,” as the old floor’s spring was the result of decades of use. But this would seem trivial compared to what faced the Commodore next.
While Burns’ company Commodore Cabaret Ltd. owned the liquor license, the business, and an estimated $200,000 of fixtures and decorations, the Commodore building itself was owned by an Ontario-based company called Pensionfund Realty Ltd. and administered by the equity firm Morguard,
which had purchased the building directly from the Reifel family in 1974.
Burns hoped to sell the business as well as the liquor license simultaneously to a new buyer at the figure he reasoned it was worth. While the business and fixtures were certainly valuable, it was the Commodore’s “grandfathered” liquor license, a combined liquor and food license that the provincial liquor control board no longer issued, that was of particular value.
When Burns’ lease, last renewed in 1986, ended on December 31, 1995, he agreed to a four-month extension while he continued to seek a buyer. But a protracted legal battle ensued, with Burns claiming that Morguard tried to go around him to get a new owner with their own liquor license.
With the case still before the courts, the Commodore Ballroom closed its doors on July 12, 1996, and Drew Burns returned the keys he’d first picked up in 1969.
In 1999, Vancouver manager Bruce Allen and his business partner Roger Gibson acquired the ballroom’s liquor license and, partnered with Universal Concerts, made a successful bid to purchase the Commodore. Halfway through the process, Seagram-owned Universal Concerts was sold to House of Blues Concerts.
So Allen and Gibson owned the license, and House of Blues was primed to run the business.
House of Blues put $4 million into the renovations. The dance floor that Burns installed in 1996 remained, but the rest of the Commodore’s interior was gutted to redesign the room.
In the opening weeks, however, some Ballroom regulars bristled at the renovations.
“I know it needed fixing up,” says Jim Byrnes. “But the ghosts that hung around were part of the fun, and to me, a few too many of the cobwebs were swept away.”
In the weeks after it reopened, the Commodore welcomed back both a host of favourite bands who considered it a second home and Canadian bands new to the venue, and before the year was over, 54-40, Big Sugar, Colin James, Wide Mouth Mason, Nomeansno, Doug and the Slugs, Platinum Blonde, and Spirit of the West performed there. It was at a Spirit of the West show that the ground-floor stores were once again all too aware of their upstairs neighbour. During the closure, some of the retail stores had closed over the small vents above their front doorways.
These vents had been designed to release the air pressure generated by the dance floor upstairs. So when 1,000 pairs of Doc Martens pogoed on the Commodore’s floor, the windows and doors of the stores below it nearly blew open because the air pressure wasn’t able to “exhale” through the now-covered vents.
The Commodore was back.
•••
In 2011, partly to showcase the history of the room and also to pay tribute to Drew Burns, Commodore general manager Gord Knights instigated a project to document all the shows that have occurred at the Commodore on its website. The author of this book participated in the year-long project, and the website features the exact dates, band by band, night by night, of all the acts that have performed there since the early 1970s when Burns began his era at the Commodore. Through it all, Knights has remained acutely aware of Burns’ significance to the room, citing “his years of mentorship and keen business sense, and his personal love for the Commodore. Today,” says Knights, “we operate the Ballroom with the same focus. We consider ourselves curators of a very valuable and fragile resource in our cultural community. Drew was our founder. We try to keep things current and make sure that there will be a future at the Commodore – we want our kids and their kids to be able to see shows there and experience what we’ve experienced, that tangible joy people get from experiencing music so closely. When people get that, it changes their lives, and it certainly changed mine.”
Burns was immortalized in the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame Star Walk on Granville Street. Of his own legacy at the Commodore, Burns spoke of it with a mixture of modesty and pride, saying, “There are new people there now, and they are adding to the history of the Commodore. They’ll be legends, eventually.”
Sadly, Drew Burns passed away this past September, aged 81.
•••
Down on Granville Street, on a late-summer evening, it’s another busy night on the strip, and the sidewalks are crowded.
Some people stop to notice the names set into the sidewalks; while these enshrine the city’s entertainment legends, in the alleyway behind the Commodore, plenty of music legends have sneaked through the backstage doors over the decades. For all of Vancouver’s lauded natural beauty, this alleyway, where the band’s buses pull up, is sometimes the only spot in the city that performers see as they come and go. While the lively sounds of Granville Street can be heard around the corner, tonight in the alleyway, veteran stagehand Tim Tilton is alone at the door preparing for the load-out, much as he’s done for decades. He looks up at the sky for a moment to see if it’s going to rain. The band’s bus cruises into the alley and stops in position. Tilton knows the bus driver from previous tours at the Commodore, and they share a joke. A full house inside is enjoying an encore, and the rumble of the music can be heard coming from the second-floor windows.
In front of the club on Granville Street, as the crowds file past the building, Gord Knights has come down to take in the scene. It’s been a good night, and he chats for a few moments with the doormen who await the thousand people about to file out of the building when the show ends. A couple walking down the street stop for a moment and get the attention of one of the Ballroom’s doormen. They ask him the question that passersby on Granville Street have put to Commodore doormen since the 1930s.
“Who’s playing tonight?”
***
Aaron Chapman launches his book Live at the Commodore, an illustrated history of Vancouver's venerable Commodore Ballroom, on November 26 at the legendary club itself.
The evening will be hosted by BC Book Prize winning author and broadcaster Grant Lawrence, and will include plenty of entertainment from the Jazzmanian Devils and other special guests, as well as reminiscences of Drew Burns, the Commodore's former owner who passed away in September just as the book was going to press.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Doors 7:00pm
The Commodore Ballroom, 868 Granville Street, Vancouver
Hosted by Grant Lawrence
Featuring the Jazzmanian Devils and other special musical guests
Free admission with ticket or reservation (please email [email protected] to get on the guest list)
