4

The Garys Shake Things Up

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying, “This is who I am.”

— Joey Ramone

In the mid- to late 1970s the Horseshoe was still widely known as a country bar, but since the retirement of original owner Jack Starr in 1976 the venue had been slowly losing its identity. Just like Toronto the Good at the time, the Horseshoe badly needed a reinvention, a cultural revolution to inject life into the well-weathered walls.

Cowboys and cowgirls who looked like they had just rolled in along with the tumbleweeds from an Albertan ranch were still the ’Shoe’s main patrons. But impresarios Gary Topp and Gary Cormier, known as “The Garys,” quickly changed that, ushering in a new musical era. The cowpokes were replaced by misfits, the cowgirls by punk rock girls dressed in skinny jeans, leather jackets, and black or white T-shirts spray-painted with the names of their favourite bands.

Nineteen seventy-eight was a watershed year in the Horseshoe’s history. Not only did it change ownership, with The Garys taking control of bookings, but it also became a club with a higher purpose. As The Garys’ inaugural concert poster proclaimed, “The Horseshoe: The First Concert Club in Toronto.” While it rattled the regulars, who lamented the end of a twenty-five-year tradition of country and western music, for those in the know, those eight months from mid-March to early December when The Garys were given carte blanche to book whomever they wanted, every night was a magical, memorable live music experience. The Garys put up their own posters — both east and west and north and south of Queen and Spadina. They would arrive at the bar at five o’clock in the afternoon and wouldn’t leave until three the next morning. The Garys were going against the grain with a shared raison d’être.

“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” Gary Topp recalls. “You didn’t know if there was going to be a fight, or whether the plumbing would flood … everybody was there for a purpose; there was an atmosphere that was irreplaceable.”

Prior to taking over bookings at the Horseshoe, Gary Topp and Gary Cormier ran the New Yorker Theatre on Yonge Street, fifty yards south of where the underground indie cinema Cinecity once stood. At this popular theatre, the pair promoted shows, including the Ramones’ first Toronto visit, curated movies like the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, and hosted myriad art-themed nights. Topp had previously owned another movie house: the Original 99 Cent Roxy.

Many of the patrons of these establishments ended up forming punk bands that later played the Horseshoe. Gary Cormier had also managed bands like Rough Trade and Joe Hall and the Continental Drift, both of which had previously played the Horseshoe, which is how he got to know the manager at the time, Peter Graham.

The Garys (Gary Cormier and Gary Topp) booked the Horseshoe for a memorable eight months in 1978.

When Graham approached The Garys to take the venerable old tavern in a new direction, the bar was due for a change. Sales were slipping. The country fans were not as loyal to the old lady as they once had been.

The grande dame of Queen needed some fresh blood and bold ideas, and that’s exactly what The Garys brought to the business. The pair had built up a loyal following at the New Yorker, but with rents climbing, the businessmen couldn’t keep pace with the rising costs. It’s no surprise they jumped at the chance to take their curatorial model that had won over a core audience at the New Yorker down to Queen West.

Working for eighteen hours straight, the first thing they did was move the stage from the middle of the west wall in the backroom, near where the current back bar is, to the the far end of the room on the north wall. Then they built up the stage to three feet, making it what they considered a proper height, and enclosed it with three walls. They brought in a new PA and lighting system, and installed a light and sound system as well as film projectors and overhead screens, video machines, and other gadgets.

As Cormier told Gary Toushek of the Globe and Mail, their intent was never to alienate the regulars:

The Horseshoe is a genuine Queen Street bar made authentic by its clientele, the street people, the country and western fans. We’re not out to destroy that, we’re adding to it, changing it for what we hope will add enjoyment of the audience. We want to make the Horseshoe more than just a bar. We want to make it a cultural melting pot. New York has the Fillmore and CBGB — Toronto never really came close to the concept that these places offer.

The Garys also hung a horseshoe, embroidered by Cormier’s wife, Martha, on the black backdrop of the stage. It would become the new insignia for the tavern. Like the horseshoe in their handbills, it was hung upside down — if the tines of a horseshoe are pointing down, it’s supposed to be a bad sign, meaning its luck has run out. The backstory is that when these promoters first started booking concerts at the New Yorker, they gave out T-shirts that featured the New York skyline with a man holding a horseshoe as souvenirs to the bands who played there. Dee Dee Ramone even wore one of these shirts on the cover of their second album, Leave Home. This symbol was an omen, for sure, that The Garys’ run would not last forever. Still, while it lasted, every night was an experience. You didn’t know what was going to happen.

“You would turn your jeans inside out and sew them straight,” recalls Lin Duperron, a regular patron during The Garys’ tenure at the ’Shoe. “We bought leather jackets at surplus stores or real motorcycle jackets … we were budding musicians, artists, and writers; many of us didn’t have a steady income, so it was a way for us to get creative.”

While it’s now remembered most as the Horseshoe’s punk rock era — thanks largely to the documentary The Last Pogo, which chronicled the infamous last night of mayhem that was The Garys’ swan song — during those 240 days, the promoters brought in an eclectic mix of the creative arts: everything from avant-garde jazz to reggae, singer-songwriters to blues, and even comedy with the likes of Darryl Rhoades and the Hahavishnu Orchestra. As the ’Shoe’s new chief curators, the duo simply booked the bands they liked — either local or imported. Here’s just a sampling of the performers who graced the venue’s marquee that year: the Police, Sun Ra, Pere Ubu, Cecil Taylor, Etta James, Jesse Winchester, the Viletones, Suicide, the Stranglers, and the I Threes.

According to Topp, two of his most memorable shows were the Stranglers, for which around one thousand people (two hundred over capa­city) were shoehorned into the place, and Pere Ubu, the first imported band the pair ever booked.

“We were very eclectic in our tastes and bringing in stuff that was in our record collections,” Cormier says. “We booked people we thought were great that deserved to be shown in there.”

The Last Pogo co-producer and director Colin Brunton had worked with Topp since his Roxy days, and was offered a job at the Horseshoe. The job description was vague:

“Do you want me to bus tables?”

“No, they’ve got people for that.”

“Do you want me to take tickets?”

“No. I don’t know. Let’s see what happens.”

Brunton basically got paid to hang out for a few months, and then left to start driving a cab and figuring out how to get into the film business. He designed the handbills, basing them on a template that featured a man (rumoured to be Topp when he was in high school) holding a horseshoe decorated with flowers. He’d alter the face to suit whichever bands were prominent on the flyer.

The handbills were made with Letraset dry transfers, rubber cement, and X-Acto blades. The transfers would be pressed onto the page and then distressed with the knife. If Brunton wanted the colours reversed (that is, black on white rather than white on black), he’d ride his bike up to Midtown Reproductions at Davenport and Yonge, pay ten bucks, and then wait a day to get it back. Brunton had to switch printing houses at least once because of complaints by the owners that he used too much black ink. Once a handbill was completed, hundreds of copies were made and then stapled to telephone poles and construction hoardings downtown, careful not to cover up any other current handbills.

The first poster produced by The Garys (and designed by The Last Pogo director Colin Brunton), announcing the beginning of their seminal time booking the Horseshoe Tavern. March 1978.

Before the gentrification of Queen Street West, the blocks around Spadina were an industrial wasteland of second-hand book and furniture stores. Brunton takes us back to what the Horseshoe neighbourhood looked like then: “Queen Street West was a ghost town of industrial kitchen supply stores, boarded-up storefronts, and used bookstores, edged onto the then still largely Jewish Spadina Avenue, with its delis, milliners, and tailors. There was gravel between the streetcar tracks. On most days, you were lucky to see a handful of people roaming the streets at the corner of Queen and Spadina, where the Horseshoe sat.”

Also, Toronto Transit Commission workers went on strike in 1978 for eight days, adding to the ghostly atmosphere. Hitchhiking was common. Cabs, which offered cheap fares, did brisk business along this strip, taking the barflies from club to club.

The Beverley Tavern, the local watering hole for Ontario College of Art students, was just four blocks east and offered an open stage to the new wave bands coming largely from the college. These bands were not interested in playing Rolling Stones covers at some dive bar or restaurant.

Peter Pan restaurant, in business since 1927, was across the street and a block west of the Beverley, and had been given a major do-over by Sandy Stagg two years earlier, in 1976. It was another artist hangout, and many musicians worked there. The seeds of the new Queen Street West scene were planted.

“What Gary [Topp] and I tried to do was take you somewhere you hadn’t been before: musically, physically, and spiritually,” recalls Cormier. “We were not about serving up the same old thing. We booked a lot of bands that couldn’t get the time of day from anywhere else in the city.”

Checking out the Horseshoe for the first time, Topp and Cormier were confronted by rounders sitting at the bar slugging back cheap draft beer. A few of these regular barflies asked them bluntly, “You’re not going to kick us out, are you?” Cormier assured them they would always be welcome. Even some of the die-hard country fans from the Horseshoe’s previous regime, who were surprised by the new and unfamiliar sounds when The Garys took over, were eventually won over by the energy and enthusiasm of the music the promoters brought in. They, too, were ready for a change.

Cormier recalls this cool transformation and musical discovery:

You saw these people who looked like they had just come in from Alberta, real cowboy crowd, and they would be diggin’ the jazz and diggin’ the punk stuff; it was bizarre. There would be instances when a couple — you knew they weren’t in the right place — who were dressed up to go downtown, had heard about the Horseshoe, came in, and after about twenty minutes would come back to the door and tell me, “We’ve been here for a while, this is not really our scene, can we get our money back?” and I would give them their money back. Then, weeks later I would be at the front door and there would be the same couple. I would say “What gives? A week ago you said it wasn’t your scene,” and they said, “Everywhere else we’ve been since is so boring, so here we are!” There was a lot of that type of discovery from “the kids.”

For The Garys, the scene is what mattered most: art for art’s sake. “Gary and I were never in it for the money,” Cormier adds. “We were in it for the thrills. It was cheaper, more often than not, to bring these bands here, rather than having to go to New York or Los Angeles or London to see them.”

Cormier says a spirit of camaraderie fuelled the scene. People helped each other.

The moments I remember most fondly are when an opening band, who barely had enough money to get [to] the gig, was on stage playing and the guitar player breaks a string; then, the roadie for the headlining act runs backstage, gets a guitar, brings it back to the player, takes his guitar, brings it back to dressing room, restrings it and tunes it up, and brings it back to him without nobody missing a beat. It was all so natural.

During those eight months in 1978, the kids in the punk scene would come out of the Horseshoe — some wearing dog collars — and the cops would bust them and give them trouble. At the same time, the fanzines, clothing designers, and independent record stores were all picking up on the scene and sensing it was seminal; it was all about independence and a do-it-yourself spirit. The punk ethos was about picking up a guitar and putting a band together even if you couldn’t play. Kids were experimenting with drugs, and they were experimenting with their instruments, creating new and explosive sounds. While this new music gave some a headache, for those it spoke to, it woke them up to a new reality and altered their lives.

Before The Garys arrived at the Horseshoe, punk was already alive and growing in Toronto, with bands performing at places like the Colonial Underground, the Hotel Isabella, and the Crash ’n’ Burn, an old warehouse that was the city’s equivalent of New York’s infamous CBGB.

Steve Koch moved to Toronto from Calgary specifically because of this underground punk scene. In 1977, he heard the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia; the sounds, unlike anything he’d ever heard before, spilling from his stereo speakers changed his life. First, he quit university and went to England, figuring if he didn’t go then, he would miss the whole movement. After seeing a ton of bands, he returned briefly to Calgary to finish his last semester of university. Then, the first chance he got, he was following the road east with a friend. “I became aware of the Toronto scene via a magazine called File,” he recalls. “I saw pictures of the Ugly, the Viletones, and the B-Girls and I thought, I need to be there, so me and a friend hopped in his car and just starting driving.”

The B-Girls.

For Koch, who joined the Viletones after the concert known as The Last Pogo and also played in the Demics, seeing the Dead Boys — a punk band originally hailing from Cleveland, Ohio — was his most memorable ’Shoe show. “It summarized everything about punk rock in my life and in the world,” Koch recalls. “If you could distill everything about that whole movement into one little crystal, that was it, that night. It was such an amazing life-affirming thing.”

The punk movement mirrored the evolution of Toronto, which at the time was really starting to change culturally, from a staid, conservative, small-town vibe to a city with a sense of chic, combined with an ugly undertone. Though you still couldn’t drink on Sundays, speakeasies like the Elephant Walk, across the street from the Horseshoe, started to spring up around town. Further east and north on Yonge Street, music venues like Le Coq d’Or, where Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks (who became The Band) held court, mixed with strip joints, adult video stores, and other seedy establishments. One stretch of Yonge Street had more massage parlours per capita than anywhere else in North America at the time. “Toronto was starting to get a bit cooler, because before that there really wasn’t a thing called the counter­culture,” says Colin Brunton, who still works in the film and television industry today. “The mainstream press and culture bureaucrats of Toronto still regarded punk as a passing fancy, not worthy of their recognition.”

Peter Goddard was one of the few journalists who got it and saw the scene for what it really was — a watershed moment, not merely “a passing fancy.” Goddard was brought on to the Star’s staff in 1973 as a popular music critic; he covered everything from jazz and big band music to rock ’n’ roll, country, and later, the burgeoning punk and new wave scene. Goddard recalls this seminal period:

What The Garys did was quite spectacular. I remember seeing Cecil Taylor there [at the Horseshoe]. It was a remarkable concert. He was near the end of his career and he played for two hours straight. It was the most muscular music you have ever heard … through-the-roof spectacular. I remember leaving to go write about it and it still seemed out of sync with the Horseshoe. I don’t think Gary [Topp], with all the voodoo he is capable of, ever managed to change the vibe of the place. It still felt like a little sleazy country club. He was only booking it.

Topp disagrees with Goddard, insisting he and his partner changed the club’s vibe. During those eight months, everybody who came to the Horseshoe was there for a higher purpose. During The Garys’ tenure, the club was a destination, not just a live concert venue. Every night was memorable for the unique music and the unique people who attended this short-lived scene. “You have to understand that that club in the eight months we were there was a hangout. It had a completely different atmosphere,” Topp says. “It was like a clubhouse for a thousand people who were into building a scene and changing Toronto. Queen Street wasn’t like it is now. We weren’t just stocking shelves in a grocery store. There weren’t as many bands as there are now, but we didn’t just book anybody. We had varied offerings; we showed movies, we had comedy … it was a gathering place for a part of the community that was developing a new music scene in Toronto.”

That burgeoning punk rock scene in the late 1970s not only grabbed Toronto by the bollocks but also slowly captured the world’s attention. Those years changed not just the Horseshoe but also the city and the bourgeoisie, even impacting fashion trends. Picture an eighty-year-old woman walking out of Holt Renfrew in leather pants and to-the-knee matching black boots.

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers on September 8, 1978.

You can attribute that to the punk rock explosion and its trickle-down influence on pop culture. Prior to punk’s mainstream appeal, the scene was a tight one, reserved for the Horseshoe Tavern and other like-minded clubs, such as Larry’s Hideaway and the Crash ’n’ Burn, and their devout followers.

Cleave Anderson, Blue Rodeo’s original drummer, recalls driving downtown from Etobicoke in his “summer-of-love blue” Chevrolet Chevelle and parking right in front of one of these taverns. There weren’t any cars on the street. Nobody who lived downtown had a car. At the time, he was playing in Battered Wives, a punk band that opened for Elvis Costello across Canada in 1978. The group mostly played Larry’s Hideaway and the Crash ’n’ Burn, where they had regular lineups around the block. Battered Wives had a rehearsal space right near where the Crash ’n’ Burn was, just southeast of the Horseshoe on Nelson Street. It was a warehouse for a second-hand clothing store called Flying Down to Rio, where they would go to pick out their clothes: skinny jeans, satin, velvet, and 1950s jean jackets, which they would dye black and then chop off their collars. While Battered Wives never played the Horseshoe during The Garys’ stint booking shows, Anderson and his bandmates would often walk north to Queen Street and check out the show after their rehearsal.

“Most of the people in the beginning in the punk rock scene were artists, suburban ne’er-do-wells,” Anderson recalls. “It wasn’t the disenfranchised. It was art students who thought rock ’n’ roll had lost all its mojo.”

Lin Duperron was one of these early devotees to the punk scene. From the moment The Garys took over booking the Horseshoe until the day their tenure ended, she was at the club every day. She was eighteen — just legal to drink — and was in search of a good time. She had moved with her family to the big city when she was a teenager, and she quickly found a home at the ’Shoe. “I felt like I ran the place in some ways, because I was there all the time … it was my turf,” she says. Initially, Duperron was drawn to the music. “Our lives push us in different directions. My life led me to that attitude of ‘screw everything, I’m going to do my own thing’ … being in that scene offered that. There were no rules, no regulations, you wore what you wanted, listened to what you wanted, and stayed up all night. The whole thing was a three-sixty for me, and I needed that at that point in my life.”

After a night with little sleep, after crashing on someone’s couch, Duperron and her friends — often ten of them — would pile into someone’s car, or a cab willing to take them, and spend their days hanging out at New Rose, a punk rock boutique owned and operated by Margarita Passion. The store was open from Wednesday to Saturday from noon until six. Here, Duperron and her friends played pinball, bought fanzines and 45s and LPs by local bands, or tried on the latest fashions from Margarita. They also met many musicians, who hung out there during the day before their gigs at night. A handbill for the store from that time promised the following: “Sick Stuff for a Sick Society, 4-5’s + EP’S by local Anti-Heros [sic].”

Besides spending lazy afternoons at New Rose, Duperron and her friends also loitered and drank too much in the front bar at the Horseshoe — playing pinball and pool and whiling away the hours waiting for the sun to set. Eating was an afterthought. At night, they headed to the ’Shoe’s back bar to see the latest band The Garys had booked. The next day, the ritual repeated.

* * *

On the first Thursday and Friday of November 1978, the Police played a pair of shows at the Horseshoe. Ask around, and thousands claim to have been at one of these concerts. The reality is that, at the most, a few dozen people showed up and paid the four-dollar cover charge to watch a young Sting and his band play a pair of gigs. There was more staff there to watch the Police than paying patrons. Duperron was one of the lucky few who caught the show. She doesn’t remember much about it, saying it was “just an ordinary night at the Horseshoe.” She still has her ticket stub, though, and a mono test pressing 45 of the single “Roxanne” that she bought that night, proving she was there.

At the time, the Police were not even on tour. The Garys got talking with an agent from England who mentioned the name of these seasoned musicians who had originally formed the year before as a punk band. The Garys were big fans of another cat from across the pond: an eccentric singer-songwriter named Kevin Coyne. Once they learned that Andy Summers, the Police’s guitarist, used to play with Coyne, they were intrigued and brought the Police over strictly to play the Horseshoe. The trio, all with their hair dyed blond, consisted of Summers on lead guitar, Stewart Copeland on drums, and Sting on bass and vocals. Before their Horseshoe shows, Cormier took the English musicians to the CHUM-FM radio station. “We were physically escorted out the door,” he recalls. “CHUM did not want to know about punk bands.”

The Police pose in the basement dressing room of the Horseshoe; the British band played there in November 1978.

A promotional 45 rpm record of the Police’s single “Roxanne,” bought by Lin Duperron at the Horseshoe Tavern when the band played there in 1978.

 

Back at the club, the band played a memorable and tight two-hour set to the small audience, many of whom they got to know by name, and who demanded an encore. As Cormier recalls in the book Rock and Roll Toronto, “I walked into the room, and Sting was already undressed. He went back and played in his underwear.” The band felt so bad about the poor attendance, they gave The Garys back the two-hundred-dollar fee agreed to in their contract.

Despite this underwhelming turnout and dissing by the media, The Garys proved they were always one step ahead of the musical trends. Six months later, you couldn’t turn on a radio anywhere in the world without hearing the Police’s hit single “Roxanne” blasting forth; the album featuring the infectious tune would go on to sell two million copies worldwide.

The Garys told the band they could come back to play Toronto any time. The next year the Police would play The Garys’ new venue, The Edge. Later, as their stature grew, they hadn’t forgotten The Garys giving them that first chance to play in Hogtown, so in 1981 the band headlined a massive concert in Oakville, Ontario, called the Police Picnic that also included the Go-Go’s, Iggy Pop, the Specials, Killing Joke, and Canadian acts the Payolas and Nash the Slash. It would be the first of three Police Picnics (the next two were held at Exhibition Place in Toronto), all brought to you by — you guessed it — The Garys.

* * *

The Garys were just starting to make money when manager Peter Graham pulled the plug on the promoters and told them he was changing his booking policies, going back to country and western music. A deal that reportedly was for eight years was cut short after just eight months.

What went wrong, and why the shift? According to Graham, the main issue with The Garys’ bookings was the growing clash between Liquor Licensing Board requirements and the realities of a new wave club. As he told the Globe and Mail on the eve of this changing of the guard, “People want to walk around and do things during a punk rock concert and they just can’t do that in a licensed bar. Just the other day, a big bar had to go before the board because there were sixteen charges laid during a Battered Wives concert.”

Another factor in Graham’s shifting his policy and ending The Garys’ tenure was new legislation he knew would be coming the following January that would allow authorities to close a bar for a week and impose massive fines if any underage drinkers were found. These were risks Graham was not willing to take.

Rather than go quietly into that good night after only eight months (though those who were there say it felt like so much longer), The Garys decided to give their patrons a gift and leave the ’Shoe with a bang with a pair of shows, which they called The Last Pogo and The Last Bound-Up.

The idea behind the names and the concept was taken from The Band’s famed farewell concert in 1976 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, captured beautifully on screen by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz. Topp recalls, “The night of The Last Bound-Up, Moses Znaimer, Citytv boss, wanted to have a meeting with us, so we met that night before the doors opened. He said, ‘I think it’s time we bring our cameras in and shoot your shows.’ We basically said, ‘You are eight months too late!’ He didn’t have a clue … comes on the last night of our run and says, I think this music is important.”

That lack of interest from the mainstream media is telling of the time. Only a select few local scribes, like Peter Goddard at the Toronto Star, got it, realizing the importance of what The Garys were doing. More often it was the foreign press who got it first. For example, when the pair brought in the popular American new wave band Pere Ubu, the London Times and New Musical Express each flew two reporters across the pond to cover their Horseshoe appearance. According to Topp, the moniker “The Last Pogo” says it all as far as what was happening at the Horseshoe and what was happening at that pivotal period in Toronto. “The whole scene was us against the wall … us against Toronto,” he explains. “There were only about a thousand people, bands included. As it started to pick up, the people who ran the place didn’t care and they wanted to go back to booking country music.”

Once The Garys were given notice that their services were no longer needed at the Horseshoe, the pair figured, Well, then, let’s go out with a bang. “We had built up a scene, and it was our goodbye party,” Cormier recalls.

The first night, which featured Cormier and Topp’s favourite punk bands, including the Viletones and Teenage Head, was called The Last Pogo, and the next night, featuring reggae and new wave groups like Rough Trade, was dubbed The Last Bound-Up. The shows were scheduled for December 1 and 2, 1978.

No handbills or posters were distributed, but those in the scene found out easily enough. The night of The Last Pogo, the place was packed and well over capacity. The walls were sweating.

With an abundance of alcohol flowing — some of the patrons had been drinking all day — by the time the bands started to play, the atmosphere was tense. Record label Bomb Records was there to make a live recording of the two nights, and with rumours that a film was being made as well, The Last Pogo started to become a big deal.

Steven Leckie of the Viletones, who had originally refused to play, crashed the show and did a set with a new lineup. Bass guitarist Sam Ferrara had to borrow a bass from Steve Mahon of Teenage Head and play it upside down because Steve was a leftie. On top of that, Ferrara struggled with a faulty connection, and the audience couldn’t even hear the bass. Leckie ended the set by yelling out, “Kill the hippies!” — a directive that the nasty street gang the Blake Street Boys took to heart and acted on a few hours later.

Teenage Head on August 18, 1978.

Colin Brunton doesn’t recall much of what went on the night of The Last Pogo, but the ending was certainly memorable. “With eight hundred people crammed into the five-hundred capacity bar, draft beer running out and only hard liquor available, and the stench of pot and tobacco smoke creating a cloud over the crowd,” he explains, “a fat detective drinking at the bar thought that enough was enough. He waddled up to the stage, and told headlining band Teenage Head that the show was over. Bassist Steve Mahon, on a rare night that he’d been drinking, wagged his finger in the cop’s face and warned him that there would be trouble if the band didn’t get to play. The cop relented and said they could play one song.”

Cleave Anderson adds, “It seemed like the first time the place seemed out of control. Up until then, it was mostly a crowd of people you knew. At The Last Pogo, these people come in all of sudden that we didn’t know who they were. There was sort of a sense of, Uh oh, violence. After The Last Pogo and Sid [Vicious] died — instead of punk being something nobody wanted anything to do with it became a shot in the arm for rock ’n’ roll.”

After Teenage Head played only a shortened version of their best-known song, “Picture My Face,” they walked offstage. The crowd didn’t know what was happening, so they went crazy. Topp once compared the sound of this moment of mayhem to “a hundred chainsaws ripping down Algonquin Park.” Tables were overturned, chairs and bottles were thrown, and the Blake Street Boys, prompted by Steven Leckie’s call to “kill the hippies,” beat the crap out of anyone there unlucky enough to have long hair. Swollen Members lead singer Evan Siegel, in a wheelchair as his persona Dr. Strangelove, never broke character and wheeled his way to safety. Brunton and his crew were literally kicked to the curb, where they joined hundreds of others out on the street. Yellow cop cars pulled up and forced the boisterous crowd to disperse. Somehow sound recordist Dave Gebe managed to stay inside and capture the sound of the destruction. Brunton, Lee, and the two camera operators managed to sneak back inside and get images of the devastation, stopping only when a heartbroken Horseshoe regular from before The Garys’ time pleaded with them to stop.

“It was more than just a party gone awry,” recalls Lin Duperron, “it was mayhem.” Duperron knew everybody from the punk crowd, but she admits she also knew the Blake Street Boys through a friend, Ally, who lived around the corner from her mom’s house. The pair used to hang out. “Some of his friends were a little sketchy and a little nuts, especially when they were drinking,” she recalls.

The Viletones on September 2, 1978.

Duperron and her friends had been at the Horseshoe partying and drinking all day. Everybody was getting really “sloshed,” she says, and then the Viletones went on. “People were drunk, bouncing into each other, throwing each other around, and things started to get a little bit aggressive,” she remembers. “All of a sudden from the stage Steven Leckie yells, ‘Let’s kill the hippies!’ Suddenly, the Blake Street Boys jump my friend.… I turn around and see my friend getting the shit kicked out of him while the band is still playing.” She continues:

The band’s bassist, Sam [Ferrara], had his head down and is oblivious to what is going on. I reach to his bass strings and [pull] on them and said, “Shut the fuck up!” No one knew what was happening in front of the stage. It was packed. My friend is on the ground, and they are putting the boots to his face. I started blocking his face — kicking their feet — I had bruises from my ankles to my thighs from blocking their shots. He had shoe imprints on his forehead … it was nasty. All hell was breaking loose. The band finally stopped and then you heard things being broken.

Concertgoers and police outside the Horseshoe Tavern following The Last Pogo, when the final show under The Garys’ reign came to an unfortunate conclusion with the cops shutting down the bar; arrests and a small riot ensued. December 2, 1978.

I remember Motor coming out saying we needed to get the hell out of there. A few friends grabbed Nathan and took him out the back. I came back and remember seeing someone doing the crab on the ground, walking backwards trying to escape as someone is breaking a chair over top of him. Johnny Garbagecan had his jaw broken. The violence was so intense. People had no idea how much they were hurting each other. That’s how it ended.

Cop cars lined the street outside from Spadina to Peter. Police officers took turns rounding up concertgoers as they piled out of the club — not the type of press The Garys were hoping for from The Last Pogo.

Reflecting back on that night, Duperron can’t explain what happened, why people got so violent. Perhaps putting a label on it — “The Last” — may have escalated things. Combine that with copious amounts of alcohol and a venue that was well over capacity, and anyone can see it was a recipe for disaster.

When The Garys’ reign came to an abrupt stop following The Last Pogo and the ensuing riot, and The Last Bound-Up, it marked the end of an era. For Duperron, it was a sad time. “We were all family,” she says. “When the club closed down, it was like a bunch of lost puppies not sure where we would go from there.”

As Gary Cormier told the Globe and Mail back in 1978, twenty-four hours before their final show, he didn’t see their eight-month run as a failure. Far from it. “We accomplished everything we intended to do.” The pair never took the tried and true road — always preferring the paths less travelled. Of that, Cormier is proud. “Whenever we’ve tried to play it safe rather than just following our own instincts, we’ve blown it,” he told the Globe.

As far as Topp is concerned, that brief moment in time changed not just the Horseshoe but also Toronto. “Everybody knew each other,” he says. “It was a smaller industry, but it was an up-and-coming industry. We were fortunate to be aware of, and like, the groundbreaking artists of that time.” He adds, “It’s a time that can’t be recaptured. It was like life and death for the people in the scene and for us, too, because we were the ones putting our money into it for the things we loved.”

The Garys would be out of action for only a couple of months, eventually opening The Edge at Church and Gerrard, where they would continue the against-the-grain booking policy they had started at the Horseshoe, eventually winning a Toronto Arts Award for their efforts.