Book review: In Vancouver After Dark, Aaron Chapman documents the once wild nightlife of the city
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 19:50:30 +0000
The Wild History of a City’s Nightlife
By Aaron Chapman (Arsenal Pulp Press)
$32.95 | 246 pages
In January 18, 1971, a page 2 ad in The Province announced a new entertainment at Club Zanzibar at 1129 Howe Street. “Topless Wraslin’. A Canadian First. See It to Believe It. Topless dancers trained to kick, maul, pinch, eye-gouge and hair-pull. Zany — Wacky — Hilarious — Violent.”
Hot baron of beef buffet rounded out the package.
There was public outcry over this entertainment, as well as the want ads in The Vancouver Sun seeking 3 midgets to appear in a different “wraslin’” event at the Gulf Club billed as “one mad dog vs. five chicks.” This was a far cry from bloody ground and pound MMA matches broadcast at most pubs today.
It paled in comparison to far more zany, hilarious and — yes — violent stuff happening all over Vancouver at the time.
In Vancouver After Dark, local historian Aaron Chapman shines a spotlight on “the wild history of a city’s nightlife.” It took decades for the No Fun City designation to take hold.
This is the third title in what the author describes as his trilogy, beginning with the story of the Penthouse in Liquor, Lust, and the Law (2012) and followed by Live at the Commodore (2014). The Last Gang in Town (2017), about the notorious Clark Park Gang, can be seen as a kind of “adjunct title.”
Responding to people’s comments that Vancouver is too young to have any interesting history, Chapman frames his response academically: “Crap.”
“For a long time, I think that the history of Vancouver that was presented was usually another story about the railroad arriving, the three greenhorns and real estate, or the standard Chamber of Commerce creation story,” said Chapman.
“But just scratch the surface a little and there is so much to learn, and it’s gritty. That’s has been something of a thread line through all of my books, I suppose.”
As Chapman notes in his introduction, Vancouver today “sold to the outside world depicts bright bustling neighbourhoods full of boutique shops, set against a backdrop of photogenic beaches and mountains, both of which can be visited in the same afternoon.”
As they do today, a century ago, pious city and provincial governments pursued teetotal agendas to put down opportunities to party. Persistent police raids, new noise legislation, and other machinery of the state couldn’t keep the crowds from cramming into everything from bars and ballrooms to nightclubs and repurposed community halls.
Reading through Chapman’s research, it’s clear that access to entertainment spots in different neighbourhoods was far better in the past. But, he notes, there has always been a kind of entertainment district trend in town.
“The whole club scene has moved around so much over the years, from Hornby, to Gastown to Granville, and each time people decry the loss of venues,” he said.
“Everyone I interviewed talked about how they saw the glory years of Vancouver, when it was the best time ever. But that changes with every generation, and there was a kid last night who went to the Commodore and saw a show which they will reflect back upon 20 years from now as the best time in the city.”
While there is no question that the scene has changed, particularly when it comes to the amount of live music venues, a healthy and active club scene still exits. New spaces pop-up in surprising places, just as they did in the past, and Chapman acknowledges that.
One thing that Vancouver After Dark makes abundantly clear is that places come and go with frequency. From such East Side cabarets as the New Delhi, where mixed-race rockers like the Hi-Fives filled the dance floor, to any number of comic legend Tommy Chong’s clubs back in the Sixties, tear it down and sanitize has always been a dominant development theme in the Lower Mainland.
The Hi-Fives perform at the New Delhi cabaret in Vancouver’s East End.
With every subsequent new luxury condo tower put up, more rules arrived. Add in skyrocketing licensing fees, rents, new noise bylaws, and more and it becomes hard to believe that anyone would choose to operate a business catering to nightlife.
“But even so, there have always been people in Vancouver who have been managing clubs or putting on a party somewhere and dealing with all of the levels of red tape and challenge,” said Chapman.
“In as much as I do try to be positive about the future, the one thing that can’t be ignored is that guys like Danny Beceda and Frank Hook essentially opened Oil Can Harry’s before they were 25. I don’t see anyone that age being able to do that now with costs what they are, and maybe if that can be fixed we will find ourselves in another golden era.”
What most certainly has transpired with the homogenization of culture in the city is that people are far less likely to have regular hangouts.
Chapman fondly recalls how the front lounge at the Town Pump was a meeting point for the whole of the Vancouver music scene for years — a place where hard rockers rubbed elbows with rockabilly musicians, industrial growlers and pop stars, the ‘Pump was a nexus for live music fans and players. The original Railway Club was another such hangout.
Such locations often had intergenerational memory.
“When these places go and disappear on us, a part of the DNA of the city changes a bit, but that is a theme that runs up and down the whole West Coast as cities have grown and gentrified.” Chapman said.
“We were fortunate to have a situation dating back to the vaudeville days where tours would make it up here that never went over the mountains to Calgary or Edmonton. Major tours still kick off here or finish up here a lot of the time, and artists frequently will be here early to rehearse or stick around after the tour ends, which has added to the entertainment scene as well.”
Vancouver After Dark delves into the way that the changing performance market paved the way for many of the older cabarets to shut down. As acts that used to grace their stages developed the ability to pack far larger venues, they no longer needed to do a few nights in a row to make the same amount of money that they could with one night. In the closing chapter, Last Call, Chapman notes how this reality has changed the Granville Strip, where more pubs have opened in place of live or even dance music venues.
Many of the buildings that once housed live music venues are still standing, potentially to be reopened. But the likelihood is that this won’t happen. Chapman notes “time and again, the threat to a Vancouver club hasn’t been a fire or mismanagement but property development.”
But there is still “room for graveyard shift dreamers.” Just don’t try to revive topless wrasslin’.
The Cave nightclub staff in Feb. 1949.
The following is an excerpt from Vancouver After Dark. Images and text reprinted with permission from the publisher.
If there is one name on the list of all the nightclubs that have come and gone over the decades in Vancouver whose loss is perhaps most lamented, it’s the Cave. There are even those who never went there who regret its demise, longing for the magic and excitement of a lost age.
The Cave was the city’s premier venue during the height of the nightclub show era — the early 1960s, when nightlife was stylish and sophisticated. Many Vancouverites even remember its kitschy faux-cavern interior of papier-mâché stalactites and stalagmites with fondness, wishing the club were still here.
Gordon King opened the Cave at 626 Hornby Street in 1938. King had come to town from Winnipeg, where he’d opened the first Cave nightclub in 1935. He later opened another one in Edmonton. The Vancouver Cave lasted the longest, though, and was the most famous, attracting many big-name American acts that toured along the Pacific coast.
In addition to its subterranean decor, the club featured a special sprung dance floor and a large forty-foot-wide stage. In the early years, the venue hosted performers from the vaudeville era and veteran stars who’d made their names in radio and cinema. Local dancers and performers also appeared, along with comedian emcees and even the odd magician.
The Cave changed management and ownership frequently during its history. After World War II, Gordon King’s son Max returned from service in the Royal Canadian Air Force to run the club, until Isy Walters, who bought it in 1952, sold it in 1958 and then opened Isy’s Supper Club a year later.
Before they bought the Cave from Walters, Ken Stauffer and Bob Mitten had both worked at the Arctic Club, one of several members-only cocktail and supper clubs that were popular in Vancouver in the late 1940s and ’50s. The two had the sort of good gamblers’ instincts that are crucial for being an effective nightclub owner. For instance, they often took chances on booking unknown acts, and most of the time, their intuition was proved right.
Since vaudeville days, Vancouver had been known as Tune-Up City, where performers could rehearse a show in front of a live audience before taking the act down the Pacific coast, through Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and on to Los Angeles. The same routes exist today in modern concert touring.
As far as club gigs went for local musicians, there were few better regular jobs than the Cave. The orchestra positions that paid union scale were coveted ones that most musicians in Vancouver did their best to keep. However, a few recent histories of the Cave suggest there was a colour barrier that kept black musicians from becoming orchestra members there. Harlem Nocturne proprietor and trombonist Ernie King stated, “I was qualified enough to play in The Cave, but they didn’t want a guy like me, they wanted an all-white band, not a coloured band with me sitting there. There were never any black musicians, unless it was a black band from the States.”[1]
Veteran Vancouver saxophonist Gavin Walker agrees race was a factor for musicians seeking entry into some Vancouver nightclub orchestras at the time and notes that the Cave orchestra in particular presented other challenges. “The guys that got the orchestra positions at the Cave—‘The Downtowners’ was their unofficial name—were very protective of their union scale work, and it was a bit of a closed circle. You had to have the ability to play but also be a top-notch sight-reader. The Downtowners also got a lot of CBC work, and when the jazz shows came up on the CBC, these were the guys the CBC hired, not the hard-core jazz players who were mostly white that played other venues like the Jazz Cellar.”
One musician who did make the cut was Blaine Tringham, who began playing at the Cave as a junior orchestra member in his early twenties. “A freelance horn player could make a pretty good living just by answering the phone and saying yes,” Tringham says with a laugh. “At the Cave, initially you’d be the third or fourth call, but eventually you’d work your way up to the first if you were any good. But in those days, the protocol was that whoever called you first got the gig, and I’d take any gig I could. So sometimes you’d take a gig at some other place like Isy’s, then the Cave might call you and you’d have to tell them you were already booked, even if you preferred to play there.”
Tringham recalls that pay at the Cave was $160 a week and $120 a week at Isy’s, because the hours were shorter. “That doesn’t sound like a lot today of course, but you have to remember this was the early 1960s. The rent in my furnished apartment was $65 a month, so you could make a good living as a club musician then.”
And with the number of nightclub acts that came through town at the Cave in the 1960s, Tringham stayed busy, but the schedule left little turnaround time to rehearse new acts. In the daytime, there were three-hour rehearsals to go over two ninety-minute shows. The constant flow of stars required a regular team of skilled musicians with seasoned chops on the Cave bandstand. In suits and ties, heads down in the charts on their music stands, Fraser MacPherson’s band appeared completely focused and reserved from an audience perspective, but Tringham confesses things were not always what they seemed.
“The guys at the Cave could drink,” he says. “They had a capacity you couldn’t believe. I was just the kid and didn’t drink at the shows because I was too nervous to screw up a part or miss a cue. But the regular Cave musicians bought Beefeater gin by the case and kept it backstage in these lockers that were supposed to be for clothes. They’d always have a cup of it at their feet, sipping it, and gin just looked like water. Every night those guys got loaded. Sometimes they’d send the busboy to the liquor store to get more. The amazing thing was they never screwed up.”
Tringham continues, “There was a guy named Stew Barnett—he was the king of the trumpet at the Cave. As many drinks as he sipped away at, he never made a mistake through the whole show. It was only at the very end of the night he’d run out of gas. The curtain would close and he couldn’t get out of the chair. It was like a marathon runner who’d hit the finish line. He was a great guy and a great musician. Everybody smoked and drank there while they played, taking a quick puff of a cigarette between parts. It was like that in the recording studios, too. That’s just what you did then!”
The Cave orchestra had their favourite performers to work with. Mitzi Gaynor rehearsed her whole nightclub show in Vancouver before taking it to Las Vegas, and came back year after year. Tringham recalls that although Mel Tormé had a reputation for being difficult, the band enjoyed playing with him and he was a complete professional. Anthony Newley, meanwhile, “confessed to us he was really nervous with this debut at the Cave because it was a new nightclub show he was trying out. But he was a lot of fun. Just one of the guys.” Another favourite was singer and actress Jaye P. Morgan, who might be best remembered as a TV game show panellist during the 1970s. “She was very outspoken about—how shall I put this?—who she liked. There was a guy in the band she kept hitting on in front of us, saying that she was going to take him to bed. She was teasing him like crazy, even during the shows. It was very funny. One night his wife came down to see the show and he sweated through the whole night hoping Jaye wouldn’t say anything.”
Over the years, the Cave featured many touring nightclub acts: older acts like the Mills Brothers and Roy Orbison appeared along with more modern performers like Diana Ross and the Supremes, James Brown, the Righteous Brothers, Sonny & Cher, and Bette Midler.
Cave gig poster.
Danny Baceda, who operated Oil Can Harry’s jazz club, bought the Cave for $100,000 in 1971. A month later, he bought Isy’s Supper Club, making him the biggest nightclub owner in Vancouver at the time. But the expansion happened too quickly, and by 1972, Baceda went into receivership. Ken Stauffer bought back the Cave in 1973, running it briefly before selling it to Stan Grozina.
Originally from Slovenia, Grozina spent his early years in a series of German labour camps during World War II. He immigrated to Canada with twenty dollars in his pocket and soon became involved in the construction business in Winnipeg. He retired in Vancouver and bought the Cave, sinking $75,000 into renovations. But when the Cave reopened, Grozina’s bookings were hit and miss. The club had success with rock bands like the Animals, Canned Heat, Trooper, and Doug and the Slugs, and Grozina occasionally booked some exciting emerging underground bands as well, like the local new wave band Pointed Sticks in 1979. The musicals he booked weren’t as successful, however, and with disco taking off in some downtown clubs, and punk rock emerging in others, the Cave was suddenly a horribly old-fashioned place to go. At that point, Grozina began booking wet T-shirt contests—things were going downhill fast.
They had, in fact, been heading that way for a while. The golden era of nightclub acts was over. In many ways, the clubs had become victims of the performers’ success. The acts the nightclubs had nurtured had now become too successful to stay there, and the top performers who had once booked ten-day or two-week club engagements now came for one- or two-night stops at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre or, if they were big enough, the Pacific Coliseum.
The Cave was unable to make the transition the Commodore Ballroom did. The Commodore had once seen an older generation of entertainment but had made the jump to a modern concert space, thanks to owner Drew Burns, whose policy of renting the room to outside promoters ultimately gave the club its future.
Stan Grozina was no Drew Burns. He mistakenly hoped the old nightclub-style acts would live to see another day, and he could not imagine the Cave as any other kind of establishment. A disastrous booking in 1978 of an aged Ginger Rogers resulted in a $40,000 loss that doomed the club financially.
“You could really feel that things were changing by the early 1970s,” recalls Tringham. For him, and other musicians like him, the very music they were being called to play was changing. “I feel lucky to have been at the Cave when I did. It was the right place at the right time,” he says.
The Cave closed in 1981, and aside from a few expressions of nostalgia, there seemed to be little public outcry that the iconic club would be no more. The Cave was demolished that summer. Some of the club’s old stalactites and stalagmites were saved and auctioned off. The Hong Kong Bank of Canada Tower was built in its place, marking the end of an era when the Hornby Street strip of nightclubs thrived.
Hornby is a different street now in a different city. There are no enticing neon signs or doormen on the street ushering you into the pleasures of the nightclubs inside. Only a few lonely taxi cabs glide by, heading to and from more exciting destinations. There is nothing to indicate this short stretch was were the city came to be entertained at the Cave and other thriving clubs. The sights and sounds of Vancouver’s nightlife have moved elsewhere.
July 25, 1981. Demolition of The Cave nightclub. Deborah Cameron photo.
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