Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Music History & Criticism

The Flyer Vault

150 Years of Toronto Concert History

by (author) Daniel Tate & Rob Bowman

foreword by Geddy Lee

Publisher
Dundurn Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2019
Category
History & Criticism, Post-Confederation (1867-)
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781459745445
    Publish Date
    Oct 2019
    List Price
    $16.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781459745421
    Publish Date
    Oct 2019
    List Price
    $35.00

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

A visual tour de force showcasing Toronto’s vast concert history.

“Not sure there’s ever been anything like this...The graphics are fascinating, the script is comprehensive. It’s staggering what’s been unleashed from the Vault.” — Gary Topp, promoter, half of the legendary duo the Garys
“These pages will take you on a musical magical mystery tour of Toronto’s important place in concert history. Reading The Flyer Vault gives you a rush, just like the one you get when the house lights go down!” — Dan Kanter, multi-platinum-selling songwriter/producer
The Flyer Vault book helps bottle the lore, bringing me a little bit closer to my Toronto and its shows that have only grown in renown.” —Danko Jones, lead singer/guitarist of the rock trio Danko Jones

Duke Ellington. Johnny Cash. David Bowie. Nirvana. Bob Marley. Wu-Tang Clan. Daft Punk. These are just some of the legendary names that played Toronto over the last century. Drawing from Daniel Tate’s extensive flyer collection, first archived on his Flyer Vault Instagram account, Tate and Rob Bowman have assembled a time capsule that captures a mesmerizing history of Toronto concert and club life, ​running the gamut of genres from vaudeville to rock, jazz to hip-hop, blues to electronica, and punk to country.

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History traces seminal live music moments in the city, including James Brown’s debut performance in the middle of a city-wide blackout, a then-unknown Jimi Hendrix backing up Wilson Pickett in 1966 — the year a new band from London named Led Zeppelin performed in Toronto six times — and the one and only show by the Notorious B.I.G., which almost caused a riot in the winter of 1995.

Complementing the book’s flyers is the story of the music, highlighting such iconic venues as Massey Hall, the Concert Hall/Rock Pile/Club 888, and the BamBoo, alongside lesser-known but equally important clubs such as Industry Nightclub and the Edge.

About the authors

Daniel Tate started The Flyer Vault on in 2015 after rediscovering three thousand flyers that he had collected over the years. He has been featured in Vice, NOW, and the Globe and Mail. Daniel lives in Toronto.

Daniel Tate's profile page

Rob Bowman is a Grammy Award?winning professor of music at York University who has been writing professionally about music for over forty-five years. His book Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013. He lives in Toronto.

Rob Bowman's profile page

Geddy Lee is the vocalist, bassist, and keyboard player for the Hall of Fame rock group Rush, with drummer Neil Peart and guitarist Alex Lifeson. The most successful Canadian music group in history, Rush is only third behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the most consecutive gold or platinum albums sold by a rock band, and has performed before millions of fans around the world. Ranked by Rolling Stone as among the top bassists of all-time, Rush's energetic frontman has long been acclaimed for his wizard-like musical talent and mesmerizing performances. Geddy lives in Toronto, Canada.

Geddy Lee's profile page

Excerpt: The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History (by (author) Daniel Tate & Rob Bowman; foreword by Geddy Lee)

Introduction

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History has been a long time coming. Although I saw the Supremes at the O’Keefe Centre when I was 11, my first real rock show was Jefferson Airplane at the same venue in the spring of 1970. In the years since those first two shows, I have seen easily 2,000, maybe even 3,000 concerts. From the start, I kept a handwritten list of every show, noting the date, venue, and name of each artist in the order they appeared onstage.

Over the years I would hear about shows that happened before my time, such as Cream at Massey Hall, Led Zeppelin at the Rock Pile, and festivals such as the Rock and Roll Revival, which featured the Doors and John Lennon at Varsity Stadium, all of which I had missed by just a year or two. By the time I was 15, I was writing for rock and roll magazines and eventually I became an ethnomusicologist and a professor of music. My interest in all things popular music continued to expand both forward and backward in time.

Several years ago I began to try to document all the shows from the 1960s that occurred before I started going to concerts. This led back into the 1950s, and eventually, given my disparate tastes in music and what I do in my professional life, I kept going farther back in time, curious about whether heroes of mine, such as John Coltrane, Hank Williams, Bessie Smith, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, had ever played Toronto.

In the meantime, on his own life path, Daniel Tate was working the street team beat for a local concert company from 1995 to 2005 and started collecting flyers and posters. Daniel eventually accumulated a collection of several thousand flyers, storing them in a bin at his parents’ home. Twenty or so years later, he started the well-known Instagram account The Flyer Vault, where he posted some of the gems in his collection along with contextual commentary about each respective show.

In the fall of 2017 Daniel reached out to me. I had done the research and written the liner notes for three different CD sets of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Daniel wanted to know if I had any flyers for the group’s legendary shows at the Hawk’s Nest in 1969 and 1970. I didn’t, but over coffee, while looking through Daniel’s incredible collection on his laptop, we quickly figured out that our interests, knowledge, and individual collections dovetailed perfectly. With each of us spurring the other on, over many months Daniel’s collection of posters, flyers, and concert advertisements expanded to about 8,000 items while my database of musical performances in Toronto increased at a similar rate. Daniel’s earliest image was an incredible advertisement for Jenny Lind’s famous performances at the St. Lawrence Hall in 1851, while I had found references to music performances by touring ensembles playing Toronto going back to 1840, a mere six years after the city incorporated. We decided that a book comprised of a number of Daniel’s images combined with my contextual knowledge would be a worthwhile project. So, here we are.

While both of us have wide interests in music and music history, we decided from the start that, with the exception of Jenny Lind and the first Toronto performances by the famous African American soprano Sissieretta Jones, we were not going to include classical music in the project. What we have done is complicated and unwieldy enough. To adequately document performances of Western art music in Toronto would require a wholly separate book unto itself. We also decided to use the year 2000 as a cut-off date. Maybe in a subsequent volume we will take on the Toronto concert scene in the 21st century.

Narrowing down Daniel’s collection of 8,000 images to the approximately 170 images included in this book was an extraordinarily difficult and painful task. There are hundreds of additional images we would have loved to have included. There were similar problems in writing the text (Daniel wrote the Hip Hop, Contemporary R&B, and Electronic and Dance Music chapters; I wrote all the others). The more we dug into this project, the more we uncovered; consequently, the project kept shapeshifting. New information would come to light and we’d realize that what we previously thought were the earliest performances in a given genre or by a given artist were completely wrong and we’d have to rewrite. This was especially true the farther back in time we went.

For anything before the mid-1960s, we had to rely heavily on newspaper articles, ads, and reviews. Both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail are digitized. The Star goes back to 1894, while the Globe was first published in 1844. Being able to digitally search back issues of those two papers made this project possible. While we both did substantial work with microfilm copies of the now-defunct Toronto Telegram, Share, and Contrast, and had access to print copies of Toronto’s NOW magazine, the majority of what we were able to access came from the Globe and the Star. If we had several more years and could go through every issue of the Telegram, the Toronto Sun, and earlier newspapers such as the Toronto World and Toronto Empire, I am sure we would find information and stories about concerts that we at present don’t know about. So, there are bound to be things we’ve missed or have gotten wrong.

We have organized the chapters by genre. Obviously, at times there will be overlap, so punk performances appear in both the chapter focused on punk, new wave, and hardcore, as well as in the chapter that covers the Queen Street scene of the late 1970s and 1980s. The book focuses on touring shows coming to Toronto, but we also tried to reference many, but perhaps not nearly enough, of the great local artists that have been so important to Toronto’s nightlife going back to the 19th century.

At times, especially for early material, for which reviews are rare and seldom very informative and there’s nobody alive who can tell us anything about the shows, the chapters can become a little bit like encyclopedia entries. And, while fascinating in terms of sheer information, these do not have as many stories as we would have liked. We tended to focus on debut performances by artists and shows that for one reason or another were exceptional. For example, we talk about the Rolling Stones’ first appearances in Toronto in the 1960s, as well as the famous El Mocambo show in 1977, but we don’t talk about the group’s appearances in 1972, 1975, 1989, 1994, etc. If we had taken any other approach, the book would have ballooned to the point of being unpublishable.

When looking back at the wealth of information that we accumulated in researching this book, it is fascinating to see how early Toronto became one of the most important cities for touring musicians in North America, and, by extension, the world. This was largely because of the railway that connected Toronto to Detroit (beginning in 1856); in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Toronto was considered part of a Midwest circuit that included Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. In later years, when Toronto became the largest city in Canada, it served as a sort of gateway to the country. Subsequently, it evolved, alongside New York and Los Angeles, into one of the three cities in North America that bands simply had to play. For more than a century and a half, Toronto has been an extraordinary place to see the world’s greatest musicians perform. Its history in this regard is something to marvel at.

— Rob Bowman

Editorial Reviews

The Flyer Vault book helps bottle the lore, bringing me a little bit closer to my Toronto and its shows that have only grown in renown.

Danko Jones, musician

The significance of this project is almost unfathomable. The result is a thing of beauty.

The Reviews Are In

These pages will take you on a musical magical mystery tour of Toronto’s important place in concert history. Reading The Flyer Vault creates a rush just like the one you get when the house lights go down!

Dan Kanter, multi-platinum-selling songwriter/producer

Through and through, The Flyer Vault: 150 Years Of Toronto Concert History is a fascinating and informative journey into Toronto’s ongoing cultural as a hub for music of all sorts...A stellar celebration of this city that we call home.

Spill Magazine

Not sure there’s ever been anything like this...The graphics are fascinating, the script is comprehensive. It’s staggering what’s been unleashed from the Vault.

Gary Topp, legendary Toronto concert promoter

a fascinating history of Toronto’s music scene from the 1850s to the noughties.

Toronto Star

Other titles by

Other titles by