He showed them all
Famed concert promoter Gary Topp helped create a million memories for local music fans — and his new graphic memoir should stir up a lot of nostalgia
It seems appropriate to interview legendary Toronto promoter Gary Topp on the day of Bob Dylan’s 79th birthday.
For it was seeing Dylan during the infancy of his career, at Gerde’s Folk City in New York in 1961, on the advice of folk singer Len Chandler, that set 16-year-old Topp on the eventual path toward concert promotion, much to our city’s benefit.
“Seeing him changed my life, really,” said Topp during an interview to promote his newly published graphic biography, “TOPP: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World.”
“Seeing the way he sang — he was so young — his energy: I still dress the same way.”
Although Bob Dylan is one of the few artists Topp never booked here, the Toronto promoter has certainly changed music fans’ lives for the better, whether it’s individually — like when he introduced Canada to punk icons the Ramones — or in partnership with Gary Cormier as the Garys.
The list of artists that duo offered Toronto for the first time includes the Police, Alison Krauss, the Stranglers, the Residents — even the Dixie Chicks.
Topp was also no slouch in promoting homegrown talent, booking the very first gigs for Nash the Slash and Rough Trade. He often combined his love of repertory cinema and live music at his 1970s venues the Original 99-Cent Roxy Theatre and the New Yorker — and later at the Horseshoe, the Edge and numerous intimate concert venues around town.
“We encouraged people to take chances,” says Topp, 74. “We brought various art forms to light that nobody else was doing. I think we encouraged the entire country in a way, because everybody watched Toronto.”
Topp’s story is all there in the black-and-white “TOPP: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World,” thanks to the efforts of notable Hamiltonbased cartoonist and illustrator David Collier.
Collier spent three years on the project and brings a strong resumé to it. He has worked with underground comics legends R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar — contributing to the late Pekar’s “American Splendor” series — and created his own books in his past, as well as providing illustrations and comics for the Globe and Mail and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
Topp said he recruited Collier after a couple of failed attempts to write a book himself. Collier actually worked at the Edge when he was 17, starting as a busboy and also helping to load in and load out equipment, work the spotlight and design a few posters.
“I asked Dave because he understood one particular era,”
Topp explains. “He has the sense of humour that I was looking for. He’s a prolific artist and writer and he’s very interested in history. I knew that this book was going to be my story and my memories filtered through his head, with him living my story.
“He becomes a character in the book. That’s just how he writes.”
The novel is different in that it’s rather episodic: open the book on any page and you’re likely to jump into a new adventure — and possibly something that doesn’t involve Topp directly but remains a connection.
“It’s an unusual book, for sure,” Topp notes. “I did not want to do the typical date-bydate, dressing-room-by-dressing-room book like everybody else. I figure some people might be disappointed, but I felt I had a crazy enough life that could entertain anybody around the world. And it’s informative regarding Toronto and the scene.”
The book focuses on some of the people working for Topp, including “The Last Pogo” documentarian and future “Schitt’s Creek” producer Colin Brunton and local muralist Alex “Runt” Currie. Collier says you couldn’t help but find lively company in the atmosphere Topp created. “Everybody who’s worked with Gary has just been exposed to so many interesting creative people,” Collier notes. “I’ve talked with Echo & the Bunnymen and played Space Invaders with the Psychedelic Furs after their gigs and hung out with the English Beat’s Ranking Roger.
“You’re just exposed to so many of them that it rubs off and you learn from them. A classic example is Dick Duck & the Dorks, a band made up of Edge staffers.”
The book follows Topp’s life, tracing his Lithuanian ancestry and revealing his love of Broadway musicals, hockey, radio, music and cinema. A devoted 1050 CHUM listener in his youth, Topp won so many radio contests that the station implemented rules to slow him down.
But it was in1972, when Topp’s film distribution company was given the 55-minute concert film “Hendrix at Berkeley” and he couldn’t find anyone to screen it, that was a true turning point in Topp’s life. He established the Original 99-Cent Roxy at Danforth and Greenwood avenues — where price of admission to see a film was, indeed, just under a buck.
“The Original 99-Cent Roxy was a really, really important time of my life,” Topp explains of the location where he met his wife of 45 years, Heather.
“I think for many people who ended up being in the punk/ new wave scene, it was a very influential place.
“It was unlike any movie theatre anywhere, anytime.”
Topp soon came up with the brainstorm to stage concerts there, bringing in Thundermug and Breathless, the latter band that included the future Nash the Slash, Jeff Plewman.
“Nash did his first show at the Roxy,” Topp recalls. “He and I were together in my living room deciding on what name he wanted.”
When Roxy’s rent became too expensive, Topp moved to 651 Yonge St. and established the New Yorker Theatre, where he met Cormier.
“We needed some carpentry done and David Andoff (an artist responsible for the papier mâché King Kong that topped the marquee of the cinema) introduced me to Gary,” Topp recalls. “As we worked, Gary and I saw things the same way and we really became friends.
“We really had a mutual love for Little Feat, who I had actually booked at the Roxy. And I’m kind of generous — I said, ‘Do you want to be partners?’
“He was really excited about doing it because he had been an agent years before and had got fed up with it to become a carpenter. And he felt that the music I liked was right up his alley.”
Shortly before the partnership, however, Topp had caught wind of an exciting New York band at the forefront of the punk movement. Thanks to an assist from agent David Bluestein, Topp booked the Ramones for their Canadian debut: three shows over two nights for $5,000 US.
“Hearing the Ramones for the first time made me feel like the first time I heard John Coltrane in his free-jazz style,” Topp recalls.
“Aside from the show, it was such an emotional experience,” Topp recalls. “It’s like a dream — you’re sitting at the theatre watching a movie and then you decide you’re going to build a stage — and then, this spectacle is on stage. It was very thrilling.”
The Garys ended up booking 35 more shows with the Ramones — more than any other concert promoter in the world — and later oversaw bookings at a number of venues — most notably the Horseshoe Tavern — for an eight-month spell and then a two-year spell at the Edge.
”Gary taught me how to book bands,” says Topp. “We worked out of our homes — we didn’t have an office — but despite that we were completely in tune with each other.”
It was at the Horseshoe that the Police played their infamous first shows, which drew a crowd of 60 people over two nights in1978. Despite the small turnouts, the trio of Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland remained loyal to the Garys over the years, culminating in the three annual outdoor Police picnics — one in Oakville in 1981 and two at the CNE in 1982 and 1983.
“A lot of the bands were extremely loyal,” notes Topp. “Who else was booking them and bringing them up to Toronto and giving them a start and building them in this area?”
But it wasn’t only punk or new wave bands like Richard Hell & The Voidoids or Simple Minds that the Garys brought to Toronto: their tastes ran the gamut, taking in the avant-garde jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra and Ornette Coleman, authors William S. Burroughs and Kenneth Anger, cult favourite singersongwriter John Otway, accordion legend Astor Piazzolla, the funk of George Clinton, the funk-soul of Kid Creole & the Coconuts, and the blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins — even an off-Broadway play called “Neon Woman” featuring drag queen Divine.
Not all of them did stellar business, but the Garys weren’t in it to court public favour.
“Gary and I didn’t care if you didn’t like it, because we liked it and that’s what counted,” says Topp. “Often, we’d be sitting around listening to a record and we’d say, hey, we should bring this person in. We searched out Georgie Fame and brought him over from England. We searched out The Troggs — and tons of jazz: Cecil Taylor was one of my favourite jazz pianists. We did a lot of that.”
The Garys partnership lasted from 1975 through 1993, when Topp grew tired of the business. Along the way, Topp has delved into other areas: he’s owned two film-distribution companies, hosted his own radio shows on Q107 and CKLN, and booked talent for the CBC.
But he still keeps his hand in concert promoting.
“I do the occasional thing that I like — mostly to either help somebody or something that I like that nobody knows about and I just want to do it,” says Topp.
At the moment, he’s pushing this graphic representation of his life, published all over the world. It’s unique, but that’s par for the course for Gary Topp.
“I’ve never done anything normally. Why should this be normal?”