Monday, February 15, 2016

No Bull: The Matador's Back

The Matador is just about back among us. The former booze can at Dovercourt and College in Hogtown's West End now has a liquor licence - a piece of paper it didn't have when Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Stompin' Tom Connors and lots of lesser lights showed up to play and perform way after closing time - and the new owner hopes to open as the Matador Ballroom this year.

I used to mosey along to the Matador after a night out in Hogtown, which back then - this was the 1970s - was chock-a-block with live music. Some favourites: Albert's Hall upstairs at the Brunswick House, The Edge, The Horseshoe, El Mocambo, the Jarvis House, the Gasworks, the Chimney, the Colonial, the Nickelodeon...I saw Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Domino, Dave van Ronk and David Bromberg, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Rough Trade, Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins and the Downchild Blues Band (as it was called). Some of these places are now memories, so any back-from-the-dead venue is cause for celebration, and the Matador, given its history, is mighty welcome.

What sort of act will be booked into the Matador when it opens anew I can't say. I just hope they are the heirs, talent-wise, to the Cohens and the Mitchells and the Connors; that they reflect Hogtown's admirable history of giving a stage to genuine ability. I don't have a say in the matter, but were I miraculously to be offered one, I'd hold out for a strong jazz-blues influence. Still, whatever the music policy real fans can only applaud the return of a venue that has earned the right to be called "legendary".      

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