ROLLING STONES EL MACOMBO CLUB TORONTO PROFESSIONAL

“When we got in there, there was a Neve console that Michael had already bought and a bunch of amazing outboard gear, and it certainly slanted more towards a full-on commercial recording studio. For this, he even brought in famed studio engineer Eddie Kramer. Then Wekerle came to the rescue, and ever since, the speculation about when it would reopen and what it would look like when it did has been endless.Įarlier on in the reimagining of the El Mo, Wekerle was envisioning a live venue that also doubled as a high-end recording studio. After a few changes of ownership in the 2000s, the upstairs being turned into a dance studio, the building becoming increasingly run-down, and the live music market becoming harder for venues in general, it was set to host its last-ever concert on Nov. It was just such a great place to be a hot, sweaty club.”įast-forward to 2014 and the El Mocambo was on its last legs. It wasn’t a very good place to see a band, but I remember going to concerts there before I started recording the shows – seeing The Runaways and Wayne Cochran and Tower of Power – and literally seeing people dancing on the tables. So, I liked that about it, but I mean, it wasn’t a great sounding room and it didn’t have great sightlines. “That was kind of thrilling, knowing that for any of the rock fans in town, that was the place to be that particular night.

He estimates that in the ‘80s, he remote-engineered roughly 120 concerts from the El Mocambo for the three big music stations on Toronto’s radio dial: Q107, CHUM, and 102.1 The Edge. “It was the showcase club from about 1978 to ’95,” says Doug McClement, who now heads LiveWire Remote Recorders. Jimi Hendrix, Blondie, U2, Elvis Costello, Fats Domino, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and of course, The Rolling Stones are just a few to have graced its stage. For decades, this sweaty club with low ceilings, poor acoustics and worse sightlines, and which held only a couple hundred people, was the place in Toronto to see the next great rock and roll artists. What makes it iconic is the music history that has taken place inside the El Mocambo. But a neon sign is just a neon sign on most buildings. Since the late-1940s, the El Mocambo’s neon palm tree sign was one of the de ning images of downtown Toronto, beckoning rock and roll fans to the corner of College Street and Spadina Avenue. This is a venue for the future of live entertainment, not one stuck in the past. The “new El Mo” may value and pay tribute to its legacy, but it’s definitely not the same place generations of music fans remember. “The whole building is a complete content factory.” “There’s nothing like this in the world,” declares Jamie Howieson, who has spearheaded the AVL design as the El Mocambo’s executive designer and production manager since late-2017. For the new El Mocambo, however, the coming weeks may bizarrely be the perfect time to showcase what it can do – even if it’s not exactly what Wekerle and his team envisioned for a grand reopening. Or at least that would be a problem for any other typical venue that had just invested years and millions of dollars into a radical reinvention only to have its opening pushed back indefinitely because of a global pandemic. Just one problem, though: this dammed virus and the eradication of live music. But now, five years after famed “dragon” Michael Wekerle saved it from demolition with a last-minute $3.78-million purchase, the El Mocambo is rising like the metaphorical phoenix.

ROLLING STONES EL MACOMBO CLUB TORONTO PROFESSIONAL

This article originally appeared in the June 2020 issue of Professional Sound magazine.įor over half a century, it’s been one of the most fabled music venues in the Canadian music scene, and for the last half-decade, it’s been one of its biggest curiosities.

Rolling stones el macombo club toronto