The Horseshoe 1978.
In May, 1978, after they left the New Yorker Theatre, partners Topp, Cormier and Silverman took over management of the Horseshoe Tavern, a dive bar that featured country and western music that was at the down-on-its-luck corner of Spadina and Queen. Opened in the 1940’s by Jack Starr, the Horseshoe had a massive main room that could hold five hundred people, and was a favourite hangout ...
The opening shot of the title sequence for our film The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a photo of an empty movie theatre, The Allenby, opened in 1936. It would become The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre (just 243 steps from the Greenwood subway station!) in 1972, run by Gary Topp. As Stephen Perry of the radio show Equalizing X Distort (on the University of Toronto’s radio ...
We had a lot of support from the community putting together our film The Last Pogo Jumps Again. One of our pals, photographer
Edie Steiner, gave us a bunch of shots she did at the original Last Pogo concert from December 1 1978. (There are about 600 photos in the film; here’s some of them.) This first shot is the aftermath of the concert, when the ...
Yea, so it was 33 years ago that The Garys presented The Last Pogo at Toronto’s venerable Horseshoe Tavern. Beauty first, safety last was the rule of the night as 800 sweating kids crammed into a bar with a capacity of 500.
A fat drunk detective waddled up from the bar around midnight to slur to Teenage Head as they took the stage that they could only ...
The bulk of The Original 99 Cent Roxy at Greenwood and Danforth has been demolished. The front lobby remains, as does a stripped-to-the-girders marquee out front. They’re going to turn it into a convenience store that will adjoin a gas station. This is the back of the building. Someone’s spray-painted “Bye Bye Roxy” on the wall.
Nash the Slash used to live in the apartment above the lobby. He was ...
It’s been a rotten few months in the world of old-skool punk. In October, Teenage Head singer Frankie Venom died from throat cancer; in January, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton passed away from a heart attack, and today Lux Interior, frontman of ground-breaking psychobilly punk rockers The Cramps died in an L.A. hospital from a pre-exisiting heart problem. His wife and original guitarist Poison Ivy issued a statement today.
We here at ...
Fast Eddie Smith, photographer and bon vivant, is fashionable in Rome.
Freddy Pompeii with The Secrets at The Last Pogo, December 1st, 1978. Photo copyright Edie Stiener.
Rock-steady crew member Ollie Brunton partied away his 16th birthday at Pogo H.Q., and the monopolization of all TV, Internet, and munchies for the evening allowed director Colin Brunton to go through some of the DVDs and tapes he’s been given over the past few years. Short films by Suzanne Naughton and Bruce Pirrie; hours ...
Joey Ramone and Colin Brunton, 1989.
Photo by Tim Sebert.
We hit the NXNE press conference/launch last night, and ran into Last Pogoers Gordie Lewis from Teenage Head and Vince Carlucci from the Cardboard Brains. Fast Eddie Smith snapped shots as we were deluged by a constant flow of eats and beers, and it was all pretty crammed and jammed.
Colin Brunton and Tommy Ramone.
Kire Paputts snapped this photo after Tommy autographed the bumper sticker.
After a month of down-time, we’re back with a slightly slicked up and slimmed down website and all the stuff we’ve been doing since we last left you in March…
While we gone, The Scenics snuck into town. With Andy Meyers on the left coast on Salt Spring Island and the other ...